I’m no ostrich.

I see the news from time to time, and I sense and understand the despair that so many people are feeling about our country and the future of Congress.

There is the pandemic and the new congress coming next year and the collapse of Joe Biden and the moral drama of Christianity and the corruption of the Supreme Court, and the Christian Nationalist insurrection, etc.

And yes,  there is also the unpredictable spectacle of our very own Mad Dracula King, who cannot be killed by mortals or undone by scandal or lies.

Enough. You get the idea

I’m sure everybody gets it. I feel it too. It changed my life and made me a better human.

I’ve been using my silent and contemplation hour to think about how best to get through the next few years and stay positive and grounded and avoid being consumed by anger, fear, or argument.

A promising response is coming together for me, and I wanted to share it, in case it is helpful to others. I don’t tell other people what to do, but I do share what I am learning. Take it or leave it.

First of all, doing good is an antidote to despair. This is my therapy and my strength. Today I got a phone call from Folasade, the Bishop Maginn student whose family came to America from Nigeria.

I sent her a laptop computer, courtesy of the Army Of Good,  so she could begin preparing to apply to college.

She called to thank me for the gift. “This means so much to me; it will make a huge difference in my life,” she said, while I felt like tearing up thinking of her typing all those applications online. Her happiness and gratitude were infectious and uplifting.

How can I feel anything but good after a call like that?  It is the very antithesis of despairing. This morning, I dropped off hundreds of dollars of shampoo, body wash, and conditioner to the Mansion residents, who deserve to look good and feel clean. What a high.

I pass this call along to the people who donated money so that Folasade could get her laptop and the Mansion residents their shampoo; for those who gave, I hope it quells your despair as well.  Doing good can do that, as Jesus preached from the Mount.

But I suspect it’s not enough in our over-heated world.

To navigate the coming storms in a positive and meaningful way I have to once again learn to think differently and open myself to some creative soul changes. I see that life is all about giving birth to myself over and over again, not just the time I came out of the womb.

Thomas Merton, my partner in contemplation and meditation, got me started on what I believe is a promising path. I’ve been on the path for years.

Merton wrote a chapter called “Humility Against Despair” in his book The New Seeds Of Contemplation,  and it was the thinking I was looking for.

“Despair,” wrote Merton, “is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.” He thought despair was the hallmark of self-pity, and there is something to that.

Speaking poorly of my life and pitying it is neither healthy nor useful.

‘Despair exists in every man or woman,” Merton wrote, “because in all of us, there is a pride that vegetated and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our resources fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and despair.”

A six-year-old girl told me once that she wasn’t crying too much over the death of her pet chicken, “because now I will have a chance to love another chicken just as much or more.”  She had not yet picked up that deep trait in adults: feeling sorry for ourselves when we lost something we care about or “fail” in some other way.

That lesson still sticks in my mind; I think of it every time one of my dogs dies.

She taught me that it is better to love a dog than mourn one. And to be grateful that I can love a dog any time I wish.

That, I believe, was a taste of humility, the antithesis of despair. Death and sickness are painful, often tragic. They are also life, the deal we’re offered when we came into the world. No one is spared loss or pain in our world. It is perhaps the one thing that can never divide us because it is one of the very few common experiences for human beings on our planet.

A genuinely humble man or woman, says Merton, does not despair because, in the humble man, there is no longer any such thing as self-pity, which is despair’s first cousin and loving partner. In a nation of victims, humility is increasingly rare.

When our expectations are unrealistic, too high, dictated by others, we are almost assuring despair. No human can live a life without challenge, suffering, and disappointment. For reasons beyond me, we were built that way and meant to be that way.

The spiritual masters say it is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life.

Humility accepts our powerlessness and frailty, and the sometimes very difficult but inevitable realities of our lives.

When we think we can have it all, and should, we are setting ourselves up for pain – in life, love, work, or politics. The true peace of mind, I believe, comes from faith, not desire or success.

Lying helpless in a hospital operating room, waiting for my heart to be removed and re-built, I felt a surprising wave of gratitude wash over me. I had just become to woe-is-me.

But a different feeling washed over me. Gratitude.

This operation would make me better, healthier, able to return to my life and live it. No pity, I thought, no anger or grievance. I do not speak poorly of my life, my body, my health,  my heart. I am not so important or powerful that I can avoid the universal human story.

We all get sick and die. For me, that was the beginning of humility, that is what Merton is writing about. For an arrogant egotist like myself, this is a hard and long road to take.

Faith and humility are inseparable,  faith is the mother of hope and strength.

In humility, selfishness and self-absorption begin to disappear, and the soul no longer lives only for itself and its idea of happiness. The soul lives for life and purpose and meaning, not an exemption from the Gods for disappointment and struggle. Out in the real world, there is no pass to a perfect life.

For most of my life, I  thought the point of life was to be prosperous and happy and always healthy, and in so believing, I was nearly doomed to a lifetime of shock, fear, and disappointment. In a strange way, I welcome disappointment and some sadness, it reminds me that I am human, and the spiritual challenge is how to respond to pain and loss, not how to avoid it.

Happiness and contemplative revelation are not achieved by accumulating glorious hopes and expectations and visions or by practicing what the prophets called heroic fortifications.

When we deny the real pain and struggle and disappointment, we deny life itself. This is what I saw in contemplation and silence.

Everywhere I look, I see people and institutions that have lost their faith, along with their illusions. What a challenge for me. The next few years are going to bring me many things I don’t want or like. I will sometimes be frightened, angry, and yes, despairing.

I need to change the way I think and adjust to the new reality, whatever it is.

I get to define my life, no one outside of me can keep me in despair. They are not that powerful, just as I am not that powerful.

What people called “faith,” it seems,  was a grand illusion because they have no genuine faith to sustain them when they fail to meet their expectations. I don’t know a human who has not faced defeat or loss of expectations. That perfect life is nothing but a human fantasy, a marketing scam,  advanced to get us to seek money and spent it all of our lives.

I could no longer comfort myself, reassure myself with most of the things I found reassuring when I was young and before I had seen so much of life. For me, struggle and pain seemed a betrayal, wasn’t that precisely what my God and faith were supposed to keep me from?

“If we are not humble,” wrote Merton, “we tend to demand that faith must also bring with it good health, peace of mind, good luck, success in business, popularity, world peace, and every other good thing. We can imagine…But they are not important compared with faith, which is essential. If we insist on other things as the price of our belonging, we tend by that very fact to undermine our own belief.”

And that’s the trap. Misery comes from wanting and expecting too much, not from failing to get it.

I am not despairing for the future, certainly not over politics or culture.

I can like politicians or not, support them or not, but faith, and thus despair, cannot come from them. Confidence comes from the deepest parts of me, so does faith and hope, both of which sustain me, not politicians.

They seek our money, but they don’t get our souls in return.

Faith is not about getting what you want. It’s about accepting who you are.

A humble man is not afraid of failure and doesn’t succumb to despair.

The truly humble man is not afraid of anything, even of himself, since perfect humility or perfection in any way requires the power of a God, and I am no God.

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Humility: the quality or state of not thinking you are better than other people: the quality or state of being humble. Freedom from pride or arrogance. – The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.