Dealing with Spiritual Slackness | January 11, 2025 | By Samuel H. Miller from The Life of the Soul

The Psalmist said that he had gone to church; he had praised God with great rejoicing; he has kept the holy days with devotion and sacrifice, and yet for all these things his soul was cast down within him, and he was puzzled and not a little ashamed. I presume that we too often must confess to ourselves if to no one else that even though we had gone to church and raised our voices in song an offered our prayer in the uttermost of devotion, yet somehow or other our soul was cast down within us and we were troubled why it should be so and not a little ashamed, or else we might have been willing to confess it more often. For the truth of the matter is that keeping the holy days, attending the worship in the sanctuary and offering prayers do not in any wise guarantee that a [person] shall be without these dark experiences which overwhelm the soul and leave [them] as if forsaken of God.

The Psalms are full of it from beginning to end; the 63^rd Psalm [Psalms 63: 1] says, “My soul thirsteth for thee (O God), in a dry and weary land, where no water is.” The 88^th Psalm [Psalms 88: 6-8] cries out, “Thou hast laid me in the lowest depths, even in the deepest darkness and I am shut up and I cannot come out.” Job [Job: 10:18-19] struggles with it and says, “Why didst thou ever take me from the womb? Why could I not have died there in the dark?” (Moffett). Bunyan, the Baptist, knew it; Fox, the Quaker, knew it; John of the Cross, the Catholic, knew it; [people] of every age, of every clime, of every sect have suffered under it.

You remember when the rich young ruler asked, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asked him what his habit of life had been, and one can almost hear the tone of despair with which he says, “I have kept the whole law from my youth up.” This was what had bothered the young man, not his wealth. He had gone to church; he had kept the law; he had worked hard being good; and yet he had no feeling that there was an eternal life within this. He was spiritually slack; he lived in a dry, weary land where there was no water; his soul was cast down within him.

In the Middle Ages, there were seven recognized sins, seven deadly sins…. One of those seven deadly sins was known as “accidie.” There is no word in our tongue for it. It was spiritual torpor. It was aridity, dryness, sterility, weariness; a kind of numbness that crept across the soul. Why should this be? Why should you and I, week after week and year after year, attend the services of the church; why should we pray day after day and year after year; why should we in a thousand different ways seek to live just as goodly lives as we can and then find all this amounted to a spirit of heaviness? Nothing comes out of it and our inner lives feel dead and heavy.

There are some things that can be said about it. First of all this is not an exceptional thing, peculiar to you as an individual. It is not because you have not tried. It will come to those most of all who have tried and who are the most honest about themselves. When we begin to play as if every service of worship were a glorious adventure of the spirit we are not being truthful. This thing does not happen to mortal men and if it were going to happen it would happen to the geniuses of the race like Schwitzer or Martin Luther or Fox or John of the Cross or Theresa of Avila or the Psalmist or Jeremiah or Isaiah. The truth of it is that every one of these freely and frankly confessed that this thing overwhelmed [them] time and time again and made it seem as though God had never visited [them], as though the word had never burned upon his tongue and as though his experience had been a dream, a vacant, empty, futile dream. No, this belongs to us as one of the crosses of our human experience and it will pass more quickly if we will admit it and recognize it, rather than be deceitful about it and make a pleasant pose of always enjoying what obviously we do not enjoy.

The second thing is that some of this may come out of just sheer fatigue. There is nothing truer of our modern world [note, the copyright of the book is 1951] than that we are overwhelmed with too many stimuli. We do not have merely our own family, our own friends, our own neighborhood on our minds. We have multiplied this by a tremendous manifold through the radio, the newspaper, moving picture, and television. We are forcing upon our poor mortal selves a burden of emotion that we have not earned or have not deserved concerning things about which we can do nothing….

Once we have exhausted ourselves with these things we are slack when it comes to experiencing something that does concern us. The sheer fatigue of a dog who could smell and sniff all the bones of the world would represent very well the condition we are in. We are stimulated beyond our capacity and are tired, tired with wanting, tired with despair, tired with sympathy, tired with trying. It is not surprising that after going through this ordeal we come on Sundays with sheer fatigue to try to lift our voices to the level of praise and to exalt our hearts to the place of worship. Is it any wonder that usually we do not succeed?

Moreover, I suspect that just because we have this habit of being overwhelmed with too many stimuli we try to protect ourselves, and so we withhold our heart and soul from a great many things in the world, until naturally enough it gets to be a habit and we withhold ourselves from everything just a little bit. We save ourselves a little bit all along the line and then this habit of withholding ourselves means we go through everything that happens only partly in it, sometimes not at all in it but just going through the motions of it and therefore we get nothing out of it. Sunday worship can be attended without being shared. Sharing is costly. It takes imagination; it takes emotion; it takes an effort to take down the bars, but we withhold ourselves and are poverty-stricken. Nothing comes because nothing is given.

