"sisters and brothers of the one clay"

At times, the late John O'Donhohue noted, "you will find sorrow moving through you." While I am writing in this sad key, I want to note that I found something Rowan Williams admitted to in an interview years ago most helpful. Williams spoke of sometimes being covered by what he called "Celtic gloom." According to O'Donohue, this sorrow moves through you "like a dark mist over a landscape." For many people, myself included, this gloom, to borrow O'Donohue's words, "is dark enough to paralyze you." Nonetheless, he insisted that it "is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling."

Sometimes this metaphorical "mist" comes and no sooner does it leave than, out of nowhere, it settles in again. At other times, the mist settles in the valley of my soul for an extended stay. Then I can go for awhile and not experience it all. When this happens, I start to look for it for some odd reason, not that I miss it or anything, I am just aware that, in all likelihood, it will appear again. But it always comes unexpectedly. Mine is not seasonally determined. "It is more appropriate," O'Donohue insisted, "to recognize that this emotion belongs more to clay than your mind." Therefore, it "is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; it is on its way elsewhere." O'Donohue is not here positing a mind/body dualism. To the contrary, this comes in the midst of him setting forth a wonderfully holistic anthropology, which begins with noting that we are made of the stuff of earth: clay.

Being made of earth, O'Donohue insists that your body belongs to the landscape. "We so easily forget," he wrote, "that our clay has a memory that preceded our minds, a life of its own before it took its present form." No matter how "modern" we think we are, "we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the one clay."

It is important to note here that I speak only of my own experience! I am not judging others. I would say that if you need help, get help and never be apologetic for seeking help. As for myself, I am grateful for wise spiritual counselors who help me do what O'Donohue here describes - not interfere with this movement, but let the mist settle, even when, especially when, it does not seem likely to me that the sun will burn it away or the wind will sweep it past. This is an act of hope on my part. It's a bit like facing the inevitability of death with the hope that death is not the end.

Saturday I listened to a song that helps me understand: "In Big Country." I find this verse particularly helpful:

So take that look out of here it doesn't fit you/
Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded/
Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming/
Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted/
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered/
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered

I find that the words, "Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded," especially resonant.

I also hold in mind that Stuart Adamson, who wrote this song, no doubt in an effort to wrestle with these issues, later took his own life. May he rest in the peace he found so elusive.