A Meditation on a the Prophets

I wrote this a few years ago as a meditation shared in the liturgy, during Advent, I believe. Just found it in some papers:

The world I live in is old and very weary.
Its canyons and highways and cities barely ripple
when good news hurries through like a shy breeze.
Can I say anything that has not been said before?
Can any new idea save us from our grief or greed or anxious thoughts?
Can nature itself be born again, with crystal-bright air
and every creature loved and thriving?
Can our worst memories be made into anything but what they are?
Can our governments and banks and workplaces and neighborhoods
truly experience a fresh, new day?
Do we dare believe in hope?
The prophets were--let's be honest--wild and incomprehensible.
The dreams they had! The audacity they encouraged!
What troubling, confusing prophesies are these:
that a new thing will happen,
that joy will burst every boundary,
that families will live long and be blessed,
that the universe will pulse with a tranquil heart.
What foolishness is this: to hope and build our courage.
How dangerous to entertain visions of holiness, justice, a good, lovely earth.
If we listen and believe, what might we do?
What songs might we compose,
and what stunning kindnesses might we accomplish?
What sort of uncontrollable, odd people might we become
if we take to heart the words God breathed into Isaiah?
Certainly the prophet knew that what he described was absurd.
Maybe he thought he was going out of his mind,
even to possess such thoughts:
No more weeping? Wolves at peace with lambs?
No wonder he had so few friends.
And yet, he spoke those wild words. He waited for the faith to believe them.
And he waited for us, so that we could believe them, too,
to create a history of people who believe.

VH Wright, December 2013

Why Are Christians So Afraid, or, Why Do Christians Keep Striving after Power?

Please note: I speak in generalities on purpose, to make broad points. Of course I know that many Christians in this country do not fit this profile.

 

So, where did the American church slip off the rails, anyway? Of course I don’t refer to every Christian in the United States, but there’s a trend manifesting in a substantial segment of that population. Scared Christians. I mean, really scared. Afraid of threats on multiple fronts. You can feel the fear in their online posts; you can certainly hear it in their voices on TV and social media. There’s a tone of panic that is unmistakable.

They are afraid that the institution of marriage might fall apart. They are afraid that the government will meddle too much. Take away their rights. Take away their guns (guns? Really? Christians stockpiling weapons?). Take away their ability to pray.

They are afraid of terrorists. They are afraid of other religions. They are afraid of people outside the country coming into it. They are afraid of actual Americans who are different from them, who don’t agree with them on doctrinal points or moral codes.

They are afraid that people will stop believing that the Bible is God’s Word.

They are afraid that people will refuse to live according to God’s Word.

I don’t understand this. To be a Christian is to follow the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, known to us as the Christ, the savior. And you can’t get through much text about Jesus—particularly text in which he is speaking directly—without confronting some important facts. One, he said many times that we should not be afraid. “Be not afraid” is sprinkled throughout the Gospels. Two, he told people to expect to live outside the norm, to be hated by the world, and to understand that God’s kingdom was within them, lived out in their community and not manifested through governments or military forces. The faith community was an entity unto itself: the Body of Christ. And this body would go through a lot of trouble and pain because Jesus took on trouble and pain. His way of living runs counter to popular modes of getting by. We should not expect to be popular, to get our way in the world outside the faith community.

Furthermore, we should welcome people to God’s grace and the message of the Gospel, not try to coerce them into acting the way we, as believers, are instructed to act. We live a certain way because Christ within us gives us the ability to do this. The Holy Spirit powers our faith, our love, our ability to forgive and to endure suffering. We have no reason to expect people outside the faith to swear allegiance to the standards we believers try to live out.

Christianity is a faith, a way of being in the world. It is not a system of government. It’s not really a philosophy of life, either. It’s the Way. It’s weird. It can get us into trouble if we truly seek to forgive, to help those who need help the most, to welcome the outcast and stranger.

