Lecture for the Lay Cistercians gathered in Avila, June 2025
“Synodality: How to live it concretely in the midst of the world. How to move from acedia to joy to
stimulate our synodal journey.”
Dear brothers and sisters,
That is the task I have been given. A rather uncommon theme and certainly not one typically
linked to synodality, but I find it to be a very prophetic theme as it touches, I believe, the
sentiments of many people in today’s world. It also raises the question of what our response
should be as Christians, and especially as individuals living from and with the Cistercian
charism that has been given to us as a gift.
Recently, I read in a magazine the testimony of Milan, a young Italian Media and Communication
student:
Testimony of Milan (18 years old), Media & Communication student:
“Sometimes it feels like the world is on fire, and we young people stand on the sidelines
with a bucket of water. Climate change, wars, inequality, fake news… it’s everywhere. You
wake up, and your first glance at your phone is already a reality check. I see a melting
glacier on Instagram, a conflict on TikTok, and meanwhile, I’m bombarded on YouTube
with ads for things I don’t really need.
That sometimes makes me feel powerless. At the same time, I also feel that our
generation is different. We are much more aware. We talk about mental health,
inclusivity, and sustainability. We ask questions like: ‘Why is everything about money?’ or
‘How is it that companies make profits while people can’t afford a home?’
Technology is second nature to us, but it’s both a blessing and a curse. Everything is
always ‘on.’ It’s hard to find peace because there’s always something happening in the
world. >Often I don’t kno where to go. I feel myself restless.”
Milan – and to me he represents all young people, everywhere in the world – stands in his
powerlessness at the edge of a world on fire. He still holds a bucket of water in his hand and
wants to try to do something. He wants to extinguish the fire but doesn’t know how. Many, young
and old alike, have long since dropped their bucket of water and sit down despondently or have
walked away and wander around, not knowing where to go. People no longer ask the question:
how can we be saved? Despondency has become a universal feeling.
This question: how can we be saved? is the central question of early monasticism in the desert.
It was the purpose of the ascetic life and the deepest driving force of the hearts of the desert
fathers and mothers. It was the source of their joy, but also of their tears. From this came their
insight that they needed to overcome this intimidating obstacle on the path to salvation. They
gave this obstacle the name acedia, which literally means: the lack of care for one’s salvation.
Acedia can be defined as spiritual laziness, an unhappiness with or aversion toward heavenly
things, a half-heartedness in spiritual warfare. Acedia drives the monk to leave his cell and to
1run away from the intimacy with God, in order to seek compensations for the austere regime of
life to which he once felt called.
The clearest symptom of acedia is a certain instability, which manifests itself in the need to
change cells, surroundings or activities. It gives you ideas of leaving, the need to change your
location and style of life, it depicts this other life as your salvation and persuades you that if you
do not leave, you will be lost. The small cell in which the monk spends his entire day can easily
become, understandably, unbearable. The result is a deep aversion for the place where he finds
himself. However, this temptation to wander physically is the tangible symptom of a deeper
sickness tha threathens every spiritual life: instability.
“The demon of acedia – also known as the noonday demon – is the heaviest of all. It
attacks the monk around the sixth hour (midday), causing disgust for the place, aversion
to prayer, and making the monk think that his work is futile, that his brothers despise him,
and that salvation is no longer possible. It stirs a longing for other places.”1
Evagrius, one of the great fathers of the dessert, suggests this when he says the monk feels
aversion not only toward his surroundings but also toward his state of life. External instability is
thus the sign of an interior instability: there exists a clear and direct link between the act of
keeping one’s body within his cell and the act of keeping one’s thoughts on the remembrance of
God.
Added to this spatial dimension is a temporal diemnsion: acedia attacks the monk at the
hottest time of the day, during the hours when the sun seems to have ceased moving along its
course. The persistent heat gives the monk a glimpse of how lengthy will be his fight, how long
his asceticism will endure, and drives him to abandon the struggle and to run away from the
contest. Evagrios said: “Acedia makes the sun seem slow to descend and the day last fifty
hours.”
