Isn’t it Wonderful How We Never Recover?
(The Dark Night of the Soul)
Given by James Covington on April 30th, 2006
Why the hell am I preaching about the dark night of the soul? When all things are greening, the flowers are blooming, the sun is glistening—surely this is the day God hath made! So you ask, “why the dark night of the soul?”
I’ve been wondering the same. Part of the reason undoubtedly has to do with the dangerous regressive state of the human condition as I witness it in the world around me. I will speak more about that later.
I didn’t sleep well a couple of nights this week. Sleepless nights can be a sign that something is going on in the soul—something disturbing me—a dark night approaching.
I celebrated a birthday this week. I had a wonderful time with my family—felt so fortunate to have them in my life and all my friends, particularly you. But I am getting older, nevertheless. Is aging the dark night looming in the distance?
So who knows? I almost decided to go with something else, but alas it was too late. For better or worse, I decided to stay with the theme. Then as I was walking through the park yesterday, from officiating a wedding at the Boathouse, on my way to another wedding, enjoying the sheer splendor of the day, feeling fortunate to be alive, I took notice of a couple approaching with their young son, prancing and playing along the path. He suddenly stopped playing and starting screeching and crying, “Mommy, Mommy!” The mother responded, somewhat alarmed, “What’s the matter dear?” To which he answered, “I think somebody pooped on my head!” And I thought to myself, “Well there you have it! Even on a perfectly glorious spring day, poop can fall from the sky!” The dark night is never far away!
There was a quirky off-Broadway that ran for a while last year that I had hoped to see but unfortunately didn’t get around to. It was entitled, “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” and was described by the NY Times reviewer as “stand-up existentialism.” It was a one-man show about the beauties and the terrors of human life, and it apparently evoked much laughter and many tears. “Life is presented as awe-inspiringly wonderful. Entrancingly mysterious. And utterly disappointing,” the reviewer says. “A big joke. An inscrutable journey. A bountiful gift.”
The actor, in the voice of the narrator, Thom Pain, “gives us a picture to imagine: a little boy in a cowboy suit tracing words in a puddle on a cloudy day. A pet dog nearby. Tragedy strikes, and the actor asks, in a gray monotone… ‘When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?’ Then comes the kicker. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how we never recover?’” The narrator is also that “dazed and changed little boy,” all grown up.
Life does this to us—at some point, we lose our sweet innocence, our lovely naiveté. We learn that what was dearest to us can be gone in a moment. The pet can die. The home can burn. The parents can divorce. The dreamed of career is never fulfilled. Something like this may happen when we’re six, or sixteen, or thirty-six, or fifty-six, but if we live long enough, it will happen. And we never get over it. We do recover. We go on with our lives. But we don’t forget. How can we forget? Memories lie bound in our bodies, in our very flesh, and they affect how we think, how we hold ourselves, the decisions we make.
Difficult experiences can lead to periods of depression or times of melancholy. I’d like to distinguish between the two. Just about everyone becomes depressed occasionally, and we speak of situational depressions caused by life’s disappointments or losses. It could be something as inconsequential as getting a parking ticket or as serious as losing a spouse. We pull back emotionally, and sometimes, if it is a serious loss, we pull back for a long time. This is a normal response to the vagaries of life. But sometimes the depression is what we call a clinical depression, and that can come at times for no reason at all—or can be triggered by some loss. The individual has a change in brain chemistry which causes his emotional, social, spiritual, and often physical system to shut down considerably, for a long period of time, and he feels isolated, without joy, without hope. This is an illness—it is treatable—and I would encourage anyone who experiences this kind of depression to get medical help.
Depression is not the same as melancholy. Depression is a deadening of the senses and of the spirit. Sometimes, a depressed person cannot feel much of anything. On the other hand, melancholy—which looks in some ways similar to depression—is not a physical illness, but a spiritual condition. I like the Hasidic concept of melancholy: it is “a thirst for the Divine that results from the terrible awareness of separation from the Divine.” Melancholy can be seen as a freely chosen response to conditions that violate the human body or spirit, such as illness or the betrayal of a friend or a job that asks you to be other than yourself—or war, or a hurricane or earthquake. Melancholy, then, is not something that attacks you—but a natural and a healthy response to a violation of self or conscience.
