Wonder and Despair
June 15, 2008 · by Christine
The Love of Morning
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we’ve lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror . . . .
God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings,
all incident - our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth’s
beloved dust, leading the way - all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.
-Denise Levertov
I had a recent email exchange with one of my readers who shared with me that she sometimes goes through stages where she is “carried by a poem.” I completely resonated with this image and the Levertov poem above is one that is carrying me through these days. These lines in particular are singing to me: “God has saved the world one more day / even with its leaden burden of human evil; / we wake to birdsong” although the whole arc of the poem reflects my internal journey in this season.
I have come to recognize a deep despair that resides in the shadow part of myself, the shadow being of course those things about ourselves we don’t want to embrace. And yet the journey toward our own wholeness is precisely about naming our shadows, welcoming them into the inner rooms of our being, and listening for what they have to say to us.
Those of you who have been reading along here for a while know that I am engaging in some family systems work as a part of my spiritual journey. My father was someone who let despair consume him, his whole life he ran from his own darkness. In addition to whatever pain he experienced within his own family, his youth was layered against the backdrop of World War II, and the trauma and despair of that experience is something he never spoke of to me. I have found that resisting the despair only magnifies the weight of it.
In some ways, in saying these things, I feel like my paint is peeling, I am revealing the more difficult surfaces of my soul. I think part of my reluctance to share these struggles is my fear that others will try to step in to offer me hope as an antidote. I have an ambivalent relationship to the word “hope” — too often I think we use that term as a way of trying to circumvent the necessary process of facing our own dark emotions, we do violence to others by trying to move them to a place where we feel much more comfortable.
I am blessed with a spiritual director who does not ask me to cheer up or have hope. He asks me to walk right into the despair, to name the darkness and pain and suffering that weighs on me at times. He invites me to dwell there and imagine the pain my father struggled with so that I might cultivate more compassion and forgiveness for him.
I want to resist the despair, as many of us would. I sometimes spend a lot of energy doing precisely that. I don’t want to leap into the dark abyss where I must come to terms with the fact that this next moment could be my last, that those I love deeply will one day be gone, that we are waging a terrible war thousands of miles away whose trauma will ripple through generations to come, that we continue to wreak havoc on our planet and much of the damage is simply irreversible. When I contemplate the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust I come to the conclusion that there is simply no consolation for that devastation. For some despair there simply is no tidy redemption offered in response, it simply is the horror that it is. Not that there weren’t stories of tremendous courage and love that rose from the ashes of that event, but the millions of crushed and broken bodies cannot be changed.
And yet, when I give myself space to walk right into that place of feeling utterly undone, of naming the things that give me reason for despair, I feel the crushing weight of sorrow and sometimes something quite remarkable happens. Sometimes when I am truly able to release my resistance to the places of darkness I am reminded of birdsong as Levertov writes, I come to treasure the simplest kindness, my heart begins to open in wonder at my own capacity for love.
These things do not outweigh the despair, as though the universe were some kind of cosmic scale. The despair and the beauty dwell together in the same space, not competing, but offering to us the full experience of soulfulness. Poetry and art help us to hold these in tension.
I come to realize that the opposite of despair for me is not hope, but precisely this experience of wonder. Wonder that there is anything at all, wonder that in the presence of great darkness there is also so much beauty, so much love.
As you read these words, I invite you to notice what stirs in you. Do you want to rush and reassure me that everything will indeed be alright? Do you want to say that the beauty of the world really does outweigh the darkness in some sort of ultimate battle?
Or can you rest here in this space with me, holding the profound paradox of the world as best as you can. Can you join me in making room within you for the full spectrum of the emotional landscape we contain within us, responding to the call to be fully present to this wondrous and despairing moment?
(photos: above taken over the Hood Canal, below taken at a sheep farm in Arlington, WA)
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts.
Posted in Family Systems |
June 16th, 2008 at 2:13 am
You invited us to notice what stirs when reading those words. About half way through I got a strong urge for avoidance activity - playing a computer game (yes, I confess, I do play them…) or something else.
You are absolutely right that the most comfortable is not the most important - we must learn to be with each other in pain and be with each other in joy, without trying to change either emotion. No ‘cheering up’ allowed, in exploration lies growth.