This is why the most efficacious remedy against acedia is perseverance: to persevere in the face
of every temptation to escape. Famous is the saying of Abba Poimen: “If you stay in your cell and
practice patience, your cell will teach you everything.” Or this anonymous saying: “There was a
brother who sat in his cell, and he said: ‘I am leaving this place.’ And as he was picking up his
cloak, he saw another who followed him. He asked: ‘Who are you?’ And the other said: ‘I am the
one who always drives you out of this place — I am your acedia.’”
For this reason, the opposite of acedia is for the desert fathers hypomenè, literally meaning the
act of remaining under the yoke. This yoke is the love of God. Fallen into the temptation of
acedia is putting self-love central. You think you can save yourself. St. Anthony the Great said:
“In times of trial, do not flee from your place; persevere in prayer, and the trial will become a
blessing.”
Acedia in the cistercian tradition
Let us go to the cistercian tradition, because I am speaking to cistercians! In the cistercian
tradition we have a beautiful example of a monk that was attacked by the demon of the midday,
1 Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos, chapter 12
2acedia. It was Robert2, a nephew of St. Bernard. He entered Clairvaux but after awhile he run
away. The cistercian life was too heavy and harsh for him.
St. Bernard wrote to him a letter and the tradition places this letter in the rain. The rain as a
symbol of sadness. Robert is sad, Bernard is sad but there is a solution: friendsship. The
cistercian answer to acedia is spiritual friendship, which becomes a place and a time to stay dry
amidst all the rain of misery and to grow in joy and inner peace.
Let’s focus a bit on this so-called “letter in the rain” from St. Bernard to his nephew Robert. From
this letter, we discover how depressed Robert was. He was no longer interested in how he could
be saved. St. Bernard continues to align his solutions with the principles of the desert fathers.
He reminds Robert of the principle of hypomenè: “You have taken upon yourself the yoke of
Christ—why are you now casting it away?”
Robert casts aside the yoke, overwhelmed by dissatisfaction with the impoverished and harsh
lifestyle of Clairvaux—the poor food, the few hours of sleep, the hard bed. He had been
promised the opposite of this, and he succumbs to the temptation that the grass is always
greener on the other side. In his sorrow, Robert leaves Clairvaux and seeks refuge in Cluny. For
St. Bernard, this is almost unbearable, and he feels deeply wounded. In this context, William of
St. Thierry recounts the touching letter Bernard writes to his nephew to persuade him to
reconsider his decision.
“Brother Robert, one of his monks and a blood relative of the holy man, had, in his youth,
been deceived and misled by some and had left for Cluny. For a time, the highly revered
father acted as if he knew nothing but then decided to call that brother back through a
letter. He dictated, and the venerable William, later the first abbot of Rievaulx, took it
down and wrote it on parchment. They both sat under the open sky, as they had gone
outside the monastery walls to dictate without witnesses. Suddenly, an unexpected
downpour began, and the scribe—we know this from his own account—wanted to put the
page away. But the holy father said to him: ‘It is a work of God; continue writing, and have
no fear.’ So, he wrote the letter in the downpour without a downpour. For though it poured
around them, the power of love covered the exposed page. What the letter dictated also
sheltered the paper. Because of this great miracle, the brothers rightly placed this letter
at the top of his correspondence collection.”3
The letter written in the downpour without a downpour was covered by the power of love. With
this, Bernard shows his brother, who had abandoned Clairvaux in despair, that not only patience
and personal effort save the monk from acedia but also the gift of friendship restores joy to
someone who has lost all joy in life.
