A Psalm (or, I see a Darkness, or, Bono vs. Thom)

The other night Jess asked me when I wanted to sit down and talk about our New Year's Resolutions. I mumbled something about this weekend, and hoped she would forget about the subject. Before we went to bed an hour later she asked me why I had seemed bothered by her question, and reminded me that I had been the one to suggest we have such a discussion just last week. I had forgotten.

I perceive life through bipolar eyes. Thus far it has been a mountainous journey, with its optimistic summits characterized by intense motivation to change, to live up to my ideals, to improve myself and to contribute to the good in this world, to find Bono inspiring rather than hopelessly delusional. These periods of optimism have always been violently ripped apart by the reality of the deep, sunless valleys between. After the summit there is always the steadily increasing sense of hopelessness that inexorably marches my psyche into a deep depression (the sort that inevitably arises from such a precipitous loss of hope). Perhaps this is a needed reality check, with the reality being that mountain peaks just allow for a deceptively peaceful panorama of the world beneath. Maybe the problem isn't so much the depression but the preceding high.

Are you such a dreamer?
To put the world to rights?
I'll stay home forever
Where two & two always
makes up five

During such intervening times I am overwhelmed by the sense that most of my goals are as empty and unreachable as George W. Bush's vision for Iraq (or, a desert mirage). The reality seems to be that I never really change. That for all my ideals and hopes, the very core of my being appears to be essentially immutable. That no matter how badly I want two and two to add up to five, the reality is that it is always just four. This despair is more than just some existential personal battle. It is not just me being down on myself. It emerges every bit as much from my observation of the world around me. It is not just me that doesn't change. People don't change. Or when they do, it's the exception, on offense to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And of course, the whole pattern of our existence is indelibly marked not just by personal failures, but by the overarching travesties of war, poverty, disease, environmental destruction, etc.

What will grow crooked
You can't make straight
It's the price that you've
got to pay
. . .

People get crushed like
biscuit crumbs
And laid down in the bitumen
You have tried your best
to please everyone
But it just isn't happening

And that is fucked up
this is fucked up

You cannot kickstart
a dead horse
You just cross yourself
and walk away

And yet this pervading despondence is antithetical to the faith that I claim, which is steeped in the concept of hope and revels in the possibility of change. While it by no means denies the reality of what it is like to be human (e.g., what I have written of above), at its very core Christianity is about God intervening in the world and creating the possibility of renewal. It is about God "kick-starting" a dead horse. Somehow, despite all I have written above, I believe this. Some days it feels as if I have no choice but to believe, like I've been somehow hardwired to think in terms of this faith. Others (perhaps most), it feels like a very deliberate decision that I must make, so that every morning I must wake up and choose to believe that God is at work in me and in the world around me. Because a lot of days it just doesn't seem true.

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist

Take this mouth
So quick to criticize
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh
All this pain before the child is born
Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn
(the sun is coming up . . . )
Yahweh
Tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?

Lyrical credits to (respectively) 1.) Radiohead "2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm)" (Hail to the Thief) 2.) Thom Yorke, "Black Swan" (The Eraser) 3.) U2 "Yahweh" (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb)