In the Cloud

It’s been a long time since I last had the experience of not wanting to get up for several mornings. I feel ashamed of it, because so many of my lovely friends battle illness and disability and my issues are petty in comparison: I know that, although it’s related to external circumstances, it’s not proportionate to them. I don’t justify the feeling, I just recognise it as a fact.

Metropolitan Anthony said that when he found himself in the cloud, he would open his letters and not even attempt to do anything more active (and, as his biographer Gillian Crow pointed out, that didn’t mean he actually read them); and that if he couldn’t face that, he would read; and that if he couldn’t even read, he would clean his room. I find at these times that even cleaning requires effort. At the moment I’m preparing for a party at the end of the month and want to clean the whole house more thoroughly than usual, and this afternoon intended to do one bit of my unrealistically vast kitchen: at several points in that process I had absolutely to force myself to carry on with it, the main impetus coming from the thought that I couldn’t leave it half-done. What I want to do is sleep, because sleep seems more rewarding than wakefulness.

It is of course a very quiet season in the life of Swanvale Halt parish at present and there have been times recently when I sit and think what I could usefully do next. Perhaps I ought to embrace this as an opportunity and not try to do anything in particular.

This morning would have been the annual open-air ecumenical service at Hornington, had the rain not forced a retreat into the Baptist Church. The worship songs were dull (even discounting for my disaffection, I think they genuinely were) and there was nothing to break through my mood. I did all I could to prevent my indifference hardening into cynicism. There was the opportunity to ‘receive prayer’ in a side room afterwards, and I thought I might do that: just tell whoever it was that I was bare and dry, and hope that it might be a means of God doing something with me. But when I looked through the door, the three Baptist Church members offering prayer were seated in a semicircle talking to each other. I didn’t think I could expose myself to that. I couldn’t walk all that way across the carpeted floor to that group of assessing faces (What’s he doing here?), so I went home instead. As an ordained person I’m used to brazening it out, and I couldn’t face it: what must anyone else feel like?

And so I remain in the cloud for now. It seems that when I have something liturgical to do I can pretend it’s not there – something else takes over, the Holy Spirit, perhaps. That’s a comfort. But I’m not pushing it, in case it breaks.