Longing for Spirit
Posted by JohnD
Some Rights Reserved by angela7dreams at Flickr
I’ve written about moments of spiritual insight in my life, moments when time is stopped, moments when I have felt transported to a different level of awareness, all pain and depression gone. These moments have come mostly by surprise, without conscious seeking. But having experienced them, I nurtured a hope that they would return. In time this became more of a longing for spirit in my life.
I still feel that but wonder what it is exactly that I am longing for. What do I imagine I will find – some flash of insight, the opening of a spiritual reality such as the great mystics describe – a union with God? Am I imagining that an experience like that will make these painful states of depression disappear forever? Is it possible to look for spiritual insight only as a means to cure a specific illness? Of course, that search is about something much more fundamental.
Depression feeds on isolation and with that comes a sense of being lost to all contact with people, all bonds of love. I become numb to feeling, or, if there is feeling, it is an intense bleakness and angry self-loathing. It’s natural enough to want to escape that misery. So I hope that I can find a way of pushing off that pain through the intensity of spiritual or creative experience. As I found, though, with attempting creative work simply as a means of stopping depression, closeness to a spiritual reality has to be sought for its own sake. But the inner violence that I often feel takes me into a whirlwind, and it is hard to keep my balance.
What I feel is a constant swirling of psychic energies. They are the moving forces of spirituality, creativity, love and a general drive to live, survive, come back from whatever depth I might descend to. Those are the forces that move me into active relationships with people, with work, with the world. Matching their movement, intermixed with them, is the shadow force called depression, that disordering anti-matter that undermines the vitality of the others. These forces, that I can separate in words, spiral together and whirl me with them. So the clarity I can sometimes find to experience each and write about those experiences can be lost in this confusion when all I can do is long for some way out. A spiritual longing can be mixed intimately with the longing to feel whole, balanced and able to find my way back to the hundreds of connections with people and things outside this inner turmoil.
Now I’m trying to separate out and focus on the need for spiritual life. I keep thinking about a line from Pascal’s Pensees quoted by Jacques Maritain at the end of his book, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
Take comfort. Thou wouldst not be seeking Me if thou hadst not found Me.
In a sense, I know that this is true, that I have already found what I am seeking, whether I call it God, or enlightenment or a deeper level of spiritual insight. But I have found this only in brief moments, enough to know that a spiritual reality is there to be a part of. But holding onto those moments is a practice I have not mastered. Even those who give themselves completely to a spiritual life report their own struggles to sustain it through the detailed practices they follow.
I think of the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit, who desperately sought a closeness to God in the midst of inner pain that seems to combine depression with a spiritual despair.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest Him that lives alas!, away.
Yes, I have found what I am seeking, I know what it is like, but so often in the midst of that knowledge and aliveness I feel it dissolving away, disappearing into thin air, lost in the shadow that takes its place. And the disorders of depression return, seemingly uncaused. They tell me there is no simple journey, no arriving permanently in the safety of a spiritual home. The fact that I’ve been there, though, is a constant reminder that depression is not a destiny. Hopkins conveys a hard, durable faith that persists through his darkest times, and his poetry of despair is balanced by his deep responses to the miracles of living:
The earth is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
.....And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last light off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I come back also to the songs of John Hiatt because he is someone who knows this whirlwind all too well.
You were dreaming on a park bench
bout a broad highway somewhere
When the music from the carillon
Seemed to hurl your heart out there
Past the scientific darkness
Past the fireflies that float
To an angel bending down
To wrap you in her warmest coat
And you ask, what am I not doing?
She says your voice cannot command.
In time, you will move mountains,
And it will come through your hands.
John wrote,“Depression is not a destiny”. I think you have discovered what the destiny is, for you, which in fact is spirituality and seeking your spirit in your life. If we focus on that, rather than the depression I think it can change how often we are in touch with our inner spirit.
Many times, I’ve felt deeply that my spirit was broken. This troubled me far more than being depressed. Having a broken spirit, meant to me that I was truly not alive or whole.
In the darkest hours though, I feel the spirit is still flaming inside our souls, we just have to find our way back to ourselves without light on the path.
That struggle in the darkness always seems to bring the spirit back brighter and stronger than before; inner growth and appreciation for self happens.
