A Pilgrim's Pause

by way of an explanation

My Dear Wildroot Parables Readers,

Well goodness, here I am! Long delayed and a little bit sheepish.

First of all: I appreciate so much your patience with my lapsed presence here. It wasn’t exactly planned, and I owed you a “hello” much earlier than this.

Second, so as not to bury the lead: please don’t worry, this is not me saying goodbye or anything dramatic. But I did want to give a brief explanation of where I’ve been and how I’d like to proceed in the coming weeks...

Photo by Lidia Stawinska on Unsplash

The Advent That Wasn’t

This past Christmas season, I completely avoided Advent.

I didn’t set up the wreath. I didn’t buy my favorite beeswax candles. I didn’t do any of the readings. I didn’t even decorate the house for the holidays. It wasn’t a conscious or malicious choice; it was a numb one. I just couldn’t muster a sense of caring about the season at all.

Like any symptom of a larger problem, this neglect of one of my favorite liturgical seasons was an unsettling red flag for me and started me down the path of some deep introspection, and—as these things often go—that introspection led to an uncorking of the proverbial bottle. Didn’t take long for everything to spill out.

Summarized: I’ve been slowly slipping down the hill of spiritual numbness for a while. By some counts, well over a year.

It wasn’t what I would call a crisis of faith. I still believe all the things I’ve always believed in (at least the important, closed-handed, salvation-level issues), but all of the things that bring me spiritual joy had sloughed away, one by one. Reading Scripture, prayer and meditation, fellowshipping with other Christians, my enjoyment of the seasonal rhythms, the objects of devotion and books I’ve collected, tactile sacred acts like cooking, gardening, craft, art…I let them all go, one after the other.

I just couldn’t care about them. And I had no idea why.

The Noonday Demon

I’ve since learned that this “spiritual numbness” has a name that the ancients were very well aware of, but that our modern society has all but forgotten about. It’s called acedia, the noonday demon. It’s the spiritual equivalent of refusing to brush your teeth or make your bed because what’s the point? You’ll just mess them up and have to do it all again tomorrow, right?

Acedia is an insidious thing. It creeps in slowly, and whispers that tedium is bad. That repetition is boring. That daily commitment to the routine rhythms of a spiritual life can never bring real happiness. And as it takes root, it steals the joy from the things that once brought fulfillment and leaves indolence in its wake.

There is a LOT more about my journey diagnosing my issues with acedia than I can explain in this post. But if you're curious to learn more about the topic, I highly recommend the book Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris. I read it once a long time ago and it soared over my head, but picked it back up this past Christmas and found it completely life-changing. (Amazing how books can grow alongside us, isn’t it?)

The point is, the only cure for acedia is tending, and tending requires holy tedium. To begin to heal I’ve had to go back to spiritual basics and restart from the ground up. For me that’s meant a steady diet of the Psalms, along with slowly reclaiming some of the things I love that bring me closer to God: feeding my long-suffering sourdough starter, carefully planning my garden, and paying closer attention to the nudges that show up in the quiet, urging me to notice the miracles in the mundane.

Moving very slowly, not overwhelming myself.

And always circling back to Scripture.

A Pilgrim’s Pause

The tricky part about writing spiritual content online is that one needs a constant stream of fresh input to write that content. While it’s tempting to use my spiritual “rehabilitation” as a series of topics for The Wildroot Parables, I’m honestly not sure I want to put that pressure on myself while things still feel so raw and delicate. So much of this journey has to be boring on purpose; that’s the only way to defeat acedia’s grip. And boring doesn't make a good essay.

So for now, I’m pulling back and giving myself a little bit of room.

First, I have put a pause on all billing for paid subscriptions here until March 1st. I feel that’s only right; I don’t want to take your money under false pretenses, despite your bountiful generosity.

Second, I’ll be using the time between now and March to pray and think about the best way to use this space moving forward. I love The Wildroot Parables. Unlike my fiction space over on Talebones which is more structured and organized, The WP has always felt more fluid, allowing me to experiment with how I “show up” here. I need this outlet in my life, and I’m glad it has been an encouragement to so many of you along the way. It will not go away but evolve.

Will this be a full-on no-posting hiatus? I can’t say for sure. If I get a wild hair and have an idea for a devotional or essay or a piece of poetic whimsy through the end of January and into February, I’ll certainly pop up and share it.

But until March, this pilgrim is going to take a pause. It feels like the right thing to do in an uncertain but hopeful season while the path is still being revealed and one can only move one step at a time.

Pray for me. I’ll certainly be praying for you, too.

I appreciate you all so much, and look forward to what the resurrection of spring—distant yet, but on its way!—has in store for all of us.

Blessings,

S.E. Reid

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