Practice Apathy
Discussion Questions
- Read Matthew 22:15-46, in which the authorities question Jesus. Then read the devotional, “Practice Apathy.”
- How do you answer Mary Luti’s opening question: How are you grounding yourself spiritually these days?
- In your life and your spirit, what’s dying and what’s flourishing?
- What do you need to set aside and what do you need to affirm unreservedly—and how do you make those choices?
Devotional
Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” – Matthew 22:37-38 (NRSV)
How are you grounding yourself spiritually these days? Praying? Cultivating community? Guarding space for joy? Doing something compassionate every day? Practicing apathy?
Apathy?
Yes, apathy. Not in the modern sense of indifference and uninterest, but in the ancient sense of focused on the necessary, unswayed by nonessential things.
Christians have always practiced apathy, especially in rough times. The radicals we call desert mothers and fathers, for example, were apathetic to the max.
They were conscientious objectors, runaway slaves, tax evaders, women escaping violent marriages, destitute people, disillusioned urbane elites, and basic everyday Christians perturbed by Jesus’s invitation to dispossess themselves and follow. Throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries, they abandoned villages and cities in droves to take up demanding spiritual lives on the margins of civilization.
Out there, they ruminated on the gospel, imitated Jesus, and kept the prophetic edges hot, daily un-adapting themselves to Empire and to an institutionalizing Church already plagued with ego advancement, social pretension, and compromises with power.
They attended doggedly to the Essential, maintaining, in historian Belden Lane’s words, “a fierce indifference to unimportant things.”
We’re not desert monastics. But our world is still awash in spectacle, ego, and lies. We still need to be unmoved by it, to grow apathetic in the face of it, asking our souls every day:
What am I learning to ignore and what am I learning to love?
What’s dying in me and what’s flourishing?
What do I need to set aside and what do I need to affirm unreservedly?
To what unimportant things do I need to become fiercely indifferent?
To what, to Whom alone, do I cling?
Prayer
Give me a fierce indifference to unimportant things. Focus me on Christ and the gospel, so that I may be free and fearless to face this hour.
About the AuthorMary Luti is a long time seminary educator and pastor, author of Teresa of Avila’s Way and numerous articles, and founding member of The Daughters of Abraham, a national network of interfaith women’s book groups.