Melancholia

   

Pastor’s Epistle—November 2023

And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone.

—Matthew 14:23

Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

—Thomas Keating

I have a melancholic disposition.

I don’t mean that in the modern sense of sad and vaguely depressing, but in the medieval sense of melancholic as introverted and thoughtful. Rowling readers might term it Ravenclaw. Books have been my portals to worlds of endless learning ever since my youth, and when silence seeps into my bones it provides to me a wondrous rejuvenation.

My grandparents’ property abutted an old church and graveyard, ancient by American standards, with headstones dating back to the 1600s. We used to take walks amongst the monuments, deciphering their weathered engravings, some fallen over like loosened teeth. We would read the inscriptions and imagine their stories. My grandparents rest there now too.

I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces, those borderlands betwixt past and present, man and nature, Christian and pagan, life and death. Autumn of course is perfect for that, with holidays like Halloween. I never was much of a hunter myself, but I understand why people love it. Up there in the deer stand, deep within the silence, aware of every motion, alert for any sound.

It’s soothing, that escape. No distractions intrude, no deadlines, no entertainments nor advertisements. It’s just you and nature, just life and death. Out in the woods, deer opener proves itself not merely a holiday but a holy day. And I get why.

These things we find so meaningful—quiet and solitude, nature and books—they seem in short supply these days. Who has time, after all, to read or walk or sit in silence? Every waking moment of our lives fills up to bursting with infotainment, meaningless drivel bombarding us to buy ever more things we don’t need with credit we cannot afford.

This, I think, is the spiritual crisis of our age. When we look to the decline of organized religion, we don’t see people following lines of reasonable inquiry to an atheistic conclusion. Rather, we’re simply so darn busy. Worship costs us time and money. And what is it for, after all? Church promises no profit, and rarely entertains. Thus it befuddles Americans. In a consumerist mindset, Sunday mornings would be better spent either being productive or bingeing Netflix.

We haven’t time to sit and think, let alone just sit and be. Yet this is the sine qua non of religion and spirituality. Remove from life that sacred rest, that temple built in time, and we cease to be meaningfully human. Without a sabbath of some sort, we’re all just beasts of burden.

I once read an interview with an Evangelical preacher who claimed that Jesus was an extrovert, and so must we all be. Frankly, I think he ought to have spent more time reading the Gospels and less time selling them. Throughout the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is constantly trying to get away: across a lake, up a mountain, out in the wilderness. He’s always seeking solitude so as to commune with His Heavenly Father. This then ought to be the model we should follow.

Christ is ever active, ever teaching, ever healing. He never sent away a neighbor in their need. Yet the reason He could do this, from a human perspective at least, is because He fostered prayer, and solitude, and silence. That’s where we find God. That’s how we remind ourselves that God is ever with us, even if our awareness of His presence rarely is.

The Buddha, they say, used to go off alone to meditate for three hours out of every day and three months out of every year. Jesus certainly tries, but we manage to hunt Him down.

Pascal wrote that the wealthy tend to drift from God due to divertissement: a constant stream of frivolous diversions and distractions. This luxury of indifference has now filled up all our lives. I can’t seem to swing a dead cat without hitting three new articles on how people in the Western world are all lonely, stressed, depressed, and nihilistic. Oh yeah, and we don’t go to church.

At some point we must each confess that all the junk we buy can’t make us happy, that all our stuff can’t fill that hole inside, and that there might be more to life than just our paycheck or career. This is all self-evident, once we slow down to catch our breath. But that’s easier said than done these days, isn’t it?

I haven’t a panacea for the ills of the postmodern age. But healing must begin with being human. And to be human we have to have sabbath: not laziness, not mere entertainment, but true and sacred rest. We must take time to think, to learn, to be. And this results in love. Every religious tradition insists that awareness and peace bring compassion—because ever waiting in the silence are both our God and soul.

One of my parishes has a gorgeous old graveyard, over 150 years old, with Norwegian on the headstones and a glorious grove of oaks. Out there in the wind, in the susurrations of the leaves, amongst the bones of our ancestors, one feels the undeniable connections between past and present, man and nature, Creator and Creation, death and resurrection. One might even understand why oaks were sacred to Thor, St Brigid, and the Cumæan Sibyl alike.

Find a graveyard. Read a book. Say a prayer. And love your neighbor. It isn’t rocket science, but it might just save the world. Or your soul. Which is really the same thing.

In Jesus. Amen.