Good morning…
“After hours of careful listening, my therapist offered an image that helped me eventually reclaim my life,” writes Parker Palmer on page 50 of Let Your Life Speak.
“You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you,” he said. “Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?”
“Amid the assaults I was suffering, the suggestion that depression was my friend seemed impossibly romantic, even insulting,” initially thought Parker. “But something new in me knew that down, down to the ground, was the direction of wholeness, thus allowing that image to begin its slow work of healing in me.”
On page 51, Parker continues: “Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to the ground on which it was safe to stand – the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.”
“The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes,” Parker concludes on page 53. “One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down – down to ground on which it is safe to stand and to fall – eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. When people ask me how it felt to emerge from depression, I can only give one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.”
Explaining our need to be grounded in life-giving connection, Jesus said this in John 15:5-8 (MSG).
“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant…if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon. This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples.”
What a Friend we might find through our depression.
…Sue…
