When depression seizes you

Here's a link to an audio of the sermon I preached on Sunday, June 20, 2010. Some background . . .

One out of every 10 Americans will experience clinical depression during their lifetime.  Dark emotion will become chronic and debilitating, affecting their ability to function, interact with others, and derive pleasure from life.   One out of every four women will be clinically depressed at some point in her life. Because of our increasingly complex and interrelated world, clinical depression has become a modern epidemic.

Says Parker Palmer: "People walk around saying, 'I don't understand why so-and-so committed suicide.' Well, I understand perfectly why people take their lives. They need the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting. It's why, day by day for months at a time, I wanted to take my life. What I don't understand is why some people come through on the other side and reclaim life with new vividness and with new intensity. That is the real mystery to me."

Depression is real, common, and treatable. Contrary to the way it makes us fee, it doesn't disqualify us.

In this audio sermon, I explore the nature and experience of depression through the life of one of Israel's greatest prophets, Elijah.  With Elijah, we listen for the negative messages that play in our heads tumbling us into despair, we watch for the presence of those angels who nudge us and tell us to do such things as "get up and eat," and we walk the long journey into the dark cave that can become a womb of rebirth into human community.

Examining my life: Am I present?

I'm leading a day-long retreat for hospital chaplains next week. Their ministry is the ministry of presence. But like most of us, they struggle to be truly present to the sick and dying and their families, and to the doctors and nurses who care for them. Like us, they too often find their minds flitting to and fro from one thought to another like bees in a flower garden. Bees seem always in a race against time. Chaplains don't want to make their rounds that way, but often do. So we'll explore two topics, "Living in the Present" and "Praying in the Present," as ways to recover the ministry of presence.

I'd like to put together a short questionnaire that helps them examine the state of their presence of mind---how present they really are to this present moment.

You can help me.

Here are three sample questions I may use. Would you test them in your own life, and give me some feedback. Do they help? What question might you add?

1. I find myself looking deeply into the eyes of the person before me, even if just for a few moments, pausing before the mystery of their life, reading their gaze as I'd read a good book.    __often __ occasionally __ rarely __ never

2. When I'm distracted by a thought about an obligation, responsibility, or need---what I'm to do next, a fear, memory, desire---how quickly am I able to return to what is right before me?

__ I don't know; I've never even stopped to think about how my thoughts lure me away

__ I can wander off with a thought for minutes at a time before I realize I'm not really here

__ I quickly recognize the distraction, tell myself "I'll get to that," and return to what I'm doing

__ When I'm driving, I'm driving; when I'm washing dishes, I'm washing dishes---thoughts pull at me but I follow them only when I choose to

3. In an average hour of my day, what percentage of time do my thoughts hover over things from the past (____%) or over concerns about the future (____%)? What percentage of that hour is spent completely absorbed in the present, aware only of what is going on here and now around or within me? _____%

On the silence of the Wise

One elder said to another: "Why do the Wise have no more words to give?" The elder replied: "Because the disciples no longer listen."

Awaken your heart

When cultivating the spiritual life, don't focus first on "how?"  But "how" is generally the first question people ask me.  It's not ultimate.  How inevitably follows why or what.  Get why or what right and you'll get to how. So, focus instead on the disposition of your heart---that is, why you seek God, and what the experience is like.

Here's Theresa of Lisieux:

"Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice; it consists in a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in God's arms, teaches us our weakness, and inspires us with an almost presumptuous trust in his fatherly goodness."

It's that that'll carry your where you need to go.  What's more, you can rest yourself humbly and little in God's arms whether your arguing a case before a jury, teaching kindergarteners, balancing your checkbook, or walking in a meadow.

Awaken your heart and all of life is prayer; daily life becomes sacred.

The purest prayer isn't complicated

Jesus said, "When you pray, go into your closet, shut the door, and pray to God in secret."  Matthew 6.6 "But I can't find such a place to pray," a young mother tells me. "My life's hectic. The only secret place in my house is the bathroom, and my four year old makes sure not even that's guaranteed."

You may not find such a place, but that doesn't mean you can't enter the closet of your heart.

Let go your idealizations of prayer, and just breathe.

"The breath that does not repeat the name of God is wasted breath," wrote Kabir.

The purest forms of prayer aren't complicated. That's their genius.