I just finished reading Walter J. Ciszek's story of being a priest in Soviet prisons and Siberian labor camps for twenty-three years. The book is With God in Russia, and I highly recommend it. A real page turner and an inspiration to those of us tempted to falter in our faith or our humanity.
At one point Ciszek mentions that when he was moved to a place with better conditions--meaning that they weren't starving, were able to stay somewhat warm, and could sleep sometimes--other problems emerged. People who were not constantly obsessed with finding food and avoiding frostbite now had the luxury of reflecting on their situation. Thus there was a higher incidence of emotional disturbance, depression, and misbehavior. I guess when you are just trying to survive, you have no resources for experiencing life at any other level.
I often say that I have First-World problems. My "bad" day involves a messed-up train schedule or a blossoming sinus infection or a dangerously low bank balance. I have good problems such as writer's block or a boring workday. Sometimes I think that I get depressed because I have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about myself too much. Clinical depression is a condition of physiological as well as psychological imbalance, and I respect the seriousness of it. I'm just not at all sure that my frequent (some days I would say constant) state of depression is really that. It can be a dangerous thing to go deep into one's life. Perhaps some days it's better to live in an intentionally shallow and appetite-driven way.
My work life for just about all of my adult life has revolved around people's spiritual welfare. If I was not teaching ESL in a mission school overseas I was trying to help teenagers appreciate the art and joy of music. Since those early days, my only job has been editing books for the religion market. Is it healthy to be in that diving-down-into-the-soul place all the time? Honestly, it can become a weariness to think about divine life day in and day out. No wonder I've taken up knitting and watching too much television. I would probably drink more except that alcoholic intake exceeding two drinks makes me sick, puts me to sleep, and depresses me further still. I have used food to break up the monotony of trying to live with meaning and purpose, but that adds pounds to my hips and thighs, and let's not even go to the body-image region of depressive episodes.
While complaining about the constant badgering of a purposeful life, I know that I wouldn't last five minutes in a life that did not dive regularly into that deep-down inner place of eternal something-or-other. I'm just not built for a trivial sort of existence, even when I act, speak, and think in trivial ways. Temperament-wise, I have always needed to reflect and communicate.
Life circumstances have also pushed me toward the more contemplative life. There were no babies and small children to distract me for days at a time and prevent prayer or spiritual reading and other interior activities. I married an introvert, which makes for a comfortable life when you, yourself, are an introvert, but it also enables some of the introvert's less healthy habits, such as sitting at home rather than being engaged with life "out there" at least sometimes. We are polite introverts, so we do ask each other, "How are you?" and mean it, but of course we never press for an answer, and there are times when you need an extravert in the room to yank you into a standing position and interrogate you until you finally say out loud what's really going on in that damned deep-down region of meaning.
The mystics tell us that everything we're looking for is already here, and much of the time "here" means that personal interior place where God speaks and you listen, where you look and God hides. But it's a frustrating, devastating day when you dwell in that interior place of wonder and divine wisdom and discover that there's a lot of emptiness in there, too, And it can be an echo chamber that blasts your own stupid thoughts back to you. The deep-down place isn't enough. In fact, sometimes it's too much.
So here's the mystery. Without the diving-down practices of reflection, contemplation, prayer, and conversation, life is reduced to finding the food and staying warm. But it seems that the diving down needs a countermove, and that countermove should probably be a practice, something we do regularly. How do we break the surface? What does a good eruption look like--you know, the kind of bursting forth that releases the pent-up energies of prayer and love?
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