When our body is invaded by a germ, what happens? We get a fever, the white blood cells rush in to attack the invader. We take to our beds, perhaps. Our body needs rest. Melancholy could be seen as a way of healing the spirit from some kind of “holy infection.” Perhaps it is a time to reflect, to reconsider, to move to a new place philosophically, or perhaps to relate to the Holy One or to life in a different, deeper way. It is a gift, giving us time to carve out some interior space, a kind of chrysalis, in which we might rest, and then unfold as we were meant to.
Part of the reason for states of melancholy is simply the human condition. Back to the Hasidic wisdom: we long for wholeness, and we are broken. Our brokenness is the very thing that pulls us to something greater than ourselves, for deeper meaning itself or a greater purpose, or some would say, to God. We suffer. Others suffer. That restlessness, that sense that something is missing, is always there, will always be there—it is our glory and our tragedy that we strive for that which we can never reach.
A lot of us have fallen into states of melancholy in the past few years. We should not overlook the cultural causes, the perfectly understandable reasons for our sadness and anger. Anyone who lives in contemporary American society and does not have some degree of sadness and anger is, I think, delusional. Think about how we live. I don’t know about you, but this is how I begin my day: I get up in the morning and turn on the TV. I hear reports of violent death in war and the ongoing miscalculations of that war and I hear about terror and suicidal bombers—I hear about the genocide in Darfur, earthquakes in Pakistan, poverty and hunger around the world. I hear about corruption in politics and the huge profits being made by the oil industry. I try to understand what our President is trying to say, but I can’t. Then I eat breakfast and read the NY Times—and there I find more of the same, only illustrated and sprinkled incongruously with ads for diamond bracelets. Burdened when I walk out the door, I get into the car to go through my NYC double parking routine, and turn on the radio and tune in to NPR—I hear still more news, and guess what? It hasn’t changed since breakfast. And we wonder why we walk around depressed.
I believe this is a cultural moment in history that brings melancholy. Unfortunately I fear that things may have to get worse before they get better. Americans have been known for our optimism, good humor, openness. We have become a fear-filled, pessimistic country, with economic insecurity, little sense of community, and shaky moral values. It is a time for our country to be reflective—and countries can reflect, reconsider, repent, just as individuals can. We need to ask ourselves, “What are our national goals, what is our vision? How are we spending our wealth? As a country, what values under gird our actions?” We of a liberal religious persuasion need to help our country ask these important questions, for we have as a nation gone far astray, and we need a moral voice calling us back home.
We carry such heaviness in our hearts, thinking that somehow we have gone wrong, not understanding that we live in a veritable sea of suffering. As Bertrand Russell once said, “Those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision . . . .” The positive side of this is that these are the very people—you are the very people—those in touch with the spiritual malaise of the day–who will because of your very frustration and discontent bring about the social and political changes that are needed.
In addition to the suffering which comes from the human condition, and that which comes from the cultural context, there is also the personal, specific pain that enters each life. Because we are a society in which everyone is supposed to be happy and cheerful—just watch the terminally cheerful people in the TV ads—we are encouraged to appear this way to others, even when our heart has been wounded grievously and is breaking inside.
This week, I attended my peer supervision group where I and 6 other psychotherapists with over 140 collective years of experience seek help from one another on how we can help our most distressed clients. This time it started off with one colleague sharing the difficult depression and trauma one of her patients is experienced from discovering her mother stabbed 26 times and murdered by her brother. Then there were others. One of the things I love about my peer supervision group is the sense of humor we share. It was difficult to have any humor this time. By the time I left, I found myself overwhelmed by all the suffering I see in the world, and yes, witness in the stories of my patients—peering into the dark night of the soul.
I know there are many in this room who also experience set backs and disappointments and illness and depression. I have heard your stories as well.
A dark night of the soul is not just “a bad day”—we all experience these days of depression from time to time, sometimes we know the reason, sometimes not, but then the mood lifts. The dark night of the soul is not depression, either, though the one can mimic the other. A situational depression is one in which a person has a loss of some kind and goes through a period of grieving, or is in a situation which is chronically unhappy for him. When the situation is resolved, the depression lifts. On the other hand, a biological depression—though it may be triggered by a loss—is a change in the bio-chemistry of the brain which requires treatment by a physician.
