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The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

JAN 3

Episode 6: Overcoming Acedia - Faithful Perseverance and Joy

Christina Gebel: Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode six, Overcoming Acedia. Welcome. So, you might be thinking, finally, we have gotten to the point where we are actually sun-setting our discussion about acedia and talking about how to actually overcome it, and this whole time, just to recap, we’ve been discussing how acedia shows up for us, how it shows up in the world, [00:01:00] and how it’s mainly driven by the false spirit and the false spirit wanting to get us off track from doing the most good in the world and from living out our true calling. The way that we can push back against all the things that we’ve been talking about is by actually overcoming acedia. Before we begin. If you’re still a little bit fuzzy on what acedia is and you’ve been following along, just please know that’s okay, and it takes time, like I’ve said in previous episodes, to ingest all of this and wrap your mind around it. Maybe you understand it a little bit on the personal level and maybe not as much on the society level. That’s all okay. And for that reason, because it can be a difficult topic to grasp, I have a [00:02:00] special treat for you, and that is as a bonus to the conclusion of the acedia series on Moderate Catholic. I will be including an adaptation of the Ignatian examine, and when I say Examen, E-X-A-M-E-N. So, for those of you who are familiar, the Examen is a tool in Ignatian spirituality that many Jesuits do and encourage others to do every single day. It’s usually part of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s kind of like the culmination, if you will, of those Exercises. And it’s an inventory of your day where you look back to everything you did, people you saw what you read, watched, who you interacted with, and you pay special attention to how the Spirit is moving within you that day. And this is very [00:03:00] Ignatian because Ignatius believes that we can seek God and all of the ordinary experiences of life. So, by reviewing our day as a part of our daily prayer, we can actually see where God is at work. So, notice that I use the phrase that the Examen helps us understand where the Spirit is moving throughout the day. In the Examen that I’m gonna include as a bonus to this series, it’s also gonna help us understand where the false spirit might be moving, and in that sense, how acedia has shown up throughout our day. So, stay tuned. This will be a great bonus for all of you, and hopefully something that you can play for yourself as you’re reflecting in daily prayer. So, once you find the acedia in your life day to [00:04:00] day, you will likely want to overcome it, and that’s where the topic today comes in. So, I’m going to start the topic with a huge spoiler. If you overcome acedia, you will know that you’ve overcome it because there is a great gift awaiting you on the other side. So that’s the spoiler, and I’m even gonna tell you what that gift is. But first we’re gonna point back to Evagrius, our desert monk, our main dude who describes the feeling of overcoming acedia as a quote, “state of peace and an ineffable joy ensues in the soul after the struggle.” When I read that, I was like, well, I would like a state of peace and ineffable joy, so obviously it’s very attractive. I [00:05:00] did actually experience some of this once I simply named acedia. I talked about that in the earliest episodes - I believe episode two - where just knowing what was going on with me spiritually and being able to point to it was peace-giving for me. It brought me some relief. If just naming it can give you that positive emotion like it did for me, imagine what overcoming it could feel like. Today we’re gonna talk about that and we’ll use the same two texts that I’ve been referring to all along The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. And because we’re nearing the end of this acedia series, you might be thinking, if you’ve hung around this long, I’d really like to learn more about this acedia thing, as I mentioned [00:06:00] earlier, I would recommend starting with Kathleen Norris’s book, Acedia and Me the New York Times bestseller, because it is a lot more accessibly written. But if you want a good theological itch and you’re kind of used to scratching theological itches, then I would say The Noonday Devil is another great option. Okay, so let’s dive in and start with where Jean Charles Nault takes us and the first remedy that he starts to talk about on page 85 is meditating on the Incarnation. So Incarnation, again, is God becoming human in Jesus Christ. He references Saint Thomas Aquinas a lot and [00:07:00] in becoming human, he talks about God actually built a bridge between the abyss of the divine and human nature and God, in that sense, through Jesus acted as a bridge maker. And actually