So long as (and I think this is also important) one is not ‘hanging on’ to the emotion after it has actually gone. I know I sometimes do that with anger - hang onto it because it energises me - but there comes a point when I have to laugh at myself and let it go, because in fact it has already gone.
Your comment about poetry and art reminded me vividly of a passage in a book of Elizabeth Goudge that I cannot lay my hands on at the moment for the exact quote. It told of a little boy whose father had died, who found comfort lying on the dusty attic floor studying the pattern of moonlight streaming through a window. The moonlight was held and arranged in squares by the leaded window glass - beauty held in tension by shape.
June 16th, 2008 at 3:07 am
I do not wish to fix or offer platitudes of fluffly betterness.
I work and live in trenches where there is little hope and much despair. Reality has been merciless in the minds of the folks I walk with.
I have been thinking much about how little hope they have. I struggled with how to help the find any. To leave them in their pain seems cruel and to push them deeper? This is a far greater paradox than I had considered.
I will have to ponder this more.
June 16th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Chrsitine,
I will rest in this space with you.
I think what you write here is important, and even as I am typing this, I stretch to wrap myself around it, embrace it. I don’t know that I quite can yet. As a person sometimes given to despair–I confess that–my impulse is to want to banish it forever. Something draws me to people of resilient, persistent, indefatigable hope. In the little I have known of you, both here on your blog and in person, I see you as a person who is fundamentally a person of hope….
So I guess what I am saying–this becomes clear to me only as I type this–is that I want to say NO to what you write here. That is my first impulse. Perhaps because in my own life I want to find a way to banish the abyss that would consume me…. I have yet to learn, as apparently you are learning, to “walk right into” it with trust that I will emerge whole….
Thank you for this. I need to ponder your word here more. And I need to, as I started out to say in the beginning, rest in this space with you.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Christine,
I was taught this famous Psalm as a child, and it walked with me, and carried me through some dark times growing up. I have not so often turned to it as an adult, but saying it over to myself this morning, after reading your post, it seemed again, as it always was,
the safest and gentlest of harbors:
Psalm 23
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
For his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
Of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil:
For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
In the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
—
June 16th, 2008 at 5:44 am
It is our nature, especially as women, to want to ‘fix’, to want to comfort, and to heal. But we can’t always do that for those closest to us, let alone someone from afar. I find myself thinking as I read this - don’t spend so much time in the dark that you forget to see the light, and I say that because I know someone who did just that - spent so much time reflecting on, examining, seeing only the dark that they got to the point they could no longer see the light. And the world is made up of both - light and dark, good and evil, sadness and joy, the age old yin and yang. Look into Tao and Buddhism, there is some wisdom to be found in a different perspective. It is not so much resisting despair as it is paying attention to the wonder, to use your words. The despair does not disappear, it just resides in its own small corner of the total whole. Begin to notice the rest of the whole, and dwell more often in the larger whole and not some small corner. And you’re right - there is healing in art, in the expression and letting go of what we feel, ah yes, feeling deeply and letting go.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Thanks for these very thoughtful comments offered here, I am grateful to those of you willing to at least take my invitation seriously for a few moments.
Tess, I fully agree with your insight about not holding onto the emotion after it’s gone, that is a different relationship to emotion that is not very helpful. I am going to write more about this for Wednesday. Thanks for the beautiful image too.
Tina, I don’t have any easy answers to this but I greatly appreciate pondering this alongside you. I think lament is some of the most powerful prayer we have to offer. And I would suggest that art is one way of expressing this.
HM, thanks for resting here with me. I would agree with you, that I am fundamentally a person of deep hope, but I am re-thinking what that word means. I see hope used so often to silence people who are suffering. I think there is a cheap kind of hope, bought without any kind of real wrestling, but then there is another kind that only comes through being present to the abyss.
kigen, thanks for the Psalm, I find the Psalms one of the wisest places of learning how to be with darkness. I believe fully that God rests in the despair with me as well.
