THE STUNTED SOUL

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the great American Poet of the 19th century wrote a poem called The Rainy Day which contains the familiar line: “Into each life some rain must fall. Some days must be dark and dreary.” I suspect however, that this fragment of the poem becomes less familiar as time goes by. These days, the reality of sadness, suffering, and pain is not to be acknowledged, but avoided. Suffering is what happens to losers. Sadness is a kind of sickness to be treated and eliminated. If I pretend it won’t rain, I won’t get wet. 

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To cope with our allergy to anything that feels bad, we engage addictions that keep us numb. We hope that by filling our calendars with vacations, hobbies, and activities we can distract ourselves from the feelings we don’t like. While there are certainly people struggling with mental health crises and real clinical depression who benefit from anti-depressants and other medication, research seems to suggest that these drugs are often used to help us avoid our struggles and talking about them so they can be resolved. Funerals have been replaced by “Celebrations of Life” where we never work to claim our grief. Increasingly, we just skip the rites and rituals at the time of death to avoid dealing with the reality of our mortality.
 
To be human is to experience both joy and sadness, to live open to the fullness of life in all its laughter and tragedy. Longfellow is right, the rain will fall. Poet Mary Oliver in her poem We Shake with Joy, expresses the same sentiment:
 
WE SHAKE WITH JOY
We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body. – Mary Oliver
 
Therapist and author Thomas Moore in his book, Care of the Soul, says “Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.” The development of our souls – that inner life which gives us wholeness – needs to embrace the reality of our whole human experience as it intersects with the Spirit of the God who made us. Without embracing the whole of life, our souls become stunted, searching for quick fixes and escapes which inevitably leave us stuck and struggling. We never become fully human because we avoid our suffering and pain. Does it really make sense that we worship a God who suffered and died on the cross and then spend our lives avoiding bad feelings, suffering, even death?
 
The Apostle Paul knew the reality of pain and suffering. He also knew that by embracing it, God could resurrect us from mourning to dancing. “… but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)
 
I have known the pain of grief. I’ve buried my parents and both brothers. There were tears and sadness in each case. I can’t honor and remember them without embracing the suffering. That is part of our life together and an expression of the love we shared. To ignore that pain is to dismiss a significant part of my life with them. The key to embracing sadness and pain is to do so with faith and a loving community gathered around you. Then our souls flourish instead of being stunted by our fear.
 
Pax Christi,
​Tim Olson – Lead Pastor
 
 
 
 
 
Image by Joseph Berardi from Pixabay