O Lord and Master of my life! Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust for power, and idle talk.
So goes the Prayer of Saint Ephriam, said daily or more during Lent. So this morning I woke up late – too late to do anything really productive before work – said the prayer, and got ready amidst the nearly continual speculations of my mind. One of these speculations was that internal monologues of that nature very well might fall into the category of idle talk. Probably it does. I would imagine that’s one reason (though not the most important) why monastics cultivate the habit of saying the Jesus Prayer continuously: it’s a lot more productive to ask God for mercy than it is to internally write a response to a blog comment from the day before. Wait… blog comments… idle talk! NO! THAT couldn’t be some of the “idle talk” I want taken from me, could it!?
So I wanted to bring it before you, whoever you are, as an open question. At what point does reading, writing, and commenting on blogs become “idle talk”? In a monastery the answer would likely be “immediately,” but I’m not a nun, and don’t have a spiritual leader within a thousand miles, which I suppose makes a difference. Or am I just making up a distinction where none exists because I *like* blogs. They hardly seem bad in and of themselves. Many people I respect have them. So where’s the line? An hour a day? Half an hour? Whenever it becomes more about gossip and rants than well considered information? And, more to the point, what ought I to do? I’m not certain yet. If I randomly stop posting for lent it’s going to because I’ve decided in favor of blogs falling into the “idle talk” category for Lent.
Aha! That’s a challenging question for which I didn’t have an answer – until I checked my dictionary. The New World Dictionary gives this as a definition of idle: “having no value, use or significance; worthless; useless [idle talk]“. This does not describe your blog or your comments.
By: Rich on March 10, 2009
at 8:27 pm
Thank you for replying
So speech or writing is idle or not depending on whether it takes as it’s subject important matters of concern to us as individuals? As opposed to, I suppose, obvious things like gossip (it’s sometimes hard to avoid at work, though!), “celebrity gossip,” or things that don’t concern oneself in any way, and can’t be helped by the conversation, even indirectly? That’s how I tend to understand it. Like, if I’m out here in the bush getting all bent out of shape about what the educational bureaucracy in Washington is doing, that’s probably idle talk, at least for the time being, because it’s not going to change the system, and it *is* going to distract me from whatever I ought to be doing at the moment. I wonder where most political discussion falls, then?
Wanting to find a more thorough definition of “idle talk,” I was reading an excerpt from a book by St John of Kronstat (a Russian monk, I believe); it’s fairly interesting and worth quoting at length:
By: Molly on March 11, 2009
at 9:07 am
You’re welcome, and thank you for the good instruction and good example on blogging.
My copout answer on idle talk is that it is difficultly defined, but easily known. Yesterday, in one of my ongoing attempts to be funny, I said something that I thought was funny. Until Cheryl asked what I meant. As I started to explain my comment I realized there was nothing there! No meaning, no value – completely empty. I could only reply (kind of ashamedly under my breath), “Well, that was idle talk.”
I don’t think we can assign a category of talk, complaints or politics or criticisms or jokes, to the realm of “idle talk”. How is this for a hypothesis? All productive talk should result in adding value to a relationship, either ours with the Father, or ours with others. Idle talk adds nothing, or subtracts something.
By: Rich on March 13, 2009
at 8:06 am