that’s what the word pontifex literally translates to: “the bridge maker.” So on page 87, Jean Charles Nault goes on to talk about Aquinas’s reasoning, where he writes, quote, “The Incarnation comes to restore to man or women, or humankind the possibility once again of walking toward true beatitude. The Incarnation thus allows humanity to rediscover [00:08:00] our proper dignity.” And I did make that a little bit more gender neutral, but the important piece here is by Jesus becoming human, we, unlike any other event in human history, are able to now have that bridge to the divine and therefore deeply understand our dignity. Aquinas goes on to argue that the Incarnation allows us to love God even more. Aquinas writes quote, “Nothing, of course, so induces us to love one as the experience of His love for us, but God’s love for me could be demonstrated to humanity and no more effective way than this. He wills to [00:09:00] be united to humanity in person for it is proper to love, to unite the Lover with the beloved as far as possible.” Okay, so Aquinas isn’t exactly known for simple sentences, but essentially what he’s saying here is there’s no more powerful gesture of love than to be united between the love and the Lover. If you truly love someone, you want to be as close or in union with them as you can. So, our responsibility in this is actually to receive this, okay? And I don’t, I don’t mean that flippantly, to receive this, to really actually meditate on how much God loves us, that He became [00:10:00] human, in the human and divine nature of Jesus Christ. Then, went on to sacrifice greatly for all of us despite our sins and despite our imperfection. So, we receive this and we are called to participate in that love. I think that John Charles Nault puts it really beautifully when he writes on page 88, “God does not save us without us.” So, this is a participatory love. This is not just simply we are these fallen creatures running around and, you know, we just need somebody to come down and swoop us up. This is not a passive salvation. This is us actively participating in the Salvation. That is meant for us. And what do we have to [00:11:00] help us with that? Guess what? We have the Holy Spirit and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. If it’s been a minute since you’ve read about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, or had Confirmation or had a child who’s going through Confirmation, you’ll remember that they’re things like wisdom to see things as God sees them. Prudence to choose what is most in conformity with the good. So, the Holy Spirit and its gifts are not this thing that we need to just memorize for Confirmation class, but they’re actually like tools in our tool belt to participate in this divine love. And we can draw on them, pray for them, pray to be strengthened in them, in order to reach that achievement. John Charles Nault writes on page 95, quote, “The encounter with [00:12:00] Christ becomes a friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit makes Christ the contemporary of every person. And makes each of us another Christ” end quote. That last part I was like, Ooh, I don’t know if I’m worthy of being even in relation to the idea of another Christ, but I do love this choice of words in friendship. A friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. Because what more does love do, and what more does a good friend who loves their friend do than to get out of their own head and be in communion and caring about the needs and wants and desires of their beloved [00:13:00] friend? Okay, so that is. Remedy number one, if you will, meditating on the Incarnation. The other one is called joyful perseverance. It can also be referred to as standing fast. So Evagrius and the Desert Fathers traced all the remedies to acedia back to one concept. Okay, so let’s just distill it down to one, and they distilled it down to perseverance. In other words, we must focus our efforts. Because the false spirit’s trying to pull us in a million different directions, y’all. So we gotta focus. Jean Charles Nault writes that we must resist, [00:14:00] stand fast, persevere, and remain faithful. And he writes about the temptation that we’re up against. In doing so, at the bottom of page 1 45, he writes, quote “Acedia is the temptation to withdraw from the narrowness of the present so as to take refuge in what is imaginary. It is the temptation to quit the battle so as to become a simple spectator of the controversy that is unfolding in the world.” End quote. Woo. Acedia never stops getting intense, y’all. So, we have this temptation to withdraw and to take refuge and what is imaginary. And if you remember from last time, the Signs of the Times, one of the ways that [00:15:00] acedia tempts us to do this is by creating this unhealthy nostalgia for the past and that selective nostalgia that we come up with in our brains is, is really imaginary because it is a subset or a se

