[This was written in response to an invitation to preach on the topic.
Delivered 14 January 2024 at Otter Creek Church, Brentwood, TN. Audio available here.]
I am wired for anxiety, enough that I was treated for a stomach ulcer as a seventh grader. Later I would experience rounds of melancholy as a boy and as a young adult, often heavy. And monkey brain?—where your brain runs round and round seemingly out of control, often with condemning thoughts—I’ve known that most of my life.
But I never experienced depression until a decade ago. This was a completely new experience. I do not think of depression as extreme sadness. There is often sadness with depression. But sadness is to depression like a headache is to the flu. It’s just one common symptom. The illness is bodily, mental, physical, emotional. It can be debilitating.
When I first fell into its depths, I called a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist, and who has also read widely in Christian theology. I said: “I know you could give me a long reply, but just give me a paragraph on why you think many Christians are reticent to take anti-depressants?” He replied: “I think that reticence is a holdover of the Gnostic heresy that fails to take the brain seriously as a bodily organ.” I replied, “that’s all I needed to hear,” and I began to take an anti-depressant.
If you’re not up on your church history, allow me to unpack that a bit: Gnosticism was a second century heresy which typically saw created, bodily realities as evil. All the emphasis, so far as salvation was concerned, was on the spirit and knowledge. To be saved ultimately entailed the spirit escaping the so-called “prison house of the body,” as one Gnostic proponent put it. The body was treated either indifferently, or contemptuously.
The Christian tradition has insisted, instead, that you are not you apart from your body, and I am not me apart from my body. The body is a created gift of God, to be treated with care and dignity and honor. The body is to be resurrected at the last day, refashioned into a new body, along with the new creation, with new heavens and new earth. And until the kingdom of God comes in all fullness, we still suffer the pangs of death, and our mental state, inseparable from our brain, may also suffer various pangs of death.
But we sometimes act like Gnostics, when we act as if depression or mental illness is just a matter of spirit, or knowledge, or piety. The brain is a bodily organ that may need medical care in the same way that a broken arm, a gall-bladder, or the heart needs medical care. We do not ask the patient with the broken arm, or with food poisoning, or with an infection—we do not ask them if they are grateful enough, if they’ve prayed enough, or if they’ve read their Bible enough. They may need to be asked that; I may need to be asked that; but to pose pious questions may be cruel when the patient lies on the gurney, including when the patient is on the gurney with depression.
So, I took an anti-depressant, and I continued this until the side effects seemed worse than the illness.
Here please allow me to insert two important parentheticals: one, it’s important to note that there are undoubtedly certain mental illnesses which require intense medicinal and therapeutic treatment, for which my choice to pause or stop taking medicine would not be a feasible option, and might be irresponsible. If you have access to a pill that a trustworthy and good physician tells you will help what ails you, receive it as a grace, and give thanks, and take it, so I’d say. Two, I want to make it clear I am neither a physician nor a therapist; and with regard to depression, I speak only of my own personal experience. I speak for no one else. Please take whatever you can use, and leave the rest.
John 5 tells the story of Jesus at the pool of Bethesda: a man who’d been sick for 38 years, lay there. And Jesus says “do you want to get well?” The man gives what sounds like an excuse, to which Jesus replies, “stand up, get your stuff, and walk…”
Jesus does not go to what we might call the “pious” solution. He does not ask him about his prayer life. Instead, he asks about his mental habits—“do you want to get well?”—and attends to his body—“come on, get your stuff, move, let’s walk.”
I can imagine myself, lying there in my pain, getting defensive in response to Jesus asking “Do you want to get well?” “Yes, of course I want to get well! What kind of question is that?!”
But such defensiveness may cover over the desire for an easy fix, some too-simple “pill.” The question “Do you want to get well?” requires a great deal of us. It asks us to probe our wants, our motivations, our habits. When I stopped taking an anti-depressant, I did so not only because the side effects were undesirable. I did so because I did not want to waste the pain. That is, I wanted to find out if there were things about me that needed to change. I wanted to find out if my depression was telling me that I had certain habits that needed to change.
And I discovered there were quite a lot of things about myself that needed change: I needed to overcome my conflict avoidance, and speak my mind more forthrightly. I needed to learn better boundaries and differentiation. I needed to practice faith the size of a mustard seed, and lean into the slightest bit of willingness I could find, to pray to be willing, or if I could not do that, to pray that I would be willing to pray for willingness.
