Today I don’t want to write anything. I’ve started several documents, gotten a few paragraphs in and deleted them. The more I try to write the more tired I feel, like every word is burden. Someone said, “one of the hardest things to do is say just to what you mean.” Maybe all art is just trying to close the gap between what we want to say and what we feel able to say. Between how we live and how we want to live. How we love and how we wish we could love. There is a joy set before us and we keep taking each painful step to close the distance, one at a time, but we wonder whether we can make it across the dark room.

Some days it takes all I’ve got just to lift one foot into the air and set it down a few inches forward. Some days I don’t even know what I want to say, and it’s hard to make out the vision of the joy set before us through the shadowy fog.

Then I remember this is not the first time this has happened. It comes and goes. Maybe it lasts a week or a few months, sometimes the darkness lightens by the next day. I’m learning to calibrate my response to it knowing that it’s just a thing that happens. I had a counselor once who told me something very helpful. She had an acronym: HALT-B. It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, or Bored. She said when you start to feel that despair creep up on you, stop and check to see if it’s been a while since you’ve eaten, whether something you care about is being threatened, if you’ve been away from your friends too long, maybe you need some sleep, or if your gifts need a place to play.  

That’s interesting and helpful to me. N.T. Wright reminds us that we are Spiritually Physical and Physically Spiritual. So something like lack of sleep or hunger really can throw us off spiritually. Just like anger or loneliness can throw us off physically. Knowing that helps me relax a little when I feel the anxiety swell, though it doesn’t magically fix it.  

It’s not particularly cool to talk about sin, but the old view of sin was that it didn’t just have to do with our behavior, but that it was also like a pollutant loosed in the earth, moving in and tainting everything. That means, there’s no magical therapeutic fix, no trick of human will-power; there was the in-breaking of a radical healing agent when Jesus came the first time, and the final fix will only take place at his second coming when the resurrection is fully realized.  

Still, I love the way my friend Bubba, a juvenile drug court counselor and deacon at our church, describes the wisdom of counseling. He says to imagine you have to cross a pitch-black room. It’s filled with obstacles. You try to go across in the dark and you pummel your shins, knock your head on a lamp, and slip on some marbles someone left on the floor and bruise your tailbone. Wisdom and good counsel don’t remove the obstacles, but they light votives around the room so you can see where the obstacles are. Counsel doesn’t fix all the problems, it sheds a little light so you can work your way across the room.

So, maybe today is a bust? If it is that’s ok. Or maybe it’s a chance to remind myself of what everyone experiences as they try to get across the room. Somedays the lights go out and I slam my shin into a table. Other days, time with a friend or a nap adds a little light to the room and I make it across one more time.

Schmemann says we are created to be hungry creatures. Days like today, I remember how hungry I am for light. Light enough to see my broken places; that helps me accept them. Light enough to know there are others in the room with me. Light enough to sit tight when the votives flicker and I get a disoriented by the shadows wavering on the wall. I think that’s what the psalmists are doing when in the midst of despair they fight to remember God’s past faithfulness. 

Scripture says, “In your light we see light”. What a bright phrase and mysterious too. He is the light of light itself. Even light has no light apart from the Lord. And Scripture also says he will not snuff out a struggling wick. He will trim and tend the guttering candle.  

The Incarnation bears witness. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light, because the light that is the light of every light has entered the room. He’s made it across to the joy, marking a way for us to get through. Maybe that’s the best news for me to remember today: that of all the little votives strewn about this shadowy room, Jesus is not just one more candle – he is the flame. He is in all of the flames lending them his light, as they lend me theirs. He is here.

It is popular to talk about being ‘authentic’, but even that can become one more thing to hide behind. Still, a necessary part of life and therefore of the creative process is, I think, to be in touch with reality. The more I learn about the people I look up to, the more I discover they’re fighting the same battle to cross this same shadowy room.

So, maybe it’s worth writing this to you today, if it can be a way of lighting a little prayer votive in there. As if to say, “Some days are like this. That’s normal. I’m sure you know what I mean.” The Lord says that even the darkness is as light to him. If that’s true, then even on days like today, when I feel like my offering is just shadowed smoke trailing wearily up from a smoldering wick, God can make that darkness a prayer of light. 

Closing Poem: Another Long Day

“Another long day”

Written in blue on blue

Paper discarded. A crumb

Left thin under the table

By a stranger, weary

As she was.

Some coffeeshop castaway

Like me

Dropping this note

Into the sea of kept worry

To watch it wave back at her.

I see you, invisible one,

Imagine your cursive

Knotted thoughts making their way

To the pen’s tip to cry out

From the bottled unnoted.

That little square of ocean

Bearing your bled-words

Communicates the long waters

Between islands. And here,

Your note is noticed, noted –

And even if unknowingly –

Two sail now together.