In light of all this, I do not understand why so many Christ followers are afraid of things Jesus already warned us would be normal life for those who follow him. Have we backtracked on our commitment? Have we now decided that anyone can live as we strive to live—even those who claim no connection to the empowering Holy Spirit? Have we lost faith in the Holy Spirit to transform lives, and so now we rely on governments and SWAT teams to protect us and to get other people in line? Have we rejected the life of welcome, charity, and generosity Jesus demands and decided that it’s better just to keep out anyone who might threaten us?

I cannot, for the life of me, connect my Christian faith to the kind of fear that crackles throughout this country like a brush fire.

·         If I am unafraid, I don’t have to live on the defensive all the time.
·         If I am unafraid, I am free to help others and to give to them generously.
·         If I am unafraid, then terrorists become, to me, just another aspect of a world struggling to be free and to find what it needs.
·         If I am unafraid, I will not need to strike out at others to make myself more secure.

As a Christian, I choose not to be afraid. It’s not easy sometimes, and I do fail at this. But I am determined not to live in fear. It’s not what Jesus did, and it’s not what he wants from me.

A more pointed question might be, not Why are Christians so afraid? But What are they so afraid of losing? Most fear has to do with security, with the dread of loss. So let’s look at some popular Christian fears and trace them to the specific powers that are threatened.

The biblical institution of marriage is under threat. No, it’s not. Christian marriage is a covenant between two people in the presence of God and the faith community. Unless the faith community starts attacking married people and trying to cause trouble for their marriages, biblical marriage is not under threat. What people outside the faith community do has no impact on God-ordained marriage. A government license to marry is not the same thing as the faith community’s blessing of a union. Unfortunately, our government has given preachers and other religious figures government authority to make a union legal in the eyes of the state. This simply confuses the issue. A legal marriage does not equal Christian marriage.

Rather than worry about how certain government licenses (for example, to gay couples) might ruin the biblical institution of marriage, Christians should give their energy to supporting marriage and helping people in the faith community discern wisely—which they aren’t doing presently, as indicated by our divorce rate, nearly identical to that in the culture at large. I’ve known some so-called Christian marriages that were not two people brought together by God. They came together out of lust or guilt or pressure from parents or their own immaturity and dysfunction. The Christian church needs to attend to marriage within the community and stop obsessing about people who seek mere legal status as married citizens.

 People will stop believing God’s Word and will refuse to live according to it. Belief comes through faith, and faith is a gift from God—we can’t just muster it up. And we can’t pressure other people to have that faith. Jesus never coerced people—never. He accepted that some people would believe him and others wouldn’t. So why do we insist that people outside our faith use our Bible and our faith norms as their bible and faith norms? When has that ever worked?

Why are we so concerned that the Ten Commandments might be removed from public buildings? What purpose do they serve there? By simply being public, do they force a change in people? By simply being public, do they make Christianity the norm? No on both counts. Words engraved and displayed have no magic power over people. And even if they did, we would be gravely mistaken to try to work magic on people so that they behaved as we believed they should. Free will and the power of choice did not originate in our constitution; God gave us free choice before we even knew what it was. God continues to allow people to make choices.

We are afraid that our children will no longer be able to pray in school. No laws prevent anyone from private prayer in a public place. But that’s not what the fearful Christians are thinking of; they believe that public, communal prayer should be happening in our schools. Which prayers? Christian? Jewish? Hindu? Islamic? Would we appreciate our Christian children having to mouth the words to Muslim prayers if we lived in a country that was predominantly Muslim? Why is it okay for us to force prayer upon groups of children?

Also, why would we want our children to be saying rote, public prayers anyway? Isn’t that what Jesus warned us against? And wouldn’t we rather our children’s prayers be meaningful and personal? The idea that not having prayer in school is a threat to our children’s well-being doesn’t even make sense.

I believe that much of the Christian fear in this country is really a fear of losing power. It’s a fear that we won’t be able to control how other people act. It’s a fear that our way will no longer be the ruling way.

