Uncomfortably Unproductive

Normally I'm productive. By which I mean, normally I have lots to do, and I rather like it that way. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I'm a list person, even if the list is only mental. I go down my list and tick things off when they're done. Actually, if I'm really honest, I am quite proud of being a list person and I pity those who have no lists, whose lives meander by in a directionless stream of unplanned experiences. Or maybe I envy them...

Because the feeling of being productive is one fraught with temptation, for anyone who values spiritual life, and especially for a 'professional' Christian. I know this because I just had a week with not much on, and it felt unpleasantly unproductive. I ought to know by now that when you have a quiet week, just be grateful, because soon it'll be back to normal, and normal equals busy, and busy equals feeling important. But what do you do when you had planned for being busy and then everything goes quiet (the admin is up to date, the thing that was going to take all day is cancelled, it's humid and half the family are already on holiday...)? That's where I'm hopeless. I want to be doing. I am not good at being. I get bored.

The internet doesn't help. There's something about having endless means to stimulate you that is highly distracting, as well as highly enervating. It's tempting to use it to fill the void. As you can use anything. In the wisdom of the Desert Fathers it was said simply, 'go, sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.' By that was meant, if you cannot be alone in a small place with nothing to stimulate you, you cannot learn anything about yourself. Being content. Being. It's the ultimate challenge to productivity. The usual notion of productivity is that on a good day, in a good week, one produces a collection of things (meals, invoices, spreadsheets, articles) which give a sense of achievement, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you cannot be productive, for whatever reason (illness, tiredness, unemployment, train strikes) how do you handle it? And what effect on your spiritual life do you notice? And if you're endlessly productive outwardly, is that any guarantee of inner riches?

Work is the main area of productivity for most people, with moments of rest if your'e lucky. Busyness, verging on exhaustion is so completely normal now, that 'having nothing on' might be thought of as rather suspect, a waste of time, an indication that you're lazy. When you have, literally, nothing to do, it makes you feel un-useful, un-noticed and unpleasantly unproductive. But it's also a good spiritual barometer. What does our reaction to having nothing to do, reveal about us? Are we just a constant set of reactions to things that originate somewhere else, or is there anything real and stable inside?

Rowan Williams' Silence and Honey Cakes (2003) has some useful advice for those feeling uncomfortable in their un-productivity. The Desert Fathers knew about the temptations of the need to feel useful and productive and the effects of realising the limits of our productiveness. They had a word for the spiritual boredom and lassitude that can creep in when you feel unmotivated and inert towards others and God: 'akedia', 'one of the eight great pressures of the soul identified by the expert diagnosticians of the fifth century and later. It has to do with frustration, helplessness, lack of motivation, the displacement of stresses and difficulties from the inner to the outer world, and so on' (p. 83). 

So the unpleasant feelings associated with not being (or feeling) productive can point to an emptiness within, a sense that actually I was doing quite well making my own action without the express help of the Holy Spirit, thank you, and now that I cannot exert myself anymore, I might suddenly remember that Jesus said 'without me you can do nothing'. A need to be needed might also lurk there, which Williams writes about: 'we are even warned (...) to beware of looking eagerly for someone to love - that is, using someone else to solve the problem of your boredom and your fear of yourself' (p. 87).

The solution, he writes, is just to focus on the small things, the unimportant things - the dishes, the bins, the letter that needs writing. Here is where holiness grows, what he calls: 'the almost painfully undramatic account of what you have to do to be holy' (p. 87). For a minister, being available when needed, and utterly content when not, also calls to mind St Paul's 'I am content in all things, in famine and in plenty' (Philippians 4:12). Of course it's nice to be needed, to be important, to be asked to do things, to have a full diary of exciting things happening, to be productive. But spiritually, the time of un-productivity might just be the most important time of all. 

Chance of fog

Fog can be dangerous because you lose a sense of where you're going. Same with spiritual fog, from which I have been suffering a bit recently.

Spiritual fog may not be a commonly known term, but others have written of 'spiritual depression' (Martin Lloyd Jones) and 'acedia' (Christopher Jamison). Spiritual fog is dangerous because it can creep up on you unawares and you may not even know you're in it. It makes everything flat and uninteresting. It makes you forget why you got ordained.

Lack of enthusiasm for God, feeling that praying makes no difference, lack of gratitude, inability to see the things God has given as gift and opportunity. All these and more characterise spiritual fog. Taking a church service when in this state is really hard. I hesitate to say this but when you meet clergy who appear to be in this state more often than not, it sends a shiver down the spine. There but for the grace of God...

Is it to do with introversion and extroversion? Are introverts more likely to look inwards and become morbid? Is it overwork, underwork, tiredness, isolation, boredom? What causes it and what can be done about it?

In his classic Spiritual Depression (1959) the great preacher, Martin Lloyd Jones explores verses from the bible which deal with being sad, down or depressed, recommending we talk to ourselves, rather than being talked to by our negative thoughts:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
   and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him... (Psalm 42:5)

We need to question ourselves, tell ourselves a different story, reassure ourselves, and generally kick ourselves up the backside (my phrase, not his).

In Finding Happiness (2008) monk Christopher Jamison explains that the 'Seven deadly sins' were once 'Eight Thoughts' that the desert fathers and mothers identified as the common experience of all human beings. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century set about trying to amend the list for lay use, and got rid of the first sin: 'Acedia' (spiritual forgetfulness) thinking this was experienced only by monks and nuns. Jamison writes: 'The disappearance of 'acedia' from ordinary people's vocabulary deprived Western culture of the ability to name an important feature of the spiritual life, namely, loss of enthusiasm for the spiritual life itself.'

When you lose enthusiasm for the spiritual life itself, you become a church functionary. It may be a scary thought that there are functionaries aplenty in the Church...Maybe they go about their business all the time, being ecclesiastically busy and efficient, their spiritual fog unnoticed by all the other foggy souls...

Fog can linger. It can help to tell someone if you discover you're in the fog; if you're not in the habit of talking in accountable ways with spiritually alert souls, you may not even know you're in the fog. But probe, and there will be some cause, some train of discouraging little things going back several days, weeks, months (years?)...some underlying sadness which may be as yet unidentified. Something not grieved. Something not owned. Something not yet in the light. Sometimes, in the absence of people to coax it out, God is gracious and lifts the fog directly.

For me recently, the fog cleared at three words from Matthew's gospel, from the story of the haemorrhaging woman who made up her mind 'if I can just touch his cloak, I will be healed'. The three words were, 'Take heart, daughter', and they appeared at the bottom of my phone screen, as I looked up the daily reading one foggy morning - just those three words. You needed to swipe the page to see the rest of the passage. I didn't really need to read the rest though. The fog had cleared.