Good morning…
Last week in class, we read aloud much of my favorite chapter in Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. In a chapter entitled All the Way Down, Parker unpacks the most life-giving description of depression I have ever experienced. I posted some of his words yesterday in our blog Befriending Our Depression. Today, I feel drawn to share more.
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Excerpt from page 52-53 in Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with an intent to kill but as a last ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, “What do you want?” When I was finally able to make that turn – and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me – I began to get well.
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls “true self”… the self planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image – the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one’s peril.
When I was finally able to turn around and ask, “What do you want?” the answer was clear: I want you to embrace this descent into hell as a journey toward selfhood – and a journey toward God.
I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction as everything else I valued: up. I had failed to appreciate the meaning of some words that had intrigued me since I first heard them in seminary – Tillich’s description of God as the “ground of our being.” I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.
The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. That is the best image I can offer not only of the underground but also of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God.
Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of myself as humble! But that person did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling fraudulent, empty, and useless – a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.
The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. 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 give only one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.
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Brought low by depression, may our true self gradually grow up through God, the humble ground of our very being.
You are like a tree, planted by flowing, cool streams of water that never run dry. Your fruit ripens in its time; your leaves never fade or curl in the summer sun. No matter what you do, you prosper (Psalm 1:3, VOICE).
The nuclear bomb called depression teaches us fresh truth: our true self is true friend.
…Sue…