The gift of spiritual friendship as the cistercian answer on acedia
2 Robert of Châtillon (+1190). He entered Citeaux in 1114 went with Bernard to Clairvaux. He left Clairvaux secretly
during an absence of Bernard in 1119. In 1124 wrote Bernard ‘the letter in the rain’ after which Robert returned to
Clairvaux. Some sources are saying that Robert became abbot of the abbey of Noirlac in 1136 others make him
abbot of the Abbey of Les Dunes in Flandres. In both cases he returned to Clairvaux and died there around 1190.
3 William of St. Thierry, Vita Prima, XI, 50.
3All Cistercian authors after St. Bernard understood that the answer to the demon of acedia lay
not only in patient perseverance but also in spiritual friendship. It would take too long to
mention all the cistercian fathers and mothers here, but I will highlight just two brief examples.
The first example comes from the letters of the Cistercian abbot Adam of Perseigne. A few of his
letters have been preserved, two of which explicitly discuss formation (V and XVII). In letter V , he
emphasizes that those responsible for formation must possess qualities such as love and
wisdom. They must be able to build a spiritual friendship with those entrusted to their care
because, according to Adam of Perseigne:
“A friendly and supernatural conversation is, as we have seen, the true remedy against
the evil of despondency: the more the soul takes pleasure in a holy conversation, the
more a fervent word makes it fluid. This is what the Bride, accustomed to divine
conversations, refers to when she says: ‘My soul became fluid as soon as my beloved
spoke!’”4
For a second example, I could of course mention Aelred of Rievaulx, who became famous for his
treatise on spiritual friendship, *amicitia spiritualis*. For him, “friendship is the medicine of life!”
But here I would also like to let a female Cistercian voice be heard—namely Gertrude the Great.
It was the Cistercian women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who deepened Bernard’s
concept of spiritual friendship through extensive correspondence with one another. Gertrude
stands in line with figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch of Antwerp.
Hadewijch, for example, wrote: “For this is the truth of love; it makes two into one being, makes
bitterness sweet, strangers into neighbors, and the lowly into noble.” And in Letter 22: “God’s
love is so great that God, in lavish abundance, embraces all His friends in heaven and on earth.”
This underscores the idea that spiritual friendship for these women reflects the divine love that
connects all. Instead of quoting long passages from Gertrude’s works, I will let the testimony of
one of her greatest spiritual friends speak—a quote that speaks for itself. Mechtild of Magdeburg
said the following about Gertrude: “If you wish to find me, look for me in the heart of Gertrude.”
These were words Mechtild heard in her prayer, whispered to her by Jesus. In those words of
Jesus, she recognized herself: *If you wish to find me, look for me in the heart of Gertrude, her
spiritual friend*. That is spiritual friendship!
A Message for Today
The Cistercian answer to acedia can still help us today when we are overwhelmed by acedia
amidst the turmoil of the world—by heaviness, a sense of hopelessness, and immeasurable
unrest. It can help us when we temporarily lose our way, when we set the bucket of water, the
solutions, aside, aimlessly wandering.
The Cistercian response to acedia—(spiritual) friendship—remains relevant. Friendship is still
the key to opening a worldview in which we have locked ourselves or are at risk of locking
ourselves. A worldview where there is only room for sorrow and despair. Mario, the young
student I mentioned earlier, wrote:
4 Adam of Perseigne, letter V, 60.
4“But I believe our strength lies precisely in how we are connected. We have no time to be
passive. We must find new ways to live together, to share more honestly, not just to
survive but to truly live. Maybe that sounds naive, but hope is not weakness. It is our
starting point.”
A young Dominican working as a student chaplain recently wrote:
“As a student pastor, I experience weekly how young students have a stronger belief in
hell than in heaven. They see hell every day in the news and experience it firsthand in
division, social bubbles, existential loneliness. C.S. Lewis wrote about hell that it is not a
physical place but a ‘state of mind.’ Those in hell have closed themselves off from any
meaningful connection with others, including the one Christians call God. But the most
important thing, Lewis argues, is that we realize the door of hell can only be opened from
the inside.”
