It's A Condition

What if all you ask for, pray for, and wish for were already existent? The other half of your longing is the answer. This talk explores a journey I have taken recently to look at this conundrum and face it with more compassion, understanding, and confidence that it is all as it should be.

Transcript

Loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.

Christian Wyman Let the psalms fly in.

The original meaning of psalm in Greek is song sung to a harp.

A few variations of this definition exist,

But this is the gist.

I've been thinking about psalms and things traditionally religious for the past few weeks.

This is atypical of me anymore,

I've ebbed in and out of religious parapets my whole life,

Beginning in the Catholic traditions,

Flowing into nearly everything else from there.

I've been toying with the idea of an artist's life being the very heart of a true religion.

Religion,

Of course,

Being that man-made construct to house spirituality,

Which to me is all things inexplicable at best.

The evocation of imagery,

Lines of poetry,

Or strums of music strike me as being the core of whatever it is humans are after in trying to define the ineffable.

That thing that never quite finds the words to describe it,

Yet sits in a place deep within with an all-knowing sensation.

This is the heart of whatever spirituality is,

And what I purport humans were ever after trying to hold and give tangible form to when creating the first churches and preachers,

Prophets,

And priests.

Religion itself is therefore the walls that got built up around this pure core,

Masking its fullest,

Rightest effect.

Spirit and nature,

I'm suggesting,

Then,

Tear down these walls and reveal the purity of beginnings.

This raw tenderness and richness is always and forever present and never contained,

Certainly not by our human hands.

Because he was lonely,

He was a theologian.

And because he became a theologian,

He was lonely.

Eberhardt Berge on Dietrich Bonhoeffer Christian Wyman suggests that replacing theologian with poet is equally applicable here.

I suggest artist,

Essayist,

Deep morning walker through half-empty streets and paths.

All these,

All these definitions they too could replace.

Which then begs a question.

Is loneliness,

Aloneness,

Melancholia really meant to be what we've made them to be in our medicated culture?

Why have they become something to shun,

Change,

Turn from,

And get over?

What if they are simply purity,

Of the other side of the things we keep trying to get more of,

Joy,

Pleasure,

Happiness,

And therefore necessary and gifted companions to life?

Humans have come to a place of willful self-aggrandizement to such an extent that we really believe we can solve,

Cure,

Fix,

Manufacture,

And create anything and everything.

Part of this highbrow believing contains also labeling and demonizing of everything and anything we can't immediately fix,

Cure,

Solve,

Or manufacture.

Everything struggle,

Difficulty,

Challenge,

More wrong than opportunity.

Give it a pill,

A label,

A shot,

And all will be well.

Because we've made sense of it.

But what if sense was never meant to be made?

Mystery,

Is it lost to all of our sensibling?

It's still there.

Surely it's still there.

Maybe more difficult than ever to see and experience,

And certainly to let be in our current culture,

But still here nonetheless.

In the poets.

In the paintings.

In the strum of the harp.

Let the psalms fly in.

A better self begs its hands out to you.

William Stafford.

A friend is seeing a cardiologist soon.

I wish they wouldn't.

The conditions are not for a doctor.

They are for self-awareness that begets making a few different choices.

That is,

An opportunity.

Maybe a doctor will guide them to this realization,

But that's not what is expected and practiced by doctors.

A pill,

A prognosis,

A program for recovery will be prescribed,

I suspect.

But behind this everyday decision,

This in-the-body,

Doctored decision,

Is a more ephemerous one.

The one to which I know I am actually reacting.

A call to listen to oneself,

In ways for which we modern minds have lost hearing.

It is difficult,

Maybe impossible,

To convince someone else of such an amorphous trust.

I actually don't always believe it myself,

But I just keep trying to,

Because it's how I've chosen to live my life.

I want to know the deep under the surface,

Or at least visit with it and get to know it a bit more while I'm here in this body.

So what if we welcomed in loneliness and melancholia,

Held space at the table as we get their call that they're here for breakfast any moment,

And let them in the door?

Would it be possible to work with them,

Rather than using our current willful trend of attempting to extricate them entirely through labels,

Medications,

And doctors?

Would it be possible to follow along,

Their mate to sit next to,

Pleasure,

Hug closely to joy,

And marry hands with happiness?

Have we been skipping over the simple process and reward of this truth,

Subjugating the effect and afforded harmony of their pure,

Purposing,

Inhuman consciousness?

What if pulling open the door welcomes in nothing of the fear and unrest we'd been told they brought in,

But discover melancholia actually holds out joy in its welcoming embrace?

What if loneliness offers the deepest draft of pleasure,

And we'd been missing out on its satiety because we'd turned to the experts,

The educated,

The society of solutions,

Instead of our own sense?

What if?

I ask because melancholia just visited.

We had the most amazing laugh,

Them telling me the foolishness they'd been visiting upon,

Other doorways and knobs that refused to be turned.

They took tea,

With plenty of sugar,

And whole milk,

Ate three biscuits and toured through my bookshelves.

They were eager to hear me talk about my lifelong attempt to put color around emotions and words around geography.

Then,

Surprise of surprise,

They hugged me close in what felt a familiar,

Forgotten embrace as they departed.

I watched with door wide,

Despite the day's chill buffeting my cheeks,

Realizing why I'd felt comfortable letting them in in the first place.

I recalled my early years hanging out for so many hours together,

Doing things that brought me joy and pleasure.

No thoughts of something wrong,

No voice doctoring away their harmonied presence.

It then occurred to me why the hug felt so familiar and right.

I'd just been visited by my oldest,

Dearest friend,

And been reminded they've only ever been offering me my best life in their trusted presence.

No doctors needed to tell me this truth.

In love,

Trish

Reviews

I too have a similar relationship to melancholia, and I so appreciate your thoughts and your words and where your mind goes as you examine this. Thank you.

I loved this talk! I've been experiencing what I thought was loneliness, but I learned that I was experiencing a yearning for God, because nothing on this Earth can provide that satisfaction or comfort. Today, you've helped me discover a new aspect that I haven't considered, which is that my yearning for God is exactly the same as this embrace by a very old friend. Instead of being sad or melancholic, it is a reminder that He exists and always has been and always will be―and that nothing of this world can replace this old friend of ours. It is another reminder that we were made for More. Not to highlight that we are incomplete or broken, but for us to hope and have faith in the future―which I suspect is the other half (the all too often forgotten half) of Loneliness & Longing.

Thank you, as always!
God bless & Godspeed 💚🙏🏽

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights, Trish! I have been pondering many of these same things and reflecting on how I want to live life. Appreciate you and your presence!
💜💫🫂✨💜

Oh wow, Trish. This picked up the exact thought I had yesterday about labeling (pathologizing?) certain aspects of life and took it further. I’ll be listening again! Thank you