Hello, friends. Welcome to Spark my muse. You are listening to soul school lesson 03:13. The temptation to despair. Before I begin that lesson, I wanna give you a couple announcements. 2 things I'm pretty excited about. The first 1 began July first. And it's called the quarterly challenge. And all it is is my attempt to connect with you in a richer deeper way. And provide a spiritual challenge for you that takes a quarter of a year. It's also broken down into months. For this quarter, the theme is encounter And for July, we are meditating on the hundred and 30 ninth sum. So if you go over to patreon dot com, you can see what's happening there and jump on. Sometimes in my own life, I've have wished I had a little more companionship. Something to help me along in my spiritual journey, dig a bit deeper and find more meaning. It really helps to find more meaning when you do it with other people. This is a chance to join together with you in that. There's no cost or anything like that. But to be looped it on the material, you just have to join... At patreon dot com forward slash spark my views as a follower or a paid supporter, either 1 is fine. The second announcement I have is that I just signed a book deal with Broad leaf books. They published my first book called the wild within and now I'm doing a book on the lives and wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers. This time period was the 3 hundreds to the 8 hundreds, it was a time when up to a half a million people left the cities and the villages and went to the desert. This is a period. We know Too little about, especially in protestantism. A lot of these people are celebrated with festivals as saints in the Eastern Orthodox church, but they have been largely forgotten in protestant, and sometimes they're still celebrated in in catholicism. But their lives were very devoted. They had a lot of wisdom and what they have to teach us is still extremely relevant today. As I've been studying and researching for this book, I came across some, fantastic stuff I probably won't put in the book, but it's really great for sol, and it's about the temptation called As aca. Ce eventually was changed to the deadly sin of sloth and sloth is what we kind of come to understand its laziness. But Aca is much more profound. It is really something we're surrounded by in our times. The thoughts of Aca lead us towards nihilism. As I found this material, I thought it would be excellent to share it because we live in times that we can be frank tempted to despair. Perhaps because we're challenged financially. Or maybe we're challenged because of our health or worldwide plagues, perhaps because democracy seems to be falling apart. Whatever those reasons are, the temptation to protect ourselves and ins ourselves from life and spiritual joy, it kind of comes in like a fog. Gonna pick over a pick and choose some of of this material, not read it in its entirety, but you're welcome to read it when you get a chance. And I will also link to where you can read it for yourself. I'm says when the sense of life disappears, az aca beg gets the first of its daughters, the most dreadful of all despair. Unfortunately, such a loss of hope is alive and well today and what's worse, even among young people, Are we not here seeing the ultimate consequences of the new understanding of freedom? Freedom no longer understood? As the acceptance of our orientation towards good, but as the possibility of doing whatever we want. As asserted in its own limitless. But instead of generating happiness, it has only served to sharpen and cruel the feeling of dissatisfaction. The fall of the idol that people have constructed in order to place God now cause people to sink into desperation. Thomas a mccoy has demonstrated that the root of all despair lies in Aca. As aca is the lack of love, the lack of the greatest love. At its core of contemporary despair in being, a true sin against the holy spirit in which the self refuses to be open to love and forgiveness. The deepest root of the sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the una of any great love. Everything 1 can hope for is known and all love becomes disappointment of the finite in the world, whose monstrous surrogate are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair. And in this way, the truth becomes ever more tangible that the sorrow of this world leads to death. It is only flirting with death, the gh business of playing with power and violence that is still exciting enough to create an appearance of satisfaction In the Christian system of virtue, despair that is to say the radical and t of faith and hope. Is labeled as a sin against holy spirit because it excludes the ladder power to heal and to forgive and thereby it rejects salvation. Corresponding to this is the fact that in the new religion, pessimism is the sin of all sins. For to doubt optimism, progression, is a frontal attack on the spirit of the modern age. It is to dispute the fundamental creed on which its security rests. Even though this is always under threat in the view of the weakness of the sham god of history. In the end, the strategy we must use against the demon of a aca, may be summed up as follows joyful, perseverance. Psalm 50 12 says, restore to me the joy of thy salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. This is a prayer that must dwell in our heart, when a cd strikes. It summarizes perfectly our spiritual attitude in the face of temptation, we are radically saved resurrected with Christ. Our sadness has been forever transformed into joy. That's from John 16 20. We must exhibit and witness to this, love, born of the resurrection of Christ. We are called to a marvelous work. To continue in our feeble manner that is by our excellent action for the movement towards fulfillment in Christ. This requires magna a greatness of spirit. Ass assyria is also the claim that absurdity may be the final verdict on existence, Here we find ourselves face to face with what is surely the most dangerous aspect of Ace aca, which is the temptation to nihilism. Nihilism is a hatred of being, a dislocation of the human person from the universe of being that is an up uproot of the human from the humans proper place. In a word, it is the humans departure from their home. We see here the most serious threat to dignity of the human person, a genuine spiritual depression, indeed nihilism views reality as unintelligible, deprived of meaning in and for itself. And the very concept of truth, is refused as nonsense as meaningless. Nihilism denies that there is any d to human life. We see how Thomas ac has an intuition of the threat to see the opposes to action and he demonstrates a remarkable perceptive. A cd blocks the orientation towards the ultimate end. Nihilism confirms this blockage and goes even further. Denying the possibility of an end in the first place. As aca exhibits the desire to get rid of God. The human has attempted to assert their self creation yet the result has only been nonsense. So what Aca is is sort of complex and contradictory. We may also experience it as restless, restless boredom on we. We may experience it as, not quite despair, but something like great discourage, and it really will keep us stuck. The temptation to despair is what a cd draws us into. And the trouble with that is that it goes against all things of life. To despair is really to give up on life. And life is our greatest gift. We might encounter things where we don't think life is much of a gift at all. But indeed, it's the only gift we're really given for a short amount of time as we are a soul experiencing a physical material world. And I wanna mention this because I think the temptation to despair is very real and very active. It should be taken seriously that we will be tempted to despair. It is a real threat and is 1 that we should be on our guard about and fortified against, realizing that it will come. It's called the ce. It will pull us towards nihilism, and we will encounter this at some point. It's all the more likely to happen when there's trouble in our culture in our political system in our relationships. And generally, in our world that becomes violence and rocket towards chaos. My hope is that we find a restoration of the joy of the joy of the life and the time that we're given. It is important that we have momentum mori moment Worry is something that reminds us that we will encounter death. It's coming. When we realize how short, the number of our days are. Sometimes we can take those days more seriously and realize they have more meaning than we've been realizing and that we've been enact. We have to use them the best we can. We have to pick ourselves up, bust ourselves off, ask for strength and carry on and not be weary of doing good. So gratitude is a big 1 that will ins us, against the threats and terror some Aca, building each other up and supporting each other helps. Being sustained in love by practicing the presence of God and realizing that God is not far away, but with us in our suffering, and generosity and grace, extending that to others at all times to the best of our ability through the help and the ministry of the holy spirit. Of course, I'll be writing a lot more about a aca in my upcoming book and the desert fathers and mothers who had so much wisdom on these topics, as well as many of the other virtue vice. They explained so well. I'll be working on that for a while, and I'll give you updates as it comes to free fruition. Thank you for hanging on with that and journey with me and that. Thank you so much for listening. Please go to spark my muse dot com for this episode and check on joining us for the quarterly challenge. I'll see you there. Listening and peace to you.