But friendship should not be an optional sentiment, nor soft chatter among acquaintances, nor
a handy “networking tool” to exploit “who you know” for social advancement. No, I mean
friendship as a worldview. As a sustaining force for coexistence, for truth, for a way of dealing
with ourselves and others that offers resistance in dark times. Resistance that is subtle but no
less radical. A worldview, then—not merely a private preference but a way of standing in the
world, perceiving it, and living accordingly.
We live in a time when people often identify an enemy faster than they recognize a friend.
Political discussions harden, media platforms amplify the loudest voices, and algorithms steer
our daily conversations. Baseless opinions become weapons; hearts seem to hide behind lock
and key. Hannah Arendt spoke of “dark times” to refer to those moments in history where human
dignity is at stake. Dark not only because there is war but because we struggle to see each other
as fellow human beings. It is not merely about external conflicts but the fundamental question
of whether we still recognize the other as equal. The need for a countervoice is great—what the
American philosopher and sociologist Danielle Allen has called the broken civic friendship.
Allen is a personalist thinker. According to her, people are inherently dependent on each other,
and their fate is inextricably intertwined. Political coexistence, she argues, is not about unity but
about the inclusion of diversity—about wholeness. To survive, to become whole, very different
people, who did not choose each other, face the challenge of working together and forming
friendships. It becomes clear from this: if we remove friendship from the social context, distrust
and injustice arise. What do we need to reverse the tide?
Friendship requires trust, and trust only emerges when people are willing to make sacrifices for
each other—and actually do so. Like Hannah Arendt, Allen argues that it is only in concrete
actions that it becomes clear where we truly stand, what our word is worth, and what we are
willing to sacrifice for another. Only through mutual sacrifices, sometimes at a cost to
ourselves, can trust be built. A friendship where one party always wins, without reciprocity, is
not true friendship. Following Hannah Arendt, and before her the church father Augustine, I
believe that the conflicts and threats of then and now always take place against the backdrop of
deep human darkness—a tendency towards selfishness, isolation, and violence—which in
Christian traditions is referred to as original sin. And yet, that dark world and those dark times
are not without hope. In dark times, Arendt wrote, we have the right to hope, the right to
5illumination. That hope does not come so much from theories and concepts but from concrete
people who, under almost all circumstances, manage to be a small flickering light of hope for
their surroundings. It is not about grand and sweeping deeds but about small gestures of
friendship under the most difficult circumstances—such as Bernard writing in the rain to his
brother, who chose to first see his fellow brother as a human, as a potential friend, rather than
as his enemy or the one who had walked away.
Friendship Today
As Cistercians, we can live out this gift of friendship as an essential answer to the moral
indifference of modern times. In a society focused on individualism and self-determination,
friendship offers connection, moral engagement, and mutual care. True friendship, according to
our Cistercian tradition, goes beyond superficial contact: it is an exercise in the art of living
where people help each other lead a good and meaningful life, grounded in their experienced
friendship with God. Friends challenge each other towards self-awareness and moral growth.
Friendship thus forms a powerful counterweight to alienation and loneliness and contributes to
a personal and engaged existence in a world often impersonal. Friendship can transform the
sadness of acedia into the joy of existence.
Friendship is more than just being together. It is a deep bond that connects us as Cistercians in
trust, care, and shared values. Especially in a community of like-minded individuals, a special
strength arises when that friendship is rooted in something higher—in the desire to grow
together and support one another.
Aelred of Rievaulx beautifully summarized this:
“The friendship that arises in Christ, grows through Christ and is completed in
Christ.”Lecture Lay Cistercians A
Let us carry these words as an invitation to see our friendships not merely as human
relationships but as sacred connections that carry, inspire, and fulfill us. In this way, we build a
community together where every person may flourish and experience joy—even in the midst of a
heavy downpour!
Br. Bernardus Peeters ocso
Rome, June 17, 2025
Memorial of Blessed Marie-Joseph Cassant