On Dealing With Darkness

I was only able to work in my vegetable garden until about 4pm yesterday. The light, and what little warmth there was, faded suddenly and simultaneously. I think depression is like this for most of us. Now you feel it, now you don't. I have often wondered what this kind of 'everyday' depression is really about. Circumstances seem to have little to do with it. Deep calm and happiness come when life is difficult and the lows are all the lower for appearing to be without any kind of basis, as on a rare sunny summer's day. I've found it's better not to try to talk myself out of either, not to try to pull myself together and move on without first questioning the feelings which accompany these sudden moments of intense joy, or of intractable depression. Guilt invariably figures somewhere.

When it comes to moments of inexplicable joy, guilt is the spoil sport, reminding me that others are having a miserable time of it. People are still recovering from a hurricane, or fleeing from war zones, or watching someone they love die slowly and painfully in a hospital bed. But if I resist the temptation to indulge in feeling guilty, I find that joy can also lead to greater awareness and compassion, The same is true of low moments. They can make one fully present to the suffering of others and more able to respond to it. Yesterday, as I read of the burning of the homes of the Rohingy people of Burma, I also found myself slipping into that default position of accepting, being vulnerable to God's embrace in my own inner self. Once again, it gave way to a sense of both guilt and outrage, but perhaps more positively directed. How could I be experiencing this renewed and familiar closeness in the face of such suffering? Does God not cherish the Rohingy as much as he cherishes me? I asked for some word in the affirmative, and got nothing, except for a sense of his presence in the darkness.

I felt something similar at Paddington station on Friday morning, that sense of something 'other', yet solid and good in the way only God can be completely good. Paddington station is a very dark place for some. Of all the thousands of people thronging the platforms, how many carry a private sadness about their lives, memories connected with that station, a brokenness which they may not even dare to own for themselves? I wanted God's embrace for them. But I also knew that it was already there in some mysterious way, that they and their memories were held, as I was held. I can't remember if I was feeling particularly low at the time. But I do remember the familiar deep calm which comes when one encounters God's unconditional love in unlikely places, or at improbable moments. I wondered if there was anything I should 'do' with it, if I was failing to appreciate this extraordinary love by not speaking with a particularly unhappy looking person, even if it was only to pass the time of day, or comment on the pigeons.

Doing, and justifying our very existence, are the most besetting Christian neuroses. One could say that they are the most besetting neuroses of our times. Of course, one cannot 'do' anything with God's love on a station platform, or anywhere else for that matter. Rather, we must remain vulnerable to it, 'doing' very little, if anything. 'Don't just do something, sit there' is a timely maxim for those who swing between highs and lows for most of their waking day. But 'just sitting there' takes single-mindedness and a conviction that God has a purpose for us, both in the highs and in the lows, and that his embrace in dark places, as well as light ones, has to do with that purpose. At Paddington station, there is no telling what pain or what tragic secrets might lie behind the way one stranger sips his coffee, or another is waiting for a train's platform number to appear on the notice board.

The interesting thing about all this is that God's embrace, as it is sensed in the midst of a hard and busy world, and the intuited knowledge that it brings, is given in order that his love may be allowed to pass through us into whatever situation we happen to be engaging with, at any moment. Darkness is not dark to him. The night is as bright as the day.