A Tear Party

Margaret Bauman 1/29/06

From The Anatomy of Melancholy written in 1621 by Robert Burton

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition is that transitory Melancholy, which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour,… not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being grown to a habit--(pleasant or painful), it will hardly be removed.

Sermon

The newsletter blurb for todays sermon summoned all to A Tear Party, stating,

“In the deep midwinter, let us celebrate and revel in melancholy as a means to replenish and renew ourselves”

…Revel in Melancholy?!…my toes are tingling at the thought! Sadist, you say?….not at all! But I validate the reality that only a few of you may share my delight. For some of you the idea of wallowing; isolating oneself from the noise of life to revel in despair would be insufferable and boring at best and teetering dangerously close to a chasm at worst. Why this is so relates very much to our personality make up.

I, you see am an introvert, and next to October, January is my most favorite month. I look forward to putting away the holiday music and pulling out my old british isle folk music and sea shanties. The cold, blustery day is like a call to worship for me. It is such bitter irony that for the last 15 years my occupational work in the world of accounting has denied me my annual pilgrimage into my self during this bleak time for it is fiscal year end and tax time and before I have had a chance to look up, winter is gone and spring is rearing its oh-so pretty little head!

I

But seriously, it is a well-known fact that winter is especially difficult for large numbers of us. It has been medically proven that the absence of light causes many to spiral into very real depressive interludes. Indeed, as many as one in ten people may suffer from Winter Depression diagnostically referred to as Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD. This condition is marked by decreased energy levels, depressed moods, a tendency to sleep too much, and an increased appetite --particularly for chocolate. According to Michael Ferenczi writing for the National Institute of Medical Research, there is anatomical evidence for the famed “Third Eye”. Fossil fish have the remnant of a third eye in the roof of their skull, in modern day goldfish, the third eye—known as the pineal gland responds to light filtered through the skull. In humans, the gland, the size of a pea is deeply imbedded in the base of the skull and contains cells with distinct features of the rod-shaped light sensitive cells found in the retina, suggesting that the gland, at some time in our evolution operated as a light sensitive organ. The pineal gland receives the same brain signals that travel down the optic nerves which control the night/day cycle of hormonal activity. These are known as the body’s “Circadian Rhythms” Further, while the function of the pineal gland is largely unclear, it is known to secrete melatonin, a hormone that is a marker in our biological clocks, low in the daytime and rising gradually at night. It appears that daylight is a necessary ingredient to producing melatonin, and is key to keeping our physiology in sync with the real world. Light Therapy has become a proven, safe treatment for this seasonal depression because it helps regulate the secretion of melatonin.

Perhaps for those of us who relish in the “low circadian rhythm”, our metabolism craves this low-energy, sluggish period as a time of hibernation or retreat.

II

In the modern day, the hermit is a disheveled character, living on the edge of civilization, and assumed to have a few screws loose. How sad that we don’t more often recognize the honorable recluse of our ancestors. The Hermit, number nine in the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck, is my favorite card. It is significant in that it is understood as the end of the first cycle of experience which starts with the Fool, who gains knowledge of the external world, meets the mysteries, finds the initial object of desire, finds mastery, finds knowledge, finds a new object of desire, leaves home, gains some strength, and withdraws for a time to integrate the lessens learned before starting on the next turn of the spiral, where the Wheel of Fortune spins him into a new adventure. Hmmm.. sounds like a good trilogy in the making!

The hermit is most often depicted as an old robed man carrying a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other. He stands atop a precipice, and I often imagine that he is taking a good look at the world below before turning into a mountain shelter or cave for his respit.

A common misconception is that the hermit enters his cave to get away from humans and the world and to live a life apart. But in my version, the truer desire is to move towards their inner light to refocus and center themselves. It is a move toward self more than away from others. This image of the hermit, recognizes her own need to replenish her soul, does so in revelry as I imagine it, and then re-enters the world with that lantern of light emanating outward to touch the world she is willingly a part of.

Thomas Merton who lived most of his life as a trappist monk, produced many written works and some 2,000 poems. He spoke out against the Vietnam war and violence during the 60’s race riots, and was a learned scholar of other faiths. He did not shun the world of fellow humans and in fact, as told in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain , he led quite a worldy, in fact spicy, life before turning to Catholicism in his early twenties and to a more solitary life in the pursuit of the priesthood. As it happened, becoming a priest was not his true calling, but the time spent in study and prayer and introspection was where he found and nurtured his gifts. He often fought with his abbot about not being allowed out of the monastery, and eventually under a different abbot, was able to travel. But he always came back to the solitude he craved for the rejuvination of his body and soul.

So, what makes us crave solitude…what makes others of us crave the stimulation of others? Is it melatonin, or lack thereof? Is it environmental circumstances that condition us to be adverse to solitude --or to chaos? After all, I was one of nine. --maybe my mother wasn’t the only one who needed a little respit for her soul!

