Longing for Spirit
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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.
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