Short story: The depressed Priest cheered himself up by writing his next Sunday sermon, about depression

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The old priest, Father, Igmy Falonen, had been hearing confessions, all of the afternoon. He was now ear weary, and brain dead, plus he was feeling rather down, and depressed himself, having knowledge now, first hand, of all of the terrible problems that members of his congregation were going through, and facing in their lives. He went into his study, a room in his rectory, that he loved. It had bookshelves of his favourite spiritual writer's books, placed all around its wall. "How can we best cope with feelings of depression, lack of motivation, laziness, couldn't be botheredness, and so being overall, fed-up, and sick and tired, of it all?" he asked himself, as he sat down, rather heavily, on his old leather couch. He pulled down a book from his shelf, and he opened it up at random, and he read: "Love reaches past all such feelings, but to contact love from your lowest position is hard to do, when you just feel like just vedging away in your life. You must attach yourself to some love, which will pull you out of your feelings of hopelessness, and despair. Do something you feel good about, write a story, go for a walk, listen to music, just make a shift in your mind's fixed position to one of not being fixed, but now being moved by what you are doing." "Good", he said. "I will write my next weeks sermon. That always fires up my juices." He entitled his talk: Depression is related to love, and to time. Here is what he wrote: "Love sits within God, but when it sits in you it's often stretched apart by time, if you allow it to do so, so all you need do is to ignore time, and allow love to be its full self in you then, once more again too. Take no notice of the ravages of time, and its destructiveness, and just allow love to be itself in you, despite any consequences of time depressing, and upsetting you. Depression is merely a ditch that we have fallen into emotionally. Look at the ditch, and see the mushrooms growing in the soil there, and realise that depression is just another state that we go through, or stay in, and life is depressed at times, or jumping over itself, depending mostly on the energy alive in you, or depressed in you, by outer circumstances, when at the bottom of every ditch is still a tap of energy, that we can turn on, when we are ready to do so. In the meantime, we should just enjoy the seat at the bottom of the well, or ditch, and not try too hard to ditch it, otherwise, it will ditch us up in itself, thinking it is the only reality, when the ditch still exists within a far greater reality than just itself's existence." Pleased with what he had written, so far, and now feeling a bit more upbeat in himself too, he put his writing away, and he went outside for a walk around his block. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com The Bishop sometimes held his confessions in an outdoor setting, but this time, even the setting did not help him.