Mr. Bobby Maddex: Welcome to Ex Libris, the podcast of Ancient Faith Publishing. I’m your host, Bobby Maddex, and today I will be speaking with Dr. Nicole Roccas. Dr. Roccas is the host of the AFR podcast, Time Eternal, and she is the author of the blog of the same name, and she is now also the published author of the AFP book, Time and Despondency: Regaining the Present in Faith and Life. Welcome to the program, Dr. Roccas!

Dr. Nicole Roccas: Thanks for having me!

Mr. Maddex: All right, so I know you are currently living in Canada, and I know you are also an Orthodox Christian, but are you a cradle in both regards, and if not, how did you arrive at each state of being?

Dr. Roccas: [Laughter] I am neither a cradle Canadian nor a cradle Orthodox. I moved to Toronto in mid-2013, because my soon-to-be-husband is Greek-Canadian, and so he was born here, he’s lived part of his life in Greece, and then they moved back here. And as far as Orthodoxy, I was actually Orthodox before I met him. I converted in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I was doing my graduate school, and that was a process through graduate school. I attended the Christ the Savior Church in Cincinnati with Fr. Steven Kostoff, whom I mention in my book. Originally, I’m from Wisconsin, so I moved from Wisconsin to Cincinnati to do my graduate work.

Mr. Maddex: Very good. So, not to put too fine a point on it, let’s move on immediately. I want to know what this obsession is with time! How did it arise in you and what have you done to pursuit it?

Dr. Roccas: Well, that’s a good question. I guess I’ve always been interested in time since I was very little. I describe in the introduction of my book an experience I had as a seven-and-a-half-year-old, kind of anxious about how fast I sensed time was moving. I’ve always been a very punctual person. I’ve always felt like I could—was very sensitive to the passage of time, like I had a really hard time sitting in time outs when I was a kid, because every second I could just feel every single second.

So I don’t know if that’s where my interest in time comes from, but when I was doing my master’s, I was walking across campus one day, and I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were actually about to be late for a class. We were heading to the library to pick up books that we needed for that particular class session, and we knew we were cutting it really close, so I was looking continuously at my cell phone to check the time. We didn’t have smart phones back then, just cell phones. And all of a sudden, I knew we had seven minutes until class started, and all of a sudden the clock tower on campus went off, chiming the hour—you know, seven minutes to the hour, but it was chiming the hour. I looked at the clock and it was, whatever, 2:53, three o’clock on the clock tower, and then I would look at my cell phone, and it was only 2:53.

And in that moment, there was this huge dissonance, and I thought, “How can it be two times at once? And is the professor going to yell at us for being late? Who has the right time? Is it my cell phone or is it this clock tower?” And at the time I was searching for a dissertation topic, so I wondered what must it have been like in the 16th century, which was my specialty—16th and 17th centuries—what must it have been like back then when time was probably a lot more fluid? How did they know what time it was and what day it was and all of that? So I turned to my friend and I said, “I’m going to write my dissertation about time, and how they knew how to tell time in the 16th and 17th century.” And I did! From that moment, it just fueled this mystery, and I’ve kind of been chasing time ever since.

Mr. Maddex: Well, that alone is fascinating, but then to connect it to something emotional or something internal, like despondency—how did that come about?

Dr. Roccas: So parallel to this whole temporal ordeal that I described, I have been a long-time reader of things to do with the sin of sloth in the seven deadly sins. Prior to becoming Orthodox, I was always interested in the history of sin categories, and sloth seemed to be the one that most adequately defined my most pernicious struggles in life. So that always kind of spoke to me, and then, sort of along with becoming Orthodox, which was happening, by the way, right around this time… When I started thinking about the whole clock-tower experience, I was already thinking about Orthodoxy, going to an Orthodox church, at that point.

As I became Orthodox, I started to read Evagrius and other ascetical theologians of early Christianity, and they weren’t talking about sloth; they were talking about something else, sometimes translated as acedia in English, sometimes translated as despondency. And the more I began to realize it, I realized, “Oh, this concept actually came before sloth, and it sort of more adequately describes what I often go through.”

Fast-forward to when I started doing the Time Eternal podcast. I had only been doing it for a few months, I think, and I thought to myself, “Gosh, Lent is coming up. I should do a series. What should I do it on?” And I realized I wanted to talk about despondency, but because my podcast was all about time, I thought: Well, let’s talk about both time and despondency. Let’s figure out if there’s a connection here. And, lo and behold, there really was. I started reading, I started researching and thinking, and I realized, “You know what? This wasn’t just a random coincidence. The two are so inter-related with one another.” Our experience of time coupled with our sort of human tendency towards despondency, it ended up being one of those really fruitful coincidence or God-incidence situations in my life that I was able to make that connection, all because of my Ancient Faith podcast.

Mr. Maddex: All right, Nicole, so this is probably a good place to give us a precise definition of “despondency.”

Dr. Roccas: So there’s a few different ways of answering that. The Greek word—it’s not the etymological root of the word “despondency,” but the Greek word that early theologians favored to describe this was akedia, which literally means a lack of care. And the Fathers often understood this as a lack of concern or effort, particularly in the spiritual life, particularly toward ascetic disciplines like prayer and fasting in monastic life.

Evagrius believed that at the heart of this kind of apathy was anger and despair: anger towards what you have in your life or anger towards what’s in front of you—sorry, anger and desire: anger at what you have and desire for what you don’t have, so desire for what you wish you had. If you think about anger and despair, having those things at the same time, that kind of creates a stalemate inside of you, and out of these sort of warring emotions and stalemate comes this just profound, almost existential, apathy, that’s often described as a slackness of the soul.

And from there, if that’s kind of the seed inside the soul, it gives way to a variety of symptoms that can look kind of different from person to person. So for some people, this may kind of manifest itself in a very anxious kind of restlessness, where you’re sort of pacing back and forth in life. Evagrius speaks of monks that would frequently leave their cells, walk kind of all over the place to visit people, couldn’t sit still. On the other hand, it can kind of propel itself into lethargy and excessive sleep, excessive eating, sort of staring listlessly, putting activities down, sadness, hopelessness. Evagrius talked about even that this passion could lead to suicide, and so it really was one of the most deadly passions. Another very important symptom to think about is rumination, which is where you think over and over again about the same things in your mind; and distractbility, hungering and seeking out distractions.

A lot of people wonder: Well, what’s the difference between this and depression? I did talk about that in my book. I believe that they’re separate conditions, in part because depression is a modern medical concept that has to do partly with biochemical balances and mood receptors. However, I’ve heard from a lot of people who struggle with depression that it kind of goes hand-in-hand with despondency for them. And I think it helps to, on the one hand, think of them both as separate and get help for depression when needed, but if you are someone who struggles with depression, recognizing that there is a spiritual component of that that has been on the radar of theologians and Christians since almost the dawn of the Church. That can be comforting and encouraging and meaningful for a lot of people.

Mr. Maddex: Dr. Roccas, I don’t want to be too personal, but I’m wondering whether you yourself have suffered from despondency, and, if so, what do you think was the cause?

Dr. Roccas: Well, I am pretty transparent in my book. Despondency is more or less the story of my life. And I will disclose, too, that I suffer from depression as well. So I kind of can see and sense the difference in my own life, but in terms of despondency, the cause… One of the points I make is that for a lot of people—not everybody, but for a lot of people, despondency seems to be congenital. For a lot of us, it just seems to be our sort of disposition, almost since birth or since young childhood, and I am definitely one of those people. I personally can’t remember not really being drawn towards despondency, in fact, this kind of existential sort of boredom and despair… I have memories that predate my first memories of praying. I have memories of that as a two- or three-year-old that are very distinct in my mind.

So sometimes there’s not really a cause. I don’t know what caused it; I just know that it’s part of kind of my make-up, and that’s part of what I have to struggle with in this world, but it’s also part of what shapes the way I see life. It makes me able to kind of understand struggle in maybe a more immediate way, like emotional struggles, just because it’s something that is very near to me, and, yeah, very comprehensible to me.

Mr. Maddex: All right, so what kind of things does your book address? Could you take us through it a little bit?

Dr. Roccas: Yeah, so my book starts with an introduction that, as I said, opens with a childhood memory pertaining to despondency, and it outlines some of the concepts used in the book. And then chapter one starts with the question, “What is despondency?” and there I sort of define despondency as I see it in light of early theology and other sources. I go through how that fits within the landscape of the human person and the soul as understood in Orthodox theology. And then the second chapter is called “Time and Despondency,” and there I get into the theology of time from a few different perspectives, but all of them relating to the role that time plays in shaping our relationship with God as well as exploring time as kind of the backdrop of our struggle with despondency. And at the heart of that is our relationship to the present moment. Despondency, as I understand it, is a flight from the present moment, and so we have to understand what the present moment actually is in light of Christ, and that I do in chapter three as well as chapter four. And that makes up the first part of the book, which is a bit more on the theoretical side, but it’s not academic. I think it’s all very accessible, very candid.

In the second part of the book, I get more into the practicalities: Well, if this is what despondency is, how do we start to counter it in meaningful and helpful ways in our lives? And I talk about a few different strategies of praying during times of despondency, one of them called counter-statement I explore in detail in chapter six, and then in chapter seven I talk about a whole host of what I call stepping-stones, which are sort of practical routes back to the present moment which is sustained and given to us by Christ. And that’s the book!

Mr. Maddex: Dr. Roccas, I think that would be an injustice to just kind of talk about the philosophical side of the book or the themes that the book [is] trying to convey, and not give a sense of the prose, because you are a very good writer. So is there a section of the book that you could read for us that could give us a sense of how the book sounds?