Much has been studied about personalities and personality types. Well known in UU circles are The Myers-Briggs personality type Indicators. In 1997 I was typed an INFJ. A few years later, I was doing the books for an OBGYN who was also very involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement and Ayur-vedic medicine. I became fascinated with the typing of personality through body type. I was a Pitta-Kapha. The third type is Vata and according to Ayur-vedic medicine, you come most close to perfect health when these three types are in balance in you. The book, Perfect Health, by Deepak Chopra is an excellent resource on this theory. There are many type testing vehicles out there. Ones that type your Right Brain/Left Brain capacity, the MAPP test, which stands for Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential which is often the one used by career counselors, and many others.

III

Harkening back to the ancient medicinal studies of Greek and Arabian physicians (Gay-len, Hi-pok-ra-tees, and ahh-vi-chay-na) Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna, Robert Burton wrote a classic tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 of which I read an excerpt from for this morning’s reading. As you may have noticed, Robert Burton displays quite a fondess for the comma, for here is the full, unabridged title of the book:

The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.

In a 1998 review of the book Stephen Jay Gould (in the publication, Natural History), lauded this work, but couldn’t help making the following tongue-in-cheek observation:

"The greatest literary work ever written on the theory of humors, the early-seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy, by the English divine and scholar Robert Burton, properly recognized the four humors as just one manifestation of a larger propensity to divide by four."

While I have read only parts of this most scholarly compendium and have never actually held a copy in my hands, I enjoyed his dissection of Melancholy with its many variants, manifestations and causes. Burton attempts to present the soul as a tangible part of the body, even hypothesizing as to where it exists. –not in the heart or gut, which for some reason I always assumed as a child, but in the brain. He cannot believe otherwise, for to do so, as Gerardo Herreros writes, would have him caught up in “a dualistic crisis in which what he believes as the ultimate source of humanity exists outside the physical.” Burton did not see this as his dilemma, but rather believed that the soul was rooted in the material, but that man simply lacked the tools or ability to precisely locate it. And so he dissects the soul as if it were part of the anatomy assigning parts and properties, and sub-parts and sub-properties, attempting to explain the root source of Melancholy.

The four humors of classical medicine are Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic. I found, in taking my personality temperament test, that I am a Melancholic-Phlegmatic, which does not mean I clear my throat sadly(!), but it does support—as do my Myers Briggs type and my ayur-vedic body type, that I like to breath in deeply of the well of solitude, introspection, and melancholy. The visual image that keeps coming to mind is a nestling in, back-first shimmying into a big, firm place, from which I can do as I please and control my environment.--- do as I please and control my environment. There!…that!…control my environment …do as I please. Is that the difference that allows me to revel, when so many others fear these bleak interludes? What benefit comes from solitude if it leaves a person frozen to act? What good is the isolation if one feels abandoned? How re-juvinating can melancholy be or how satisfying a deep, long, heartfelt cry , if you don’t rise from it with a huge sigh like you’ve just unloaded the world’s burden’s from your shoulders? As we learn to know ourselves (and those around us—these tests surmise), we can grow to understand and accept our moods and stimulants and revel where we will.

I began going to a UU church regularly when my son, David was about 5 years old. I came in through the Religious Education door and it took almost two years before I ventured over into the coffee hour. And even then I would grab a cup of coffee and walk out nervous that someone might try to strike up a conversation. I do not revel well in large groups of relatively unknown people, yet there are those who can work a room like Bill Clinton! (I know-- I am married to one!) And that is rejuvenating and re-energizing for them. Socializing, discussing, even friendly argument is the wellspring from which they re-group.

But give me a nice overstuffed arm-chair and a teapot for my Tear water tea and it’s like spinach to Popeye for me!

So, if after all of my heralding of this most dark time of the year, you still find yourself sitting there thinking—harumph-no way…Winter bites…I heartily recommend the accounting/bookkeeping profession—Winter will fly by and before you have a moment for despair, the forsythia buds will be popping and the crocuses will be peeking their cheerful little heads out of the soil!

But for those of you in despair during this bleak time of the year, the message of my sermon today was not to tell you that it is all in your head or that you have a disorder. My attempt was to tell you that it is absolutely normal, and to be in a funk, or slump, or doing nothing is in fact doing something. To embrace the dark is not only to persist, but to prevail. Accept the melancholy for what it is and don’t beat yourself up about it. Keep as your mantra, no time is wasted time. If you can’t get moving and find yourself housebound, but with no real energy, commit to having a Star-Trek marathon or watch all the Fellini films, or sit and make lists. List all the movies or books you’ve ever seen or read. List every restaurant experience you’ve ever had. You can do this even if you don’t have much time—if you get home and just want to crawl in to bed cause it is cold and dark outside–go for it. Make a cup of tea—even if you don’t usually drink tea and take your Fellini film or list paper to bed with you. Or walk. Bundle up and walk down streets you’ve never been down, or drive and see what is to the right or left of the highway you drive down every day. Even if you do nothing, you can be doing something.

And until Spring, Blessed be all the creatures—nay—all the personalities of the universe. Be well!