48 min
12/23/2025

Episode 5: Acedia & Interreligious Dialogue

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Balu Natarajan to discuss the interreligious aspects of acedia, particularly as it relates to Hinduism. Balu Natarajan identifies as friend, husband, father, son, educator, and lifelong learner. By profession, practicing physician and Chief Medical Officer, maintaining board certifications in internal medicine, sports medicine, and hospice + palliative medicine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinagebel.substack.com

56 min
12/03/2025

Episode 4: Acedia & the Signs of the Times - continued

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode Four: Acedia and the Signs of the Times Continued - Why acedia makes perfect sense right now. So welcome back to our podcast. So far, we have discussed a lot about acedia, including where it shows up for us personally, its symptoms and its manifestations. And last time in episode three, we something called the Signs of the Times in Catholicism. And if you remember from episode three, the Signs of the Times are essentially our way of looking at what’s happening out in the world and interpreting it in the light of the Gospel. I wanted to do a two-parter, and this is [00:01:00] part two on the Signs of the Times because I think it takes a little bit to sink in, and I hope that you will get more of that in this episode. So why are we talking about acedia, and the Signs of the Times? Or in other words, why should we care about this intersection specifically? We talked about, early on in this series, acedia manifesting on a personal level and how that shows up acedia manifesting on a societal level is how the Signs of the Times come to be. I want to offer a reason to go to the societal level, even though acedia is a deeply personal spiritual topic. And that is because the Signs of the Times have really been with us throughout all of human history. The Signs [00:02:00] of the Times, even though it’s a Vatican II-type phrase, is really about how do we look out into the world and see a lot of suffering and injustice and make sense of that in light of our faith. When I go about the world today, which is rampant with injustice, I personally can feel really overwhelmed and really powerless. And this intersection of acedia and the Signs of the Times actually helps me to make a little bit of sense of it, although certainly not all of it does make sense. But also, to temper my reaction in the wider arc of human history. Something I like to tell myself is that we really aren’t that special right now. A lot of times you hear people say, [00:03:00] oh my gosh, this is the worst it’s ever been, or never in my lifetime can I remember a time when we’re so divided and it’s been this terrible. And certainly, that could be true, especially in the course of a lifetime. But I think what’s on the flip side of that type of thinking is this idea that we are perhaps in the worst part of human history, or we’re dealing with the worst humans that have ever existed. And that can lead to a lot of hopelessness and also a lot of despair. And as Christians, we have to push through that and get to what we are meant to do and called to do in light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, it helps us to make sense of what we’re seeing, to know that the Signs of the Times have always been with us and so has our faith [00:04:00] and we’re alive here and now in this particular moment using those tools to try to navigate all of this and live as Christ would intend us to live. It also helps, I think, to know how the false spirit, or in other words, the devil, or in other words, evil, operates in the world. I hear a lot of people saying right now, I just can’t believe the amount of good people that are doing awful things or supporting awful things, and again, it’s hard to make sense of that as Christians, especially people who say they’re Christians. But when you look at it through the lens of acedia and the false spirit, the goal of the false spirit is to get as many people off track as possible, and that is how acedia operates on a [00:05:00] larger scale. So, when I see all these things happening and I see otherwise good people supporting really bad things, I tend to not let myself drown in despair. Although I would be lying if I said I had succeeded in that at times, but I instead try to think about how is this false spirit moving in this and what does the false spirit want us to do? It helps me to see humanity really struggling with evil, and that makes it more manageable in my brain more towards action as opposed to despair. So just as a recap, we know the false spirit has two goals: one, to keep us from living out our God-given vocation, and two, from allowing us to do the most right that we [00:06:00] can do in the world. And when you think of it that way, in the framework of those two goals, what we’re seeing right now is a lot of people who are straying from their God-given vocation and a lot of people who are not living into the most right or justice that they can do in the world. Think about the world that we would live in: Everybody living into their God-given