We’re accustomed to having power in the United States because Christianity was the primary religion here for so long. Also, we were, to some extent, culturally Christian. But we’re not the grand majority we used to be. So we must shift the way we do religion in the public square. We must respect the rights of others, the beliefs of others.

And we must remind ourselves that Jesus never meant for Christians to rule over others. That’s right. He didn’t. He said that we would serve others. That we would love others. That we would care for the least of these.

He said we would be persecuted. We would be hated. We would have to be as wary as serpents—but as harmless as doves. And we would not win any battles with weapons but with the Holy Spirit.

But Christians have bought into the cultural norms of dominance, ego, bigotry, and violence. None of these qualities have anything to do with the Christian faith. Yet we act out of those qualities when we rage against laws that no longer favor us. Jesus never promised that we would have the protection of any laws. He assured us of the opposite.

A lot of church historians will agree that one of the worst things to happen to Christianity was its adoption by Constantine as the state religion, back in the 300s. Yes, it meant that we didn’t get fed to the lions anymore. And we could share the faith freely. But it also meant that we got cozy with power and with all the un-Jesus-like characteristics of power, such as coercion and intolerance and corruption. The monastic movement began because Christians could see that the state church was corrupting the Body of Christ. They had to get away and pray, and establish among smaller, more intentional communities the realities of prayer, service, and discernment.

 Now is the time for prayer, service and discernment. It is not the time to skew every law and powerful will toward our preferences. It is not a time to insist that our way be established as the public way. Real faith never worked that way. Christians who are trying to force everyone to live by their way are doing untold damage to God’s kingdom by repelling people—by hurting and angering them. And who wouldn’t be hurt and angered when their rights are usurped by even well-meaning power?

Finally, Christians are afraid of terrorists. Which is understandable. The whole world fears the horror being played out constantly by terrorists. Jesus did not speak directly about terrorists, but he’d spent his life under Roman occupation, and his people knew terror. But Jesus didn’t really talk about that. He talked about faith, hope, and love. He talked about helping those who suffered—whether under terrorism or something else. Jesus said bluntly that a person should not fear the one who could only harm the body. Even in horrible situations, the goal is that we walk forward in faith, in prayer, and in generosity toward others.

If a Christian is living in fear, then she or he needs to return to the Gospels and listen to Jesus for awhile.

If a Christian is afraid of losing power, then she or he needs to return to the Gospels and listen to Jesus for awhile.

Please. Before more damage is caused in the name of the One who bears no resemblance to our petty, hateful, grasping, cultural-christian American God.

We Could Stop Being Racist if We Truly Believed in Forgiveness

After watching the film Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity (http://crackingthecodes.org/), I have been mulling over a set of truths and the problems they cause.

·         We are all (in this instance, I speak of those living in the USA) conditioned and taught to be racists.

·         Racism goes deeper than personal choice and belief; it is structural and generational, practically in our DNA.

·         Even well-intentioned white people who work for racial equality hold biases, some of them subconscious.

·         Economic, social, and governmental structures propagate racism.

When I face these realities, I am tempted to feel defeated and hopeless. I was set up to be a racist long before I was born, long before my parents were born. As a white person in this country, I automatically have privilege, and this same privilege—and the system that birthed it—hurts other people, all the time.

White people are uncomfortable talking about racism. We like to think that we understand it and that we’re doing something about it. What might happen if we talk about it, openly and bravely, with people of color? The moment the discussion starts, some quite specific fears set into my white mind and body:

·         I will say something that reveals me to be biased, prejudiced, racist.

·         I will discover that I indeed carry biases, prejudices, and racist tendencies.

·         I will have to face this horrible fact: I have been wrong.

·         I will have to face this horrible fact: I have hurt others.

·         I will have to face this horrible fact: I am a sinner.

And if all of these things happen, where in the world can I go from here?

If I have tried hard, perhaps for decades, to be a compassionate, fair-minded, un-racist person, and still I have failed, what can I possibly do now?

If I have been wrong in my perceptions, for years, being as smart and aware and moral as I am, then what good is all that?