What, then, is this “dark night of the soul”? The phrase comes from St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic and poet. John was a member of the Carmelite order, where he tried to introduce reforms. For his efforts, he was imprisoned for eight months, during which he wrote a series of poems, one of them with that title. He embraced the night, and the darkness of his prison cell, using it as a symbol, a retreat for his union with God, his Beloved.
A dark night of the soul is an extended period that many of us—including literally all of the saints—fall into where we feel that there is no place out, where despair is our constant companion, where the grounding that gave our life meaning gives way, and we find ourselves bereft . As F. Scott Fitzgerald described it, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” Like depression, this state may also be triggered by job loss, betrayal, serious illness, or the death of a loved one, for example. But the dark night of the soul is a spiritual condition and is not an illness to be “cured”—it has to be moved through, blindly and courageously, until at last this place of confusion and meaninglessness eventually propels us into a new vision of who we are and what we can do. Poet Theodore Roethke writes: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see . . . .”
This is a period of transformation in which we are pushed deeper, spiritually, sometimes whether or not we want to be. It is in this dark place that St. John believes we are most likely to find union with the Divine. Let me be clear: the dark night of the soul does not necessarily lead to happiness and security, or health and a new and better job, or the relationship which is right for us. It may, or it may not. It leads rather to a transformation of the soul of the individual or of the nation.
I suppose one of my highest values is to be honest, to be authentic. And the hardest part of that is being honest with yourself. You see, when we repress one feeling, we tend to repress all feeling. Joy is the flip side of your grieving. You’ll see it at memorial services often—deep grief, followed by laughter that is full and rich and healing. When we repress grief, or anger, we also repress Eros and creativity—we give away our sparkle for a shallow, forced grin.
Let me tell you the story of Robyn. Robyn broke off a relationship of 7 years, a relationship that had proved to be destructive. Have you ever loved someone who was bad for you? Well, that was Robyn’s problem. The sadness, grief, and despair were almost overwhelming for her, for months. Robyn was inconsolable. She continued to work for parts of two or three days a week, and she took some solace in taking care of a menagerie of animals in exchange for living rent-free. It was hard for her to talk with friends and family because they had been telling her for some time to let this man go, and they were greatly relieved when she finally did break up with him—so she felt alone with her grief, except for one couple.
This couple offered companionship when she wanted it, they would listen when she needed to talk, and mostly they were just a silent witness to her struggle. They had no prescription for how Robyn “should be” while she was mourning this loss. They didn’t try to advise her or “fix” her. Even when she tried to be friends with her ex and began to suffer from that, they gave her the room to be exactly where she was. They took her out to lunches and dinners with them, when she felt like eating. If she found she couldn’t eat, that was okay. They weren’t upset when she cried at the table. They didn’t expect their comfort to get her out of her funk, she said, and yet because they didn’t expect or need it to, it often did. Months later Robyn came out of this difficult period. She writes, “This couples’ undemanding presence, their willingness just to bear witness, enabled me to surrender into the fullness of these dark feelings, which were the only doorway to my healing.”
We all go through transitions. Transitions are difficult. Even little changes are difficult—So as we go through these larger changes in our lives, we suffer, we become irritable, withdrawn, angry sometimes. We should realize that we may be in what the Tibetan Buddhists call a “bardo” state—that time between incarnations, the period before the next birth into the next life. I call it the “middle ground” state, that directionless state of emptiness between endings and beginnings.
Sadness, grief, anger—these are not conditions to be solved, illnesses to be cured. They are part of the cycle of life. They are signals of life—signals that we care, that we are moved by the ills of the world, that we love—this is life reaching out to life. We don’t want to stay there in that troubled space all the time, but when it is our time to be there, we want to give ourselves to this experience, that it might teach us its rich lesson.
Isn’t it “wonderful how we never recover”? And yet we love—perhaps love more deeply because we can never be whole. We reach out across our brokenness to one another. Comforting our neighbor. Healing ourselves. Healing our nation. One wounded heart to another. So be it. Amen.
*Much of this sermon is drawn from writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Dalai Lama, David Whyte, Forest Church, Marilyn Sewell, Peter Morales and a slew of books on depression I have stacked in my office.