Rope Trick

To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end.  It gets you from some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head.  In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.[i]  –Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth:  Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.  –The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

(Note: if you’ve been following this blog, you may have noticed that the time between posts has been increasing.  This is because once I had plucked all the low-hanging fruit about my cute children, bad mental habits and shifting doctrinal landscape, I was left with nothing to do but actually confront the root causes of my profound screwed-up-titude—and that confrontation is something my inner Senate continually threatens to filibuster. I mean, how many times can a relatively reasonable person check his email, Facebook and the Huffington Post?  Enough to fill up whole afternoons with not-writing, apparently.  A large part of my brain wants to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this.) 

“I’m probably going to bail early,” I told the grad student who requested a ride to the potluck-and-bluegrass-jam that wrapped up the first day of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology.  I had left Philly at dawn to drive to Charlottesville, daylight savings time began that night, and I was giving my paper the next day; everything argued for a good night’s sleep. 

Need I say that’s not what happened? 

Most of the non-jamming guests had left by the time we packed up our instruments and said our goodbyes.  As I looked around for the people I’d come with, I heard the sound of an axatse (a West African instrument comprising a gourd enclosed in a network of beads) and turned to see our hostess demonstrating a complex 12-beat rhythm to a colleague by bouncing the gourd between her hand and thigh. I stifled an impulse to go over and learn the rhythm, too—I have to go to bed! I told myself--then turned sheepishly to the waiting grad student.  “I guess that bailing early plan didn’t work out,” I admitted.

En route to the hotel, I told my passengers that “I used to smoke weed when I was younger, until I discovered that the world is fascinating already.”  And it is.  When I let the dogs out before bedtime and hear the wind soughing in the neighbor’s gigantic sycamore tree, its looming form blotting out the stars over our back yard, it is fascinating; when we open up the Styrofoam cooler in the shed and find that the children have filled it with grass while playing Underground Railroad (apparently the grass represented provisions of some kind) it is fascinating; when I am bawling out my five-year-old, and my six-year-old tells her, “Daddy’s not saying you’re not a good person, Sophie,” it is altogether fascinating. Bluegrass and the axatse are fascinating.  Who needs weed? 

Of course, we all need fascination—what Paul Gauguin called “a sense of the beyond, of a heart that beats.”  One evening while our first daughter Clare was still a baby, my wife and I were having dinner at a friend’s house when Clare began to get fussy. Our hostess picked her up and took her across the room to look at a candle.  “Let’s get fascinated!”  she said.  Our baby stared, rapt and slack-jawed, at the flickering flame, and I saw for the hundredth time how numinous and mesmerizing the world was in her infant eyes.  Not presuming to have all the answers about anything she saw, or to be able to control things by naming them, she was happy to let the world be its fascinating self--almost as though she could detect “the dearest freshness deep down things”[ii] with some special sixth baby-sense. “We see the world with the five senses,” said Swami Vivekananda, “but if we had another sense, we would see in it something more.”[iii] 

Longing for this “something more” is, I believe, the reason people smoke weed; having lost the baby-sense, people turn to THC to open their minds to the bottomless fascination of the world.  Because we no longer have eyes to see and ears to hear, we have lost touch with the infinite, absolute, eternal life that animates our narrow, relative and temporary lives. "I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[iv]  But changing is hard, and chemicals can seem to bypass the need for it.  It’s not for nothing that the body’s neurotransmitter that the cannabinoids in marijuana mimic is called “anandamide”; ananda is Sanskrit for “bliss.”[v]  We will, apparently, take our bliss any way we can get it. 

People do drugs because they want, as Marianne Williamson put it, “a different experience of what is.”  And it seems to work because “what is” is slippery and unstable; so much so, in fact, that many things can alter your roadmap of reality.  My first year or so of temp work was strictly blue-collar, from assembly line and warehouse work to flagging traffic to shoveling ore in a government mineral depot.  During a run of success as a composer, when my temp agency supervisors noticed my name appearing in the local papers and heard me interviewed on public radio a few times, I started getting “cleaner” jobs, like setting up insecticide displays in supermarkets—jobs for which I wore a tie.  I was astonished at how differently people treated me--even out in the country where nearly all the men wore work boots and lined flannel shirts--when I wore a white shirt and a tie.  I was the same person who had worn the reflective orange vest the week before, but when the complexion of the maya, or illusion, around you changes, people perceive and respond to you differently. If a drug could make that kind of difference in our experience of the world, you couldn’t keep it on the shelves.