I believe that I resist these conversations because I don’t know what I will do with the shame, guilt, and disappointment that are bound to come.

Racism is complex, and I won’t pretend to simplify it or supply an answer that is easy to implement. However, I do believe that if we treated racism as the sin it is, perhaps we could allow Divine Love to deal with that sin.

I’ve been a practicing Christian for 47 years, and all that time I have claimed that God’s forgiveness can deal effectively with any and every wrong, sin, defilement, shame, guilt, and wound. Yet, when it comes to racism, I pull back, as if I’m the one in charge and it’s my responsibility to clean up my act and prove to everyone that I’m okay now.

So what if I have been a racist? I’ve also been a liar. I’ve also been jealous, envious, hateful, lustful. All these other sins I entrust to God. I can confess that I’m greedy and too worried about money and can ask for help in adjusting the way I think about money and possessions. My greed may have caused all kinds of grief for others. But I can acknowledge and own my misbehavior and my bad attitude and treat them as sins.

Why can’t I do this so easily with racism? Why am I so afraid of discovering the depth of my sin in this area? Why am I so afraid to say, “Yes, I’m a racist. I keep trying to root out these attitudes and perceptions, but some of them are deep in my history and culture, and I still have a long ways to go” ? Why is the possibility of discovering and naming this sin such a threat to me? Why is it such a threat to us, as white people in the USA? Why is this one thing that we fight and fight in regard to our personal confessions?

I’m not sure why racism, out of so many sins, is so difficult to treat as sin, and I mean that in the traditional, centuries-old Christian sense. It’s a defect, a wound, an interior crime, an orientation away from love and toward self-seeking and self-protection. Sin is not something we solve. It’s something we learn to recognize and confess and for which to seek healing and restoration.

Racism, like all other sins, hurts both the victim and the perpetrator. It cannot simply be solved. Of course, it can be dealt with in structures. We can pass legislation and revise organizational processes and communications to deal with structural racism. But we won’t have the will or the strength to do that until we face the personal racism that riddles us with cruelty and bad judgment. Personal racism makes us defensive and afraid. Personal racism shuts us down and triggers our self-justification.

I can’t speak to people outside the Christian community, but to other Christians I can say this: Treat racism as the sin it is. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you see it in yourself. Identify it, grieve over it, confess it, and ask for help to move on. Ask for wisdom to make apology and reparation when necessary. If you truly believe in the power of Divine forgiveness, racism will not remain this huge black hole of shame and avoidance. It will become yet another aspect of your spiritual growth and your growing, Christlike compassion for others.

Six Poems for Advent and Christmas

Shrine at Christmastime

A tree in my neighborhood

serves as memorial shrine;
two years ago, ribbons and stuffed toys
nestled at its base. Later, vodka bottles.
Out of respect, I pulled the dogs away,
sent bits of prayer for the woman or boy,
the man or toddler gunned down
or killed in the crash.

More recent months found it empty.

Time heals or, more likely, wears away.
But this week, a new totem:
One large dolphin, all silver plush,
store tags intact. It hangs, head down,
its tail fin nailed to the tree.
I don’t know if this victim is old or new.

Maybe a bare winter oak calls out

the long sadness; maybe Christmas shopping
was rent by a sudden memory.
As for me, who must bear witness,
Advent proclaims the Child but
cries of children who, unnaturally still,
leave their toys perpetually new.
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright

  Before Annunciation

Just before snow covers,
it reveals. In the gloom and gray
appear the bright veins of stone
and rippled bark, the sharp character
of shingles, street signs, forgotten toys
and paper bags. As if the interior
of everything has grown outward,
adorning itself in fine lace.

