RonRolheiser,OMI

Melancholy and the Soul

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Normally none of us likes feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally, we prefer sunshine to darkness, lightheartedness to melancholy. That’s why we tend to do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. Mostly, we run from feelings that sadden or frighten us.

For the most part, we think of melancholy and her children (sadness, gloom, nostalgia, loneliness, depression, restlessness, regret, feelings of loss, intimations of our own mortality, fear of the dark corners of our minds, and heaviness of soul) as negative. However, these feelings have a positive side and are meant to help put us in touch with our own soul.

Simply put, they help keep us in touch with those parts of our soul to which we are normally not attentive. Our souls are deep and complex, and trying to hear what they are saying involves listening to them inside of every mood within our lives, including, and sometimes especially, when we feel sad and out of sorts. In sadness and melancholy, the soul tells us things to which we are normally deaf. Hence, it’s important to examine the positive side of melancholy.

Unfortunately, today it is common to see sadness and heaviness of soul as a loss of health, as a loss of vitality, as an unhealthy condition; but that normally isn’t the case. For instance, in many medieval and Renaissance medical books, melancholy was seen as a gift to the soul, something that one needed to pass through at key points in life in order to come to more depth and empathy. This, of course, doesn’t refer to clinical depression, which is a true loss of health, but to multiple other depressions that draw us inward and downward. 

Why do we need to pass through certain kinds of melancholy in order to come to a deeper maturity?

Thomas Moore, who writes with deep insight on how we need to listen more carefully to the impulses and needs of our souls, offers this insight: “Depression gives us valuable qualities that we need in order to be fully human. It gives us weight when we are too light about our lives. It offers a degree of gravitas. It also ages us so that we grow appropriately and don’t pretend to be younger than we are. It makes us grow up and gives us the range of human emotion and character that we need in order to deal with the seriousness of life. In classic Renaissance images found in old medical texts and collections of remedies, depression is depicted as an old person wearing a broad brimmed hat, in the shadows, holding his head in his hands.”

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, echoes what Moore says. His heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it’s not heavy, when there’s too much lightness, sunshine, and frivolity, when life is devoid of the type of anxiety that hints at darkness and mortality. Thus, she always feels the need for gravitas, for some heaviness that signals that life is more than the simple flourishing of good cheer and comfort. For her, lightness equates with superficiality.

In many cultures, and indeed in all the great world religions, periods of melancholy and sadness are considered as necessary paths one must travel in order to deepen one’s understanding and come to empathy. Indeed, isn’t that part of the very essence of undergoing the Paschal Mystery within Christianity? Jesus, himself, when preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice for love, had to painfully accept that there was no path to the joy of Easter Sunday that didn’t involve the heaviness of Good Friday. How can Good Friday be good if melancholy, sadness, and heaviness of soul are signs that there is something wrong with us?

So how might we look at periods of sadness and heaviness in our lives? How might we deal with melancholy and her children?

First off, it’s important to see melancholy (whatever its form) as something normal and potentially healthy in our lives. Heaviness of soul is not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong inside us. Rather, most often, it’s the soul itself crying for our attention, asking to be heard, trying to ground us in some deeper way, and trying, as Moore puts it, to deepen us appropriately.

But for this to happen, we need to resist two opposite temptations, namely, to distract ourselves from the sadness or to indulge in it. We need to give melancholy its proper due, but only that. How do we do that? James Hillman gives us this advice: what to do with heaviness of soul? Put it into a suitcase and carry it with you. Keep it close, but contained; make sure it stays available, but don’t let it take you over.

That’s secular wording which can help us better understand Jesus’ challenge: If you wish to be my disciple, take up your cross every day and follow me.

The Person of Jesus and the Mystery of Christ

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I was raised a Roman Catholic and essentially inhaled the religious ethos of Roman Catholicism. I went to the seminary, earned theological degrees, and taught theology at a graduate level for a number of years before I ever started making a distinction between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. For me, they were always one and the same thing, Jesus Christ.

To my mind, Jesus Christ was the second person of the Trinity who took on flesh in the incarnation and is still now our God, our advocate, and our friend in heaven. I didn’t distinguish between Jesus and Christ in terms of whom I was praying to, speaking about, or relating to. Indeed, for many years in my writings, I simply used the words Jesus and Christ interchangeably.

Slowly through the years this changed and I have begun to distinguish more between Jesus and Christ. It began with a deepened understanding of what the Gospels and St. Paul mean by the reality of Christ as a mystery which, while always having Jesus as its center, is larger than the historical Jesus. This distinction and its importance became clearer to me when I began to have more contact with Evangelicals, both as students and as colleagues.

In faith fellowship with various groups of Evangelicals, I began to see that one of the ecclesial differences between us, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, is that we, Roman Catholics, while not ignoring Jesus, are very much about Christ, and Evangelicals, while not ignoring Christ, are very much about Jesus.

How we understand the church, how we understand the Eucharist, and how we understand the primary invitation given us in the Gospels are colored by how we perceive ourselves in relationship to Jesus and to Christ.

What’s at stake here?

What’s the difference between saying ‘Jesus’ and saying ‘Christ’? Is there any difference between praying to Jesus and praying to Christ, between relating to Jesus or relating to Christ?

There’s a difference, an important one. Christ is not Jesus’ second name – as in Jack Smith, Susan Parker, or Jesus Christ. While it is correct to use the two names together, as we do commonly in our prayer (We pray through Jesus Christ, Our Lord), there is an important distinction to be made.

