"Yes, let us put together in thought the traits
which meet in the picture of accidie [sloth]; let us think of
it in its contrast with that brightness of spiritual joy
which plays around some lives, and makes the name-
less, winning beauty of some souls; aye, and even
of some faces; and we may recognize it, perhaps, as
a cloud that has sometimes lowered near our own
lives; as a storm that we have seen sweeping across
the sky and hiding the horizon, even though, it may
be, by God's grace only the edge of it reached to
us, only a few drops fell where we were. Heaviness,
gloom, coldness, sullenness, distaste and desultory
sloth in work and prayer, joylessness and thanklessness,
do we not know something of the threatenings,
at least, of a mood in which these meet? The mood
of days on which it seems as though we cannot
genuinely laugh, as though we cannot get rid of a
dull or acrid tone in our voice; when it seems impossible
frankly to rejoice with them that do rejoice,
and equally impossible to go freely out in any true,
unselfish sympathy with sorrow; days when, as one
has said, everything that everybody does seems
inopportune and out of good taste; days when the
things that are true and honest, just and pure, lovely
and of good report, seem to have lost all loveliness
and glow and charm of hue, and look as dismal as a
flat country in the drizzling mist of an east wind;
days when we might be cynical if we had a little
more energy in us; when all enthusiasm and confidence
of hope, all sense of a Divine impulse, flags
out of our work; when the schemes which we have
begun look stale and poor and unattractive as the
scenery of an empty stage by daylight; days when
there is nothing that we like to do when, without
anything to complain of, nothing stirs so readily in
us as complaint. Oh, if we know anything at all
of such a mood as this, let us be careful how we think
of it, how we deal with it; for perhaps it may not be
far from that sorrow of the world which, in those who
willingly indulge and welcome and invite its
presence, worketh death." From The Spirit of Discipline