The Hiatt quote is beautiful, thank you.
Hi JOhn,
I think you are the first person to put a voice on isolation. I am the Queen of isolation, I long for it when I am depressed, take the phone off the hook, don’t collect the mail, no human contact. I don’t want it.
A few days into it, I long for it, but get so afraid of it…..I’ve lost so many friends over the years through this I don’t know.
How can you long for something which is so toxic, but sings to you like a siren and destroys you in the end, and all your friendships and love relationships?
Stephany – You know, I’ve learned so much from your comments here. I think you’re right about the importance of spirit and the fact that I’ve been sketching out my path in writing about it. I’ve been thinking of starting another blog to focus on the recovery side more completely and the many ways people have found to live with and get beyond the limitations in thinking that accompany mental illness. – And that Hiatt song captivated me when it come out, perhaps 15 years ago. He writes a great deal about his struggle and recovery.
Queen Susan – I can’t say for sure why isolation would sing to you, but from what I’ve experienced and seen in friends, that siren I hear wants me alone to start with but eventually wants me dead. Sorry to be blunt. It scared me to realize that after years of giving into the lure. Now I’m a total introvert anyway, so it’s never all that easy for me to reach out to others. But at those moments I need to try so that I can break the spell. I don’t know if that is at all close to what you go through. But for me the attraction of isolation is a big danger sign.
John wrote, “But holding onto those moments is a practice I have not mastered.”
I offer this idea: Let go of the idea of “holding on” to any particular experience and open instead (and ask for?) more and more of these moments to occur for you.
To me, having even one of these experiences is a reminder that more are possible. I love the Pascal’s Pensees quote you included.
Stephany, your comment is beautifully evocative. Thank you.
Susan, I used to do that for days/weeks at a time—although I could never be fully isolated because I had a roommate at the time. This was long before I had any suicidal urges. What I learned was that when I recognized I was going into isolating, to tell my friends that I was. That way I didn’t lose them in the long run. And, sometimes I asked them to check on me in a week or so if they hadn’t heard from me. Then I could tell them whether I wanted another week of isolation or I wanted them to talk with me for a while or come visit for a little bit in order to help me start moving outward again.
At the time, I felt I needed the time in isolation to rest occasionally from overdoing. I don’t think it led to my depression but I wonder if it was a “light weight” form of the depression I have much more deeply now. (By using the term “light weight,” I don’t mean to belittle what you’re going through. I just can’t think of a more appropriate word at the moment.) Anyway, I don’t feel my response overrules John D’s. Both of our experiences are informative.
And, John D again—about the idea of starting an additional blog to focus on the recover side: I see much value in interweaving the recovery info with acknowledging the everyday reality we live. Ignoring “the shadow” (and I use the psychoanalytical meaning, not the radio show) will only push it further into the dark and cause more problems later. I’m not disagreeing with you, Stephany, “If we focus on that, rather than the depression I think it can change how often we are in touch with our inner spirit.” But focusing on one thing doesn’t exclude acknowledging the other.
(It feels like I’m not making sense here but don’t have the focus to rewrite. This blog and comments are just too dang rich sometimes!!! And that’s a compliment.)
Thank you John, you know your posts are very thought provoking.
I often take several days to read and re-read them, because they offer up so much to think about.
I feel we all are on a healing path to somewhere, and there is no end to it; recovery is a process, and we are living it in present moments; so that is why I say we are recovered. It is possibly “uncovering” what we are doing. We are deciphering how we got to where we are, and how we want to move forward.
The personal journey to finding spirituality, I think, is a life long journey and we in fact should never stop the search, because that is what life truly is about.
The journey.
I think that another blog could focus on your spiritual journey and have much to offer as a side note to this one.
Anon for Now – Yes, your formulation about seeking additional special moments rather than “holding on” to each one is a good one. I think what I was getting at is something I need to go into in another post – that I do not have a spiritual practice that helps me reach and sustain spiritual encounters. Also, I’m referring to longing for something so elusive and so precious that I simply wish such experiences could last longer when they come and could come more often. That’s just the feeling, the wish.
