From today's Upper Room Daily Reflections, which I so love, as many know:

SOMETIMES you are in so much pain that you cannot pray. When you try, your prayer seems to fall with a thud to the floor, and when you try to open yourself to God’s presence, you encounter a whole lot of nothing. God seems to have vanished, and all you have left are emotions and spirit tangled with pain, anger, and desolation. … At this point grace comes in. Your groping desire for God is enough; God can listen to the prayer you can’t yet articulate.- Tilda Norberg, Ashes Transformed


I was just thinking about the times when you aren't in pain, but rather aren't feeling much of anything - maybe numb, maybe melancholy - maybe something like depression - and maybe you're groping, but maybe you're not. Maybe you aren't particularly feeling that tangle of emotions, spirit, pain, anger, and desolation - maybe you just aren't feeling anything -- what brings you out of numbness, of apathy, of not caring, of not feeling? I sometimes think that there's more potential for redemption in pain than in not feeling anything at all. Frank, the priest at St. Stephen's talked on Sunday about how death, in the sense of something that we should oppose and work against (if indeed it is something that we should be against - that I'm still not so sure about, but I think his explanation is better than others) isn't the thing that happens when our eyes close forever - that is in fact just a part of the human experience. Rather, death is anything that keeps us from the fullness of life (or something like that - he was likely more eloquent). Anyway - a "death" that's something like depression just seems to me so much harder to even touch. I'm not necessarily in the midst of any bout of even minor depression right now, but this passage just caused me to reflect on personal past experiences, in which I remember pain and crying being such a comfort - having the energy to grope, the energy to reach down into the depths and face "stuff" - is so much more hopeful and full of life than walking about through the motions of life listlessly and without purpose.