The Slope through Darkness

The great world's altar stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I came home from work one evening a few years ago and realized that I had gone flat. Just a blue Monday, I thought, or a bad case of the blahs. Surely a good night's sleep would set things right. But I was wrong.

During the days that followed I descended into a very dark place. I woke up morning after morning in the grip of melancholy, struggling to pull myself out of my gloom. I felt as if I were clinging to the side of a bottomless pit, my handholds precarious, afraid to move for fear I would plunge into a dark abyss.

Work became painful duty, a desperate effort. People with problems were a bother; friends with sunny, cheerful dispositions were a special trial. I wanted to get away from everything and everyone — take early retirement, build a cabin in the woods, or get a permanent job in a lighthouse. I cared for nothing. I enjoyed nothing. I had nothing to live for, and I could think of nothing for which I was willing to die.

Oh, there were flashes of delight — occasions that led me to think that I might be out of the doldrums, but then I would slip again into the old groove of my misery. Each time I moved closer to despair. I could deal with the dreariness; it was the hope that was hardest to bear.

Friends suggested that my joyless state was the result of stresses, losses, or that I was getting a little long in the tooth — but so what? What could I do? I sought good counsel. I read good books. But like Al Capp's Joe Btfsplk, I couldn't get out from under my cloud. Nothing displaced the darkness. Every day was a new shade of blue.

Then one morning something triggered the memory of an old poem — the Twenty-Third Psalm — and the lyrics of that work became my safety line. I awakened morning by morning and seized on its words. I stuck to them like a limpet, reciting the words, reflecting on them, proclaiming them to myself. The Twenty-Third Psalm became my creed.

One spring morning, not long ago, I woke up; the clouds had dispersed and the sun was beginning to shine. I don't know what brought me out of the darkness, but one thing I do know: My melancholy wasn't wasted. It was part of the good that God had determined to do for me. In the end, I could begin to say with Job, "My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you" (Job 42:5).

What follows are some of the glimpses of God that came my way — a stream of thoughts emanating from the journal I kept during my Dark Age and my subsequent memories and musings. I share them with you in the hope that they will lead you to take another look at this old poem and at that Great Shepherd of the Sheep — the only good shepherd worthy of the name.

A Psalm of David

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named "spiritual" life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive, rank andsavage one, and I revere them both.

Henry David Thoreau

Michelangelo's marble statue of David stands today in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy eighteen feet tall.

Michelangelo was right to sculpt David with such immensity: He was a giant of a man, combining in himself the military genius of Alexander the Great, the political savvy of Abraham Lincoln, the musical talent of Beethoven, the literary skill of Shakespeare, and the hand-eye coordination of Joe Montana.

But the real measure of David's magnitude was his obsession with God: "One thing I ask of the Lord," he wrote. "This is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple" (Psalm 27:4). He was a man who was preoccupied with the love of God.

Yet, there was that other obsession: David was often consumed by pride, ambition, and lust. Capable of any sin and culpable of many, he frequently gave in to sudden, careless passion and that more deadly device — deliberate and determined evil.

That was David — eaten by lust and by the love of God. His dual obsessions make him familiar to me. He's my kind of man! More importantly, he was God's kind of man as well: "A man after his own heart" is the way God put it (i Samuel 13:14). Ah, the fools God chooses!

Michelangelo took almost four years to finish his statue of David. The task was difficult because he was working with a piece of flawed marble. The block had been damaged when it was removed from the quarry.

So it was with David. He was flawed in his origins, abused as a child, left all alone, and nearly ruined. The world never met his needs.

But God did. He saw that lonely, ragged, love-starved boy as no one else did and set out to shape him into the man He envisioned David to be. It was hard work because David was deeply flawed, but God never gave up until the deed was done. Out of that labor, David's Twenty-Third Psalm was born.

Some say the psalm was one of David's first efforts, composed while he was still a youth. But I disagree. Though the poem enshrines the memories and metaphors of David's early years, it is the thoughts of someone nearer the end of life than the beginning. Only a mature mind can sort out the complexities of life and fix on the things that matter. Only an old soul knows that very few things are necessary — actually only one.

"Wanting"

That is the land of lost content.

Alfred Edward Housman

In the movie ClTY SLICKERS, three New York men head for the Old West hoping to find that one thing that satisfies.

The main character is Mitch Robbins, a wisecracking, thirty-nine-year-old advertising salesman who had "lost his smile." Mitch had a lot going for him — a charming wife, two handsome children, a spacious apartment on Roosevelt Island, two good buddies, and a quirky sense of humor. But the joy had gone out of his life. His birthdays, which used to bring him such happiness, now filled him only with sadness, each one reminding him that he still had not found out what life was for.

Mitch's two friends, Ed and Phil, shared his malaise and dreamed up the idea of joining a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado. (The year before they had run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.) The Old West seemed just the right place to shake off their unhappiness.

When the three men got to the ranch they were greeted by the last of the Marlboro Men, a leathery old cowboy named Curly, whom Robbins characterized as "a saddle bag with eyes." Under Curly's stern...