I also needed to put other healthy practices in place: a lot more cardio exercise; mindfulness meditation, eating a better diet; taking cold showers; learning to stop using a cell phone. Much of my healing related to those practices, plus a lot of therapy with a great counselor. I found no easy way out, no simple fix; it took both grace and work; and the work was often much harder than I had anticipated. And I still wonder, when I have recurring episodes, if I need to add back in an anti-depressant.[1]
During the difficult days, the difficult nights, sleep is often hard to come by. The lack of sleep deepens the depression; and depression causes lack of sleep. One anxiety-ridden sleepless night, I remember lying in bed on my side, my back to the wall. I experienced a night-terror: In the space behind me, where the wall meets the floor, there opened up a chasm, a black-hole, a palpable pit of darkness, seeming to suck all life, all light, all gladness, into malice and oblivion. It seemed to have a palpable presence. I did not turn to look at it. But I could feel it there. And it was terrifying.
Whatever one might make of such an experience, it meant at least this to me: I had a choice to make: a choice between life and death. I do not mean that I was being tempted to end my life. I mean that this experience presented a choice: between lying down and giving in to the depression, yielding myself to it, becoming one with it—or not. Put differently, it was the question of whether I would just keep laying there, by the pool of Bethesda the rest of my life, identifying my fundamental self with the sickness, or accept the sickness as part of what I had to carry.
I was being challenged: are you going get up or not? Carry your mat, or not? Walk into the world with my own particular limp and my own particular challenges to carry, and accept that this is the package you’ve been given? Or not?
Put differently, it was the question of whether I would choose to keep living before I died. This is the question that all of us must face. Whether you deal with depression or not; whether you deal with cancer; whether you deal with profound trauma; whether you deal with a sense of deep betrayal; whether you look at your life and feel as if it all means nothing: we all must deal with what it means to be mortal, fallible; we must all deal with the pain and difficulty that accompanies life. Life. Is. Hard. And then comes the question: will we lie down in the pit, be consumed by the pit, identify with the pit—or not? Will we allow ourselves to be interrogated by God’s grace—do you want to get well?—and then allow ourselves to receive the invitation: get up, let’s walk? And then walking with our limps, re-discover how wonderful and beautiful life may still be, even when our days are marked by pain.
As I’ve noted, I have not to this point been speaking of suicide. To make a plan for self-harm is not part of my own story. But I would like to address that issue directly.
Some of the statistics ought to get our attention. Suicide rates in the US have increased 40% since 2000. We men tempted to delusions of machismo grandeur as that which shall deliver us ought note: the suicide rate is roughly 4 to 1 male to female. Recently The Tennessean reported that Tennessee has one of the higher rates in the US for suicide among young people age 9-17.[2] And in our gun-loving south we ought note this too: successful suicide attempts are three-times more likely in a house with a gun than in a house without a gun.
When my grandmother was in her first year of marriage, her father, my great-grandfather, killed himself. He had been the proprietor of a general store in small-town Alabama. His store had somehow survived the Great Depression. But shortly thereafter, a fire destroyed the store, and everything was lost. He went home and killed himself. And then his wife, my great-grandmother, went to bed. She not only missed the funeral. She stayed in bed the rest of her life.
My dear grandmother, so far as I remember, never talked about it. When she was well into her 90’s, I was back home in Alabama. After Sunday lunch I drove grandmother home. I knew she didn’t have much longer to live. So I decided that afternoon to risk the conversation. First I asked her about the loss of one of her children, a baby son, who would have been my uncle. They had decided to have the baby at home; there had been a complication, and the baby died soon after birth.
Then I asked her about the death of her father. She told me the story, forthrightly, laid out the bare, hard, cold facts.
Then she quietly told me that she had wondered whether she had not been enough for him to live for.
I asked her if she and Grandaddy, who had died a few years prior, if they ever talked about it. “No,” she said. “There are some things that are just too hard to talk about.”
Then I asked her: “do you still think about it?” “All the time,” she said. Or perhaps she said, “every day.” Here she was, some sixty or so years later, still thinking about it “all the time,” “every day.”
Please hear me say this: if you ever find yourself making a plan to harm yourself, just hear me saying this: do not despair. And if you cannot help but despair, do not lay down in the despair. Do not surrender to the pit. That is not the way forward. Call a friend. Call your doctor. Go to the hospital. Text the Suicide and Crisis Line at 988. It may be the most courageous thing you ever do in your life, and we need you to do it.
And please hear me say this: if you have lost someone this way, and you are carrying this on your own: it’s not too hard to talk about. My grandmother actually could talk about it: she did so with her grandson. I just wish she had done it more, earlier, and more often. You can. Find someone trustworthy, find someone who’s carrying a similar pain. Walk and talk together.
To this point, I have been largely speaking of life in the body as a gift, riddled as it may be with illness, pain, or challenge, before the full coming of the Kingdom of God. But I would like to turn to a second gift: viz., that of friendship.
