Saucier: In the absence of light

It is dark to the west.

Rain is not as much threatened as promised in the silence of the sky and the stillness of the leaves.

It is not a storm, more like nature just needs a good cry.

We’ve all had days like that, when we can’t find the sun, where a pall seems to cover it all.

The gloom is not menacing or ominous, not as if something bad is about to happen. It is in the present, something heavy and sad.

It is not depression. I know people who bear this insidious cross and the courage it takes to face a day that holds nothing but a deeper loneliness.

This is not that. That is a disease and this is more a dis-ease.

What I feel when my horizon blackens is a sadness, a sense of separation from something mysterious and deep.

It is something that I cannot describe other than the feeling of its absence.

There is no causal event. On the outside, nothing has changed. Life presents no existential challenge. Work is fine. The people around me are still accepting and supportive — a wife who loves, friends who care, and grandchildren who delight.

But in these moments, none of that seems enough.

I wonder if that is not part of the problem. I fear a danger of being too blessed, of life being too comfortable, of it all being too easy.

I can wrap myself in that world and ignore those questions that nag and nettle, disrupting my mood.

When the darkness descends, they are there in full force. Have I chosen the easy path, remaking God’s ways in the image of my own?

Do I allow the pain of others to touch me? Am I doing all I can, or just enough to make the cut?

Is my life an honest effort or a mask of who I want you to think I am?

This is not the desperation of Gethsemane, but more what drove Jesus to those places of solitude to reflect, to reconnect, and recharge.

It may be an invitation to sit in the darkness and let those questions remind me of what I have done, and what I have failed to do.

And sometimes, like the heavens above, we just need a good cry — a cry of confusion, of sorrow, of want or of surrender.

It is the prayer of the heart in the heart of darkness.