There is so much I don’t know. There is so much<\/b> I don’t know. I wish I could just pour it into my head or swallow it like a pill so I could absorb the knowledge quickly and move on, instead of having to go to the trouble of realizing what I don’t know, finding out what I need to learn, finding the best book on the subject, and reading about it — all of which provide ample opportunities for me to go off on tangents and forget about what I was originally trying to learn, or get bogged down in the learning and never get around to the doing.
\nI am speaking of the spiritual life: learning to pray, learning to recognize the snares and pitfalls that lie along the way, and above all cultivating the virtue of perseverance. When I read solid works on spiritual growth, so often I find myself without the background knowledge, so to speak, I need to fully grasp what the author is telling me: What is a spiritual bouquet? What exactly is meant by meditation, by mental prayer?
\nWhen we are told that we should not be sad, that sadness is a symptom of lukewarmness, what does that mean? Surely it does not mean that we will never experience the emotion of sadness for the rest of our lives — or that we should deny that we feel this emotion when we feel it. Or does it? Or is there another, more restricted meaning of the word “sadness” in writing on the spiritual life? In that context, does it mean something more along the line of “cultivating self-pity” or something like that? Or are we being warned to take sadness seriously, as a warning?
\nYesterday I was walking around in a pretty blue mood all day long. (I went through about two years of clinical depression and had a mild relapse a few years later, so I tend to pay attention when I feel the grey cloud settling around me.) Nothing serious, nothing weepy, but still a melancholy day — a mood that seemed most inappropriate for Easter Monday. Part of it was just the natural result of too little sleep (I had not slept well) and too little breakfast. Part of it was the letdown from getting back to the routine after the stress of travel.
\nBut a good bit was just plain old disappointment and sorrow. Sorrow for my friend who had received bad news on Thursday; sorrow for the bad news everywhere. Sorrow over some disappointments we’ve had at our own house recently. And then the disappointment: disappointment at my very sense of disappointment (God has been good to us, what possible right do we have to “want more”)<\/i>; disappointment at my lackluster Lent (my resolution was to make daily mental prayer a priority, with a 50% success rate at best.) Disappointment at my totally lame Holy Week. Disappointment with my laziness, my disorganization, my dirty kitchen floor.
\nI wish I weren’t so ignorant.
\nI wish I weren’t so weak.
\nI wish I would remember that part of the answer is to stop worrying about — to accept and even rejoice in — my weakness and ignorance. But then, I missed class when that topic was covered, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is so much I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know. I wish I could just pour it into my head or swallow it like a pill so I could absorb the knowledge quickly and move on, instead of having to go to the trouble of realizing what I don’t know, finding… Continue reading Sadness and the soul<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-christian-life","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}