The Darkness is Upon Us: On Despair and Duty

We hear a lot about our culture of despair these days. Many people are noticing how pervasive things like depression, anxiety, loneliness, addition, and a general rootless, drifting apathy seem to be in the twenty-first century West. The causes are myriad and there are plenty of excellent diagnoses out there, from the technological to the social to the intellectual to the spiritual. But what is to be done? As is so often the case, the diagnosis is so much easier than the cure.

I came across two responses recently that struck me as representative of the broad options before us. The first was from author Katherine May who was a guest on a podcast called The Sacred. At one point, the conversation turned to fan mail. May never responds, she says. Too much of it is people looking for help, for advice, for therapy, for sympathy, for pastoral care, even. It’s not reasonable to expect authors to fill this role:

We are the pit canaries of a huge failure of the mental health system in our society, and of the social care system, and of community and care just breaking down. But think I feel increasingly a responsibility to show people the stuff I’m not doing, and that I can’t do, and that I can’t be expected to do…

I don’t fully know how to manage it. And I know now that I am… being called on to offer leadership. The complicated things for me is that I don’t seek that leadership… But it’s unavoidable to notice how many people are sort of seeking a flock, and are seeking a wider community to be in, but also they’re seeking the figureheads that can help them to unravel the world a bit and make sense of it for them.

Ok, so that’s one response. The second comes from Australian musician and author Nick Cave. In a recent edition of his Red Hand Files — a forum where Cave just responds, often at length and with no small amount of wisdom and candour, to the questions of his fans — he was asked about how he can possibly respond to people’s grief as much as he does. Is it cathartic for him? Therapeutic? In some way inspirational? Here’s how he responded:

I don’t find the process of replying to these letters cathartic or therapeutic, although it may well have been when I started The Red Hand Files. Neither do I find writing my replies inspirational, in the sense that it does not inspire me, for example, to write a song. Mostly I see what I do as a human duty, I feel I am playing my part in what has become an ever-expanding and robustly vulnerable community of soul-barers. In this space I have come face to face with a kind of truth – a truth that has embedded itself in my life, and which demands something of me, whether I like it or not. I don’t mean that it is some kind of burden, it is anything but, for duty is often the very thing that ultimately bears the greatest rewards. To act dutifully is to acknowledge that things matter, that things have value and are worth caring for.

The Red Hand Files have become a quietly instructive influence over the way I try to live my life, which is openly and with curiosity. They are a kind of existential condition, a means by which to navigate the world, a way to be. They have also, perplexingly, brought to light a kind of ministering impulse that I am both proud of and somewhat embarrassed by. Whatever it is that is going on here at The Red Hand Files, it is a true privilege to be a part of it and I thank you all for that. It is never more than I can handle.

Now, I want to be very careful with what I say here. I am very well aware that people have very different capacities and inclinations. Not everyone is called or gifted to do the kind of thing Nick Cave does. Katherine May is surely at least partially correct to say that it’s unreasonable to expect artists and writers to provide pastoral care to their legions of followers. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here. This is true.

And yet.

I was struck by the chasm between the nature of the two responses. May’s default is to outsource the pain of the world to “mental health system in our society.” She acknowledges that it goes beyond that. She refers to “community care” breaking down and that there is a vacuum that religion and family once filled, however inadequately. But she also clearly sees herself as doing a service to her fans by not responding to them. She is teaching them the importance of self-care, boundaries, etc.

Cave, on the other hand, wades right in. He appeals to things like “duty” and locates himself in a wider community of “soul-barers” who have a responsibility to be bear one another’s burdens and be vehicles of truth to one another. Cave obviously does not respond to every letter or request he receives, but neither does he hide behind “self-care” or “boundaries” or some other such thing. He clearly sees his pain (he has lost two sons in tragic circumstances) as something to steward with care and to perhaps be a path into healing and hope and responsibility for others.

I doubt it will surprise any to learn which approach I favour. “Mental health” is increasingly becoming a bloated and unwieldy category into which we pour all our pain and confusion and sorrow and rage and existential angst. It’s a government problem, we often seem to think. It’s something to leave in the hands of “the professionals” and “the experts.” They’ll fix it. Dumping the whole mess into the bucket of “mental health” absolves us (we think) from reckoning honestly with our spiritual poverty, our failure to attend to our families and our communities, our unwillingness to view our neighbours as in any sense people to whom we might have something like a duty.

As I was writing this post, a new song from Josh Garrels was playing my headphones. It’s called “Watchman” and it speaks to me of the importance of a faith and a hope that transcend all our despair and all our partial attempts to address it. Our duty to bear one another’s burdens is negotiated in the broader frame of a promise whose fulfillment we still wait for, a morning that has yet to finally break.

I’m waiting on Your promise
Even through the trauma that swept my friends away
The darkness is upon us
The death of saints and psalmists
But I will sing my song for You anyway

Because You’re all I have Lord, You are the way
And I’ll always love You and I will wait
Like a watchman at the gate
Waiting for morning to break