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How History Helps Us Stave Off Despair

How History Helps Us Stave Off Despair

Last updated on: February 4, 2025 at 2:00 am by Guest Contributor

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How History Helps Us Stave Off Despair 2025-02-03T00:46:28-04:00 Guest Contributor

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For today’s post, I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Skylar Ray back to the Anxious Bench! Dr. Skylar Ray is an assistant professor of history at John Brown University. Her research interests center on the intersection evangelicalism, mental health, and modern psychology in American history. She is currently adapting her dissertation, Healing Minds, Saving Souls: Evangelicals and Mental Health in the Age of the Therapeutic, for publication.

For academics and educators, the new year means a return to the rhythms and rigors of a life spent teaching. Often, the start of the second semester feels far more harried than the first. (I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one whose syllabi were completed on return flights home from a January conference.) But while many Anxious Bench readers are all too acquainted with the ins and outs of this particular kind of seasonal transition, I think I speak for many of us when I note that this January felt particularly difficult as we attempted to return to quotidian obligations in such a fraught societal and political moment. We’ve found it difficult to devote attention to what often feel like the comparatively insignificant tasks attendant to our profession as the world burns, both literally and metaphorically. Against the backdrop of such a bleak landscape, our daily efforts often feel mundane at best, and futile at worst. And, to be sure, those populating the halls of academia are not alone in this feeling.

As I’ve prepared for and begun teaching this semester, though, I’ve been reminded that the study of history offers both the resources and practices capable of teaching us teaching us how to lament, labor, and rest well in the present and, in doing so, how to resist despair in sustainable and meaningful ways.

Songs of Lament, as Source and Practice

In American history courses, spirituals are consistently among the most valued sources of the semester for students. The value of these spirituals is manifold, both musically and historically. Songs in this genre constitute invaluable primary sources, helping us to get at the experiences of many in the past who left behind few written records. Students are typically most struck, however, by the deep theology of suffering that these spirituals contain. Songs like “Troubled in Mind” or “Go Down, Moses” are, by their own admission, a far cry from the saccharine sounds that suffuse many of their regular worship services. These songs give voice to pain, cry for justice, and remind those listening that Christ is present in human suffering. Spirituals, in short, stand as exempla par excellence of the Christian practice of lament.

And lament, strangely enough, can be the very thing that staves off despair. Lament and despair, of course, have much in common; each is, in its own way, a cry of pain. But if despair is a cry into the void, a lament is a cry to. In the case of Christians, in particular, lament stands as a cry to one who hears. Lament, then, is implicitly and stubbornly hopeful—even if that hope lies far from our mental and emotional surface. Even if that hope lies not in an emotional optimism but in a Person. The Psalms, of course, have long stood as a resource for the expression of lament, but I’ve also found it particularly helpful as of late to integrate listening to songs of lament into my regular routine. This musical tradition continues to speak to the goodness and necessity of lament in the Christian life—reminding us that Christ’s death and resurrection don’t dismiss our lament, but rather validate it, ensuring our cries do not fall on deaf ears.

The Possibility in Particularity

While lament is good and necessary, we as Christians are not only called to lament, but also to love—in word and in deed. So, how to live out love in the midst of lament? Perhaps the most surprising place I’ve lately encountered an answer to this query is in teaching Arkansas History (a required course for education majors in my state and, honestly, not one that I initially found particularly inspiring.) The class, however, is quickly becoming a favorite for many reasons, not least of which is the attention to place and community that local and state history prompts. I began the semester by explaining to my class why they should care about a course that might, for them, be simply a checked box on the way to teaching licensure. I explained that, while larger historical lenses might appear more exciting or important, state history offers us the opportunity to study the place where we’ve been planted—thereby opening our eyes to a past and to people to whom we are tied, whether or not we pay attention to those ties in our day-to-day lives. Case in point: I recently moved to begin a new job this past fall, and a Salvadoran restaurant not far from my house quickly became one of my new local favorites (an unexpected gem in a town as small as mine.) An attentiveness to my state’s particular history, however, demonstrates that the presence of this food is not a random stroke of good luck, but the product of a regional history of which I have become a part. This history involves the fallout of the Salvadoran Civil War (in which the United States was directly implicated) and the dominance of the poultry industry in Northwest Arkansas, both of which led to a substantial and vibrant Salvadoran community in my region. Attention to place and its past reminds me that I am now involved in this history and, I would argue, am compelled as a Christian historian to steward my knowledge of that past toward the end of loving my neighbors.

Now, I’ll insert the obvious caveat that I don’t hold up the particularity of place as an alternative to the bigger, systemic solutions that so many of our national and world issues call for. I do, however, think that attention to our particular places can help us stave off the kind of overwhelm that leads to powerless despair. This feels important during a time when the scope of the issues that dominate our feeds and our minds can so easily overwhelm us to inaction. In this way, teaching Arkansas History has reminded me that attention to these more local histories spurs attention to particular people and particular problems. Attention to smaller histories illuminates problems that we can actually address in tangible ways, enabling us to better love those with whom we share a common place.

Labor & Rest

Both lament and attention to the local are not, of course, sustainable without healthy rhythms of labor and rest. I’ve had regular reminders of this truth in two unlikely (or, perhaps, not-so-unlikely) conversation partners this semester: Milton and Marx, both of whom my Integrated Humanities classes encounter over the course of the semester. In reading Paradise Lost, students are often struck by the way that the Fall does not simply mean the advent of individual sin, but the perversion of the Edenic iterations of labor and rest. It would seem that the same fallen world that prompts our lament and begs for our loving care is a world in which the fulfilling work and holistic rest for which we were made have also fallen, replaced with the twin shadows of toil and lethargy. Our burnout begets check-out. When we read the Communist Manifesto a few weeks after Milton, students are confronted with examples of the exploitation and dehumanization of workers in the early industrial era. These reading discussions prompt many fruitful conversations, but one of them surrounds our human need for meaningful work and truly restorative rest. These beginnings of these conversations are hitting differently this semester, at a time when I’m tempted to vacillate between two extremes, to allow despair to drive me to unhealthy toil that then begets a kind of apathetic listlessness. This being the case, I am more thankful than ever for the weekly reminders that the best and most sustaining response to this temptation is often true rest—that which restores the body and the mind and the soul. More and more, I am praying for the grace to respond to that familiar call, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

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