Spirituality, Despair, and Rebirth

Please see Urban Monk for my guest post remembrance of 9-11-01. It relates to the theme of this post. Thanks to Albert at UM...

Daphne’s recent thoughtful review of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You on her Joyful Days blog included referencing the book’s discussion of despair. Not everyone experiences a despairing crisis of faith. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James distinguishes between “once-born” and “twice-born” types. For twice-born types the experience of our despair, in retrospect, appears integral to how we came to make our way forward.

Constructive Despair

From what I’ve experienced and read, constructive despair, so to speak, is a period of despair that is reconstructive below the surface. That is, unconscious processes somehow make use of our “down time” to do a great deal of work toward remaking our perspective – enough that eventually a breakthrough occurs and we can begin to consciously support and participate in the process.

Debilitating and Fatal Despair

Yet there are also people who don’t go through despair as a stage but remain depressed for years, decades or a lifetime. And then there are those whose despair brings them to end their lives.

Regarding suicide, I’ve often cited a quotation given by one of my professors when I was in graduate school for my counseling degree: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Depressed people tend to view their problems as events or situations that they'll never get over, when the causes of depression are generally psychological, spiritual and sometimes biological. Just the passage of time and the person’s further life experiences, sometimes with the help of therapy, would have been enough to pull them through.

What do you make of “the dark night of the soul” in its different forms? Could there be indicators that might help us distinguish potentially constructive despair from despair that appears likely to do the person more harm than good?