blue christmas 2017

It's so delicate, the light.

And there's so little of it. The dark

is huge.

Just delicate needles, the light,

in an endless night.

And it has such a long way to go

through such desolate space.

So let's be gentle with it.

Cherish it.

So it will come again in the morning.

We hope.

‘Just Delicate Needles’, Rolf Jacobsen, trans. Robert Hedin

People in the middle of depression are beings who have to live, for a while, without a story, which is why it feels as though you’ve lost your soul.  But this period is a dark room where you’re developing the next stage of your life before living it.  The work will be all the more vivid if you’re patient and let it take its course.

Gwyneth Lewis, Sunbathing in the Rain

It feels like for most of this last year I have indeed been living ‘without a story’, when depression has pulled me back deep down into a grip I thought, hoped against hope, had loosened, and a virus has brought me nearly four months of voice and bed rest.  This literal silence that has been imposed on me through losing my voice this summer mirrors the sense that has accompanied me since Lent that I ‘have nothing to say’.  I have written no posts for my shot at ten paces blog and I have not contributed to the Godspace community since this time last year.  I have felt that I cannot formulate a coherent thought, yet at the same time I have been aware that the outer silence of my circumstances has only revealed the noisiness within; pent up voices from long ago have risen from my murkiest depths, and have found no outlet to express their howls in either verbal, written or visual forms.  Without uttering a sound

I yell out to my God, I yell with all my might,

    I yell at the top of my lungs. He listens.

I found myself in trouble and went looking for my Lord;

    my life was an open wound that wouldn’t heal.

When friends said, “Everything will turn out all right,”

    I didn’t believe a word they said.

I remember God—and shake my head.

    I bow my head—then wring my hands.

I’m awake all night—not a wink of sleep;

    I can’t even say what’s bothering me.

I go over the days one by one,

    I ponder the years gone by.

I strum my lute all through the night,

    wondering how to get my life together.

(Psalm 77.1-6, The Message)

I am not alone in struggling with periods of an inability to express myself in any meaningful way.  Any artist has their times of ‘block’, any one with mental health needs has their seasons of such numbness it feels like isolating dumbness; most people, if they are honest, will identify occasions where they felt not, or mis-, understood; and anyone committed to exploring their faith will have come face to fearful face with the sense of God’s absence and silence.

In his meditation on Silence in his Consolations collection, poet David Whyte writes,

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives. ... Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing, listening elemental powers.

Being prepared to embrace my own elemental powers sounds a daunting enough challenge, let alone being prepared to embrace the elemental demands of a Presence I can never understand, struggle to hear and only fleetingly experience.  In fact, if embracing the God of the Elements means I have to put aside my (over) reliance on the God of the Word, then I quail at the thought of who I might have to become.  And yet, though being locked into wordlessness through fear, stress and anxiety too often makes me feel desperate, I am left wondering whether this time of an enforced embracing of deliberate silence is a gifted reminder not only of the elemental presence and power of God as Word, but also that I need to counterbalance this presence with the elemental power and presence of God as Silence.

In When God is Silent Barbara Brown Taylor urges preachers not to attempt to explain away the silence of God:

By addressing the experience of God’s silence in scripture and in our listener’s own lives, we may be able to open up the possibility that silence is as much a sign of God’s presence as of God’s absence - that divine silence is not a vacuum to be filled but a mystery to be entered into, unarmed with words and undistracted by noise - a holy of holies in which we too may be struck dumb by the power of the unsayable God. (118)

God’s innate unsayability, I AM WHO I AM, has never been in question for me, and often the words I use when I try to speak of God are probably more limiting and unhelpful for my listeners and readers than they are revelatory. What I wrestle with is being struck dumb by circumstance and situation rather than choice.  I feel utterly powerless to communicate my most basic needs, let alone the twists and turns of my faith journey.  Yet perhaps I might learn to see that one of the anguishing gifts of deep depression is an opportunity to embrace ‘having nothing to say’, having ‘no story’ to tell, as paradoxically a sign of renewal, and as a confirmation that I will find a story is waiting for me in its shadows.

Just as I was succumbing to the virus and losing my voice in August, I serendipitously picked up an excellent book from my brother’s bookshelf.  Just one of the many insights that Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham’s The Spirituality of Imperfection brought me was the following:

Spirituality is not spectacular, but spectacularly simple, and that is precisely why we find it so difficult to define or describe. The profoundly simple is simply ineffable: It literally cannot be spoken.  The Hebrew Bible portrays Moses and Jeremiah as protesting, when called by God, that they "cannot speak", a claim that has been interpreted by some scholars as evidence that these prophets laboured under some kind of speech defect.  This interpretation suggests two ideas: First, God chooses the least likely individuals to be divine spokespersons, and second, through this choice, God signals the ineffability - the literal "un-speakability" - of spiritual wisdom. The spiritual is simply beyond words. (38)

Rather than seeing only lack and grief in my silence, the possibility that I might have even the merest nodding acquaintance with Moses and Jeremiah’s experience of God is such an encouragement to me.  I hesitate to call myself any kind of divine spokesperson, but I believe I have known the joy of being spoken through, of experiencing times of being a conduit between God and God’s creations.  I long for my photography and visual art to be a medium through which others might encounter their God, discovering for themselves the infinite number of ways there are of seeing God without words.  And it is no coincidence I know, that even in the midst of depression’s darkness I am being invited to see this season of Joy is present in it; and in me.  

On this shortest day of winter light, and as I remember all those made blind and dumb by illness, grief, depression, abuse, torture and persecution, I reflect again on the words of a lectio divina collage I made at the start of Advent in response to Isaiah 52.8,

Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices,

    together they sing for joy;

for in plain sight they see

    the return of the Lord to Zion, (NRSV)

In the course of my meditations I thought I clearly heard the seemingly impossible commission: ‘see joy. be joy. in plain sight.’  When joy feels completely out of sight, how can I possibly be the woman in whom Joy is clear for all to see?  How can I possibly speak of Joy when it feels like I have nothing to say, and no voice to tell it with?

On the 11th November I wrote in my journal:

The voice is there.  Perhaps it’s only when I’m completely relaxed that I can find the power to use it?  There is no doubt some complicated interaction between virus exhaustion and psychological - what? - fear? disbelief? -

I wonder if one thing I can learn from this is to think before I speak - to treat my speaking as a precious commodity - so I can discern better what’s important to say and what’s not.  Maybe having nothing to say is a good thing - means my attention is on the other person’s presence - hearing them - what is said and left unspoken?

When attempting to project my voice involves pain, perhaps my own voice is paradoxically at its most powerful when it is unheard: when I am consumed by the power of sensing another presence, when I embrace silence to hear it, becoming the spokesperson of Silence? 

The challenge of this day then is to choose to let the quiet of the incarnation truth - God is in this pain, here, now, with me - break into my anguish; and dare to believe that projecting my silence just might usher in (in)expressible Joy.

By day

the passers-by, who are not

pilgrims, stare through the rain’s

bars, seeing me as prisoner

of the one view, I who

have been made free

by the tide’s pendulum truth

that the heart that is low now

will be at full tomorrow. 

‘At the End’, ll. 13–21, R.S. Thomas 

(Glimmer, ink on paper, original artwork, Kate Kennington Steer)