by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We gather this hour as people of faith,

With both burdens and joys;

We come to give thanks,

To make confession,

To offer forgiveness—

We come to be reminded of our highest values and ideals—

 Come, let us worship together!

There’s an off-Broadway play running right now that I’d really like to see—it’s entitled, “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” and is described by the NY Times reviewer as “stand-up existentialism.”  It is a one-man show about the beauties and the terrors of human life, and it apparently evokes much laughter and many tears.  “Life is <presented as> awe-inspiringly wonderful.  Entrancingly mysterious.  <And> utterly disappointing,” the reviewer says.  “A big joke.  An inscrutable journey.  A bountiful gift.” 

The actor, in the voice of the narrator, Thom Pain, “gives us a picture to imagine: a little boy in a cowboy suit tracing words in a puddle on a cloudy day.  A pet dog nearby.  Tragedy strikes, and the actor asks, in a gray monotone . . . ‘When did your childhood end?  How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?’  Then comes the kicker.  ‘Isn’t it wonderful how we never recover?’”  The narrator is also that “dazed and changed little boy,” all grown up.

Life does this to us—at some point, we lose our sweet innocence, our lovely naiveté.  We learn that what was dearest to us can be gone in a moment.  The pet can die.  The home can burn.  The father can leave.  Something like this may happen when we’re six, or sixteen, or thirty-six, or fifty-six, but if we live long enough, it will happen.  And we never get over it.  We do recover.  We go on with our lives.  But we don’t forget.  How can we forget?  Memories lie bound in our bodies, in our very flesh, and they affect how we think, how we hold ourselves, the decisions we make.

Difficult experiences can lead to periods of depression or times of melancholy.  I’d like to distinguish between the two.  Just about everyone becomes depressed occasionally, and we speak of situational depressions caused by life’s disappointments or losses.  It could be something as inconsequential as getting a parking ticket or as serious as losing a spouse.  We pull back emotionally, and sometimes, if it is a serious loss, we pull back for a long time.  This is a normal response to the vagaries of life.  But sometimes the depression is what we call a clinical depression, and that can come at times for no reason at all—or can be triggered by some loss.  The individual has a change in brain chemistry which causes his emotional, social, spiritual, and often physical system to shut down considerably, for a long period of time, and he feels isolated, without joy, without hope.  This is an illness—it is treatable—and I would encourage anyone who experiences this kind of depression to get medical help.

Depression is not the same as melancholy.  Depression is a deadening of the senses and of the spirit.  Typically, a depressed person cannot feel much of anything.  On the other hand, melancholy—which looks in some ways similar to depression—is not a physical illness, but a spiritual condition.  I like the Hasidic concept of melancholy:  it is “a thirst for the Divine that results from the terrible awareness of separation from the Divine.”  Melancholy can be seen as a freely chosen response to conditions that violate the human body or spirit, such as illness or the betrayal of a friend or a job that asks you to be other than yourself—or war, or a tsunami. Melancholy, then, is not something that attacks you—but a natural and a healthy response to a violation. 

When our body is invaded by a germ, what happens?  We get a fever, the white blood cells rush in to attack the invader.  We take to our beds, perhaps.  Our body needs rest.  Melancholy could be seen as a way of healing the spirit from some kind of “holy infection.”  Perhaps it is a time to reflect, to reconsider, to move to a new place philosophically, or perhaps to relate to the Holy One in a different, deeper way.  It is a gift, giving us time to carve out some interior space, a kind of chrysalis, in which we might rest, and then unfold as we were meant to.

Part of the reason for states of melancholy is simply the human condition.  Back to the Hasidic wisdom: we long for wholeness, and we are broken.  Our brokenness is the very thing that pulls us to God, that gives us the measure of humility we need to engender compassion.  We suffer.  Others suffer.  That restlessness, that sense that something is missing, is always there, will always be there—it is our glory and our tragedy that we strive for that which we can never reach. 

A lot of us have fallen into states of melancholy in the past few years.  We should not overlook the cultural causes, the perfectly understandable reasons for our sadness and anger.  Anyone who lives in contemporary American society and does not have some degree of sadness and anger is, I think, delusional.  Think about how we live.  I don’t know about you, but this is how I begin my day: I get up in the morning and turn on NPR.  I hear reports of violent death in war—war that we caused—I hear about Grasso’s salary, Gonzales’ confirmation as Attorney General, more lies from some major drug company, refugees freezing to death in Afghanistan.  Then I eat breakfast and read two newspapers—the NY Times and the Oregonian—and there I find more of the same, only illustrated and sprinkled incongruously with ads for diamond bracelets.  Burdened when I walk out the door, I get into the car, and turn on the radio—I hear still more news, and guess what?  It hasn’t changed since breakfast.  And we wonder why we walk around depressed.

I also think this is a cultural moment in history that brings melancholy—it is, after all, the fin de siecle, or end of the century, and such periods often bring convulsive social change.  The late 18^th century brought political revolution and of course the Industrial Revolution.  The late 19^th century was a time of new thought in art and philosophy, and a time of social and political reform.  We are surely on the cusp of change now.  My sense is that things may have to get worse before they get better.  Americans have been known for our optimism, good humor, openness.  We have become a fear-filled, pessimistic country, with economic insecurity, little sense of community, and shaky moral values.  It is a time for our country to be reflective—and countries can reflect, reconsider, repent, just as individuals can.  We need to ask ourselves, “What are our national goals, what is our vision?  How are we spending our wealth?  As a country, what values undergird our actions?”  We of a liberal religious persuasion need to help our country ask these important questions, for we have as a nation gone far astray, and we need a moral voice calling us back home.

