A Different Spin on Despair

How do you experience despair? I guess despair is reaching the point where no good options exist, and doom seems inevitable. To look at YouTube videos of health care town hall meetings, some folks act as though they're close to despair. A terminal illness diagnosis can result in despair. The genocide victims of Darfur in the Sudan may feel despair, as their plight seems completely to have gone off the radar of international politics. I guess I've felt times when I was close to despair in my ministry. I suppose I've always assumed that despair is a legitimate experience, often.

However, this morning I encountered a stop-dead-in-your-tracks different spin on the experience of despair, courtesy of one of my sabbatical travelling companions, Thomas Merton. (I've been slowly working through New Seeds of Contemplation, a revision of his classic work of 1961.) Get this..."Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost...Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that he is above us and we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves." (page 180.) Wow...

I don't think Merton referred to those who experience despair because of violence and oppression, or any kind of circumstances over which they have no control. More so, I think, he targeted those of us who have much, but who fail to see it, and spend more time lamenting what we do not have than giving praise for what we do have. I'm still mulling all this over. What do you think?

I come off of my sabbatical leave in two days. It's been an impacting two months. The sabbatical has been restful, renewing, challenging, gut-wrenching, Jesus-focused, and hopeful. I'm anxious to get back in the saddle. I miss the folks in my congregation. I hope the resume the blog posting rhythm of three times a week, starting Monday. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.