vocation, trying to do good. We would live in a very different world than what we find ourselves right now. That’s where we’re heading, right? That’s the Kingdom. That’s heaven. That’s the world where everybody finally gets it right and we live in this peace and harmony and love of God. We as Christians, and I think specifically as Catholics, are called to work to bring about the [00:07:00] Kingdom here on Earth. It doesn’t say to accomplish it necessarily with some finality, but our goal is to not dwell on the when and the how and the where, because Jesus says nobody knows the day or the hour anyway, but to try to bring about the work of the Kingdom in the here and now. So today we will be again, primarily drawing from the two books the Edia and Me by Kathleen Norris and the Noonday Devil by Jean Child Malt. And we will review right now the four signs that we brought up in this last episode, and we’re gonna continue on. With more signs today. So just as a review, the four signs from last time that we’re [00:08:00] seeing, is number one, many people not having a closeness with God or drifting away from God. Number two, the sensationalization of everything from media to sex to violence, like the most evocative thing, the most graphic thing, the most wow factor. Number three, thinking that it might be better to not exist. And if that’s a little too much, too heavy, too extreme, think about questioning our own worth and our existence here and now. And finally, number four the one that I resonate with personally is this idea of instability and restlessness and how we kind of flee from the depths of what we’re called to and we busy ourselves with a lot of other [00:09:00] things the false spirit needs this in order to thrive because the false spirit doesn’t want us to live into our calling or do the most good in the world because that’s quite frankly how evil in the false spirit are overcome. I think of it a lot of time, too, of just like the false spirit is always trying to make us spin our wheels like you go over there in the corner and run on the hamster wheel, and that will gimme a lot of time to focus on carrying out my false spirit plan because you’re gonna be distracted on your little hamster wheel Peloton that you’re doing, nothing against Peloton. I just am picturing a little hamster on a wheel with a Peloton. The other thing the false spirit is doing, while we’re so distracted, is making division among us. The false spirit knows that the soil of all of this is a divisive world, and that’s something [00:10:00] we’re feeling so much right now. It’s like putting all of us on our own little respective hamster wheels in different corners of the house, and what happens? One, we get really absorbed in our little hamster wheel, Peloton. Two, we aren’t communicating with each other, we’re making assumptions about each other. We’re exaggerating what we think the other person may or may not be doing because we’re not in connection and we’re not having a healthy encounter with each other. What better way to keep us divided than to keep us all restless away from God questioning life and getting whiplash from every sensational thing coming our way on our screens, right? The false spirit in that sense keeps us in a holding pattern, and that is exactly by design. And our job is to say, as [00:11:00] Becky, my wonderful spiritual director told me, our job is to say, I see you little punk. And yes, she did use the word punk, and I love her for that. You are not going to do that to me. I believe in what is good and right and compassionate and true, and you won’t fool me. You won’t keep me town. And it’s important to remember that it’s a hamster wheel, but it’s not a cage with a lock on it. We have free will. We can exit the wheel at any time and we can step off of it and say, hey, false spirit, I get what you’re doing now. I’m getting off the hamster wheel. I’m gonna go find my friends and we’re gonna work together to put you in your own corner. So that my friends is a prayer right now, if there ever was one. And with that, I will talk to you [00:12:00] about the remaining Signs now we’re going to move on to number five. All right, so signs of the time, number five: struggling with being alone, and in the Noonday Devil on page 116, Evagrius, remember our like main dude here, calls acedia, a flight from oneself, it’s not just the temptation to flee what you’re called to do, but it’s actually to escape your true self. And that might show up as no longer knowing how to be alone or perhaps being afraid to be alone. And this is not the kind of afraid to be alone, like in COVID when you know we craved social interaction because we’re social beings and all that stuff. It’s more [00:13:00] so that in solitude, he writes, what’s scary about it is that we discover what we are really. Like who we really are and we start to face our own demons. And Jean Charles Nault writes: “I do not play a role for long when I am alone, since there is no one to observe me except myself.” I love that quote. He’s essentially saying, we all kind of role play when we’re out being our social creatures. Maybe some of that is our true, authentic selves that we sho

