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15 | (continued) I know now that I’ve always wanted to believe in God with my whole mind, but there are regions thereof which have been trained to veto the notion every time it’s raised—as they did then, and as they still do. That remark which I imagined myself making in so egocentric a venue was a knowingly ephemeral, fragmentary prayer for a psychic wholeness that inevitably eludes us all, regardless of the material circumstances of our lives. I wish I could add to my allotted span of life the hundreds of nights I’ve spent agonizing over this. Genuinely chronic anxiety/depression is no mere state of mind—it is not a brief, vagrant mood caused by some misfortune; that is known as situational depression. For me, the chronic form can give rise to a malignant and irrefutable Ideology that colours all that I encounter. Never have I been so astonished as by the ideational content of what I had long thought of as a passing spasm of simple sadness. The reality and the popular image of true Depression have almost nothing in common; they bear no comparison whatsoever.
If this too is part of God’s intention, is it unreasonable of me to expect that in more than sixty years I might have been given a somewhat clearer idea as to the use I am to make of such a gift? Surely it cannot be—can it?—for such puzzled utterances as these? What kind of a God are we dreaming about? |
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Some people will of course insist that God clearly wishes this to be so. But here is not the place, nor am I the man, to enter upon a theological discourse. I simply wish that the workings of my brain could be less orderly and more humane. But even this complaint, which I’ve often expressed, seems but a childish lamentation over the fact that I do not possess an ordinary mind.|
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