Dr. Roccas: Yes, I can. The excerpt that I’m going to read is from the introduction. I’m just going to read the first page. In this, I’m talking about an experience I had in childhood, so this is kind of on the personal side. The book isn’t a memoir, but I do frequently refer to personal experiences, and this gives you a taste of that.

It was a warm autumn morning in elementary school. During the middle of a math lesson, my teacher escorted me down the hall to the school guidance counselor, Mrs. D. “She was crying at her desk. We were doing calendars,” my teacher told Mrs. D. “She’s upset about the time thing again. I just don’t understand.”

With warm hands and an even warmer smile, Mrs. D. ushered me into her room, a tiny nook that had once been a janitor’s closet. Despite its dinginess and small size, the room was one of my favorite places in the whole school. Instead of windows, the wall was plastered with drawings, a patchwork quilt of crayon and construction paper.

As we tucked ourselves into the child-sized table that the narrow walls could barely contain, Mrs. D. scooted a box of crayons towards me. “Let’s color!” she said. This was her ritual, her invitation: to talk or be silent, but mostly to be myself, with all my worries and fears, no matter how silly they seemed.

“So I’m already seven-and-a-half-years-old,” I began, after selecting a crayon. “Plus my dad just turned 40. I’m getting too old. Time just goes too fast, and I can’t stop it.” Other children went to Mrs. D. with seemingly weightier matters—a family member going back to jail, their parents divorcing, their sibling dying of cancer. I, on the other hand, agonized about time, about days and months and years, and about how they all seemed to be slipping through my tiny fingers. Fortunately, Mrs. D. was not one to minimize a precocious little girl’s existential crisis. She nodded as I spoke, as though we shared something deep and significant in common.

Perhaps she knew then what would take me years to discern: that underneath it all it was not some calendar lesson that upset me. I was coming to terms with something every human must face: mortality, impermanence.

Mr. Maddex: Once again, that was Dr. Nicole Roccas reading from her new book, Time and Despondency: Regaining the Present in Faith and Life. Dr. Roccas, do you feel like you have solved your own despondency problem? What has been the most helpful approach that you’ve found to at least address the issue in your own life?

Dr. Roccas: Well, I sort of hoped writing a book about it would alleviate the problem, but if anything it kind of made my hyper-aware of it in my life, but in a good way, and I’m thankful for that. In my book—and I explain this in the introduction—what I’m trying to do is to start a conversation, because I don’t think despondency is for most of us on our map of spiritual struggle, even though I think many of us face this struggle to some degree or another, some people less and some people more, and yet we don’t have a word and we don’t really employ that word to talk about it. And I think in talking about it and gathering together and wrestling with what it means to be people of faith in a world that’s full of distraction and angst and sadness is really important, and starting that conversation is the first step in waging that battle.

Mr. Maddex: I noticed that you include a study guide at the end of the book.

Dr. Roccas: Yes.

Mr. Maddex: Why did you feel like something like that was important?

Dr. Roccas: Well, I hoped that the study guide could serve as a basis for reflection, either as a group in a parish setting, or among friends, or just for personal reflection. In one part of the book when I’m talking about sort of practical ways to counter despondency, I talk about journaling, and those questions could also serve as sort of journal questions. But primarily I was envisioning them as being group questions, where people could get together and not gaze at their navels and get pulled into these sort of aimless, emotional discussions, but to really think about despondency and to think about the ways that it impacts us, both as individuals and corporately as the Church. I think those conversations are healthy and important to have.

Mr. Maddex: Well, in addition to this study guide, what else are you doing to support and complement the book?

Dr. Roccas: One of the things that I’m hoping to develop for this Lent or next Lent is a study guide that can be used particularly during fasting times, when we tend to become more aware than usual of our own despondency. The other thing that I do is I host a page on Facebook where I regularly curate content related to time and faith, and along with that, of course I have the usual time podcast and blog, where you can subscribe to those and get all sorts of interesting stories and content related to time, eternity, and despondency.

Mr. Maddex: Well, Dr. Roccas, I’ve taken a lot of your time today, and you’ve provided much-needed information. Is there anything else that you would like to add before I let you go?

Dr. Roccas: Just that if you do end up reading Time and Despondency, I would love to hear from you. I’d love to hear about your experience reading the book; I’d love to hear about some of the things that make you aware of—feel free to get in touch with me on the Facebook page.

Mr. Maddex: All right. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Roccas!

Dr. Roccas: Thank you for having me. It’s been a wonderful time!

Mr. Maddex: All right, so once again I have been speaking with Dr. Nicole Roccas. She is the author of the AFP book, Time and Despondency: Regaining the Present in Faith and Life. To purchase this and other great Orthodox books, please visit store.ancientfaith.com. Thanks for listening.