48 min
10/27/2025

Episode 3: Acedia & the Signs of the Times

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode three, Acedia and the Signs of the Times. So, if you’ve been following along these first two episodes, you’ll know that we’re here to talk about acedia. Acedia is, in brief, what used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but got lumped in with sloth and has kind of fallen out of favor of our modern spiritual discourse. In episode one, I talked a lot about how I knew that acedia was showing up in my life, but I didn’t quite know what the name [of it] was yet. And in episode two, I start to describe acedia using two [00:01:00] books, The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and another one called Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. You may have been tuning in so far and thought a lot about the episodes, I’m sure, and still be wondering what is acedia. I wanted to pause before we get to today’s topic and just say that if you aren’t sure what acedia is still, that is okay. It takes a while to wrap your head around it. And really, it’s goals and its symptoms and how it moves in the world is actually quite simple. But at least, for me, getting to naming it and understanding it was a little more complex. So, I just wanna tell you, if you’re [00:02:00] like, is she gonna keep talking about that acedia thing? Because I’m thoroughly lost. The answer is yes for now. I’m gonna keep talking about the acedia thing, and it’s totally okay if you’re lost. I was thinking this week a little bit about how to better describe acedia, just in my own words, and I thought a lot about something we discussed in episode two, which was how is acedia different from depression? I think depression is something that we all either have experienced or maybe we have experienced it by proxy as showing up in someone’s life whom we love. So I wanna talk a little bit about that difference there, because I think most people have a fair enough understanding of depression, and that can be a launching point to understand more [00:03:00] about acedia. The way that I would describe it is if you were to exist in the world, and you were to exist free of depression, let’s just say, normal mental health, depression has been treated. Maybe it’s not even an issue, maybe it never was, and yet you still feel something that is nagging at you or seems to bother you, but you can’t quite figure out why, because nothing seems apparently wrong. That even if you have the most sound, mental health at that point in your life or maybe your entire life, if you’re really lucky, you still feel this unsettledness in your spirit. And that’s where I think depression and [00:04:00] acedia can start to diverge is, as I explained in episode two, depression can be a very true clinical issue that has clinical therapies and medications designed to overcome it, thank God. But acedia creeps into the realm of spirituality, and it affects our spirit. While it might show up looking like what we’re familiar with as signs of depression, it really at its root comes from the depression of the spirit, if you will. I hope that helps you to delineate a little bit better, and it will begin to make more sense as we go along. The second thing I wanna talk about, and I did mention a little bit before, is the false spirit. So the false spirit is [00:05:00] what I will refer to as the devil. I think I might have explained that I’m not usually a person that goes around talking about the devil. So, the false spirit for me is a much more palatable version of how to talk about it. I like the phrase, the false spirit, which comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola because it literally describes what I think, evil or the devil is the spirit, which is good, obviously, but the false spirit, which is kind of the antithesis of the good spirit, right? So, I wanna talk about the false spirit a lot in the next two episodes, including today and to understand and try to make sense of what’s going on right now, which is completely overwhelming if you’ve been following along [00:06:00] in the world. We need to understand how evil is at work through a spiritual lens. The false spirit, in other words, the devil, is acting in the world. Even if you’re not okay with the phrase, the false spirit or the devil, you can just call it evil, whatever spiritual tradition you come from, there probably is some conception of evil. So how does the false spirit operate, especially today, and I’d like to give you two goals that it has. The first goal of the false spirit is to keep us from living our God given vocation. And when I say vocation, I don’t necessarily mean like becoming a nun or becoming a firefighter. I really just mean what is it [00:07:00] that you are meant to do in this world? You specifically, a beloved child of God. Some people might call that, you know, living your best self, living your best life, living into God’s calling for you. Living into your purpose. There’s a lot of ways to describe that, and God wants us to live in that space, to live in that authentic being that we were created to be. However, the false spirit being false wants to keep us from getting there as best that he can. Okay? He wants to deter us from what is good and what is ultimately the purpose and fulfillment of our lives. The second thing, the false spirit does is keep us from doing [00:08:00] the most good that we can in the world. And I say the most because I do think, especially right now, there are a lot of good people out there, and they are doing otherwise seemingly good things, and maybe not outrightly bad things, although some people are doing outrightly bad things, but let’s just talk about a normal person, just kind of existing. They might not be doing bad, but they might not be doing the most good that they can do, even for myself, and I do consider myself someone who cares about doing good in the world. That is the growth point for me, always spiritually, am I doing the most good that I can do? Because if I kind of sit with [00:09:00] contentment and say, well, I’m doing good enough, I don’t really know if I’m going to reach the point that God wants me to be at, but also that the world needs, so again, the false spirit, two goals. One, keeping us from our God-given vocation or calling in life. And two, keeping us from doing the most good that we can in the world. The false spirit is really clever and really smart. I think back to the theology I had growing up which was like, the devil is bad and he tells you to do bad stuff. And if you do the bad stuff, it means you listen to him. As I’ve gotten older, I will say I have never truly abandoned that thinking. I realized, much to my shame, I still have a part of [00:10:00] me that thinks that the devil is like this little person that sits on your ear and says like, take the candy, do it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that understanding of the devil or evil, or the false spirit served me well in childhood because that was kind of the extent of my moral thinking at the time, but I really have graduated instead to this idea that the devil is not necessarily the thing that’s sitting on your shoulder every day telling you to do the bad thing that’s in front of you. The devil is clever and smart and way more manipulative than at least I was told growing up. And one way that the false spirit shows up for me and my life is by actually. preying [00:11:00] on my good intentions and twisting it the devil knows that trying to get a good person off track is going to be really, really hard because that person has already, let’s say, made a commitment to goodness in their life. So the devil or the false spirit being clever thinks okay, well, how can I get that person to reneg on that? And one of the ways the false spirit does it is by using our inclinations, even sometimes our good inclinations and twisting and manipulating them towards evil or towards not doing enough good in the world or towards not going to the fullness of our God-given vocation.[00:12:00] So how does this all relate back to acedia? Acedia is one of the tools that the false spirit uses to keep us away from those two things. Living out our vocation, doing the most right in the world. And that’s what really was one of those things that clicked for me when I was doing spiritual direction, which I talked about in episode two. My intention has always been to listen to God, to do the most right in the world, to do what God is asking me to do. I’ve always tried to center my life around that. When I kept feeling these feelings of acedia, I was like, well, if I’m trying, trying, trying, why am I still feeling this unsettledness or this nagging or [00:13:00] this inertia or this restlessness? I keep at it every single day and I’m not trying to outrightly do something bad, so what is going on inside of me spiritually and naming acedia and realizing how it can affect people that are trying to work for the good it can really show up in that way. So, today what we’re gonna do is talk about acedia showing up in the world today, and I actually think that the false spirit is pounding us with acedia right now because there is so much evil going on and the false spirit knows that an order for that evil to survive, he’s gotta kind of mess with the goodness and the [00:14:00] good intentions of so many people out there. I think today is one of the most critical moments to talk about acedia because I think understanding it and being able to recognize it in society is what’s gonna actually help us to get out. I’m operating from a belief that we are right now in a time of great upheaval and very, very severe division. That is kind of the foundation that I’m going to talk about acedia in the modern context. It is feeling very, very overwhelming in every corner of the world, to be honest with you, and h

48 min
09/11/2025

Episode 2: Naming Acedia - What is it?

