GTM Part 70
Introduction to Indifference
Indifference, frustration, exhaustion and boredom. You’ve probably faced one or all of them in your struggle to grow in manliness. We’ve dealt with exhaustion, boredom and frustration. I left the most poisonous and damaging for last: indifference. (If I had to rank them from least damaging to most damaging to your manliness project, I’d say: frustration, exhaustion, boredom and 1,000,000km further out, indifference.)
Poets, dramatists, Nobel laureates, martyrs, Catholic bishops, Anglican clergy, philosophers, priests, statesmen and even God himself have spoken out against indifference. (We’ll look at these later…) It is one disease of soul that you want to avoid like the plague. (That phrase now makes more sense to us: to “avoid like the plague” :) ).
What the world knows as indifference, the Church refers to as “lukewarmness”, much in the same way in which she speaks of “apostolate” to refer to what the rest of world calls “leadership”. Of course, the Church’s understanding of apostolate goes much deeper than the secular concept of leadership, just like her concept of lukewarmness has a 4th dimension missing from the concept of indifference. But let’s not get side-tracked… We are discussing indifference…
Every year, I attend a spiritual retreat for a number of days (to rest, refuel, reset, recalibrate and relaunch). And every year, without fail, we are guided to think and pray about the real and debilitating evils of “lukewarmness”, that one author referred to as the “devil in disguise”. That’s just how important the topic is.
And what exactly is this indifference? It’s a certain attitude where you just don’t care. Apathy… literally a lack of feeling. You should have some feelings one way or the other, but you don’t.
Think about it this way. As a normal, fully-functioning human being, there are certain stimuli your body is expected to react to – if only to preserve itself from damage or death. When in the presence of these stimuli, the body experiences pain which is a physical signal that there is something wrong, get the hell out of there! Similarly speaking, there are certain stimuli that our mind or soul is expected to react to: either for or against, towards or the hell away from. In medicine, you have some conditions or diseases that disrupt the pain-relay system of the body, and a fellow with such a condition, who’s body is being damaged, doesn’t realise it and ends up more injured or damaged or dead because he feels no pain. Now indifference does the same to your mind and your soul.
020620