(Sometimes a little maya bait-and-switch can be fun.  During a period when I was getting a lot of commissions and performances, expensively-dressed people would approach me at post-concert receptions and ask me where I taught.  “Actually, I work at K & W Tire,” I’d tell them.  The visible discomfort in their faces and bodies before they extricated themselves from my company and went to freshen their drinks:  priceless.)

So what happens when our experience of our lives is wildly out of tune with any rational assessment of our circumstances?  During a rehearsal at another musician’s house, my hostess handed me a drink.  Distracted with a piece of sheet music, I took the glass, seeing peripherally the clear liquid inside and assuming that it was water.  I took a drink and was appalled by the nastiness of the fluid in my mouth—which, as it turns out, was Sprite.  Which I like.  But because I had been expecting water, and my mind was configured for it, I experienced the Sprite as unpleasant.

My life is like that.  I have a fantastic life:  two wonderful, intelligent, thoughtful, exuberant children, a loving wife who puts up with me and keeps me honest and earns enough to allow me to stay home, keep house and garden running, compose and perform music and spend hours on a self-indulgent blog.  But because it isn’t what I was expecting, I often experience my life as confining, unfulfilling.  I expected it to be full of height and depth and gravitas, and have found it full of dog fur and goutweed.  I looked forward to being intellectually and aesthetically stimulated on a daily basis.  (What I thought would happen about the dog fur and goutweed I don’t know.)  I thought I would feel more important.

There are no Desert Fathers around when you need one to adjust your attitude.  I am haunted by the story of the young monk who went to Abba Moses for advice on spiritual advancement. “Go and sit in your cell,” the Abba told him, “and your cell will teach you everything.”  Your life as it is, here and now, is gravid with everything you need to know--but it seldom appears that way.  And yet, if we had eyes to see—if we could get our thoughts out of the way of our perceptions, if we could stop labeling everything with a “yes, I know all about that”--who knows what we could detect in the seemingly undifferentiated landscape of our lives?  If we had no mental category for “green,” the woods would be a riot of color.

I have never owned a television in my adult life, but when I was a child I watched a lot of TV.  And of course, life on TV always seems more interesting and fulfilling than life elsewhere, as it’s meant to. My own life involved a lot of being bullied on the schoolbus and playground, so TV had a lot of allure for me.  Moreover, my budding religious sensibility was stewed in a sort of vindicationalism: I got picked on at school, but I was going to reign with the saints in the Kingdom.  So there were some pretty powerful incentives to regard day-to-day life as unreal--a preparation for some more fulfilling, fascinating “real life” that was going to happen at some time in the future.

The worst of this is that so much good passes us by while we are on the lookout for something better. I read somewhere that most of us meet some 1400 people during our lives with whom we could be compatible life partners.  So why aren’t we all happily married?  Because we see other people through the filter of the ridiculous ideas in our heads.

And not just people.  Early on in my folksinging days, a number of friends urged me to “go on the circuit” as a folk musician.  I was reasonably good at it, and I loved doing it.  But something had happened in my brain that made me regard ballads, pub songs and fiddle tunes as mere avocation, and somehow frivolous; my real work, I always told myself, was in the musical world in which I was being trained in graduate school.  It didn’t matter that playing my concertina and inviting my listeners to sing along made me happy; I was a composer—which is to say, a “serious” musician.  I cringe with shame to recall this—some of the most phenomenal musicians I have known have worked in traditional music--but that is honestly how I thought about it.  I could watch a group of novice dancers and extend a tune until they had completed a figure before moving to the next part of the tune, I could invent lyrics on the spot, I could improvise a musical accompaniment to a Commedia dell’ Arte performance, I had several hundred songs in my head ready to go at any time—but those skills all involved music in the service of something else, while serious music existed purely as a sonic object to be politely contemplated in a concert or recital hall.  So I spent years of my life, great pots of money, untold hours of unflagging industry and enough emotional energy to power a small city trying to fit into that world and make that music.  Why didn’t I see earlier that I was barking up the wrong tree?