Rebecca, I understand the longing to comfort. Although when I was grieving the death of my mother one of the lines from the Hebrew Scriptures that spoke most deeply to me was about Rachel who had lost her children and would not be consoled. I loved that it spoke to the kind of grief that cannot be easily managed or soothed. I actually don’t think the despair is a small corner, I think it is in some ways equal measure to the light. But I agree that the whole of it needs to be embraced, to lived into.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:04 am
I agree that too often we want to push people through the hard stuff too quickly for them to truly learn and assimilate the learning into their hearts and lives. But I believe just as strongly that despair is momentary. It is, literally, a moment of choice. A moment that passes because the choice is between living and dying — despair being the utter loss of hope (and therefore not the same as intense grief or anger). You are not in that place just by virtue of your willingness to look into the depths of darkness and not look away, by virtue of the fact that you insist on not rushing through the work of it, by virtue of your most obvious courage. And perhaps that is a new way to think of hope: action married to courage in the face of adversity. Never ceasing. Always trying, over and over, believing this next time will be THE time.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am
So much resonance for me in this post…..the landscape you describe is familiar…count me among those who will rest with you.
I am grateful for your verbal offering of one of the great strengths of spiritual direction, that invitation to be where you are…to stay, to feel what is…and to not be alone.
‘There is no savor more sweet, more salt,
Than to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
If I bear burdens, they begin to be remembered as gifts, goods.
A basket of bread that hurts my shoulders, but closes me in fragance.
I can eat as I go!’
-Denise Levertov
June 16th, 2008 at 10:10 am
More thoughtful comments . . .
blisschick, I really appreciate your insight into the despair and the element of choice and courage. I think we fundamentally disagree though in at least one place, I don’t believe that the presence of hope negates despair, I believe we are called to be able to hold the possibility of both existing together. The spiritual journey for me goes to the heart of paradox and dwells with that tension, it is a movement beyond the either/or.
Carolyn, thanks for joining me. I adore the Levertov poem you posted. And yes, I think one of the greatest gifts we can offer to another is being fully present and offering a safe container to face the full spectrum of who we are.
June 16th, 2008 at 11:29 am
the photo of the paint peeling did it for me. a good and strong metaphor.
like old paint that doesn’t peel off entirely, sometimes we need someone to help us scrape off the old stubborn layers of despair, self-criticism, sadness, and anger. i don’t know anyone who can do it by themselves.
may we all encourage and inspire each other.
thank you, christine.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
christine, Oh, no, I totally agree with you about the mutual compatibility of seemingly disparate emotions and experiences. We are complex spiritual beings, of course.
I just believe — and I have to believe this — that somewhere, very deep within us, lies that still point (or “virgin point” that Merton calls it or the “ground luminosity” of buddhism) — a point that emotion, which is temporary regardless of how awful or wonderful, does not touch, does not affect. A point where all the illusion disappears. A point where there is no more paradox. I believe that we are born to get there right now.
June 16th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Bette, thanks for chiming in and resonating with the image. I like the way you describe the image.
blisschick, thanks for coming back and clarifying. I can see this is going to be a fruitful conversation. I would agree as well that we have a place within us as you describe — ground of luminosity is beautiful — and I will write more on Wednesday about the image I use which is of an inner witness, the place within us that can observe emotion and learn from it without being carried away or choked by it. Part of what I was trying to get to in my post, and I hope to develop a bit more, is that when we resist the emotion it ends up having a great deal of hold on us. Learning to walk into the despair, grief, anger, or any emotion and welcoming it in without anxiety, witnessing it from the still place within, we begin to discover the hidden gifts there and the healing that is possible. I don’t think we can get to the still place without taking our emotional life seriously as a landscape of formation. Not sure if we are still talking about the same thing, but I appreciate the dialogue!
June 16th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
No, we are soooo talking about the same thing. I took a long time to clarify with that last comment — an inherent danger in blogging, I find, is misunderstanding (oh, duh! that would be with any type of communication). Anyway, I started down this whole path of “map and territory” talk and the importance of earning through hard work the “having arrived” at this witness (to use your terminology!), and I deleted it — afraid I was just going off and babbling!
I love that image of “landscape of formation.” Beautiful. And it demonstrates the physicality (metaphorically and literally) of having to walk a path — and not just being handed answers (thus my own mistrust of the whole Guru transference method). My own path has been through many thorny and deep, dark woods, and turning 40 this year and feeling like I am finally, finally, finally out of them, I know I have no desire to return to those woods — thus my reaction to the word “despair.”