Alongside the epidemic of anxiety and depression is the epidemic of loneliness: the epidemic of loneliness is so great that the UK has appointed a permanent Minister of Loneliness. Loneliness is now an official public health crisis.
I had the opportunity last year to interview the director and co-director of the world’s longest scientific study on human happiness.[3] It’s an amazing study, begun in 1938. A group of “Harvard men,” from among the country’s most wealthy and privileged families enrolled in the study; and then a group of men from Boston’s most troubled neighborhoods, and from the least privileged and most troubled families. Then the researchers set out to study their lives, and subsequently their spouses, their children, and even grandchildren. The amount of data collected is remarkable. Extensive interviews, blood tests; more recently they’ve added MRI’s, and even checking for cortisol levels in their hair, which indicates, as I understand it, the amount of stress someone has been experiencing over weeks and months.
What did they find? That the most important variable, whether rich or poor, advantaged or disadvantaged, is what they call “warm relationships.” The most important variable in a happy and healthy life? Good friendships, or a healthy relationship with family, some set of close, trusting relationships.
What they, and increasingly other studies are discovering, is that loneliness poses a health risk similar to obesity, or to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Good relationships, on the other hand, not only make you happier, but less likely that you will get things like coronary artery disease, or type 2 diabetes.
But good relationships, I have found, require a great deal of courage. Because good relationships require us to face our shame.
Shame, as many have noted, is different than guilt: guilt pertains to having violated some objective norm or standard outside the self, while shame is a judgment about the self. Guilt says “I did something wrong.” Shame says “I am something wrong.” Moreover, shame may in some cases have nothing to do with guilt. Someone who has experienced abuse as a child, for example, might have zero guilt, but be dogged by shame.
There are ways in which shame is a natural and required part of becoming a mature human being. “He’s shameless,” is not a compliment. But shame may grow toxic, and deadly. It prompts us to seek to hide ourselves from God. It cuts us off from our fellows. But we cannot afford either to seek to hide from God, or to be cut off from our fellows.
Shame is one of the heavy threads that runs throughout the whole of scripture. Scripture addresses shame turn after turn in the great narrative. It is shame, said the preacher in the book of Hebrews, with which Jesus himself had to deal in the agony of crucifixion. But we talk too little, I think, as to how to navigate our shame. We talk too little of the immense, intense, sometimes overwhelming power of shame. But this should be no surprise: talking about our shame feels shameful.
Our shame can be a monster, which has the capacity to make our own lives monstrous. But our shame can also become a path to fellowship and authenticity which may make us kind, and compassionate, and merciful, and beautiful. Many are the lonely souls who stand at a cross-roads, their shame taunting them: and there we must make a decision. Our lives will take one route or the other, depending upon the choice that is made: will we face our shame squarely, and seek out trustworthy friends, who will be true companions? Or will we patch our little fig leaves over our shame, seek to bury it in the recesses of our heart, where it will only fester, and in time demand that it be paid attention: whether through depression or anxiety or acute forms of acting out or varied addictions?
To navigate our shame requires profound courage. It requires bravery to allow friends to see us as we truly are. It can be utterly terrifying. It can be utterly terrifying because we do not know how the friend will respond to us.
Happy are we who have friends who have seen us at our best. And happy are we who have friends who have seen us at our worst, and yet still befriend us.[4] And happy is the community, the church, that is a community of friends such as this.
And what a marvelous truth, this: that we serve a God who has invited us to be friends. I have not called you servants, said our Christ; I have called you my friends, he said.
But to be friends with a God revealed as a crucified Messiah can be terrifying. To be friends with Christ is to be friends with one who has taught us to accept that the only way to live truly is to live “out of control.”[5] That is: when God became incarnate in Christ, things did not, well, turn out well. He was justice-incarnate, but subjected to the most gross injustice. He was love-incarnate, but subjected to the most gross hostility. He was mercy-incarnate, but suffered betrayal, contempt, and torture. He did not use his divine prerogative to “make things turn out right.” He trusted the Father for vindication, yes; but that vindication came only on the far side of things going terribly wrong.
Is it any wonder that his friends fled, turned their back, on the night of His Passion?
While in my depression, one of the contributing factors was fear for one of my sons. He was ill at the time, and we feared for his life. When he was admitted into care for his illness, a friend of mine called me. I shared this news with him. Then he told me that his own son had dealt with the same illness, and had died. He told me that he had conducted the funeral service for that son, who had died from the very same illness.
