Darkness, My Old Friend 5 comments

By Brian Volck

“What happens in despair...is that the private imagination...reaches the point of the end of inward resource and must put on the imagination of another if it is to find a way out.”
—William Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless

As this past winter turned to spring, I looked forward to the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, knowing I would meet up with friends. What surprised me on arrival was just how many friends–old and brand new–were there: mentors, MFA graduates and current students, spiritual companions, fellow writers, and literary heroes I was anxious to meet in person.

Among the Festival presenters in my “old friends” category was Mary Louise Bringle (who goes by “Mel”), chair of the Humanities Division at Brevard College and president elect of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. Mel has an array of gifts–a deliciously slant sense of humor, quiet grace, a largeness of imagination–but what astonishes me is her rare combination of scholarly rigor and deep compassion, the latter forged in the trials of her own life. In the embarrassment of riches that is the Festival schedule, I made certain to attend her session, “From Despair to Healing: Theological Insights from Fiction.” (For an introverted physician and Christ-haunted writer descended from a long line of German melancholiacs, what’s not to love in that title?)

I arrived late–navigating Calvin’s campus can be tricky for the newcomer–and took a seat towards the back. Bringle’s familiar, engaging manner set me at ease until I noticed who else was in the audience. Several writers of note were intently listening, including Kathleen Norris, who just that morning had spoken to a crowded auditorium on acedia, the “noonday demon” of uncaring and spiritual sloth periodically assailing any life of discipline (monks, writers, and most other adults). This was no ordinary group.

As Bringle unpacked some of the content of her book, Despair: Sickness or Sin?, quoting freely from Mary Gordon’s novel, Final Payments, as well as Christian writers of the fourth through nineteenth centuries, I understood why others may have come to hear her. The spiritual and writing lives attract those who ponder weighty matters and hope to turn their ruminations into something beautiful: prayer and service, a work of art; but anyone who travels that path for any distance knows what obstacles and desolations await.

In short, I was among people who, like me, were so well acquainted with acedia, depression, and despair, we might call them old friends.

I’ve been chewing on Bringle’s words ever since. How many times have I stood at the brink of writing or prayer and told myself, “I don’t have the energy for this,” “What’s the point if no one ever listens or reads what I say?” or “It’s all a colossal waste of time.” How do any of us pray or write when the fire seems to have gone out, our early fervor lost, the vision abandoned? Whoever else she was speaking to that day, Mel spoke to me.

Mel Bringle has the courage to name despair a sin and the wisdom to recognize that depression, for all its biological correlates, is as much a sickness of the soul as of brain chemistry. And whatever else one may need in order to crawl out from under the weight of despair–therapy, medication, sleep–the soul, too, needs healing.

Bringle’s soul doctors include other old friends, ones I’ve met only in books: Evagrius of Pontus, John Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Robert Burton, Soren Kierkegaard. Wise counselors all, unaffected by the post-Freudian, bioreductionist schools now dominant. Who today, for instance, would pair–as the scholastics did–the sins of despair and presumption? Yet how often have I, in darker moments, assumed God’s capabilities were subject to the limits of my imagination? And how often have I emerged from depression not by reasoning my way to hope, but by accepting the unlooked-for gift of a wider vision?

For all the promises of the Prozac era, chemical fixes are limited in application and scope. (See Jeffrey Smith’s lyrical Where the Roots Reach for Water for a first-hand encounter with that disappointing reality.) Nor is the talking cure a sure fire technique. For the artist of faith, old friends like acedia and despair must be met with a delicate balance of works and grace, confident that emergence from dark occasions depends far less on the will than on the receptive imagination.

When I was a young boy, I glued myself to CBS news during the Apollo space missions. In each translunar flight, there came a point when the tiny craft moved from the gravitational dominance of the earth into that of the moon. From that moment–even in Apollo 13’s imperiled mission–the capsule’s moonward course was set. The soul’s movement from desolation to consolation is like that–a mysterious, almost imperceptible escape in a dark, uncertain voyage. In our own dark passages, may we all have the patience and spiritual discipline to wait, in the company of friends, for that subtle confluence of gravity and grace.