I like to think that, before the great angel

pronounced and the Holy Spirit overwhelmed,
the girl Mary had a moment—or perhaps years—
of revelatory and incidental wonders,
and even that morning, taking her breakfast,
she said something startling, and her dreams glistened
upon the outlines of face, shoulders, hips, and feet;
and something gusted through the room,
hinting of chill and snowflakes.
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright
 

Mary’s Mom

I’d like to know if you noticed anything different

about your daughter. On a particular day, did she seem pale
or out of breath? Was she weepy? Did you have to tell her things twice?
When the truth came out, did you agonize that she had not
confided in you? Did you tell her father, or did she?
And—be honest—when you, being the mother, being a woman—
understood the situation, didn’t you enjoy some moments
of sheer satisfaction? Didn’t you say to God, one eyebrow arched,
“You couldn’t have picked a better one”?
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright

 

Gabriel

How much did you have to shrink

before entering the house?
How much shine did you rub off
before she could see you?
Did you carry the plan like a secret fire in the heart,
knowing that such information could cause
a whole new rebellion up there?
And when the girl said yes, how much
did you ache to grow legs and lungs and
a head of hair, just to know the sensation
of your spirit breaking open?
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright

 

Liturgy

Later I will choose ornaments

and dig out the holiday tea towels.
But now the cross is carried aloft from the nave
to the font to the table to its place near the lectern,
and we sing words almost too old for connection.
The vestments are shot through with greens and purples;
the cup and candlesticks glimmer. Such tones ring
uncomfortably deep, into memories bright and dark,
into twists of theology and the crowded dreams
of a conflicted race—that’s us,
hoping for heaven while the cookies bake,
praying our rosaries of unraveled lights and bells.
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright

 

Star

People who often traveled this road noticed

how familiar shadows had sharpened, cast upon
the ground by some fresh brightness in the night.
Halting, they identified the frightful star.
Jabbing fingers upward, voices tight,
they murmured debates about the meaning of it.
But nothing had changed; the road remained the road.
Their lives passed by beneath their feet,
moving forever in the same direction—only now,
across their bent necks, a band of warmth,
a deep hum that would not leave.
© 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright

Holy Instincts, Autumn 2015

Go ahead and give in. It's that time of year. Actually, the urge strikes many of us twice a year, in spring and in autumn. Something about the weather changing, probably. We get these little urges. We find ourselves gravitating toward old behaviors, those practiced by mothers and fathers and great-grandparents before us.

We feel the need to clean things and to clean out things: cupboards, drawers, closets, garages, rooms, gardens, back yards. In the spring we clean to make room for summer's activity and growth. This time of year, in the autumn, we clean to eliminate the clutter of all that summer accomplished.

May we remember that we are creatures, tied to this earth through our chemistry and memory. As much as our minds and interior worlds churn away to create esoteric systems of thought and religion, our bodies sense the change of temperature and season and move us to do the work necessary for riding our little island home in its murmuring galaxy, through time and atmosphere.

And so I make many lists of tasks to complete before the winter holidays. There are home repairs and the clearing of flowerbeds and vegetable garden; there's putting away the summer items, also pulling out the winter clothing and the heavier bedding. Every bit of dust and grease seems to show more precisely in the clear air of October, the gusty winds revealing my laxity at home keeping. When did I last dust every item in Grandmother's china cupboard? How did the silverware drawer become so icky? Exactly how many second-hand paperbacks have accumulated on that over-laden shelf?

But the instincts dive deeper. What shall I do with the rest of my life? What goals have I allowed to languish through evenings of watching too much television? What qualities of character are important to me and need to be helped along by, perhaps, a new practice of prayer or charitable work? With whom should I spend more time, and whose needs might be calling upon my gifts, if I can unclutter myself enough to notice?

What creative work is waiting to be accomplished? Can I write more regularly, learn a new knitting pattern (maybe friends and family would love to have socks rather than another scarf?), work a little harder to create meals with more flavor and benefit?

I'm grateful for seasons and the subtle shifts that occur in an ordinary year. I'm glad they trigger within me the basic desire--God given, I think--to live with great love and purpose. In the same way, I'm glad that such fluctuations revive the desire for joy, a holy want that is easily pushed aside in the service of getting through the week. But joy deserves its own post: maybe next week.