When I first hung up the phone, I was rather incredulous: what sort of friend at such a difficult time would say such a thing? What sort of pastoral training seminar had he taken in seminary?? But over the next number of days, months, I came to see that my friend had served me well: that one part of the driving force of my depression was my refusal to accept that I was not in control, that I could not make things turn out the way I wanted. That the gifts which I cherish, I have them only now, in the present, in this moment: in this moment, I can love my sons, my wife, my friends; in this moment, I can be grateful for breath in my lungs, for the gifts of the day. In this moment I can be grateful for daily bread.
One other night during that dark season, I was unable to sleep. It was a bitter winter night. I finally got out of bed, three in the morning. The house was cold. I wanted to build a fire in our woodstove, but there was no wood on the front porch. I put on shoes and a winter coat, shuffling through our long backyard in a state of self-pity. At the woodshed, I loaded the wheelbarrow, and pushed it back to the house. Everything was frozen. Everything was dead. The trees were barren. The grass was brown. The frost was heavy. And I was angry, and I was resentful.
Then I heard this: “you are my beloved.”
“You do not love me,” I said. I shoved the handles of the wheelbarrow away from myself, and said it again: “You do not love me.”
I think it was Ignatius, but I’m not sure, who once said that sin is a “frightful ingratitude.” This is one thing that terrifies me about my depression; it is an illness that affects not only brain and body, but soul, too: such that the soul seems to be struck lame, that the soul seems to be struck blind, cannot see the gifts, the graces, the beauty, but only darkness, bitterness, the frost and the cold.
But the bounty of our Great Friend’s Grace: that the Friend who let go of divine prerogative to make things turn out right will not force us to be well, but will nonetheless gently come to us languishing in the portico of the pool of Bethesda, and will seek to pierce our soul’s darkness. And gently say, gently insist: “you are my beloved. You are my beloved.”
And being loved in such a way, it turns out that the gifts of the day are enough for the day. The weight of any given day may still be heavy, the burden we are given to carry still weighty, the lamentations we need to cry still urgent, even profane. But embracing the gift of life in the body, taking seriously the question of whether we want to be well, refusing to lay down in our despair, getting up, taking up our mat and the whole package of the life we’ve been given, and walking into the day with friends who know us and we them, and posturing ourselves to receive the continued Friendship and love of God—then the day’s gifts are enough for the day, and they are so wonderful, and they are so beautiful, and it can be so good just to be alive.
Such are the gifts and the love of God.
…
Footnotes:
[1] Another bit of bodily wisdom I learned from Jesus that changed my life was his insistence that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. You might find it odd that I refer to “faith” as “bodily wisdom.” But I do not think we best understand “faith” as primarily a matter of intellectual assertions of what we say we “believe.” Our true “faith” is best known, understood, seen by what we do, and how we live our lives.
A decade prior to the onset of my depression, I was dealing with another difficult time in life, that required intense growth and new possibilities: which meant I had to start getting out of bed at 5.30 so I could meet with new friends at 6.30 many mornings. This seemed to my 30-something year old self like moving a mountain.
But Jesus’ wisdom: faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains: this became operable for me this way: when my alarm went off, and I knew I could not possibly get myself out of bed, I discovered I could wiggle my right big toe. And that then I could let that wiggling toe lead me to move my right foot back and forth. And that then I could let me foot slide out from underneath the covers on the side of the bed, and then let my foot touch the floor. And that then my body could follow, and I could stand beside my bed, and having gotten up, I could walk toward the day.
Then again a decade latter during my acute depression, I would find that getting out of bed, getting off the chair, setting foot outside the house: some days this seemed impossible. But I would try to lean into whatever smallest willingness I could find. Perhaps it was simply to raise my arms above my head; perhaps it was to walk around the house; perhaps it was to walk outside; perhaps it was to get on the elliptical trainer; whatever willingness was there, to embrace it, to lean into it, and often, though not always, that willingness would slowly expand into a greater willingness. This was one concrete, mundane thing it meant for me to walk by faith, not by sight.
I have discovered that this habit—to lean into the slightest bit of willingness—can change the trajectory of a life. And also this: to pray for willingness. And if you cannot pray for willingness, then pray for the willingness to pray for willingness. Or pray for the willingness to have the willingness to pray for the willingness.
[2] https://nashvilletennessean-tn.newsmemory.com/?publink=125550d7c_134d114
[3] Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. Interview available here: https://www.nosmallendeavor.com/the-good-life-lessons-from-the-worlds-longest-scientific-study-of-happiness
[4] A true friend, I think, will never be surprised by anything I do. If I screw up in some particular way, they could have seen the possibility of that coming. If I live well in some particular way, they could have seen that coming, too.
[5] I learned this way of putting the matter from Stanley Hauerwas.