An Irritated Melancholy

By Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI 

We live in a world where, as Karl Rahner says, our lives are always an unfinished symphony. In this life there is no final fulfillment. Mostly we are unconscious of that, and also unaware this creates a certain gap inside us that makes us grasp greedily at life.

But certain things can help bring this to our consciousness, for example, poetry and music. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, 1821-1867, a French poet, essayist, and art critic, once said this of poetry and music: “It is both by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendor beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the edge of the eyes, these tears are not  the proof of an excess of enjoyment, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect and which we would like to seize immediately, on this earth, a revealed paradise.”

Wow! What a different language! Poetry and music as irritating our melancholy in a way that makes us aware of the limits of our lives, even as they simultaneously trigger a sense of what heaven will be, and how we would like to be there right now.

Baudelaire uses the word “melancholy” to name what we feel because of this gap in our lives, but is that the best word for what we’re feeling? Is it melancholy? Is it sadness? Or might it be better named? Indeed, it has been given many names.

St. Augustine, for instance, would not name it as a sadness, but as longing, an aching, a restlessness. As he puts it in his famous dictum: You have made us for yourself Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. That’s its signature expression. But there are others.

A number of French spiritual writers call it a disquiet, a dis-ease; the biblical writer Qoheleth calls it a timelessness inside us that perpetually puts us out of sync with natural rhythms of time; the young Anne Frank, writing in her diary, simply named it an energy that made her want to jump out of her own skin and want to be everywhere all at once; the wise old Ruth Burrows called it “tortured complexity”; the scientist/mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called it “an irresistible, hallowing, which makes everyone cry out: ‘Lord, make us one’”; and Frederick Buechner called it “a subterranean presence”  beneath the surface that’s  not like a brass band announcing itself, but is something which comes and touches and strikes in ways that leaves us free to either not even notice it or to draw back from it.

What’s its origin? Where does this come from? It is, as St. Augustine says, the ache that tells us that we are made for God and that this world is not our final home. But this is not inside us as a sadness, a melancholy, or a darkness. The opposite. It’s inside us as an excess of energy, an excess of light, a luminosity.

This is its origin: As Christians, we believe we are made in the image and likeness of God. However, too often we imagine this simplistically as some beautiful icon stamped inside our soul rather than as divine fire, a touch of infinity, an insatiable godly energy in us that lets us know we are more than our biology and more than the physics of this world. It also assures we will never find full consummation in this world. We are built for more.

Now this can be experienced as a sadness, as a melancholy, but paradoxically that’s because its excessive light makes for a dark shadow. When we speak of the shadow inside us with which we are frightened to engage, it’s really our luminosity, the image of God inside us, we are talking about. We’re afraid of the godly light inside us. It’s too much to cope with.

The poet Marianne Williamson captures this in her poem Our Deepest Fear:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

This is not exactly a sadness, but it is indeed an irritated melancholy that makes us aware of just how much light there’s inside us.

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Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher, and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website  www.ronrolheiser.com. He is now on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser

Find Fr. Rolheiser’s past columns online, along with an explanation for the column’s title “In Exile”: RonRolheiser.com/ARCHIVE