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For the soul, depression is an initiation, a rite of passage for deeper, richer meaning than clinical care. Melancholy or sadness are not pathological terms treating depression as a problem. Melancholy can’t invite imagination in the stirrings of the soul’s sadness.

St. Malachy Church in Sterling Heights, where I have an office for Cura Animarum has a meditation garden, an outpost, if you will, a place of withdrawal and solitude. The garden sits next to a center where people come to get into their soul and sit and stay and be still to refresh and renew. In that shrine of Mary, visitors come away awakened, more aware, even enlightened as they may light a candle to illumine their problem, sadness, dark night of the soul, if you will. Some wrestle with life’s dilemmas while others distress or quiet their minds.

Six hundred years ago, melancholy or sadness was identified with the Roman god Saturn. To be depressed was to be “in Saturn.” Saturn was called the black sun for in Saturn’s darkness there is brilliance, distilled by depression’s gift of melancholy.

People need to withdraw at times in their troubles to touch their coldness, darkness, sadness, disappointment or fears. They can go within as they sit in the meditation garden or shrine of Mary at St. Malachy’s Church. If they go within, to their center and soul, they won’t go without the “fresh” feeling of a renewed being.

Depression moves away from the center of architecture’s circle or square where community forms. Depression seeks an outpost, a garden, a place for passage that is away from the center. There in their solitude people look at their sadness.

Cura Animarum/Care of the Soul counseling helps people to learn to meditate and be still in a frenetic culture of “doing.” One cannot give what one does not have and many persons are depleted by now or burnt out on the job or with work at home or school.

Meaning in one’s struggles moves beyond the drive and economy of mammon. Another example of Cura Animarum’s aims is addressing spirituality’s explosion in the workplace, especially among babyboomers in search of a higher purpose in their lives. We have to go to where people live and work and eat. The historic ecumenical Vatican Council (1962-65) invited believers to find God where they work and play.

As business people yearn for meaning, practical places where they work will address their quest for soul. That’s why I would like to host lunchtime meetings with executives at their banks and businesses and engage in dialogue in factories and malls, just as Fortune magazine reported middle-agers who meet on the top floor of the LaSalle Bank building in Chicago for sandwiches and spiritual sustenance.