https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_tWi3ENhfwI
Vic Serta asked, can you please talk about the sin of sloth, Asidya? I’ve been reading about the seven deadly sin, but this sin in particular is very disturbing since it seems different from the rest. Yes, how can one overcome it? Thank you, Jonathan. So yeah, man. I mean the sin of Asidya, that’s the sin of us. Like that’s our sin, man. That’s that I would say that if there’s one sin that represents the modern world is the sin of Asidya. Saint John the Damascene, Saint John, no Saint John of the Ladder, sorry, Saint John of the Ladder says that it is in a way kind of like it’s different from all the other sins. It’s almost like all the sins can be kind of contained into the sin of Asidya. So what is the sin of Asidya? What is it? I can use, let me explain it in a way that is usual to the way I explain things. So maybe it can help you understand it if you’ve been paying attention to what I’m talking about. So it’s like the sin of Asidya is something like the incapacity to pay attention. It’s something like that, right? And so that’s why it’s hard to understand. If you don’t kind of understand it that way, then you’ll struggle to understand the descriptions of it because it’s not just laziness. Because the sin of Asidya is also the sin of a busybody. It’s the sin, so for example, one of the descriptions of the sin of Asidya is the monk in his cell who wants to see people, who wants to go out and talk to people. And so that’s also the sin of Asidya. And like you can imagine that someone who is sitting around and is bored, that’s the sin of Asidya. Who wants to see change, that’s the sin of Asidya. But also sloth in the more general sense, in the sense of laziness, of incapacity to do the things you need to do. All of that is the incapacity to pay attention. So the sin of Asidya can actually manifest itself as being extremely busy because you can’t imagine being alone. Like you can’t imagine stopping. You can’t imagine, let’s say, stopping in silence and prayer. And so your mind and your activity moves from one thing to the other. You always need to be distracted, right? That’s the sin of Asidya. And so like I said, it can manifest itself as this desire to be constantly distracted. So the sin of Asidya, I don’t have it here, but the sin of Asidya is looking at your phone every five minutes. That’s the sin of Asidya. Checking your phone is the sin of Asidya. Every time you can’t help yourself to check your phone, you are manifesting Asidya. Every time you doom scroll Facebook, you are manifesting Asidya. Every time you bored and you’re wondering what to watch, or you absolutely have to watch something, or you don’t know what to watch because you don’t know what to do, all of these are all Asidya. So it’s like the kind of overpowering fatigue that you get when you need to do something. Asidya is often called the demon of noon, the noon demon, the noonday demon, right? And so one of the images people have of the demon of Asidya is the guy in his late 40s, 50s who all of a sudden leaves his wife, buys a sports car, and gets a young girlfriend. That’s the sin of Asidya. It’s the incapacity to hold attention. It’s like I need to be distracted. I need to change. I need a new car. I need new clothes. I need a new TV. I need all of this is all Asidya. So it’s like if you want to understand the sin of our world, it’s Asidya. And what’s the solution to it? I mean, the fathers say it’s patience, which is just really difficult for us. Stillness and patience, a capacity to attend, capacity to pray, because often a lot of these things are there to stop us from praying. So yeah, good luck with that. But I’m saying it like you notice that the examples are just streaming out of me because I am a slave of Asidya just like most of you as well. And I can see that. And so we need to develop discipline in prayer and discipline in solitude, the capacity to attend.