The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Scars and Scraping
In the beginning he is still too fragile. They send him to a big city church for a few months and he does not cope. he can do aspects of the job well, but people, and visiting are still too hard. He realises he is badly scarred, and the healing is a longer process than he expected. There is also a shortness of patience in him. The old morès of how you do parish irritate him constantly. He wonders if this is part of the healing, part of needing to recover further.
Then one morning Ralph grabs him coming out of church. "Why did Jesus rub mud in the blind man's eyes," he asks?"It was the standard medical understanding of the time.""Yes," says Ralph. And when we had cattle and they got 'pink eye' we rubbed castor sugar in their eyes. It irritates and scrapes off the stuff causing the problem. That's what Jesus did. And it was painful to see clearly."
He sees this is like what depression has done, too. Along with the scarring and new sensitivities there has been a scraping away of old blindness. His new impatiences is to do with seeing that some old habits are utterly pointless, staving off inevitable endings to some ways of being church. Now that he sees, these old ways will make him ill again if he stays.
So he goes, and the scraping is found to be a deep gullying into his soul. As the daily disciplines fade, the habits of the mind and of knowing fade too.
He cannot see why he would believe anymore. What God is there? How can you believe the Jesus story and resurrection? Why do we so passionately want life after death anyway? What hubris, when we know all other things end and die, to think that we will go on!
He is surprised by how central "life after death" is to the Christianity of his church. He is startled by how much God is seen only in human terms. It is not the Divine he has begun to meet. He has no language for this. He can't keep telling the old stories, but he has no new story. There are no words.
He can feel the old ghost of the depression circling him, testing his defences, seeking to seduce him into a darkened room, because again, he does not know.
What can he know? Why keep going when there is no point to it. What for?
"Please let me sleep again... I am so tired..."
(This series on Depression is reprinted, with some editing, courtesy of One Man's Web)
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