Episode 2 Transcript (includes links for further reading) [00:00:00] Okay, welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode two. So, it's been a little bit since episode one. I know that I left y'all on kind of a cliffhanger of sorts. Life has really been life’n lately, so I haven't had time to record the next episode, but I've been thinking a lot about it and it's been highly anticipated. So, my sincere apologies for leaving you for such a long time and also on such a cliffhanger, and I hope that you will enjoy this episode that we have today. So, if you remember from the very first episode, what I had been talking about is essentially what [00:01:00] led me to do spiritual direction, namely the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola with my spiritual director. And that was around a six-month process where we very slowly went through those exercises, and I was trying to gain some insight into how I was feeling, which was somewhat new to me, I guess you could say, in the sense that I hadn't quite felt that way before. And while it was perhaps a close cousin of other feelings I had had in the past, like maybe depression, it was somewhat different. And the way that I described it in episode one, in telling other people about it, was that I [00:02:00] think I had a spiritual problem that needed to be solved as opposed to a medical problem or a mental health problem, of which I was really familiar with up until that point in my life. So. I laid out that whole scene and promised to tell you what I would eventually come to know that it is, and that's what we're gonna focus on today. So today we are going to name it, and we are going to do that in the next episodes where we really unpack what it is. It's nature. And ultimately how to overcome it. I do wanna mention that most of my research around this not only came from my conversations in spiritual direction with Becky Eldredge, but also from [00:03:00] two texts that I read subsequently to learn more about it. And I'd like to share those with you because one, you might be interested in reading them and two, I want to give credit to the authors that wrote them and they have informed me of so much of its history and how it can manifest in our lives. So the first text that I wanna draw to your attention, and we will be going over these in multiple episodes, is called The Noonday Devil: Acedia and the Unnamed Evil of our Times. So that's kind of a bit of a foreboding, somewhat, Uh, interesting title. It talks about the devil. It talks about evil. And if you know me, and you know how I talk about spirituality, I don't tend to bring up those two things [00:04:00] frequently. I prefer to use a different word for the devil, which is one that I learned during spiritual direction, which is the False Spirit, and that's something that St. Ignatius kind of coined, if you will. And this text is written by Jean Charles Nault. Nault is spelled N-A-U-L-T, and he is with the Order of St. Benedict, (Benedict is a saint in the Catholic church) and he resides at the Abbott of Saint-Wandrille. And if you're noticing my very poor French accent that I've tried to salvage from my time in high school, though I doubt it was ever actually there, he resides in France. And [00:05:00] he is a monk there at this Benedictine Abbey in Normandy, France. His book is one that I read, actually second after the next one I'll tell you about, and I will say it is a little more academic in its writing, so. I would not consider it to be kind of an entry level read to this topic. It is definitely a lot more theological, and also just academic in its approach to the topic, but it is really excellent. So if you're up for that, definitely check it out. The second book that I wanna bring to your attention, and the first one I read. At the recommendation of Becky while I was going through direction is actually a New York Times bestseller, so that bodes well, and it is called Acedia [00:06:00] and Me: A Marriage, Monk’s, and Writer's Life. And that author is Kathleen Norris. And she is an American poet and essayist. She currently is Episcopalian, so that's one denomination of Christianity within the United States, but she also became what's called a Benedictine Oblate at the Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, which sounds like a really intriguing place to visit. A Benedictine Oblate is essentially when a layperson, and by layperson we mean somebody who's not a priest or an ordained religious person, comes to an order like the Order of St. Benedict and says, I'm not going to become a monk [00:07:00] or an ordained follower of this St. Benedictine order, if you will, but I'm going to remain a lay person, and I want to live my life in accordance with the values and teachings of this saint. So, she is essentially a lay person like me and you. I would imagine not many of the people listening are priests or ordained religious, though if you are welcome, we are happy to have you here. But she really felt drawn to St. Benedict so much so that she wanted to make this commitment. So if you haven't guessed already by the two titles, I have just read to you the thing that we are going to name and the thing that I feel I was really struggling with at that point in my life, and to be honest, still do or else I [00:08:00] wouldn't be here talking about it, is acedia. So, acedia is spelled. A-C-E-D-I-A, and I spell these things only because if you want to Google them, you won't be like me guessing at the spelling when you do so acedia, say it with me if you'd like, because we're going to talk a lot about it. And what's interesting is that Jean Charles Nault calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today. And while he is a contemporary with the rest of us, he did write his book a little bit ago (2015), but the fact that he [00:09:00] calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today speaks to how this concept of acedia has lasted for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and how we still find relevance in it today. And one of my goals is to help you understand where it might operate in your own life, but also where it's operating, on a very large scale in our society, and hopefully you can find some comfort in naming it like I did. So, I'm going to read a little bit about Acedia from the Acedia and Me book. On page three, she talks a little bit about where the word came from, and I think it starts to unpack its meaning and mystery. So [00:10:00] on page three, she says, “At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care. Or is incapable of doing so when life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding. Acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine. You know the pain is there yet you can't rouse yourself to give a damn.” So, that is a really intense definition, and having told you that I experienced this at a certain point in my life and perhaps still do, as I said, might seem a little contrary to those who know me because I certainly [00:11:00], like you, care a lot about what's going on in our world. And a word to describe the absence of care seems a little bit contradictory on one level, but I want you to keep an open mind because I think that Greek root, the absence of care, is not essentially the way that you and I would think of as not caring today, but perhaps not caring to our fullest. And that's a little bit of a teaser as to what we will be talking about. So, Kathleen also talks about naming it, and naming it, for me, you might remember from our first episode, was a bit of a liberation because it [00:12:00] is really difficult to suffer from something that you don't know the name or the nature of, but you're certainly feeling its impact and its symptoms. And Kathleen struggled with this, which is one of the reasons I imagine she wrote this New York Times bestseller, and perhaps a lot of people do, if it was such a popular book. Yeah, but naming it, for her, and also for me, was like a point of liberation because I didn't really know how to describe it, and I sensed that it was not something that was in our modern day discourse that I could entirely point to, again, like depression is close, but not quite. It's a little bit different. So I'd like to read a little excerpt from page four of Acedia and Me. She says, “As I read this, (and [00:13:00] she was referring to when she learned about acedia), I felt a weight lift from my soul for I had just discovered an accurate description of something that had plagued me for years but that I had never been able to name as any reader of fairytales can tell you not knowing the true name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or a “issue,” puts you at a great disadvantage and learning the name can help to set you free. He's describing, (she was referring again to how she came to light of acedia and who wrote about it) He's describing half my life.” I thought to myself. So, wow. Again, this is really powerful. [00:14:00] She uses the word enemy. She uses the word demon, but she also says, it set her free. As if she was in a way bound by this, and she says it describes half her life. I mean, that's pretty significant. So again, I think this is a real issue and I think a lot of people either experience it or have periods of it, and she writes very eloquently and honestly about how it affected her. So in reading these two books, I learned a lot and I took some handwritten notes as I was reading the first book, the Noonday Devil, and I jotted down the many ways that acedia is described or ways that kind of came to me as I was reading about it, [00:15:00] and these are synonyms, if you will, but I think with this being perhaps your first introduction to acedia, this list will help you to understand what I'm talking about as it helped me in reading it. When I

