This week, especially this weekend, I’ve slipped into a period of serious contemplation and medication; several days of quiet, self-awareness, and meditation.

I fear moving past my own life too quickly and missing it simultaneously. My mind races; I need to stop sometimes and take stock.  This is what Maria and I are doing this weekend.

I’ve been reading three or four or five different spiritual writers, all favorites of mine – Nouwen,  Merton, Mary Oliver, Anne Lamott, St. Augustine, Parker Palmer.

Merton is the spiritual guide I lean on the most, but reading the others also gives me a sense of specific themes and ideas that stand out.

One is the importance and value of humility. Anne Lamott writes powerfully about the meaning of mercy, and Mary Oliver’s poems are almost always profoundly spiritual and touching. All the great thinkers say humility is the pathway to hope and joy.

I know many people who are feeling despair now, which made me pay special attention to it.

The prophets consider despair to be the absolute extreme of self-love.

We come to despair when we turn our back on the idea of asking for or receiving help from anyone else in order to feast on the awful luxury and addiction of knowing ourselves to be lost.

The addicts of anxiety, drugs, haters, and alcoholics have one thing in common.

They just want one more panic attack, pill, or drink. They just need something new to hate. They are strangers to humility.

They live in or with despair.

Only the strongest and most fortunate – the ones who finally accept their helplessness and accept help – break away.

Despair is, for me, the complete opposite of faith and hope, without which none of us can live peacefully.

“But a man who is truly humble,” writes Merton, “cannot despair because, in the humble person, there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.”

Amen to that.

Gandhi, who often struggled with despair in his long struggle to force the British out of India, often wrote about it:

“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”

I do think of it.

Gandhi speaks the truth. Love is the most powerful of human weapons and tools.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that hope is born when all is forlorn. That is my experience.

Merton argued that it is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power and relevance to spiritual life.

“Humility is the answer to all of the great problems of the life and the soul,” he says. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins, and peace of mind is the enemy of despair.

In my life, despair began to end when I acknowledged my faults and shortcomings and learned to share my vulnerability. To say I had failed and couldn’t do it by myself. That took a very long time.

Despair is a habit, an addiction, a hiding place. When I despair, I believe there is no help, and I cling to my unhappiness and fear. When I admit my helplessness and seek help, despair lifts like a fog, and hope and promise come out of hiding.

And my life moves forward.

Pride is the best friend of humility in my experience; this is when I choose self-pity and my importance to be above help or understanding from a God, a friend, a lover, or a partner.

Because what is despair, really, but the growth of pride so great and so unyielding that we chose the misery of self-damnation rather than accept happiness from accepting that we can’t live perfect lives or fulfill our chosen destinies all by ourselves?

We need help. We need faith. We need to believe in something other than ourselves.

Because my resources inevitability failed me, as they inevitably fail all of us at one point or another, I was often subject to depression and despair. I couldn’t accept this as an unavoidable part of living, of being human. It couldn’t be happening to me.

I didn’t know or think it happens to everyone at one point or another.

It is only the sociopath or the hater who never feels despair, said Freud, because they are incapable of hope or unable to be vulnerable. They never despair because they never feel. They are missing something in their soul.

Discomfort is at the heart of everything they do. They can’t know happiness or peace or true love.

But losing is a part of life; it is hell to deny that.

If we were incapable of humility, wrote Augustine, we would be incapable of hope and joy because humility alone can overcome the self-centeredness and self-pity that makes happiness and hope impossible.

For me, despair is a kind of spiritual poverty, emptiness, misery, and total abandonment of the mystical life.

I don’t wish ever to go back there.