in the airport in phoenix, arizona... and i dont know what it is about hot states that make them so cold indoors... its as if they enjoy jumping from extreme to extreme...
read a bit more of palmer's "let your life speak" on the flight... i want to read it slowly because there is so much to really think about on each page, yet the pages turn themselves to quickly... perhaps this inspiration is so refreshing that i dont want the moment to end...
his mentor/friend was henri nouwen, the late mystic who devoted his life to reconciling his humanity with his divinity... coming to grips in his later years by serving full-time in a home for the mentally challenged, where he was no one but henri... i love henri nouwen's books, or at least the couple a few that i have read... i need to read more of them...
at any rate, palmer writes the following words as he looks back on his seasons in life that were marked by clinical depression...
"...depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes - and when we pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work."
simple thoughts, but so heavy to me... it defines me, how i want to figure things out in order to live instead of living within the things... nouwen had a phrase of "living the question" as opposed to always seeking answers... beautiful...
here is another thought of his... regarding the beauty in sinking downward in the hell of depression...
"...embrace this descent into hell as a journey toward selfhood - and a journey toward God."
he goes on to refer to tillich's description of god as the "ground of being"... making the connection with our descent into our own failings and successes, our own darkness and light, that these can lead us downward towards god... okay, its not coming to me right now in my own words very well, so ill close with palmers again...
"I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction as everything else that I valued: up. I had to be forced...to understand that the way to God is not up but down."
and i could go on to quote the whole friggin book, but i wont...
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