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By Root 838 0

my experience of many years before. He speaks of the depressing thought that suddenly “depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, and . . . leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.” At fifteen I had no “cell” but a small bedroom in Navy housing near Pearl Harbor (which was luxurious to me because until recently I had been sharing a room with my two younger sisters). I had no knowledge of monks, or of ascetic practice. But I had been visited by the noonday demon and, in ways I was not to become fully aware of for many years, my life was changed forever. The fear of the daily had intruded into my consciousness at a time when it could do real harm. A shy, pudgy teenager, suffering from the loneliness that so many teenagers feel, I had just become more lonely. My fearful thoughts of the future seemed so absurd I could not speak of them to anyone.

Some thirty years later, I am back in Honolulu, in fragrant Manoa Valley, not far from that school. A letter-press book has come for me in the mail, exquisitely made by a friend, full of poems I wrote during a year at St. John’s. The book, and the poems themselves, are a great gift, I know, but I can’t bring myself to open the box. After a few days, when I finally do unpack it, the book’s beauty seems remote. My mother and sister-in-law admire it—yes, it’s lovely, I say, agreeing with them. But I can’t feel it. They know this, and it troubles them. But they’re tolerant; we share the hope that I’ll soon snap out of it. Drugs, therapy, someone might suggest. The last time it got this bad I did consult with a doctor. We discussed many options, and what she suggested to me I treasure still: exercise, she said, and spiritual direction.

I have promised to go to services this Sunday, at the modest but spirited Disciples of Christ church where my brother is a pastor. I still feel half-dead but do my best to sing with the congregation. One of the verses of “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart”—“I ask no dreams, no prophet ecstasies, no sudden rending of the veil of clay, no angel visitant, no opening skies; but take the dimness of my soul away”—makes me realize that I’m praying for the first time in days, and that it’s working. The rest of that service is a giddy blur; I felt alive again, appropriately enough, on a Sunday morning. In his sermon, my brother says, “God’s language is silence; how do we translate it?” He speaks of gifts differing, gifts of the Spirit coming to each of us, for the common good. The title of the closing hymn, “There Is Sunshine in My Heart Today,” seems like icing on the cake. The melody is appropriately zippy, upbeat, the lyrics as thoroughly Protestant as the title would suggest, and I enjoy every bit of it.

When last I was home and attending church, the children’s choir sang “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” a song I remember singing as a child. I suppose I loved it then. What made their song so marvelous in the context of our worship that day was that it was followed by a reading from Jeremiah 14 that made it clear that God did not want Jeremiah for a sunbeam. Gifts differing, I suppose. And I suppose that both of the hymns that have touched me today could be labeled “pietistic,” not sufficiently concerned with the larger picture, the larger world. But it’s acedia that made my world small, a self-centered hell—“Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath once asked, anguished, in a poem—and these hymns that have released me to live in the real world again. In the context of this worship service, both hymns seem fine to me, not un-caring, not irresponsible, but merely a glad response to grace. I wonder if Christians might be permitted a certain gladness on Sunday morning. Even if the universe is mostly hydrogen atoms, and the few human beings who exist in it are continually at war with one another, even if time and space stretch out into the void. Here, in this ordinary church service, I have gained the strength to live this moment,