The year is almost over, and I sit on the verge of yet another New Year it is only natural to take stock of where one is in life. It' s usually a gloomy time, an airing of grievances against oneself for the roads not traveled (such as the one that leads to the gym) or other roads traveled far too much (the road that leads to the cupcakery).
Though I too am guilty of finding my feet wending their way to the cupcake place a little too often I actually find that I feel pretty good as the next year dawns. A nagging depression that had been sitting on my shoulder and hitting me in the head with a cricket bat seems to have finally eased.
Ah yes, I've had my bouts with depression, two or three good solid throw downs perhaps with several minor scuffles here and there where we kick each other in the shins for a time. Nothing special - run of the mill mild to moderate depression with a kicker of Seasonal Affective Disorder thrown in for good measure, maybe even a little dysthymia, plain old simply melancholy. Why it comes I have no idea. I have nothing really to be depressed about -- which of course makes me guilty that I am depressed which in turn makes me more depressed. It's fun. Makes for decent poetry if you don't lay it on too thick.
While I can't exactly pinpoint the cause I can note a couple things that have contributed to its ease. One, honestly, is the fact that I have joined a poetry reading group. It's not that I find poetry theraputic in anyway, but it has given me some hope that maybe, through connections and practice, I might find a way to write professionally in a year or two. Probably only make enough money to buy a sandwich, but I'll tell you that will be one of the best tasting sandwiches I will ever eat, provided it doesn't come from Subway. Anyway, that gives hope to the deeper yearnings of the soul which is important in stringing me along in a meaningful way. I may tilting at windmill, but it yields purpose.
Two, work is good, but we are little hush hush about things at the Newport News Candy Factory.
Three: My faith in God has reached it's low point.
That third one may surprise you. It certainly has surprised me. Racked by doubt for years, I have felt that only by having God sweep me off my feet to make me his buddy buddy friend can I truly kick my depression, and have lamented the fact that God through it all remains seemingly silent. There are no whispers in the wind, there are no words in the clouds, there is no spirit through strangers, there are no hobos that you kind of want to punch in the face but then you don't and it's a good thing because it turns out that hobo is Jesus, and now he shall grant you three wishes.
No. There has been none of that. Only emptiness, only nothingness.
So for several years, going even back to when I was in college, my faith as I knew it to be, a faith in things unseen as recorded in the Holy Bible, has been slowly chipped and weathered away. Bit by bit, day by day. Going to Church became a burden, the hymns become impossible to sing, the prayers are choked out by silence.
But then finally there comes a day where there is simply nothing left to chip away it, nothing more left to give away, and you ask yourself in dead seriousness what it is you truly believe; when I do this I find that something inside me will simply not let go of the idea and the feeling that there is a God, there is something beyond ourselves that we are all bound up in.
I can take that one step further and say that something important happened with Jesus of Nazareth, and I believe that in him we get a glimpse of what God is truly like (i.e. loving and merciful). But that is as far as my creed goes.
What is so great about that? My salvation, dear Christian Soldiers, is still in doubt.
Well, in a strange way, I have come to feel that to be in a state of doubt is like being in a state of grace. It is only my belief in a God that is good and merciful that allows me to have the courage to doubt God's existence in the first place; to have the freedom to be receptive to new ways that the Spirit might move through the world; to boldy pray for salvation not in a distant heaven but rather in every moment of time passing; to have the latitude to be incredibly, stupidly wrong, as I surely am about a great many things.
That, I think, is something worth celebrating.
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