Liminal time and Real Church

I’ve been depressed recently. Can you tell? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t qualify as clinical depression. My low moods come and go. But I have been more down than up.

I don’t want to inflict too many depressed blogs on my handful of readers, just like I don’t like to talk much to anybody when I feel down. I prefer to go silent. But writing often helps and besides, I have always found other people’s honest writing helpful to me no matter what the topic, no matter whether I identify or not. So let me get a little clinical here and describe my symptoms and the suspected causes.

I’ve been crashing in the middle of the week when Vic is away in Chicago. I don’t exactly depend on him for happiness but having him around, quiet as he is, keeps the gloom at bay. I have someone else to focus on. I have appearances to keep up. I can’t just lie down and be sad. If I did, I’d have to explain myself and that would be too much bother. And it really does help to have to pretend to be ok. You can talk yourself into a lot, good and bad. Self-pity is self-perpetuating.

I’ve been wondering whether this down time is a response to my December health crisis. If so, it is not a conscious one. Thinking about that doesn’t scare me or make me feel vulnerable. There is an indirect connection to that event, however. It was truly life-changing.

I have written before that it left me impatient with a lot of things, such as having to handle logistics and multitasking. It also left me impatient with doing large parts of my beloved, longtime part time job. I simply can’t stand to write grant proposals and reports any more. I also became aware that I see lots of things that I should be doing, or that could be done in my work, and I have no interest in doing them.

I decided that this plum job should go now to someone who would really treasure it as I once did. And so I gave notice. And we immediately found someone eager and qualified to do a large part of my job probably better than I ever did it, ways to redistribute other responsibilities on staff, and I will probably keep doing a few things I love to do. This all happened, remarkably, within a week.

I don’t think I gave notice because I am depressed. Nor do I think that giving notice has made me depressed. The health crisis simply made me focus on what I no longer want to do—what no longer serves me well, and ways I no longer serve well.

It was less successful in showing me what I want to do over the next phase of my life. I can figure out the day to day, but when I think about the future I draw a blank and that, dear friends, is a little scary. This, I believe, is a major source of my recurring low moods.

Yesterday at church I received surprising gifts. First, the service of this fourth Sunday in Lent ended with the offer of anointing with oil for healing. I was among the first to line up at the altar. Then I found myself speaking of my situation in the second-hour session I’ve been attending called “standing on sacred ground.” One friend in this small group, Deanna, named my situation as “liminal.” I am indeed in the place of the in-between, the unknown, the changing, and it is a vulnerable place to be. And then Deanna and her husband, who are Zero Balancing practitioners, invited Vic and me to lunch and a session of this energy and bodywork. I found it restorative, cleansing, and, yes, balancing.

When things come together like this I do feel like I am on sacred ground, and sometimes it even happens in church. My friends and I have a term for this. We call it Real Church.

Today I feel tired but in a good way. Like things are shifting and will be shifting for some time to come, but I don’t have to worry about where they will come out.