[Magdalen] Motley Pew

[Molly Wolf]

Clouds: A Metaphor

Sometimes all you need is a really good metaphor.

I am frankly a Facebook junkie, not least because it tends to introduce me to people I would not otherwise hear of and ideas I didn’t know I needed.  (Besides, I like the silly quizzes.)

And so I sat at the feet (actually the Facebook page) of a handsome black guy named Prince Ea, a hiphop artist two years younger than my younger kid, who in quite simple terms upended my way of thinking with a really useful metaphor, which I have taken to my gravity-challenged bosom.

He was talking about the self and depression.  Depression, he said, is like clouds in the sky.  It comes and goes, comes and goes, but the sky remains, and the clouds don’t.  When the clouds are gone, the sky remains.  Depression isn’t who a person is; it’s something a person has.  Temporarily. Like a bad cold.

Now, this may be obvious to the rest of you, but I was brought up with the Ghost of Freud  and the notion that a neurosis is forever and is somehow the responsibility of the person who has it, because otherwise the person wouldn’t be neurotic. Neurotic is what a person is, not what a person has. You could learn to live with it, that was all. Or at least this was the pop version current in my youth.

From a psychologist’s standpoint back then, depression was a life sentence, biologically determined and likely hereditary.  It would always be a trap into which you could fall.  I was told to avoid intellectual pursuits and not to have children, lest they inherit the disorder as I had.

On the popular front, depression was like cancer, a sign of the Evil Eye and something that might just possibly be catching if you attracted it.  Depression was cooties.  Once cootified, always cootified, and cooties are (we know) unclean and also contagious.  Hence the stigma. Like Job’s comforters said, you must have done something to deserve this.

Besides, it was all in your head, a moral failing; if you were depressed, you just needed to get over yourself and haul your socks up because the rest of the world has it tough too… This buffleguff is still out there, sadly enough.

But here is this gorgeous young black guy, radiating wisdom and telling me that depression is like clouds in the sky; sometimes we can’t see the sky for the clouds, but it’s still there and it will be there when the clouds have gone, even if they come back, even if they last a long time.  There is a you who exists beyond depression as the sky outlasts the clouds.  Depression is what a person has, not what a person is.

I still get fits of depression, although they tend now to be lighter and briefer than the old suffocating weight of years back.  But I’ve also suffered off and on from another form of dark fog, one that doesn’t get the airtime that depression gets:  what feels perilously like the absence of God.

It’s the sense that God has somehow left the house.  There is a God-shaped hole all right, but it’s like the space in a molar where the filling fell out.  It is a hollowness at the centre that demands to find a filling.

Now, I believe, with all my heart, that faith is pure unspoiled joy for many people, and I’m glad for them.  I’m glad for people whose strong faith helps them through difficult times and makes them pursue justice and mercy.  In their journey in faith, for some the walking is strong and joyous, even when the path is difficult; people walk in company, singing as they walk.

You go, guys, and I’ll cheer you every step of the way. Me, I hobble and my feet hurt and I can’t keep up on the hills, and it makes me too cranky for singing around the campfire.

I’m told to work harder, to believe more strongly, to pray more fervently, but that’s just as useful as telling someone with depression to “just get over it, already.”  I’m fed such lines as “if God feels far away, who moved?” or “count it all joy” or “take an attitude of gratitude” when I’m up to my earlobes in the freakin’ Dark Night of the Soul.

It’s the spiritual equivalent of living high up in rainy country, where you can’t see the forest for the fog – what they used to call in Nova Scotia “black thick of fog”.  Fog so thick that (so legend has it) you can actually shingle it.  It’s like chill fog at evening, when it closes in like a spiritual sepulcher and the deep green of the forest turns ominous and strange..

I have spent long periods – dreary, resentful, grumbling periods – hanging on to faith merely by believing in belief: not actually believing, but trusting that belief is possible if a person just hangs in there.  Being pig-stubborn is a real advantage sometimes.

It took me a long, long time to learn that this is, in fact, a perfectly valid way of getting through one’s spiritual life, if not perhaps the most delightful experience.  For some of us, it’s not that faith is the easy way out.  It’s the hard way, far harder than easy skepticism. The Dark Way, the via negativa, is ancient and honourable.  Fun, not so much.

But with Prince Ea’s metaphor in mind, I can understand something I tend to lose in the suffocating darkness:  that there is always sky behind the cloud, and that the fog does pass.  I will see the blue of daylight sky again.  If I travel the journey, it’s in a silent company, and the silence is companionable. And if I feel like this, it’s probably time for some deep self-care.

I am reminded that I have a soul that exists like the blue summer sky:  limited because this life is limited, but only clouded, not permanently hijacked, by the temporary tomfoolery of some of my neurotransmitters.  Tears may last any number of years, but joy really does come in the morning. But it doesn’t come because I’ve purchased it with fake cheerfulness, but because God is particularly gracious when I’m particularly miserable.

I am also reminded that if I’m willing to see further and deeper, past the blue of a sunlit day, up through the atmosphere and beyond – if I’m willing to chance leaving not just my self behind, but my beautiful blue-green-clouded world as well – there are stars out there.  Gazillions of stars.  Extravaganzas of brilliance stretching out far beyond what mind can ever grasp, the Creation that God reminds Job about.

It’s just a matter of a good metaphor, one that carries me to a steadier place with a much, much longer view.

The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain