When I heard my friend’s confession that he needed to give up despair for Lent, I tried my best to listen. He sounded pretty desperate. I tried to give up the temptation to fix the problem. Even then, I wondered aloud — after listening for what seemed like a long time — about the distinction between feelings of depression and the mental choice to despair about the feelings. That’s when he almost exploded with rage.
“It’s despair, dammit! Don’t sugarcoat it! Don’t confuse it with anything else! Here we go again with another humanitarian catastrophe because an angry, nervous bully throws his weight around with modern military might….” He went on for quite a while about the Ukraine crisis, focused on the blood and guts spilled by bullets and bombs, like the thrust of a patriarch using his newest adult toys to get his unconscious child’s way.
“Brings out your inner bully — that angry, nervous side of you.”
“I guess so, huh? Yeah, and I’m so glad I have my friend to psychoanalyze me and help me sort it out.”
“Stop the sarcasm. I see it in you because I’m feeling it in myself.”
My friend grew up in a Quaker family. For decades, into his sixties, he kept hope for peace by praying the Lord’s Prayer, keeping ties to his Quaker Meeting, cultivating a meditation practice individually during the week, then feeling the power of group meditation on Sundays. He served on the national board of the American Friends Service Committee. He lobbied with the Friends Committee on National Legislation which eventually brought the 2021 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to the attention of the US Congress. When the otherwise wise Vermont delegation ignored it, he spiraled down into the clinical Depression that now engulfed him.
I shared my friend’s hope even though I disagreed with his pacifism. We’d dialogued for decades about the radical center between pacifism and militarism — nonviolent conflict management that addresses bullies as persons, inquiring about their pain, insecurities, and fear, even as they are held accountable for the impact of the harm they cause.
Now, with his illness and my own temptation to despair, I went to bed the night of the Ukraine invasion with a prayer for my own inner peace, and for the people of Ukraine now terrified by marauding tanks, missiles, and the agony of the injuries, death, and grief of friends.
I didn’t sleep well, woke up early with a dream about a reunion of college soccer friends who told me there was an extra seat at the table. Someone was missing, and somehow I was sent to find him. I found an old friend from seminary — Seamus MacIntosh — whom I awakened from a deep sleep. Seamus awakened with a bright face, thankful to see me. We talked briefly before I invited him to the table with my soccer buddies — two old sets of friends getting together by the magic of the dream.
As I awoke I pondered the appearance of Seamus in my dream. We’d been close in seminary when his bright ebullience helped me shed a depressive pall from a catastrophic divorce. But we’d lost touch after a parsonage fire in his first pastorate in Maine. Blame for ignorance about proper woodstove care and nasty cultural conflict following the fire led to his resignation. He descended into the hell of clinical Depression. I’d seem him at the Providence Zen Center, and once after that in Vermont. Attempts to reach him later were unanswered. Yet here he was in a dream years later, his bright face suggesting new recovery. When I told my Quaker friend the dream, his own face brightened.
“Your college buddies and you needed Seamus to awaken. And it’s not just Seamus who’s awakening. It’s the species. He’s like the face of a new humanity severely depressed by millennia of military trauma, awakened by a friend who needed a change.”
Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, Vt., is a member of the international ecumenical Iona Community. The Radical Center is a syndicated monthly column seeking to transcend intractable fractures in cultural and religious discourse.