Article by The Rev. John Michael Hayes & Photo by Fernando Esponda.

We’re living in a very dark time, and we can feel helpless and hopeless. Nothing is more distressful than terrible things advancing, with no real way to stave off catastrophe. That is where we find ourselves. Who can rest easy? And yet we know we cannot succumb to despair and impotence.

Democracy threatens to devolve into autocracy. Obscene inequality deepens as the oligarchs tighten their rule and the cruel excesses of global capitalism everywhere on display. Climate crises advance; much of L.A. has just been reduced to ash.

We live in an age of disinformation. Who knows what we can believe and who we can trust? Sixty years ago, in another time of war, upheaval, and grave uncertainties, Thomas Merton wrote, “We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.” [1]

Where will this end? What world will our children inherit? And what can any of us do? Where is God in this?

These are questions we will explore together in the upcoming in-person retreat, Nurturing Hope in a Dark Time at St. Columba’s Inverness from February 7-9. Hopefully, participants in this retreat will re-center themselves in God’s wisdom and grace and come away empowered to engage the world’s problems in this terrible time.

The psalmist tells us “weeping spends the night, but joy comes in the morning.” But we know that night can indeed be long and frightening. There are compelling reasons that so many psalms are angry protests and profound laments: Are you awake God? Do you not see what’s going on down here?

Contemplative practice that ignores this collective reality would be irresponsible escapism. It is our unhappy fate to be thrown into this grave moment of history, and our duty to find a way to respond to it. Despair and denial are not options. We know the answer is not entirely in activism and politics, as necessary and worthy as these might be.

Again, Merton wrote, “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are forms of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Activism and politics can readily become an ego trip that hardly advances real peace and real understanding. Our work in this retreat is to open up a contemplative space in a deep silence so that we might hear God’s wisdom guiding us in this time. All change must begin with inner change.

All inner change begins with self-confrontation. I have never felt a contradiction between being a priest and being a psychologist/psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis teaches us that all human motivations are complex and always tainted by selfish aims and that we humans are greatly capable of self-deception. The radical self-honesty that psychoanalysis demands certainly accords with all principles of Christian spiritual practice.

In another dark time, Jung warned of the dangers of mob possession and the critical need for awake and aware individuals to break the spell of that contagion. Jung tells us that our work is to open ego consciousness to a deeper collective psyche, that deep place in the soul where God meets us. At depth, our psyches are not just ours and are not self-contained. When we are changed, the collective changes. To be effective, activism and politics must be grounded in contemplative practice and the inner transformation that practice creates.

In this retreat, participants are invited to engage in critical self-inquiry and self-confrontation to create an opening to silent contemplation and listen for God’s guiding wisdom. There is no one way to respond to the world’s distress. Each finds his/her own way in which God will use us. This retreat aims be a catalyst for re-centering ourselves and engendering hope, courage, and resilience.

The Reverend John Michael Hayes, Ph.D., is a priest of the Episcopal diocese of Maryland and a psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst. He serves on the faculties of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland, the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Ecumenical Institute, St. Mary’s Seminary and University.  Rev. Hayes will be presiding and serving at St. Columba’s Inverness from February 7-March 7, 2025.

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander