Go out into the world...

I think we have about 11 Monday holidays on this country’s calendar. Since I normally took Mondays as my day off, my wife, with some amusement and some irritation, would comment that such Monday holidays didn’t ease my schedule very much. It would have been reasonable for me to simply add a Tuesday or some other day as my extra holiday, but for lots of reasons, that rarely happened.

It has got me to thinking about what one would do if you really took one whole day off from all responsibilities. What if you gave yourself permission to be totally self-indulgent for a complete day? In this particular fantasy, I’m saying what would you do totally for self? Yes, I know you love your family and would want to do something with them, and that is good, but what if one day, you simply pampered yourself?

I might begin breakfast with a hot fudge sundae, go to a book store and buy a fast paced novel that had no social value but was just fun to read, get a hot latte and begin reading it from cover to cover in a shaded park with a very comfortable lawn chair. If I completed the novel in time, maybe I would take in a late movie or find a good restaurant and indulge in a slow, really good meal with a friend.

The next day would be back to reality, but it might be a really refreshing day that might nurture me in ways I can’t anticipate. What would your day look like?

You are in a blue funk. You are going through the motions, quite successfully, but internally you are hitting an emotional wall. If you are expressing any of it, it probably comes out either as weariness or cynicism. Internally it becomes a growing crisis of faith. Maybe life is just a bunch of atoms hitting against each other, without rhyme or reason, certainly without purpose. If there is no meta-story, no God who is working God’s purpose out as year proceeds to year, then why keep banging your head against the wall?

Maybe tomorrow or next week you will feel differently, but right now nothing holds much meaning. So what can you do? If this is the dark night of the soul, how should you respond? While it is always important to check yourself out physically, because chemical imbalance in the body can have a major impact on ones thoughts and emotions, it is also important to examine your spiritual side. It would be best to do this with a trusted spiritual friend but you can also do this with a piece of paper or a computer.

The basic question you are examining is “What if God is real and actively involved in our universe as a compassionate God?” That may seem to abstract and theoretical yet what you are exploring is how to make sense out of our world if God is real. To make it more personal, assume that God is real and trying to communicate with you in your present state. What might God want to say? At this point, you are not wrestling with whether you believe that or not but simply exploring what it would mean if it were true. Sometimes the barrier of doubt can be best approached from the other side of the hurdle. If you did believe, then how might your life and the world look?

Living your life “as if you believed,” can sometimes help you move past the dark moments of doubt. If your response is that you would be living a lie, then hold on to the possibility that after you are done exploring, you can still return to a stance of disbelief, but then you will know what you are sacrificing for that disbelief.

Feelings are very mercurial. At one moment they are up and another time they are down. Sometimes we can attribute such feelings to an incident or experience and at other times feelings seem to come out of nowhere. If you have ever tried to capture a piece of mercury, you know what an apt metaphor it is for our ability to grasp our feelings. It has always amazed me, as a pastor, to recognize how rapidly my feelings could change.

One of the gifts we have been given to help us navigate the roller-coaster emotional ride of our profession, is the gift of Scripture. Sadly, because we are so accustomed to using Scripture in our various professional roles, we often don’t allow ourself to be addressed by Scripture personally. As I mentioned yesterday, the Psalms can be an important gift from God in addressing your life experiences.

The psalms are meant to be a framework for teaching us how to pray. They are not meant to be a straightjacket. I would encourage you to take a psalm and paraphrase it as a personal address in your present situation. Personalize it by putting your name in place of the pronoun. Rephrase it within the framework provided. Give yourself permission to express some of the harsh feelings that the psalms articulate. Notice how most of the psalms of lament begin with blunt words of anger, hurt, or despair but end in praise. Hear yourself giving voice to that same continuum.

This is not for a scholarly article or a public sermon, so give yourself the freedom to play with a number of possibilities and note how it feels to be personally addressed by these ancient but very modern prayers.

Acedia feeds upon the thought that nothing is worthwhile. Ecclesiastes gives expression to such thoughts. “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. . . What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” (1:2 & 9) If we stay there, we can lose all energy to continue to move.

The importance of Ecclesiastes giving expression to such thoughts is that it reminds us that we are not alone in wrestling with despair. Such thoughts are a normal part of life’s journey. It may even help to allow “the preacher” to give expression to how you are feeling.

Fortunately, there are other voices to which we can also pay attention. The Psalms are also an important gift for us. As John Calvin expresses it, the Psalms are an anatomy of the human soul. Here is expressed almost every feeling that the human soul can experience. The psalms give expression to the continuum from lament to unrestrained praise.

In struggling with acedia, give yourself permission, even when you don’t feel like it, to allow the psalms to feed you. Open to the psalms and read and reflect on a few verses at random. Don’t insist that they make sense in the moment. And don’t search for answers. Simply read a couple of verses and let them be planted in your thoughts. When you find another sliver of time, do it again.

One of the destructive thoughts that feeds acedia is that you are alone in having such feelings. Over time, when you repeatedly read the psalm as a form of prayer, you become aware that there is more to life than you have concluded. There is movement in life and life is addressed from beyond your experience. Such is the beginning of moving beyond acedia.

In the more familiar passage from Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” The apathy that you are experiencing is real but it is only one phase of your life.

Yesterday we talked about utilizing those slivers of time that frequently happen during your day to compose some scrawled notes. After you have done that for a time, you will find some good material for re-framing your future. It’s amazing how those quick, almost spontaneous, moments of reflection can open you up to your inner-self. The challenge is to write those notes in an uncensored form. Whatever you are thinking and feeling are valuable to record.

Now, when you have a small block of time, begin to reread some of what you have written, looking for some discernible patterns. What are the common threads to the circumstances or thoughts that lead to your feeling either negative or positive. The negative feelings are equally as valuable as the positive ones. While this could be valuable as a psychological probe, I’m interested for the moment in utilizing this material for a spiritual probe.

Regardless of whether you are feeling full of doubt or belief at the moment, engage in an “If there were” exercise. If there were a God and that God was trying to speak to me personally through my experiences, what might God be trying to say? Let me emphasize what spiritual teachers have noted in the past, that periods of disbelief or overwhelming doubt can well be the fertile ground for positive growth in faith. The challenge is not to banish disbelief but allow it to be an integrated part of our spiritual journey. So you are “playing with the What If possibilities” in any part of what you have written.

Also, don’t be too serious about this reflection at the moment. Have some fun playing with the possibilities. Examine some bizarre or zany things that God could be saying to you as well as some serious, challenging ones. But as you do so, keep alert for signals that might prove to be valuable for the future. Don’t look for conclusions. Just keep record of some of your thoughts.