But then, anyone who actually knows me will know that I (and this blog) are rarely the place to go to for that.
However, this is NOT a post of unmitigated misery, hopelessness and despair. Indeed it is a actually a plea for an antidote to that.
It does however come out of one of my periodic low moods... The causes of this are partly biological but also a function of circumstance, both personal AND looking at a society and world that is not in fine fettle.
Given my tendency to focus on the negative, that could result in despair and cynicism. I am not optimistic, but like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "I am a prisoner of hope."
Which is why the titular word of this blog appeals to me. Throughout lockdown one of my "sanity-saving" discoveries was the "Something Rhymes with Purple" podcast by Countdown's Susie Dent and name-dropper-in-chief Gyles Brandreth. In that, particularly through and in the wake of lockdown, Susie has championed this word "Respair" indeed in an article in the Guardian from Boxing Day 2021 she says "I mention it all the time, because I’m determined to bring it back. Or bring it anywhere in fact, for it never really enjoyed more than a day in the sun. “Respair” has just one record next to it in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1525, but its definition is sublime. Respair is fresh hope; a recovery from despair."
We as Christians should be harbingers of hope and respair.
But over the past couple of months I have had difficulty with some conversations that have come across, to me, as reflecting a somewhat glib/superficial spirituality that sees hope and faith as a Romans 8: 28 belief that "God works all things together for good..." FULL STOP... ignoring the potential difficulties on the journey...
I expressed this in different forms in two meetings recently. In the first one I spoke of my personal circumstances, and a colleague kindly asked whether I wanted the group to pray with me...
I turned down the offer, asking them top pray "for me" instead as I left...
In the second I was reflecting more on the church and society as a whole in Northern Ireland and the need for the church to experience and offer "respair". One participant's immediate response was that they said they wanted to invite others to come and "pray over me." Thankfully they didn't as I might have had to leave that meeting too...
Because in both cases the immediate offer to pray, and particularly the second image of inviting others to "pray over" me, made me feel, first that they felt I needed some form of "deliverance ministry" or "exorcism", and second, that they weren't really listening... Or willing to sit with me in that awkward period of honest bleakness.
Which is one of the reasons why I am Glad that Corrymeela and others are inviting us again to a Service of Lament in St. Anne's Belfast Cathedral on the (poorly observed) Day of Reflection here in Northern Ireland, 21st June, at 11.30am, seeking courage to remember the past and hope for the future. Might I also suggest that we also need a sense of reality for where we are in the present...
A number of the tools in my mental health toolkit that help me address my periods of low mood, are those that foster what has come to be known as "mindfulness"... And part of that is the ability to sit with the mess rather than rushing to sort it all out or expecting someone else to magically sort it out for us...
If we are to know "respair" it must be founded in an acceptance of reality...
Allied with a refusal to accept that it always has to be that way...
That is a key element of hope...
Shalom
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