Half my lifetime ago I had an experience that, had I known at the time how to interpret it, could have saved me a lot of anguish and wasted time.  But life, as Kierkegaard pointed out, can only be understood backwards, and it would be many years before the lesson the experience had to teach me would finally become clear.

(All my former students should stop reading now.) 

The summer after I graduated from college I was with a group of friends, and we had all eaten psilocybin mushrooms.  For some time, I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about; I didn’t seem to be what I thought of as “tripping” at all. “I just feel stoned,” I said to a friend.  “That’s it,” she replied:  “Just relax into it.”

And she was right:  as soon as let go of my prefabricated mental construct of “tripping” and simply allowed my experience to be what it was, I discovered that I was indeed tripping, and in a big way.  It was all happening already, but my willing-it-to-be had kept it from my awareness. Sober, I had the life I wanted already, and I didn’t know it, because I never “relaxed into it.”  The Zen teacher Sunryu Suzuki made a very similar point about the pursuit of satori, or sudden awakening, in meditation:

(A)s long as you think, “I am doing this,” or “I have to do this,” or “I must attain something special,” you are actually not doing anything.  When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something.[vi]

Relax into it.

(Now, let me be clear:  I am not recommending mind-altering drugs.  There are far too many uncontrolled variables, too many dangers.  And the mind, moreover, is like a computer:  garbage in, garbage out.  The second time I used mushrooms, I was in a worse state of mind than I realized, and the drug released an amazing trove of mental garbage; the experience was so terrifying that I vowed never to do it again, a vow I have kept for twenty-four years. Finally, drugs and the like only seem to be expanding our minds while we are under their influence; they make no real and lasting change in us.  Eckhart Tolle posited that, while things like meditation can take us above our thoughts, things like drugs and television take us below them; both can free us from our thoughts, but not in equally beneficial ways.[vii])

Sri Ramakrishna, the 19^th century Bengali saint who is regarded by many Hindus as an Incarnation of God, used a telling metaphor about wisdom seekers “doing something” in their quest for God. They climb the stairs of renunciation one by one, Ramakrishna said, and when they finally reach the roof, they discover that it is made of the same brick and lime as the stairs.[viii] We are not going anywhere, because we are already there—or at very least, “there” is not essentially different from “here,” now matter how much we sacrifice to our belief that is surely must be.

What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.[ix]

I’m tired of wandering; if the “one indivisible Self” resides in us all, where is there to go?  The Infinite does not “go” anywhere.  It is—you are--already there.

Jesus was apparently trying to get his hearers to “relax into it” when He told them, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."x  There is no place to go;  it is already here--you are already there. 

This is how the world regains its fascination: by our looking at it neither through the eyes of deluded desire that compare it to something “better” in our heads, nor through the eyes of calculation and greed for gain, but through the eyes of the Kingdom within, the eyes of a little child who sees “the dearest freshness deep down things.”  Not of drugged sleep, but of alert wakefulness.

“Could you not stay awake with me for one hour?” Jesus asked His disciples on the last night of His earthly life.[xi]  I think He asks each of us the same thing—“Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”[xii]  When Jesus asks us to keep awake with Him, he is inviting us to share in His divine life and ministry.  According to poet Andrew Hudgins, Jesus is

…someone walking through his life—or hers—

Until God whispers, It’s you. And God’s ignored…

Or does God simply choose us all?[xiii]

So OK, smartass, I tell myself:  if you’re Jesus—if you abide in Him and He in you like vine and branch[xiv]--stay awake with yourself! Don’t be continually falling back into the sleep of life inside your head, don’t be always drawing a veil of expectations and desires between yourself and the circumstances in which God and your karma have placed you.  Don’t end up like Jacob, who had to physically wrestle with his Creator and sustain a painful injury before he could say,  “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”[xv]

Vedantic philosophy uses the image of coiled rope in a dimly-lit room to explain our cognitive dysfunction. If upon entering the room we mistake the rope for a snake, we will be unable to see the rope, and we cannot see the rope until we stop seeing the snake.  As long as we see our lives as preparatory, stalled, unreal or unfulfilling, we cannot see them as numinous, fascinating, “charged with the grandeur of God.”[xvi] These, says Paul Simon’s song, are the days of miracle and wonder—but all days are the days of miracle and wonder if we are fully present to them.  The earliest Christian texts speak, not of the “return” of the Christ, but of Christ’s “revelation;” when the scales fall from our eyes, we will see that we are already in God.  This is surely what the Psalmist longed for when he prayed,

When I awake, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face to face.[xvii]

---

[i] Tolle, Eckhart.  A New Earth:  Awakening to Your life’s Purpose.  Plume, 2006.  (202)

[ii] Hopkins, Gerard Manley.  “God’s Grandeur”

[iii] Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga.  Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.  (28)

[iv] Matthew 18:3

[v] http://drug-abuse.suite101.com/article.cfm/what-does-marijuana-actually-do

[vi] Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shambhala; 2006. (page 44)

[vii] Tolle, Eckhart:  A New Earth:  Awakening to Your life’s Purpose.  Plume, 2006.  (229)

[viii] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Abridged edition.  Translated by Swami Nikhilananda.  Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1988.  (271)

[ix] Katha Upanishad  II.i.9

[x] Luke 17: 20b-21

[xi] Matthew 26:40

[xii] Matthew 25:13

[xiii] Hudgins, Andrew. “Crucifixion—Montgomery, Alabama.” Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry.  David Impastato, Editor.  Oxford University Press, 1996. (8)

[xiv] cf. John 15:15

[xv] Genesis 28:16b, ESV

[xvi] Hopkins, Gerard Manley.  “God’s Grandeur”

[xvii] Psalm 17:15b, NLT

Me and My Shadow

Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the state: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. George Eliot, Adam Bede

While a visitor in a church other than my own, I had a strong negative reaction to one of the lay ministers—some confluence of mannerisms and appearance just grated on my nerves to the point where I couldn’t stop watching this person, in the same way that one will continually pester a cold sore.

It being apparently a good morning, I was able to self-transcend enough to notice not only the irritating object, but also my own irritation. Isn’t that interesting, I thought; now why should I respond so negatively to this person?

Trying to run my thought process to ground, I began to catalog all the things about the person that annoyed me, and ask myself why I was so annoyed at each one. This strategy backfired. In no time, I had gone from being conscious of an irritant within my field of awareness to being entirely subsumed by irritation: I had absolutely nothing on my mind but how much this person annoyed me, and a laundry list of self-justifying reasons for being annoyed.

Then I remembered something that Martin Laird pointed out in his book, Into the Silent Land: when Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn’t debate with him; he didn’t allow himself to be hooked. Instead, he simply met each temptation with an appropriate quotation from scripture. “It is written…,” he said, then shut up, never giving the tempter the time of day.

(I’ll interrupt myself here to share the only thing I ever learned in my brief career as a vacuum cleaner salesman: “once you have stated your case, the next person to talk loses.” When you are arguing with someone—a sales clerk or petty official, say—make your point and then absolutely clam up. It’s difficult, but often works; the tension produced by the silence just becomes too much, and your adversary will begin to babble in order to break it. Then you win.)

So I tried Jesus’ stratagem; abandoning my bogus self-examination about why this person rubbed me the wrong way, I simply told myself what God told Samuel in 1 Kings: “You see not as God sees, but as mortals see; for you look at outward appearances, but God looks on the heart.” I had to repeat this a few times over the course of the service, but it worked: I set aside my involuntary response and put my attention where it was supposed to be.

(The fact that this person turned out, in later conversation, to actually be a jerk is immaterial. I suppose. It’s not as though obsessing about the offending mannerisms was doing any good. And anyway, maybe being a jerk is just one more layer of appearances between me and the heart that God looks on.)

Fifty years before Jung opened his practice, George Eliot put her finger on the problem: “unacknowledged agents” in our minds do stuff without our awareness or consent.

Now Jung attributed much of this stuff to what he called “the Shadow”—those aspects of our personalities which we reject and repress, and which undermine and sabotage us in a bid for self-expression. And Jung believed that, in banishing the unwanted aspects of ourselves into the unconscious, we cut ourselves off from our creativity and self-realization. Jungian psychologist and Episcopal priest John Sanford likened the Shadow to Jesus’ “treasure hidden in the field” (Matthew 13:44). Make friends with your Shadow, the pop-psyche mavens tell us--and why not? If some repressed aspect of my personality is forcing me to read political blogs all night instead of going to bed so I won’t be irascible toward my children the next day, I’m willing to take that as a sign that some fundamental change in my life is called for.

But sometimes the Shadow just needs to pipe down. The Desert Fathers externalized their troublesome inner promptings as demons, and oriented much of their lives and practice toward silencing them—and surely not every vicious or self-destructive drive is potentially redeeming. Sometimes evil thoughts are just evil.

Martha Graham counseled Agnes DeMille to keep open to the urges that motivate her. Well and good; the jungle is dark, but full of diamonds. But how do we distinguish between motivating urges that are potentially liberating, and those that are just plain bad? Or at any rate unhelpful? (“All things are lawful to me,” said Paul, “but not all things are useful.”) How can we tell the gifts of the Shadow from the Trojan Horse of the ego?

One thing I have heard before, but have only recently realized in my own experience, is that turning the attention from the object of one’s feelings toward the feelings themselves is a great disclosing tablet. When our whole field of awareness is filled up with the object, there is no room for awareness of self—the very reason, I suspect, that most of us “nurse our wrath to keep it warm” toward at least one person or situation: we don’t want to become self-aware on that score.

One evening I was at a motel desk with a friend, trying to get in touch with a mutual friend who was staying there and whom we had arranged to meet. Her room phone wasn’t working, and we were trying to get the desk clerk to somehow get a message to her—which, being more afraid of his employers than he was sympathetic to us, he refused to do. As we pressed him—OK, as I became angry--he became rude and dismissive.

Back in the car, my friend asked me why I so furious at this subaltern. As one reiterating the self-evident, I said, “Because he was rude to me!” “So what?” my friend asked.

And I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Later, upon reflection, I realized that if someone is rude to me, it constitutes an implicit statement about my relative worth—and that at some level, I take that statement at face value. This person is, by being rude to me, implying that I deserve no better, which some part of me already believes, so in order to distract myself from that externally validated self-assessment, I become furious at the rude person.

Lesson 5 in A Course in Miracles says “I am never upset for the reason I think.” The ego does a bang-up job of directing the attention outward in order to avert the inward gaze. Maybe the key to discerning between the (potentially) liberating drives of the Shadow and the cramping, self-protective machinations of the ego lies somewhere in there. Maybe if I had the keenness to discern and the courage to follow my redemptive inner promptings, I would find myself happier and more self-aware--whereas getting caught up in ego chatter invariably makes me more miserable and more aware of other people, other things (or rather, of my thoughts and feelings about them.) Maybe these internal agents need to start carrying ID. Or maybe I’m just breathtakingly self-involved.

(Or all of the above. Once as I stood in line at a convenience store in St. Paul, I asked the clerk, “Are magazines becoming trashier and trashier, or am I just becoming a grumpy old fart?” “Well, sir,” she deadpanned, “both of those things could be true.”)

The Noonday Demon

Cognitive psychology has become aware that much depression is maintained, even generated, by getting caught up in negative patterns of thinking. –Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land

I struggled with depression for several years. I cannot say for certain how long, because it took me a long time to realize that I was depressed. Like Hamlet, I found weary, stale, flat and unprofitable all the uses of this world, and it took a long time to figure out that the problem wasn’t with the world, but with me.