June 16th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Yes yes yes. This is such a good and helpful post. I am a both/and gal. I find at Easter that the Good Friday liturgy is sometimes internally mitigated by reference to the coming resurrection Sunday. For me it is important to enter fully into the Friday and Saturday and not to say _ it’s alright - Sunday is coming. When my dad died, suddenly and unexpectedly while he was on holiday with us, one of the words I remember most fully came from a friend who pointed me to the scene in ‘Four weddings and a funeral’ where the bereaved lover calls for the clocks to stop. And Auden’s Icarus is one I often come back to - on both sides - how suffering goes on unnoticed - and how I don’t notice what is happening around me:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
blisschick, it does indeed sound like we are speaking of the same thing.
I also love the map and territory image and the need to walk our own path, do our own work. thanks too for sharing of your own journey through the dark woods, I understand completely about not wanting to go back. On my own journey I discover I am called back many times and now am trying to articulate the gifts that might rise up when we stop resisting the despair. Thanks for engaging me with this, it will definitely shape my next post.
Thanks so much Mavis, I am totally there with you about Good Friday! It always feels somehow shortchanged to some degree because we know the ending of the story. I may have to go back and watch “4 weddings” because I don’t remember that scene, but love the image you share. And Icarus is a stunning addition to the conversation as well.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
resting with you in the paradox…and grateful for your words and stirrings
June 16th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I am brought to tears in the realization of the moment of the now - of that which was me, is me, and will always be.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I am really moved by the response to this post. Thank you Cathleen and Val for showing up here.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
dear friend, i too choose to rest in this space of deep paradox with you. i could feel your strength and tenderness throughout the entire post. blessings!
June 17th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
“As you read these words, I invite you to notice what stirs in you. Do you want to rush and reassure me that everything will indeed be alright?”
What stirred in me as i read your words, Christine, was identification and understanding and compassion and thanksgiving. These are your words expressing your interior … your thoughts …your feelings. No, i did not experience a rush to reassure. The only rush present for me was the one to lean in closer to listen … to really, really listen.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Thanks so much dearest lucy for your blessings and presence.
And thank you too Laure, I am grateful for your identification and warmly receive your understanding and compassion, your listening.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
This is a courageous blog. Two things stood out for me – First, your reluctance to put it out there because others might come and try to immediately to hand you hope. Yes, there is that temptation on my part, but it is like trying to quickly put wall paper up over the peeling paint. We certainly try to do that often in this culture, reaching for the quick solution.
The second “stand-out” for me was when you wrote, “The despair and the beauty dwell together in the same space.” This is something very profound, something that we all have to learn and learn again. We usually try to separate “the good” from “the bad”. We even talk about “a good day” or “a bad year”, when truthfully both were likely present. I really believe that they come hand in hand.
On the same day as the tsunami hit S.E. Asia, I went on a boat ride to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Most of the people on the trip were from Sri Lanka and many had relatives that had lost homes in the tsunami. But, here we were celebrating and laughing. They are from a country that has been going through a terrible civil war for around 30 years, but they also know how to continue their lives and find some happiness in the midst of it. The good and bad are intertwined. There is not room for them to be separated.
This way of looking at life has helped me to be more accepting of life as it is. Not everything can or should be fixed. During my cancer, I haven’t seen it just as something bad. Your image shows that there can be beauty in the peeling paint as well. This doesn’t mean the light and dark are always in equal portions, but sometimes in the dark, you only need a small light to find your way.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Thanks Pam, your comment is very meaningful to me because I know you are write from this courageous place as well. I agree wholeheartedly that blessing and curse mingle together. It does not have to be lament or praise. And isn’t that part of the mystery of our pain, that so much beauty is indeed there, not taking away the difficulty, but dwelling with us there.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:01 am
Peace, one and all…
Thank you Christine for a very thought-provoking post. Allah! I have often been guilty of rushing in with ‘hope’. As such, your words regarding ownership and hope as a means of claiming another’s emotion, in a sense, strike me as important.
The image of peeling paint resonates with me, as I feel very similar myself. I have an ambivalent relationship with my father, so I can relate to much of what you say.
One of the strangest things I have experienced are bad times in sunshine. I found it very difficult to balance the two. At the end of the day, they just are!
Abdur Rahman