And last of all, it could be that we just grow too sure. We have been through this service a thousand times, a million times. We have prayed and prayed and prayed and know that to expect and what not to expect. We have sung our psalms and expect nothing new in them. We have lived our lives and the ruts are plain and the paths are all marked and we never go into a new one. We are absolutely sure and certain, and the end of absolute security is utter complacency and out of this there is nothing but death, darkness, routine, sterility, and dry and weary land where one motion follows another, and no thought need ever by given to it. To be sure is to lose life. [Where is the joy?]

What can be said about a positive way of handling this? After we have dealt with all the negative ways in which we might have come to this experience, we must confess that being human we do all come to it and experience it most plainly even at the time when we wish we were not experiencing it. We come into worship and we want to worship, but we are dead. We want to praise God, but there is a spirit of heaviness over us. We want to exalt our souls, but they are cast down within us. What shall we do?

First, we must get back to the center of things. Dislocate life from all the peripheral concerns, from the thousand and one activities, and return to the center where life is a very humble miracle and mystery, back to the place where we cannot fold our hands without clasping a strange, inexplicable experience of being and of existence. Get back to the center where God is at the very point of that abyss of need at which we stand. Get back to the center for this is the only place from whence life comes to the spirit. There is no life outside of God. All things are dark, dry and weary, heavy and deathly…. Life is in God….

Perhaps I can hear you saying, “But that is the one thing we cannot find. Everything is dark. God is the very thing we have difficulty in discovering when worship slackens and our souls are cast down.” Yes, you are right. I must go back to what Jesus advised the young man to do after he said, “I have done all these things from my youth up”: “Sell all thou hast.” I presume that most of us have been intent upon this tremendous command to sell everything and get rid of all one’s possessions. But I have a feeling that there was something deeper even than that, as radical as that my seem, namely, that Jesus was trying to tell this man, “Make a totally new start. Get rid of everything on which you have been leaning and start all over again. Get to the center of your very life and even without God start to follow these humble paths of anguish and lean on nothing, nothing at all. Make a new beginning. You have done it this way, you have done it that way; you have followed this custom, that practice. Break them. No matter how good those things are, break them and start again and refresh yourself and dig a new well somewhere.”

Someone said of Renoir that he never painted one day as he did the day before. There is something here for the Christian to remember. One ought never to do exactly the same thing the same way as it was done before. If it is done too often it will deaden. God is infinite and therefore is to be approached in infinitely different ways. One ought not to limit one’s own experience of God to one experience. Start over again. Start humbly. Make a new beginning. It is said that Beethoven discarded thirteen different attempts before he finally captured the unmistakable glory, he wanted for the funeral march in his Eroica Symphony. Christian experience is forever in need of beginning again. To keep the finger on one spot too long makes an idol of it and blinds us to the revelation of God elsewhere. Every experience in time and space has its limits, and to forget that is to turn away from life and its eternal liveliness. Make new beginnings! God’s world is infinite and can well afford all the beginnings we dare to make.

Finally, we can reach out for help. We are not living in an impoverished world, even though we have come to a place of barren rock and sand in our individual pilgrimage. In this wilderness the everlasting arms are beneath us. The kingdom of God still exists, and there is grace for a new beginning. We can reach out to souls stronger that ourselves and redeem our days. We can reach out to Moses and stand with him before the burning bush that was not consumed, and kneeling share the glory of that hour. We can walk down into the potter’s house with Jeremiah and watch the molding of the clay, while the prophet broods on the mysteries of God working with His people. We can listen to the voice of the troubadour of God, good St. Francis, singing with such gay faith that all the ages have been inspired by it. The Bible and the history of the Church are full of such resources waiting to restore our souls to their proper brightness and strength. Such infinite hospitalities of the spirit are an everlasting refuge for the soul cast sown and weary in the exhaustion of its own limited powers.

Rabindranath Tagore once said:

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power – that the path before me was closed, that provision were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity. But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and when the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

One of the texts in the New Testament which we have reserved for use at funerals only but which I think ought to be claimed for life first of all is the one in which John [Revelations 21:5] hears the voice from heaven saying, “Behold I make all things new. Write: for these words are faithful and true.” You will know a thousand deaths before you die. Your soul will grow slack and weary and will lie down and die. It will be as if it was buried, many times. And then, out of newness of life you shall find a resurrection and in that resurrection all things shall be made new, and you will enter into a larger abundance than ever before. But it will only be if you have a strength to confess you have died and want to be resurrected and will enter through travail into a greater glory and a wider abundance and a deeper eternity. “We must find some place,” said Yates, “upon the Tree of Life for the Phoenix nest.” Why art thou cast down within me, O my soul?... We must be born again…. Behold, I will make all things new.