August 11: Saint Clare

I'm having one of those days when I don't find a whole lot to be happy about.  I've known it was coming.  I've been in a good mood for quite some time now.  One of my friends, after reading my last few posts, said to me, "Those are really nice.  What's up with that?"  Last night, I felt the tide shifting.  I spent the evening sitting in my living room in the dark, watching the season finale of Hell's Kitchen.  Seeing people verbally assaulted on television usually improves my mood.  It didn't help.

There are reasons for my change in attitude.  An accumulation of reasons.  The end of summer and the impending start of a new teaching semester.  My daughter starting fourth grade in a few weeks.  Twenty or so pounds I need to lose.  Sarah Palin still in the news.  And other things.  Put them all together, and I'm in one of those states that doesn't quite qualify as a dark night of the soul, as John of the Cross called it.  More like a cloudy-with-a-chance-of-brussel-sprouts evening of the soul.  Just enough to push me to the edge.

I hate getting like this.  It's not really full-blown depression.  I guess, if you had to use a clinical term, it could be called situational depression, which doesn't sound too bad.  To me, situational depression seems to imply that all you have to do to correct the problem is change the channel on the TV, watch a few reruns of Gilligan's Island or The Brady Bunch (especially the one where Marcia gets hit in the nose with the football).  Simple.  Problem solved. 

Not quite.

The good thing about this kind of mood is that it doesn't require hospitalization or medication.  Usually.  In the past, my way of coping involved River Phoenix movies and a trip through Catcher in the Rye.  Maybe some wine coolers.  I haven't resorted to those antidotes yet, and, at my stage in life, I'd probably want to slap the shit out of Holden anyway.  So, I have to come up with some other coping mechanisms.  Hopefully, they won't involve the abuse of chocolate, caffeine, or prescription drugs.  I can't guarantee it, though.  I have a serious weakness for Cosmic Brownies and Twix bars.

I know I'm in good company when it comes to suffering these bouts of soul dusk.  I've written in a previous post about Mother Teresa's letters in which she talks about the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness," and "torture" of her life.  She discusses the alienation she feels from God, as if she's been ignored or forgotten.  She wrote to a spiritual adviser, "...as for me, the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, --Listen and do not hear--the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak..."  I'd like to think that, for people like Mother Teresa and Clare, today's patron saint, there's a kind of lighthouse of hope that lets them always see through the dark times.  Clare, who was a contemporary of Francis of Assisi, established a religious order that embraced poverty and the care of the needy, sick, and outcast.  Faced with daily evidence of cruelty and neglect, I'm sure Clare, like Teresa, experienced periods of drought, when God seemed as distant as Pluto or Jupiter (the planets, not the gods).  Teresa lived for years in this empty space, smiling her usual smile in public, groping through darkness in private.

Clare and Teresa made it through, obviously. One's a saint and one's on her way to sainthood. And they did it without the aid of Ativan or Gilligan's Island.  Even if I'm having a shitty day/week/month, as long as I have something to look forward to, something to hope for, I can make it through.  When that hope dims or disappears around a bend in the road, I find myself in the state I'm in right now--contemplating a Cosmic Brownie binge.  I'll make it through this funk, however.  I know this.  I just have to rediscover hope.

In the mean time, I'm hitting the chocolate drawer at work.  Kit Kats and PayDays.