50 min
06/23/2025

The Moderate Catholic: Inaugural Episode

Welcome to the very first Podcast Episode of The Moderate Catholic! Launching this has been a (good) itch in my side for quite a long time now, and it feels great to finally “scratch” the surface of podcasting. I am including the transcript below for your listening/viewing ease. Thank you for supporting me in this big step. ~ Christina Episode 1 Transcript (includes links for further reading) Hello, my name is Christina Gebel, and I am with the Moderate Catholic. This is our first episode of the Moderate Catholic, and I'm very happy that you're here. So today I would like to tell you a little bit more about myself, my background, what we hope to do here in our time, listening to the Moderate Catholic, and discussing the topics as well as what we're gonna focus on in the next episodes. So, a little bit about me. I am a public health professional, specifically maternal and child health, and have been doing that [00:01:00] for about 11 years now. And in addition to that formal training, I have also been a doula for about 14 years now . But that's actually not the expertise that I am bringing to this podcast at the outset. I also have a deep love for spirituality and also my Catholic faith. So much so that I majored in theology and undergrad, and within theology, I focused a lot on ethics, particularly sexual ethics. And just developed a really deep love of the Catholic Church and many of the documents it's written, and I started to get more and more into social justice and particularly Catholic social teaching. Some of the main figures out [00:02:00] there in Catholicism regarding social justice became heroes of mine, and I went on to try to live my life in a really intentional way. So fast forward to today, which is a lot of years between today and undergrad, but I have remained in my Catholic faith, and one thing that has been a little bit of a challenge to me throughout these years post undergrad has been finding spaces where I can get together with like-minded Catholics and discuss not only my own thoughts and feelings, but also our faith and how it relates to the world that we're in. I noticed oftentimes that as I was moving from city to city and quote unquote [00:03:00] church shopping, which if you're not familiar with the phrase “church shopping,” it's when you go around to a bunch of parishes and try to figure out which one you feel most at home with, which resonates with a lot of your interest and values. And granted, it's all Catholic, but for those who are Catholic and listening, you might know that some parishes have, let's say, a take on what to focus on within Catholicism. And so for me, the thing that was important to me in selecting a parish throughout these years since undergrad has been where can I find people that want to be in and of this world and also want to be Catholic and want to lead with compassion and social justice, and always putting vulnerable populations in mind whenever we're [00:04:00] making decisions that could affect them. What I found is that, in every major city I've lived in so far, which is outside of where I grew up in Cincinnati…I've lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and now Durham. I found that, there are certainly just your run of the mill Catholic parishes with, let's say in aging population that aren't as active, but just go along, have Mass, have the sacraments, have a ladies' auxiliary function that sells, baked goods, a fish fry, all the good things that we remember, or at least I do from childhood. But there's also some really traditional leaning parishes, and those seem to be. Very popular right now and growing in number. Those tend to be a [00:05:00] little more conservative. And also, there are parishes, which have more of a progressive, if you will, or a social justice leaning, and they might have a rainbow ministry for L-G-B-T-Q Catholics, they're not afraid to go there with the issues of the day, like immigration and so many of the hot button issues that actually we're experiencing right now in spades, they're not trying to shy away from the world or create an alternate world, or create a world as though it should be according to them. But more so a world as it should be according to the life and teaching and example of Jesus Christ. And [in] those parishes, I feel good and at [00:06:00] home because there's a tension there, and it sounds odd in a way to say I feel good in a tension, but it kind of is, I think, where our faith lives. And that is in the tension of we have this 2000 plus year old religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and a lot has happened in 2000 years, and some of it looks familiar, some of it's slightly nuanced with different players and names and faces. But a lot has happened, and we find ourselves as Catholics just continuing to wrestle and wrestle with taking the foundational values that Jesus laid out, again in his life example ministry and teachings, and trying to be in and of this world and apply them and. In my personal [00:07:00] opinion, as we keep going down the road in modernity, so to speak, that to me gets a lot more