Perseverance Through Weariness, Exhaustion, and Burnout: The Desert Wisdom of Christian Resilience / Tish Harrison Warren
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
What sustains faith when prayer feels flat and God seems distant—and there's no clear tragedy to explain it? Anglican priest and former New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren joins Macie Bridge to talk about weariness, burnout, and the quiet middle stretches of a long spiritual life. Drawing on her new book What Grows in Weary Lands, she turns to the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a resilience that resists both flaming out and numbing out.
"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead."
In this episode with Macie Bridge, Warren reflects on her own season of spiritual aridity and the ancient counsel to stay in your cell rather than escape.
Together they discuss the difference between burnout and weariness, acedia and the noonday demon, perseverance, silence as countercultural practice, and the world as a womb. They explore why escape rarely heals and what it means to trust the slow work of God.
Episode Highlights
"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." "We're not having to hold our life together in the midst of weariness with will power and duct tape." "We kind of bring Times Square with us wherever we go now." "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving."
About Tish Harrison Warren
Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, named Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night, which won both Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times on faith in public and private life and was a columnist for Christianity Today; her essays have appeared in Comment, The Point, and Religion News Service. She currently serves as the C. S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Baylor's Truett Seminary, is a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum, and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church. (Source: tishharrisonwarren.com) Learn more and follow at tishharrisonwarren.com, Instagram @tishharrisonwarren, and X @Tish_H_Warren.
Helpful Links and Resources
What Grows in Weary Lands (newest book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/whatgrowsinwearylands
Liturgy of the Ordinary (most popular book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary
Curt Thompson, referenced on the brain and community: https://curtthompsonmd.com/books/
Show Notes
- Writing from the middle of the process - Weariness vs. burnout—bigger than the occupational - "It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." - Two years at The New York Times—top of a career, bone-tired - Spiritually tinged exhaustion, distinct from depression - Comprehensive difficulty—work, marriage, church, politics, drama - Post-COVID burnout talk; why the church rarely names this - Craving emotional highs in contemporary Christian faith - We lack stories of long, steady faith - "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." - Discovering the Desert Fathers and Mothers - Acedia, the noonday demon—sloth, boredom, irritation, doubt - Flame out, numb out, or go deep - The cell as guiding metaphor—a rhythm of prayer and work - "Stay in your cell"—counsel of St. Moses and Arsenius - Resisting the lie that escape elsewhere brings contentment - "The cell is actually this transformative place." - Curt Thompson: the brain isn't made to do hard things alone - A desert mother's maternal metaphor—the world as a womb - "What is happening right now matters"—hope without escapism - Grace: "we're not having to hold our life together... with will power and duct tape." - "Part of our weariness is it is too noisy. The world is too noisy." - "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving." - Trusting the slow work of God
#TishHarrisonWarren #WhatGrowsInWearyLands #ChristianResilience #Burnout #DesertFathers #SpiritualFormation #Weariness #Acedia #Hope #ForTheLifeOf
More from For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture
What happens when an ancient discipline built to remake the self in the context of a way of life and normative map gets sold back to us as lifehacking for stress relief and optimization?
It took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.
Everything is “maxxed” right now, and the news cycle in particular seems to be historymaxxing, insisting that things have never been worse than they are now. And the threats are real, from AI and global warming to election integrity—foreign affairs gone wrong, and violence abroad, in our homes, and in our schools. But the news maxxes us on fear, and so do politicians and corporations, because they want us to do something. If theologian Lee C. Camp is right, history was already maxed at the incarnation, and it came through a subversive way of life: humble, compassionate, at times angry, but radical and scandalous all the same. Camp, author of *Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians* and founder and host of the nationally syndicated podcast and radio show No Small Endeavor, argues that the idolatry of the nation state, and even the effort to legislate Christian morality and values into a political movement, is a subversion of Christianity.
Human growth can seem to just happen—genes, care, and nurture set each of us on a trajectory across the lifespan. But how do people actually grow toward wholeness, and is virtue even the point?
Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.