A Quite Difficult Prayer

Yesterday's sermon was about aspects of the Bible that are offensive. It helps, from time to time, to say that out loud, or to write it for all to see. Parts of holy writ just don't sit well with me. I won't supply a list of examples here, but I'm sure that if you read holy writ--whether the Christian scriptures or something else--you suffer your own discomfort.

Here's the bit that's irritating me today:

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous."

Jesus of Nazareth said that. And it sounds wonderful and noble and generous, and usually I feel pretty good about these words.

But it occurred to me yesterday that the obvious enemy these days is more atrocious, more persistent, than anything I've heard about before in my life of nearly six decades. ISIS has become the enemy of just about every human on the planet. That's Enemy with a capital E or, perhaps ENEMY. This growing entity is fueled by the worst kind of fundamentalism; it claims to be the most pure form of Islam; its members commit atrocities and call them prayers (the systematic rape of "infidel" girls, for instance).

I am very nearly pacifist, am opposed to military solutions 99 percent of the time. But I have said to my husband recently that it seems the only solution to the ISIS problem is just to kill every last one of them. Yes, I said that. There seems to be no reasoning with such people. This is the type of organization that attracts people who are already imbalanced in some way--many of them are probably pathological to begin with--and there seems to be no rational way to reach them. The whole world is frustrated to the hilt with figuring out how to thwart the evil work of this organization.

Then I read Jesus' words, and I know what I must do, and it really pisses me off. I'm supposed to pray for the people who are involved with ISIS. I'm not obligated to pray for ISIS as an entity. But I must pray for the people within it.

I don't even know where to start with this. Am I a radical enough Christian to pray for the members of ISIS? To ask God to heal their souls and draw them away from their evil? I'd rather pray that God wipe them off the planet. Fortunately, I am not Jesus.

So, who is with me? Shall we actually pray for our enemies? Today? Now?

Why We Stop Talking about Our Depression

 After a point, with depression, you just stop talking about it.

After all, there’s no new information. You don’t want to remind family and coworkers that you are unhappy and you struggle to function. There’s little, if anything, they can do, so why burden them?

So when you return from possibly the most difficult vacation of your life, you say, when asked, that it was wonderful, and you show them the beautiful photos that represent the better 50-60 percent of what actually happened. You don’t tell them that you cried—rather, sobbed—nearly every day, or that the pristine forest around your cabin felt oppressive, or that most afternoons you hid in your room and alternated between sleep and panic.

You don’t want the people who shared the time with you to understand how difficult it was because then they would feel responsible somehow, or they would wonder why you took a vacation in the first place, if things were that bad. You don’t want to belabor the point that you scheduled events so that you would be on this new medication a few weeks prior to the trip, so that it would have time to take effect and thus allow a lighter, better you to step off the plane and into an enjoyable few days with loved ones.

How could you know that the medication would not work, that it would in fact backfire, making you jittery, robbing you of sleep, and turning mild habits into moderate compulsions? You did not plan to be so fidgety that you hoped no one at dinner would notice your legs bouncing rapidly, out of sight under the table. You did not plan to be exhausted by noon and then again by 8 p.m., even after spending most of the afternoon lying in bed and struggling for moments of calm. 

And you could not help that these days included events you could not control, such as the two military guys driving on the mountain illegally in an off-road vehicle and scraping the side of your rental car, even though you had pulled all the way over and come to a complete stop to let them pass—and then they had an attitude about it and made it difficult for you to get information, all the while claiming that it was a no-fault state and, well, they were the military so they had no insurance. Even in more normal circumstances, that would put a damper on the trip. But add to it your current state of mind, and then try to think of anything but that and try not to worry that you will end up stuck with a huge bill even though it was absolutely no fault of yours. Try not to spend the hour or two before you finally sleep obsessing over how you’d like to tell them off or track down their commanding officer (they refused to give you a name or the commander’s contact information) or even post photos of them and the accident on Facebook and Twitter and hope it will go viral and cause them decades of misery.

