by Roland Ashby
For several months now I have been waking up in the morning feeling slightly depressed. The solitude imposed by COVID-19 has created more opportunities for negative thoughts to arise, and what seemed to be safely buried in the past - mistakes and failures and humiliations, as well as hurts (both given and received) – suddenly reappear as if they happened yesterday - with all the freshness and immediacy, and therefore pain, that that entails.
Anglican hermit Maggie Ross, who has chosen solitude and silence as a way of life, says that such thoughts can keep returning “like clouds of mosquitoes on the Arctic tundra”.
Having reached a point where most of my life is behind me I seem to have entered a period of reviewing my life, and also of urgently seeking to discern how best to live the years ahead of me. Two questions in particular keep pressing in on me: How can my life be purposeful and meaningful, and at the same time, how will I cope with the diminished physical capabilities that inevitably accompany this stage of life?
It’s been slowly dawning on me that “feeling slightly depressed” does not really do it justice. It’s actually more a case of what the biblical tradition would call ‘lament’.
But it is also a lament for the state of the world.
It’s a lament for the looming environmental catastrophe, the beginnings of which we are already witnessing, and which will not be averted unless there is decisive action over the next few years; it’s a lament for the corruption of our democracies by powerful lobby groups, particularly the fossil fuel industries; it’s a lament for the cynicism of callous, narcissistic and mendacious political leaders intoxicated with power; it’s a lament for violence and oppression wherever it exists; and it’s a lament for the 40-year-long undermining of the post-WWII public commitment to the common good, and for out-of-control capitalism resulting in obscene disparities in wealth.
But, despite all this, I cling to hope. Because I know that within me and each one of us there is a deep spring of love, joy and peace, of compassion and justice, of goodness, beauty and truth. Maggie Ross calls it “Deep Mind”. It’s an encounter with ultimate reality, pure being at the ground of our being, which is an encounter with pure love. Thomas Aquinas believed that this infinite fullness of being, this infinite fount of love, is what we call God. And as the psalmist says, it’s a love “that endures forever”, even through the hardest of trials.
One way to enter this Deep Mind, this fullness of being, is through one-pointed meditation. In my case this means using a prayer word or mantra. It’s at such times I bathe again in what Jesus called “Living Water”, renew my strength, and find the courage to go on, hoping and working for a world in which all can flourish, justice will prevail, and the vision that Jesus embodied and died for will not perish.
One of the great spiritual writers of the 20th century, Henri Nouwen, once spent seven months in a trappist monastery, the Abbey of the Genesee in New York, and wrote in a diary that he kept during his time there that in times of solitude and silence his mind would wander “in all directions, but started to brood on negative feelings”. He learned there he said the importance of ‘Nepsis’, “watchfulness in keeping bad thoughts away” and instead directing his attention to God.
In one beautiful and moving diary entry, he writes: “God’s grace... is like a gentle morning dew and a soft rain that gives new life to barren soil... My call is indeed to become more and more sensitive to the morning dew and open my soul to the rain so that my innermost self can bring forth the Saviour.”