complicated. Now, we're in this world where people still fight wars and people still get ill and, die and we still have widespread illnesses unfortunately. But the way in which we confront those things has become a lot more complicated. And there's a lot more within our grasp right now that has never been available, and on the one hand that's good because it shows that we're progressing and we're using our, human intelligence and our ability to reason to solve the problems of the world. But within it come really deep ethical questions about just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. And that is my focus on ethics in a [00:08:00] nutshell, and why I naturally gravitated towards that when I started studying theology. And within that, I found kind of sexual ethics and marriage and family ethics, too. And you'll come to know this about me, but I am married, which I'm very happy and proud of, to a wonderful, loving, compassionate man, who I found a little bit later in life compared to my peers, but was well worth the wait. And he grew up Hindu and it worked for me, not only because he is this incredible person, but I actually really appreciate when perspectives on Eastern theology and thinking come into my life because I think that Eastern religions and thought, enriches really our whole being, but also our [00:09:00] understanding of God, in my case, and even my understanding of what it means to be a good person on this earth and for me as a Christian to better live as Jesus intended. So anyway, there's these parishes, there's this interest on ethics, there's the social justice vibe. It's been a journey in the modern world since then. But again, going back to why we're here today. I think that people really are craving community and spaces, and for me, there have become less and less spaces out there for so-called “moderate Catholics” who are looking to talk to each other, but not strictly within the bounds of these kind of polarized frameworks that we keep finding ourselves in today, [00:10:00] particularly conservative and liberal. And as many good Catholic teachers and professors and priests have taught me over the years, if we really are to live into this Catholic faith, it's not going to fit really nicely into those frameworks. It transcends our secular understanding of conservative, liberal, or a lot of other philosophies that have come up throughout the ages. So, at this point, maybe part of any of what I've just said and rambled on about, might speak to you and, I realize in articulating all of this, that, everything I'm saying is like über Catholic, you know? And sometimes I have to stop myself a little bit and be like, Christina, not [00:11:00] everybody wants to hear about everything you think about Catholicism. But maybe there's some of you who do. And for some of you who are listening just because you're interested or you, felt guilty 'cause I encouraged you to, I'll try to stop and explain a little bit about some of the Catholic things that I keep, referring to, not only for folks who are less familiar with it, but also for folks who are Catholic themselves. Because I'll be the first to say, I listen and read a lot of Catholic things out there, and I don't always know everything that they're referring to, to be honest with you. I would definitely love some refreshers on terms and people and all the things that's wrapped up in this like 2000 years of existence of the Roman Catholic Church and.[00:12:00] I always love learning new things, too. There's a lot that I don't know, I don't really fully understand. I've talked a little bit already about what my focus has been within these years, but I think that was guided by the Holy Spirit, and I think the Holy Spirit helps us to figure out where our strengths lie, where the mission that we're trying to meet in the world is, and as the saying goes, marry those two things. So, you might see that reflected a little bit as well in the logo of the Moderate Catholic. So, there's a dove, which represents the Holy Spirit as a symbol, and the dove’s speaking kind of these audio tongues, you know, so it's a podcast, so it has audio things. And then again, the Moderate Catholic piece comes from what I've started to describe, and we'll talk a [00:13:00] lot more about in future episodes, which is basically what does it mean to be moderate? And maybe that's not even the term for it. Maybe it's just that you find yourself somewhere that is not on one of the poles of the polarization, and you're just trying to do your best and live in the world and be a good person and imitate the life of Christ. So, I wanted to launch right into, like, here's everything I think about politics right now and how, the left and the right aren't getting it right. And both of them have major flaws, but I've written a lot about that on my

37 min

6 Episodes

4.7

out of 5

3 Ratings

The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

Creator

Topics that deepen faith and inspire action.
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

6
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Christina Gebel
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The Moderate Catholic