Devotion while depressed.

Dear Reader,

Some days, devotional worship comes easily. You feel that connection with the Divine clearly and your devotional activities come easily to you. No one talks about the days where devotional worship is really very hard. Days when you are sick, stressed out, or just 'too busy' to do what you expect for devotional worship happen more often than we'd like. In some cases, we just don't feel like there is any point to it because it feels like we're just going through the motions.

Building a devotional relationship is like training for a marathon. It takes a long time to reach that marathon level of practice. It starts with small motions and focused attention on what you are doing. Watching my Beloved train for his first marathon was an interesting experience. He couldn't just go out and start running. He had to learn how to stretch and prepare for running. He had to start with walking the distance and work his way up to running it. Then he had to keep running until he built up the endurance to run that marathon.

It is important to keep in mind, not everyone can run a marathon the same way. There are people who make record time consistently. There are people who wind up walking most of the way. And there are some who can only make part of the run and have to be helped across the finish line. Now, one may ask me how this metaphor holds up when we are talking about devotional relationships with the Divine.

First, everyone has different levels of devotion as their goals. Second, everyone has different levels of devotion they can accomplish at a given time. Thirdly, these levels change overtime, sometimes even on a daily basis. When you are in a state where you can not reach your devotional goals for the day, week, month, or year, it is very discouraging. This disparity between goals and what you can accomplish for the given time is often the reason why many give up on having a devotional relationship.

As a person who struggles with depression and low energy/spoons on a regular basis, I have learned a few things over the years since my diagnosis. The first thing I learned is that I have to accept that I have limits. These limits are not a sign of moral weakness or laziness. They are simply limits just like a box has confined limits for what can be placed in them and how much weight they can hold. This was a very difficult lesson for me to learn and I still struggle with it, to be honest.

The second thing I learned is that the Divine knows and accepts that I have limits. It takes a considerable amount of humility to say that the Divine knows and accepts that I have limits. We are often goaded by our pride to say that we must do 'better' and say that we must do 'better for ...' the Divine, people in our lives, our employers or any number of others who we say we must exceed our limits for. But what is really pushing us to do 'better' when we're not at peak performance is our pride (and possibly a heap of anxiety if you're like me). It's scary and awkward to say that Zeus, for example, recognizes and accepts that you are a human being who can't give offerings every day or engage in daily prayer because of life circumstances.

The over culture teaches us that if we can't do these things all the time, we are some how in the wrong. This is entirely inaccurate. The Divine is well aware of our limitations (more so than we are ourselves in many cases) and interacts with us on the basis of where the Divine can meet us where we are at. This brings me to the third point that I have learned in having an active devotional life even when I am unwell, everyone's devotional life and devotional practices look different, even within the same religion.

On days when I am so depressed that doing the bare minimum to keep the household from collapsing under its on weight is too exhausting, all I may manage is to mumble a few prayers or just to think of the gods. On days when I am hypomanic and I can't focus enough to get through my prayer routines, I more or less do the same thing. Same for when I last had the flu and was sleeping pretty much all day and didn't even so much as look at my altar the time I was sick. The Divine does not want us to push ourselves to the point where we can not function, they will forgive us for forgetting to say our prayers properly or forgetting them all together. It is our greater struggle within ourselves to have that level of understanding and forgiveness.