And the road itself—that narrow, winding mountain road with minimal grading and no guard rails—on this trip it becomes the focus of all your fear. The Road becomes a menacing archetype that might have been living inside your kinspeople for centuries but just now revealed its dark power to you, on this trip. Such a mountain road would likely make you nervous and extra cautious under “normal” circumstances, but people drive it all the time—mothers with carloads of small children drive it, delivery trucks traverse it numerous times a year—and if you were someone other than who you are right now, the Road would not possess you as it did for that entire week. Your imagination was on a loop the whole time, spinning images of every possible disaster, of every way the car could skid or slide or stall or get crashed off the mountain, killing all of you. Your breathing grew rapid hours before all of you made the trip down to the town to give the children an excursion into town. By the time you made the final descent, to a day somewhere else and then the airport to home, you huddled on the back seat, eyes squeezed shut, hands clutching as if you had already fallen over the cliff but found a tree limb to grab, and trying not to whimper with every bump or every sensation of turning. You cannot remember ever being as terrified as on that one twenty-minute drive. To be so overwhelmed by the situation has unhinged your sense of who you are.

In fact, you don’t even know who the real you is. Well, you do know, in that chemically disrupted part of your brain. You know that, really, you are weak and cannot manage your life, that you need to grow up and develop better coping skills. You need to pray more and trust God. However, you have tried to pray, and every sense you have tells you that God has gone away, ultimately and finally and with no regard for you or your suffering. You feel God slipping into absence and yourself slipping off the divine radar. You try various prayers and methods, hoping that something will break through that wretched barrier of desperation and despair. But nothing breaks through, and no relief comes. And you know the truth about yourself: you have failed at life and at faith.

You don’t tell friends or colleagues any of this, because you don’t want them to find out now, after all these years, that your spirituality and your life skills are variations of fraudulence. You would rather they not know the fragility of your belief or the depth of your emotional disability. You can still do your job; this is often true of someone who has reached a certain level of accomplishment and competence. You go to work and do your job well, and people may pick up on a strange vibe, but they see you functioning and leave it alone. You know that you function but at a great price. You do the same work you have done for years, only the energy around it is weakened and your passion for it muted.

Also, you do not reveal to others the horrible secret that your life is over, that you are sailing in a giddy fall to the floor of the world and just waiting to feel the impact of the crash. How would you communicate such a profound truth to people as they sit with you at lunch or share jokes during a meeting? You simply can’t. At least you finally understand that such things are impossible and should not be attempted.

We stop talking about our depression because talking uses up the power it takes to get out of bed and get dressed and walk, step by step and moment by moment, through a frighteningly ordinary day. We stop talking about our depression because we have nothing revolutionary or insightful to say about it. And we know that healthy people have low tolerance for this kind of truth telling. They stay close for a while but then feel the pull of negativity as they would discern an undertow and then hurriedly swim away.

I enjoyed spending time with family. I was able to enjoy good food. I hiked a mountain trail and got an infant to stop crying and smile at me. I read books and played electronic solitaire (another never-ending loop of compulsion). And I slid through an immense, deep gorge by train, focusing my gaze upon rocks and fissures and wildflowers and foamy river water. You see, much of what we call depression is not total. It is merely debilitating.

I publish this blog post knowing it is a risk. Who will find out this unattractive truth about me? Who will pass it on to others? Who, learning of it, will have it in their power to deprive me of respect or job security? Who will judge me as weak or hysterical and dismiss as self-indulgent these words upon words that I have drawn out of myself as though they were sharp threads twined and tangled up in my intestines and blood vessels?

But I draw out the words because, although I might stop talking about my depression because it seems to me completely useless, I will perhaps create, with this post, a place in which other depressed people can pause. Perhaps they will recognize this experience and understand that they are not alone and that the experience—even at its most delusional—is painfully and empirically real. Many of us stop talking about it, but the phrases are always there, however silent or invisible.