Deserts

We have just spent time considering desert life in Sunday's readings. That inevitable bleak, awfulness that seems to invade everyone's life at some point. Like Jesus we are often driven into the desert but I go unwillingly and with great resistance. For this desert place of desolation is familiar to me as the hair on my head.

I reflect today that for all its familiarity, for all the well known ache of it it is not something I ever talk about.

Why?

It seems to me that if you are driven to despair by an addiction to drugs or by anorexia or by an abusive husband or cancer that these are topics that can be spoken about and which will as often as not receive a sympathetic hearing. But when your particular desert leads down the road to self destruction, well then. Perhaps not always. I am not talking about that fleeting suicidal fantasy that a person might experience but rather that well planned and carefully thought out option that is amongst the deck of cards that I hold as a response to any given situation on any given day.

I recall one deep dark night a couple of years ago searching blogs on suicide. There were remarkably few. Curious I plugged in "sexual abuse" and was overwhelmed by the mass of choice out there. By some remarkable circumstance I landed on Gannet Girl's blog "Desert Year", written about her response to the death by suicide of her beautiful son. I began to learn what suicide might do to others, not something that had occurred to me then. I learned that I am not alone in these self destructive feelings and began to chart their origin with in me, in the hopes of heading the downward slide off before it got really dangerous.

Now it occurs to me that this painful process might be made easier if I had someone else's experience to add to my own. And perhaps that I might feel less of an outcast.