Thanks too for your comment about my reference to another blog. I agree that focus on recovery alone without going into what you’re recovering from wouldn’t be too meaningful. I’m still thinking about that new project and will devote some space to it in another couple of weeks.
Stephany – That’s so true – “in recovery” or “recovering” are processes that do not end. It has made an enormous difference to me just to change my thinking to embrace this idea and accept the reality. Thinking about recovering is a daily reminder that I have to keep using all the tools that I have come up with all the time and prepare as best I can for those times when depression is overwhelming.
I love the idea of blogging at greater length on another site about the spiritual exploration. As I say above, I’m still working on what I might do on another site. I’ll keep you posted.
John
This may be premature, as I plan on re-reading your post, but I felt compelled to respond.
I know that when I’m crashing into the thicket of Depression, I need to be alone. The very act of making eye contact, speaking, inhaling and exhaling have become monumental tasks. I feel contaigous, as if by even being near me, others will get sucked into my mental black hole.
As to the Divine Light within, I have learned that I’m not in control of anything. In understanding that, I am free to let the Spirit be in and around me, knowing that any doubt or fear comes from my mind. Not from beyond.
I find certain things help me touch the beyond, help me reach a state where I cease to exist and my mind is quiet. Painting is generally the best, but meditation has it’s place.
This is a journey, this life we live. Sometimes the road is smoother than others. We can but try to travel well.
Your posts are always beautiful and profound. I have more than several books by my bedside which explore this link between spirituality and depression. Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore is one such book. I bet you have read this haven’t you?
I feel like we sometimes have to enter the fire to clean out our innards. Clear it all away and make way for a new landscape. And within this new landscape is the center of the soul. What you end up finding there is anybody’s guess.
Just wanted to also personally thank you for reading and commenting on my posts over at health central. Here is my latest: http://www.healthcentral.com/depression/c/84292/38285/snap
Keep writing because I want to read more of you!
Dano – You bring out so well the suffering of a crash and the ways to achieve peace. I haven’t yet been able to get to that deep down belief of surrendering to higher powers and grasping that fears are only from my mind. That’s something I know in my head but not quite in the deeper soul. I’m so glad that you can turn to painting and meditation to find peace after the hellish experiences you describe so forcefully. I wish you well!
Merely Me – Thanks so much for these kind words. I want to read more of your work as well, though I guess I don’t have to encourage you, given your amazing output these days. I only wish I could be that productive! As for Thomas Moore, I’ve hesitated about the Dark Nights book which, I believe, builds on ideas in one chapter of Care of the Soul. Just a tick of mine, though – I’ll get into that book soon. Thanks for reminding me about it.
John D
Dearest John,
You should know that my comments come from a tranquil mind. But that that is a fleeting moment of my existence. When I feel well, I can invoke the concept of a Divine Light within, because there is no struggle!
Imagine, if just for a moment, if we were able to grasp this in our most awful hours. The relief would be more powerful than any medication out there.
I believe that I know this to be impossible. When one is crushed by the relentless weight of despairing, suicidal, immobilizing depression, one cannot remember any other state than the one that one is in.
Time shuts down. Memories of a happier existence seem dreamlike and surreal. Reading or hearing of past joys is moot. The awful power of depression rules.
I think that the only way that we survive, is to think of loved ones around us. But for them, we surely must die. Why else to go on in such exquisite pain?
For myself, I do not particularly care to live right now. My Divine Power exists beyond my comprehension, so I believe that I cannot mess up. This is but a mortal coil.
All my best wishes, Dano.
So much life in all that pain and struggle. So much of spirit, your spirit – not merely generically spiritual as so much is these days.
It’s like a dream that hits the highs and then you awaken only to remember the experience rather than the thing itself. Your words carry powerful resonance that I don’t encounter many places. That’s very cool. This post stirs up a lot in me – and not just on the surface either.
Thank you, Catatonic Kid – You’ve given me so many ideas in your writing, I’m so glad this is something you connect with. I know that feeling of waking from a dream-like state and only remembering the impact of what happened not the immediacy of a different reality. I have images of what I experienced in mind, but they are two dimensional renderings only. ..... By the way, keep an eye here – I will have something for you shortly.
Oh yay – a surprise! w00tness =)