While Clare was still a baby and before Sophie was born, I began wasting time. Lots of time. I spent hours and hours playing computer solitaire. When I became aware of YouTube, things went downhill very fast. Although I have never owned a television, and prided myself on never having seen Friends or Seinfeld or Survivor, I have watched over 4,000 videos on YouTube.

I was self-employed for many years before I began teaching, cobbling together a livelihood out of composing, performing and temp work. I was always unusually self-disciplined; during grad school, I regularly rose at 5:00 a.m. to write. But during the last six years, I became unable either to face my obligations, or to take pleasure in constructive diversions. It was as though my mind were in open rebellion against the things I was asking it to do. I was clearly addicted to loafing.

Screwtape, the senior demon invented by C.S. Lewis in his book, The Screwtape Letters, wrote to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter out on his first assignment, about people like me:

As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness,…you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. … You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".

Ultimately, between the fatigue brought on by staying up late every night—on top of the fatigues of having an infant and a toddler in the house—my corrosive shame and the weariness of hiding it, I became irritable and intolerant with my family, lashing out in self-righteous impatience at the least provocation. By the grace of God I woke up enough to see what I was doing to my family, and realized that I needed help.

I found a therapist and got a prescription for a mild antidepressant, which took the edge off enough for me to think a little more clearly. But I discovered that while drugs can help manage negative feelings, they can do nothing about negative habits. You have to tackle those yourself. And even now, with the apathy and despair gone, when I no longer want to sleep all day and am no longer smothering under the weight of a leaden sky full of black clouds, I still struggle with what the Desert Fathers called “afflictive thoughts.” I may be out with my children, taking them someplace we all like to be on a beautiful day, and the thought “I’m so unhappy” will come out of nowhere. Or “I’m so miserable!” Literally, those words. And the strange thing is that the words aren’t true; I’m really not miserable. But I’m in the habit of telling myself that I am. These thoughts –and doubtless many, many others, unlanguaged and unrecognized--slide unbidden down tracks I laid for them long ago. And it takes colossal effort to pull up those tracks, and constant vigilance over what I am thinking, so that I now understand the challenge in Paul’s advice to “take every thought captive for Christ.” Vivekananda said that most of us are like spoilt children, and we let out minds think whatever they want to. Not letting the mind default into old destructive patterns is a huge undertaking which, though made more doable through the relief offered by chemical intervention, cannot be accomplished except by laborious effort. Ora et labora.

The yogis call these patterns samskaras, or “volitional formations.” The idea behind karma is that everything we think, do or will leaves “traces” in the vritti, or mind-stuff, which will pre-dispose us to continue to think, act and will in those ways. (“The dog returns to its vomit,” as the Hebrew Bible colorfully puts it.) Once samskaras—literally, “what has been put together”—have been established, they must work themselves out completely. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; as you sew, so shall you reap; what goes around, comes around. Only grace can break the cycle.

Though the acute emotional distress of my depression is in remission, I still struggle with what the Desert Fathers and Mothers called acedia—what the Western Church has, as one of the “seven deadly sins,” translated as “sloth,” but is actually much more: a deep spiritual lassitude that is a near relation to depression. It is always worse after a period of progress; Mother Theodora nailed it when she said, “You should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul through acedia, faint-heartedness, and evil thoughts.” This is why the Desert Fathers and Mothers called acedia the Noonday Demon: it comes at mid-day to undermine all the resolve of the morning.

I knew someone who, because of what I had experienced myself, I was convinced was deeply depressed. The hole he couldn’t climb out of was so familiar to me, I wished I could convey to him the fruit of my own struggle. It was terrifically frustrating knowing that some medication could have lifted the bell jar enough so he could breathe, allowing him to get out from under his feelings enough to take steps toward managing his thoughts. But in the end, he had to choose to do the work himself; no one could make him accept help.

Jesus couldn’t. “Do you want to be well?” he asked the paralyzed man at the well—not, presumably, because he didn’t know the answer, but because he needed the man to own the question. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…again and again would I have taken your children to myself as a bird takes her young ones under her wings, and you would not!” And God can’t force it on us either, or doesn’t; we have to seek and accept the grace ourselves.