Friday, March 11, 2011

In the Land of Bottoms

A score of words and deeds issue from me daily of which I am not the master. They are begotten of weakness and born of shame. I cannot assume the elevation I ought...for want of sufficient bottom in my nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals

I have shared with close friends my "on again off again" encounters with depression. Profoundly polar, it appears my deep incessant hunger for openness and responsiveness to life, beauty, community and God are equally informed by this chronic loss of heart. In recent months I have taken off a significant amount of weight. As a poet, I am always looking for the spiritual metaphor hidden in my response & interpretation of the world or reality. Depression in its most profound sense usually brings with it a "weightiness of soul." This mass of sorrow takes on an actual volume in the soul. Full of this empty, normally fluid emotions now are frozen and muted. There are times when I feel like a thousand pound deer caught in the headlights. No act or engagement with others makes sense. Why? I have exhausted all my energies, my perceptions, my skills, my mental & emotional acumen in regards to life and it is still out of my control.

The mere fact that everything changes remains a bone in my throat. The impermanence of the outer world is more than tiresome. It often mocks me with ceaseless shifting and endless meandering to places not on my planned-out maps. These were not my dreams for this life. This is not the place I had decided to create for myself.


In this new place I discover once again, the limitedness of my own ability to fit in, to know how to act, to know what to feel, to actually know who to be. I am confronted once again with the very vapor-like nature of my sense of self. I thought I was so together, so intelligent, so wise, so loving. Now, in a new place, a new time, with a new people, I find my heart freezing up in resentment and fear. I feel the very edges of my sense of self melting away and I feel a sense of shame.


Why can my soul go so high in moments of aesthetic bliss and wonder and yet feel so small and weak in the dark new places of change? Growing up in a Christian holiness tradition (this is the perspective that one can be sinlessly perfect), I found very early on in my teen years an overwhelming impression of anxiety & guilt. Very early on I knew I was not the airy, light, spiritually victorious person I was being raised & groomed to be. My inclinations towards earthiness & the love of music (especially R & B) informed me even in budding adolescent childhood that some part of my journey involved going deep as well as going high. In fact, the way of depth intrigued me more than the way of light, white, strength and power. I sensed in my weakness a doorway facing heaven that is easily missed in seeking a spiritual glow & knowledge of God.


It is interesting that Emerson sensed he did not have sufficient tools and inner strength to allow his soul to move in and about the darker parts of his heart. He knew his shame and guilt were telling him something. He was not sure what. God is trying to speak to me through this loss of heart. Given my history and access to spiritual knowledge, hubris disguised as love and care and wisdom are my nemesis. As Thomas Moore says, "Shame corrects the hubris of the spiritual ascent." Any pastor knows that his ministry if often spilt between the Sunday morning service and the weekday counseling session in a private room. This conversation with pastors in the counseling room represents the Church's underworld. This is the sin we refuse to repent of, this is the fear we run from, this is the pain we avoid, this is the shame we refuse to embrace, this is the guilt we project on others, and yet in this place we encounter the proper love of self needed to properly engage the vicissitudes of life. And yet the torturous patterns of personality and soul are often not only neglected but seen as an optional or even an avoidable bother.


I am naive if I do not see the darker side of my depression. As much as I know the love of the Father is the ultimate antidote to this noonday demon or sickness of soul, I also know the lurking self-absorption hidden in depression's cycles. To enter the story my loss of heart is telling me is to know & feel the fluid feelings running deep under the glacier I call my persona or public self. To actually be as vulnerable as my feelings are telling me they are is to fall apart on some level. Within these stories lie uncertainty, sorrow, anger, helplessness and fear. Hidden in the chapters yet to be published also awaits my own complicity, my own broken nature inclined to blame and yet avoid any responsibility for change, for life, for forgiveness.


When my sadness is overwhelming I know I am in need of a great emptying. My very heart is to full of emptiness. My very heart knows pain beyond its ability to feel it. I must share this knowledge. I must weep together with others. I must tell someone of my overwhelment.


Is there a different dialect to the Spirit's voice in "the land of the bottoms?" When will I stop seeing the world before me as mere meaningless interferences? When will I regard the unsettled self as a benevolence of soul offered as a gift?


I am always amazed at the shear idiosyncratic complexity of the friends that are in my life. And yet I want my own life to be simple and uncluttered. I want my engagement of life and the Lord to be free of sorrow and sadness. I have had my fill of this emotion thank you!. And yet Scripture is replete with images of the ongoing spiritual warfare involved in the blossoming and fulfillment of the call upon one's life. The way of our Savior and the Cross is wrought with this kind of darkness and travail.


So as I feel this loss of heart, this sense of transgressing social expectations (often my own unexpressed projections), and the failure of my plans, my ideals, my own sense of righteousness and self, I discover much is rising up from this weakness and shame. Like Emerson I am in the "land of the bottoms" and I am seeking the engulfment of the Savior. I will sit in this vulnerability today. I will let the fire of the Spirit burn the chaff and stubble and create embers to warm my chillier traits. In this, and out of this I pray I do fall completely into the arms of God and as Bonheoffer realized, one can ..."take seriously, not our own suffering, but those of God in the world."