We carry such heaviness in our hearts, thinking that somehow we have gone wrong, not understanding that we live in a veritable sea of suffering.  As Bertrand Russell once said, “Those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision . . . .”  The positive side of this is that these are the very people—you are the very people—those in touch with the spiritual malaise of the day--who will because of your very frustration and discontent bring about the social and political changes that are needed. 

In addition to the suffering which comes from the human condition, and that which comes from the cultural context, there is also the personal, specific pain that enters each life.  Because we are a society in which everyone is supposed to be happy and cheerful—just watch the terminally cheerful people in the ads on the Super Bowl—we are encouraged to appear this way to others, even when our heart has been wounded grievously and is breaking inside (and I love that song, “Wounded Heart,” that Diane sang—who hasn’t been there?).  I personally am loathe to look happy when I’m not happy, and that is disturbing to some people—women, of course, are supposed to be cheery—and I can tell you that more than once, some strange man has stopped me on the street and said, “Why don’t you smile, Honey?  You’d be prettier if you’d smile.”  (I see many of you women nodding in agreement.)  It would not be appropriate here in the sanctuary, in this holy space, to tell you my response to such a query.

I suppose one of my highest values is to be honest, to be authentic.  And the hardest part of that is being honest with yourself.  You see, when we repress one feeling, we tend to repress all feeling.  Joy is the flip side of your grieving.  You’ll see it at memorial services often—deep grief, followed by laughter that is full and rich and healing.  When we repress grief, or anger, we also repress Eros and creativity—we give away our sparkle for a shallow, forced grin.  I like David Whyte’s words from his poem “Sweet Darkness”:  “Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness/ to learn/ anything or anyone/ that does not bring you alive/ is too small for you.”

Let me tell you the story of Robyn.  Robyn broke off a relationship of 7 years, a relationship that had proved to be destructive. Have you ever loved someone who was bad for you?  Well, that was Robyn’s problem.  The sadness, grief, and despair were almost overwhelming for her, for months.  Robyn was inconsolable.  She continued to work for parts of two or three days a week, and she took some solace in taking care of a menagerie of animals in exchange for living rent-free.  It was hard for her to talk with friends and family because they had been telling her for some time to let this man go, and they were greatly relieved when she finally did break up with him—so she felt alone with her grief, except for one couple. 

This couple offered companionship when she wanted it, they would listen when she needed to talk, and mostly they were just a silent witness to her struggle.  They had no prescription for how Robyn “should be” while she was mourning this loss.  They didn’t try to advise her or “fix” her.  Even when she tried to be friends with her ex and began to suffer from that, they gave her the room to be exactly where she was.  They took her out to lunches and dinners with them, when she felt like eating.  If she found she couldn’t eat, that was okay.  They weren’t upset when she cried at the table.  They didn’t expect their comfort to get her out of her funk, she said, and yet because they didn’t expect or need it to, it often did.  Months later Robyn came out of this difficult period.  She writes, “This couples’ undemanding presence, their willingness just to bear witness, <enabled me> to surrender into the fullness of these dark feelings, <which were> the only doorway to my healing.”

Sometimes our melancholy is so deep and so lasting that we think it will never end.  We will never experience joy again.  I know that’s how I always feel.  But it will end.  Sometimes it’s best just to be with it and experience it and ask for the gifts that are surely there.  We all have needs for time alone, for a fantasy life to play with our dreams, to distill and make meaning of our memories, to check our living against our values. 

And we all go through transitions.  Transitions are difficult.  Even little changes are difficult—I have my chair in my office, my favorite chair—and if somebody else sits in it when a meeting starts, I feel a little unsettled.  Tom teased me once about how I greeted a former intern on our first meeting, when he plunked himself down in that chair:  “Hello,” I said. “Welcome to our church!  And by the way, that is my chair.”  So as we go through these larger changes in our lives, we suffer, we become irritable, withdrawn, angry sometimes.  We should realize that we may be in what the Tibetan Buddhists call a “bardo” state—that time between incarnations, the period before the next birth into the next life.  We surrender—and not easily—the identity we have won, in order to go deeper, into the next stage of fulfillment.  The emptiness is there to allow new life.

Sadness, grief, anger—these are not conditions to be solved, illnesses to be cured.  They are part of the cycle of life.  They are signals of life—signals that we care, that we are moved by the ills of the world, that we love—this is life reaching out to life.  We don’t want to stay there in that troubled space all the time, but when it is our time to be there, we want to give ourselves to this experience, that it might teach us its rich lesson.

Isn’t it “wonderful how we never recover”?  And yet we love—perhaps love more deeply because we can never be whole.  We reach out across our brokenness to one another.  Comforting our neighbor.  Healing ourselves.  Healing our country.  One wounded heart to another.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

God of Light and God of Darkness, we pray that in whatever form your presence comes to us, we will be open to it.  We come today knowing that we need healing, healing of the spirit, and we come asking your help in that healing.  We know that the thirsting we feel is a thirsting for you, O God.  May we turn away from all that is not life, from all that is destructive of life, to the living water you have provided for us.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

You whose hearts have been wounded, know that you are not alone—and know that your melancholy is the path the joy and creativity.  Go in love, and go in peace.