Even though most of us don't suffer from depression as serious as Winston Churchill's "black dog," I think that many of us have gone through times of severe trial that have put us close to, and perhaps in, outright despair. I can't speak for others, but when those times have occurred in my life, I know that my tendency has been to believe that there's no way out of the hole, and that I might as well live for the short term because the long term seems like an exercise in futility.
Recently, I went through one of those dark periods. What moved me into it now seems relatively trivial, yet once you're in that mindset, it's easy to wallow in it. What brought me out of it this time, and likely will be a "prophylactic" against lapsing into that state of mind in the future, is a passage from Thomas Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation." The mystic monk nailed me square on the noggin with an insight that had never occurred to me and shamed when I read his critique.
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.
In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and despair.
Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of a damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny ourselves.
But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.
Despair as the ultimate development of stiff-necked pride, as a pure form of self-centeredness and even selfishness. That certainly never occurred to me, but once I read this passage and thought about it, it certainly applied to me. There's a perverse pride in thinking that you don't deserve to suffer what you're suffering or, even more perversely, that you're too much a bad ass to really be "saved." Why are you so special? When you think of yourself in relation to others, especially if, as a believing Christian, you consider the suffering that Christ endured for our sake, you ought to be embarrassed at your presumption in surrendering to despair over any set-back in life. As to being a bad ass, please! Paul reportedly hunted down Christians and participated in their stoning, and he became the apostle to the gentiles. I don't hold a candle to Paul.
The tonic offered by Merton brought me up and out of the despair as quickly as I'd entered it.
Not long afterward, while receiving the sacrament of reconciliation, my confessor, a young priest, offered up a couple of suggestions when confronted by the emotion of despair, or the triggering emotions that can lead to it, one practical and immediate, one requiring contemplation. First, he recounted the story from the gospel of Matthew where Jesus approaches the boat containing the disciples by walking on the water. When Peter questions whether it is truly Jesus and asks Him to command Peter to also walk to Him on the water, Jesus does so. Peter walks for awhile toward Jesus, then notices the wind and the waves, becomes afraid, begins to sink, and cries out to the Lord to save him. Jesus catches his arm and holds him steady while asking, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" My confessor told me that as long you keep your gaze fixed upon Jesus, it is hard to sink.
The second bit of advice he gave me was to think about this: God so loves us that, even though we are all sinners, he died for us. He told me to contemplate that thought and its meaning in my life. I have, and part of what I've come to realize is that no one is beyond God's love, which is constantly present if one only turns and opens himself or herself to receive it. It brought Merton's criticism of despair as essentially an exercise in navel-gazing pride in its worst form into a new light.
As we learned in the first night of RCIA class, "faith is the response to a God who reveals." Among the things that God reveals are facts about His nature, and while many revelations involve mysteries so profound that while the intellect can follow the imagination cannot (a hit tip to Frank Sheed for that thought), one is easy to comprehend: that God is love and His love is infinite and eternal. In our brief time here on Earth, we can respond to that revelation with acceptance or with rejection, and that choice makes all the difference in the world.
Okay, I really need to come over here more frequently, This passage from Merton and your commentary struck a very ray nerve, and for that, I thank you. I have much to ponder.
Posted by: Valerie | June 28, 2009 at 07:57 AM