Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
1 Kings 3:5, 7-12
There is an uncomfortable fact underneath today’s first reading.
Insight doesn’t guarantee fidelity.
Truth doesn’t guarantee love.
You can pray exactly the right prayer at twenty and still lose it by sixty.
Solomon is a young king when God appears to him in a dream and asks him: “What do you want?” Money? Fine. Power? Take it. Long life? It’s yours. Solomon asks for none of that. In the Hebrew he asks for a lev shomea— not a clever heart, not even a wise heart, a listening heart. He doesn’t ask for more information or a sharper mind. He asks for the capacity to keep hearing: to hear God, and to hear the people he is meant to serve. What more could you ask from a good leader?
God is pleased with the request, precisely because Solomon didn’t ask it for himself. The Lord grants him a wise and discerning heart, and adds the riches and honor he never requested. It looks like the perfect beginning.
Then comes chapter eleven.
This same Solomon, older now, wealthier, more accomplished, builds altars to the gods of his foreign wives on a hill across from Jerusalem, a hill in sight of the temple. Both chapters sit in the same book on purpose. The wisdom that began so well simply stopped continuing.
We know this pattern in our own lives. Even the self-help industry, whose whole business model is staying disciplined, has a story that proves it.
For decades, speakers from Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins told packed rooms the same stirring tale: Yale surveyed its 1953 graduating class, discovered that only 3 percent had written down specific goals… and twenty years later that tiny 3 percent had amassed more wealth than the other 97 percent combined. Cue the gasps.
There’s just one small problem. Yale has never heard of the study. No one from the Class of 1953 remembers taking it. When a journalist finally cornered Brian Tracy with this inconvenient fact, he allegedly shrugged and said, “If it’s not true, it should be.”
Even the professionals, who make a living telling the rest of us to stay disciplined, couldn’t be bothered to fact-check their own favorite story.
Remaining faithful when no one is watching, when the emotional payoff has faded, and when ordinary life is boring — that is the part almost no one markets, because it does not sell nearly as well.
The desert father John Cassian has a name for what happens in years like that, and it isn’t a name we use much anymore. He calls it acedia, the noonday demon. Acedia is one of the oldest and most misunderstood concepts in Christian spirituality. It is often translated as “sloth,” but that translation is misleading. Acedia is not simply laziness. It is a deep spiritual weariness that causes a person to lose the desire for God and for the good. It can show up as constant boredom, restlessness, cynicism, emotional numbness, endless distraction, escapism, loss of purpose, indifference toward God, or chronic procrastination in spiritual duties. A person may remain incredibly busy while suffering from acedia. Ironically, the opposite of obvious sloth can sometimes be another form of the same disease: filling every waking moment with activity so there is never silence in which God can speak.
The modern world almost trains us into it. In the midst of social media, YouTube, streaming, gaming, endless news, or constant music, the soul gradually loses its appetite for quiet. Silence begins to feel uncomfortable. We start looking out the window—or, more often, at the phone—imagining that life would be better somewhere else, or with something else.
Acedia can also look like losing sight of one’s vocation. Parents, priests, teachers, spouses, students, and professionals begin asking, “Why am I doing this? Does any of this matter?” We make small compromises: the person still believes, still attends Mass, but stops striving. Spiritual life becomes maintenance instead of pursuit. Repeated failure settles into quiet resignation: “I’ll never change, so why try?”
Today’s psalm is the longest poem in the Bible. It is an acrostic: each stanza begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The whole alphabet is used to praise God—not just one enthusiastic opening letter. The psalmist keeps going, letter after letter, day after day.
One of the practices offered by the desert fathers, was a daily examen at the end of the day—ten minutes asking where you actually paid attention to God and where you didn’t.
Solomon at twenty did not pray better than Solomon needed to pray at fifty. He prayed once, well, and assumed it was finished. The prayer was never the finish line. It was the first letter of a very long alphabet, and God is still waiting—patiently, letter by letter—for the rest of it.
May the Lord grant us, not only a listening heart for a moment, but the grace to keep listening all the way to the end of the alphabet. Amen.
The Joy of the Gospel 