Without A Care In the World

Retirement is great. Like the bumper sticker says:

Not My Job.
Not My Responsibility.
Not My Problem.

I’m Retired.

My life is care-free.
But, I’ve discovered that being care-free is a problem.
When I was a young pastor, I preached a series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins:

• Pride
• Envy
• Anger
• Acedia
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Lust

Smack dab in the middle of the Seven Deadly Sins is acedia. What the hell is that? I knew all too well what pride is, and envy, and anger, and greed, gluttony and lust, but what is acedia?

It is usually translated as “sloth,” being lazy. As a good Protestant minister, I preached a sermon on the sin of being lazy.

I missed the point.

When you add an “a” to a word like “moral” it negates it. “Amoral,” for example, means “not moral” or “without morality.” Acedia does that to the Greek word kedos. Kedos means, “care/anxiety.” So acedia means “no care,” It is less “care-free” and more, “I couldn’t care less.”

One of the great things about being retired is supposed to be that you are without cares. It’s true. Those of us who have the good luck to have saved some money and dodged the bullet of ill-health can live without a care.

That is a change. All my life I had something to care about; something to worry about.

During my school years I had to worry about the next test.

Then, I had a young family to support and raise.

I had churches that needed a pastor. I had to get to the hospital to see someone who was dying. I had to get to the church on time for the wedding. I had to write that sermon because Sunday was coming.
I always had something to care about.

But now, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t need to be anywhere. Jacquie is not a dependent, but a partner and friend. That may not last. The reality of “until we are parted by death,” is that one spouse almost always becomes the other one’s caregiver. Marriage also conveys responsibilities to help each other along our spiritual paths, but writing about that would take me off in a new direction. Right now, in a superficial sense, I am free. Free of care. Care-free.

That freedom means that I can fall into the living death called acedia.

It may not feel like death. At first, it may feel like heaven. It felt like that to me — a perpetual vacation. But after a few months, doing whatever I want when I want has worn thin. How many times a day can I check my Facebook feed? What is trending on YouTube? What did President Trump tweet this morning?
Like I said, living death.

The reason acedia is one of the Seven Deadly Sins is because the list was put together by monks. In the Middle Ages, monks were the most care-free people in that world. They lived in a community that provided their food and shelter. They had no personal dependents. They all had responsibilities. But many of those jobs did not require them to lie awake at night thinking about them. They could fall into what we might call “laziness.”

The monks recognized that the problem was not laziness. It was a spiritual problem; not giving a damn about anyone or anything.

When you have nothing and no one to care about, your life is without purpose or meaning.

It can lead to the three deadly sins that follow acedia in the traditional list: Greed, Gluttony, and Lust.
Or, as it so often plays out in retirement, a preoccupation with three questions:
“How much money do I have?”
“Where will we go to eat tonight?”
“What’s on TV? Or, what “bucket list” item can I check off next?”

There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but if that is all there is, we are in the living death of acedia.

However, acedia is also a spiritual opportunity. It means that the first three Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, and Anger, aren’t motivating us anymore.

In the Third Half of Life, most of us are no longer trying to make a name for ourselves. The people we used to envy are just old crocks like us. We no longer even have to prove that we were right.

It’s true that without those motivators, many of us are in danger of not caring about anything.

It’s also true that when we strip those things away, we find the best motivator of all, love.

It’s taken me three years of retirement to see this truth. I started this blog out of the sheer momentum of having written a sermon almost every week for 45 years. I couldn’t stop it on a dime.

I’m embarrassed how often the first three deadly sins got mixed in to my sermon-writing. Pride wanted  people to admire what I had to say. Envy wanted to compete with preachers who were better than me. Anger sometimes motivated me to sound off on things that I should have left unsaid.

Over the past three years, those things are becoming less relevant. I am learning to write because I love to write. I am hoping that what I have to say matters to someone else.

Love manifests in so many different ways in the Third Half of Life.

We may care for family and friends. As a pastor, I was often amazed at the friendships widows in my church formed with each other. They didn’t just socialize together They called each other every day. They stepped in to help when illness struck. They called the children, or the pastor or the doctor, when they were worried about their friend. They knew it was a living death to only care about themselves.
Even caring for a pet can help. When my grandfather died, my grandmother was at a loss until a cat named “Timmy” came into her life.

We may care about brightening a little corner of the world. A couple of days ago, I passed a man who was knee deep in a patch of ground not big enough to bury him. It’s what we call a “garden” here in Jackson Heights. I knew he was a volunteer for the JH Beautification Group, preparing that opening in the sidewalk for next spring’s flowering.

We may even care about the survival of the world. When he was 92, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was arrested for chaining himself to a fence at 10 Downing Street. He was protesting nuclear weapons.

A reporter asked him, “Lord Russell, why would you do this since it is unlikely that you will live to see a nuclear war?”

Russell replied, “It is necessary to care deeply about things that will happen after we are gone.”

I wonder what you care about?

What motivates you?

How do you overcome acedia?