What do we do when we’re depressed? What’s our temptation when a dream is shattered, when we feel betrayed, and when it seems like the trust we’ve shown someone was childish naivety? Generally, the temptation is to gather what pride we have left and walk away, away from that person, away from that place of rejection, away from the humiliation, and away from our former dream, all the while saying to ourselves: “I’ll never trust in this way again! I’ve been burned, taken in, I now know the lesson!”
In Luke’s Gospel, we see this in the story of two dispirited disciples walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus on Easter Sunday morning, unaware that Jesus had risen from the dead. Luke writes that on the morning of the Resurrection, “two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, a village some seven miles away, their faces downcast.”
What they were doing was out of depression; their dream had been crucified when Jesus died. Indeed, when they describe their faith in Jesus, they use the past perfect tense: “We had hoped.” Their dream is over, dead. So is their faith.
This is a mystical image worth meditating. Like these dispirited disciples in Luke’s Gospel, we too, when faced with the kind of pain that brings us to our knees in agony and humiliation, too often are too discouraged and too disheartened to grasp the lesson that’s being taught. We “fall asleep out of sheer sorrow” and then, in our sadness and discouragement, we feel tempted to walk away from what’s hurting us and move instead towards some human consolation, towards something in the world that promises earthly compensation to replace our crucified dream of faith.
The good news is that Jesus finds us on that road and turns us around so that, like the disciples, we never actually get to Emmaus. Instead, after re-reading the scriptures and breaking the bread, we regain our vision and our idealism and find the courage to again return to our faith and to our church. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Walking Away Out of Sorrow,” March 2006]
