Acquainted with the Night

My friend and colleague Rev. Dr. Kathy Hurt has recently published a moving memoir about her own personal struggles with depression and also the ways she has met with others who struggle through her ministry work. I welcome her thoughts here and hope you might find meaning for your own struggles through her work; The book is Acquainted with the Night and is available through Amazon kindle.

     Ever since I encountered the possibility of telling one’s life story in various ways as a first year seminary student, when I was frequently writing my life story as part of assignments and scholarship applications, and reading in the theological work John Dunne that life stories can be told as stories of deeds, of events, of choices, and of meanings, I have considered my own life as an unfolding story and wondered at what the meaning of this life might be.  At times, I have concluded my life was a story of tragedy, replete with failures, unwise choices, and suffering; at other times, I would believe my life story was an account of restoration and redemption; still other times, I might have insisted my life story told of blessings and remarkable moments of grace.  Ultimately, I believe all such perspectives were true, though only partially true.  A life story is being written until one draws a last breath.  To conclude before that last breath exactly what the story was, what it meant, is probably premature.

     Nonetheless, I recently published a life story, entitled Acquainted with the Night, the second time I have done so, that endeavors to discover meaning in the times I lived in despair.  I want to believe that our lives are not random, that we do not simply ping pong from event to relationship to action to experience in a way that has no purpose.  Yet I do not believe we live like trains running down a track that has already been laid down for us to follow, set by genes in us or by some master divinity who prescribes a plan for each person to live out or by some implacable force called fate.  Because it can be tempting to try to dismiss the darkness in life as the result of sin or stupidity or bad genes, I determined to write my life story with the intent of finding what sort of deeper currents were at work in the years I most wanted not to be living.  That effort of course is rooted in the assumption that the suffering we endure holds meaning for us provided we can be present to it and not too quick to try and make it go away or deny it.

     Our culture tells us constantly that if we are smart, if we try hard enough, we can have whatever life we desire (including a life amazingly devoid of struggle or pain).  That message may sometimes serve us well and motivate us to dig in and keep going.  But when nothing we do works, when suffering strikes, the same message is useless or even pernicious.  Ultimately, we have little control over what comes our way.  What we may be able to control is how we understand what comes our way—and even that understanding may not take us far given how much of our experience is simply a mystery.

     I make no claim to having reached some overarching understanding of the dark times of my life.  I also make no claim to never wishing those dark times had not happened, for suffering is never desirable or good.  What I hope to claim, however tentatively, is that my own suffering, the suffering any of us might have to endure, may bring its own insights that, in time, enrich our lives and deepen our capacity for compassion.  Like trees with trunks twisted into unusual shapes by storms, like rocks lined and smoothed after being tumbled in river currents and pressed by the forces of gravity, any of us may be shaped by suffering into persons who are in time unique, precious, and powerful.