Jesus is a person, the second person in the Trinity, the divine person who became incarnate, and the person who calls us to one-to-one intimacy with him. Christ is a mystery of which we are a part. The mystery of Christ includes the person of Jesus but also includes us. We are not part of the body of Jesus, but we are part of the body of Christ.

As Christians we believe that Jesus is the body of Christ, that the Eucharist is the body of Christ, and that we, baptized Christians, are also the body of Christ. Saint Paul states clearly that we, the Christian community, are the body of Christ on earth, just as Jesus and the Eucharist are the body of Christ. And Paul means this literally. We (the Christian community) are not like a body, or some mystical or metaphorical body; nor do we represent or replace Christ’s body. Rather, we are the body of Christ on earth, still giving physical flesh to God on earth.

This has implications for Christian discipleship: Jesus is a person, the person who invites us to one-to-one intimacy with him (which Evangelicals see as the goal of Christian discipleship). Christ is part of a larger mystery which includes Jesus but also includes each of us. In this mystery we are called to intimacy not just with Jesus, but also with each other and with physical creation. In Christ, the goal of Christian discipleship is community of life with Jesus, with each other, and with physical creation (since the mystery of Christ is also cosmic).

At the risk of huge oversimplification, allow me a suggestion: Roman Catholics and Evangelicals can learn from each other on this.

From our Evangelical brothers and sisters, Roman Catholics can learn to focus as much on Jesus as we do on Christ, so that like Evangelicals we might realize more explicitly (as is clear in the Gospel of John) that at the very heart of Christian discipleship lies the invitation to a one-to-one intimacy with a person, Jesus, (and not just with a mystery).

Conversely, Evangelicals can learn from Roman Catholics to focus as much on Christ as on Jesus, with all this implies in terms of defining discipleship more widely than personal intimacy with Jesus and church more widely than simple fellowship. Relating to Christ points to the centrality of the Eucharist as a communal event. As well, it implies seeing Christian discipleship not just as an invitation to intimacy with Jesus, but as an incorporation into an ecclesial body which includes not just Jesus but the community of all believers as well as nature itself.

We can learn from each other to take both Jesus and Christ more seriously.

Casting out Demons Through Silence

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There is an incident in the Gospels where the disciples of Jesus were unable to cast out a particular demon. When they asked Jesus why, he replied that some demons can only be cast out by prayer. The particular demon he was referring in this instance had rendered a man deaf and mute.

I want to name another demon which seemingly cannot be cast out except by prayer, namely, the demon that forever fractures our personal relationships, families, communities, and churches through misunderstanding and division, making it forever difficult to be in life-giving community with each other.

What particular prayer is needed to cast out this demon? The prayer of a shared silence, akin to a Quaker Silence.

What is a Quaker Silence?  

A tiny bit of history first: Quakers are a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations whose members refer to each other as Friends but are generally called Quakers because of a famous statement once made by their founder, George Fox (1624-1691). Legend has it that in the face of some authority figures who were trying to intimidate him, Fox held up his Bible and said: This is the word of God, quake before it!

For the Quakers, particularly early on, their common prayer consisted mainly in sitting together in community in silence, waiting for God to speak to them. They would sit together in silence, waiting on God’s power to come and give them something that they could not give themselves, namely, real community with each other beyond the divisions that separated them. Though they sat individually, their prayer was radically communal. They were sitting as one body, waiting together for God to give them a unity they could not give themselves.

Might this be a practice that we, Christians of every denomination, could practice today in the light of the helplessness we feel in the face of division everywhere (in our families, in our churches, and in our countries)? Given that, as Christians, we are at root one community inside the Body of Christ, a single organic body where physical distance does not really separate us, might we begin as a regular prayer practice to sit with each other in a Quaker Silence, one community, sitting in silence, waiting together, waiting for God to come and give us community that we are powerless to give ourselves?

Practically, how might this be done? Here’s a suggestion: each day set aside a time to sit in silence, alone or ideally with others, for a set period of time (fifteen to twenty minutes) where the intent, unlike in private meditation, is not first of all to nurture your personal intimacy with God, but rather to sit together in community with everyone inside the Body of Christ (and with all sincere persons everywhere) asking God to come and give us communion beyond division.

This could also be a powerful ritual in marriage and in family life. Perhaps one of the most healing therapies inside of a marriage might be for a couple to sit together regularly in a silence, asking God to give them something that they cannot give themselves, namely, an understanding of each other beyond the tensions of everyday life. I remember as a child, praying the rosary together as a family each evening and that ritual having the effect of a Quaker Silence. It calmed the tensions that had built up during the day and left us feeling more peaceful as a family.

I use the term Quaker Silence, but there are various forms of meditation and contemplation which have the same intentionality. For example, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (the religious order I belong to), Saint Eugene de Mazenod, left us a prayer practice he called Oraison. This is its intention: as Oblates we are meant to live together in community, but we are a worldwide congregation scattered over sixty countries around the world. How can we be in community with each other across distance?

Through the practice of Oraison. Saint Eugene asked us to set aside a half hour each day to sit in a silence that is intended to be a time when we are not just in communion with God but are also intentionally in communion with all Oblates around the world. Akin to a Quaker Silence, it is a prayer wherein each person sits alone, in silence, but in community, asking God to form one community across all distances and differences. When Jesus says some demons are only cast out by prayer, he means it. And perhaps the demon to which this most particularly refers is the demon of misunderstanding and division. We all know how powerless we are to cast it out. Sitting in a communal silence, asking God to do something for us beyond our powerlessness, can exorcise the demon of misunderstanding and division.