At the end of last month, Ryuichi Sakamoto died from cancer at the age of 71. Sakamoto enjoyed a long, varied, and influential career. From his time with the pioneering electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra (check out “Behind the Mask”), to his solo work as a synthpop artist (see the original version of “Thousand Knives”), to his score contributions to films like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Revenant, to his arrangements of his previous electronic and film music into solo piano, chamber, and orchestral music (see the video above for one of his last solo performances of “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” or a “Playing the Orchestra” video on YouTube).
Sakamoto’s musical vocabulary spanned multiple idioms and styles; he could use the same notes to say very different things. Take “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” for example. The piece began its life as electronic music that served as the main theme of a movie, but was reimagined in several different ways since its birth in 1983. There’s the vocal version, “Forbidden Colors” (which I don’t really care for), or the piano, violin, and cello trio version from the 1996 album, or the many solo piano versions, or the grand orchestral version recorded at the Budokan. Each version says something similar, but never the same thing. One of Sakamoto’s gifts was creativity through iteration: repackaging the form a musical theme takes in order to uncover some new detail or some latent emotional aspect—or perhaps simply to make some old thing fresh again.
How beautiful will be the day when all the baptized understand that their work, their job, is a priestly work, that just as I celebrate Mass at this altar, so each carpenter celebrates Mass at his workbench, and each metalworker, each professional, each doctor with the scalpel, the market woman at her stand, is performing a priestly office! How many cabdrivers, I know, listen to this message there in their cabs; you are a priest at the wheel, my friend, if you work with honesty, consecraring that taxi of yours to God, bearing a message of peace and love to the passengers who ride in your cab.
Oscar Romero, 1977
The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor…. The same is true for the shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor.
We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
[…] Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us. They predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours. (ch. 1)
The extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed. In this new context, goods and services are merely surveillance-bound supply routes. It’s not the car; it’s the behavioral data from driving the car. It’s not the map; it’s the behavorial data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and eveything in it, all the time. (ch. 5)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
A couple of thoughts here:
Jacques Ellul’s analysis of Technique still rings true over 50 years later. Technique still wields its totalizing hold over humans. Note: Technique in Ellul’s thought isn’t “technology,” but the drive to systematize, rationalize, and make more efficient every aspect of human life. The smoother and the more autonomous the environment, the better Technique can do its thing. The “free” cost of social media or Google’s service provide some of the most ideal structures for producing Technical progress. Which, as Ellul and Shoshana Zuboff say in their own ways, is detrimental to human flourishing. (The corollary to Ellul’s critique is that humans need “friction” in their lives. Not everything can be made efficient. This friction is the obstacle that the surveillance capitalists seek to hurdle.)
Second: it’s always interesting to read accounts of how we got to our current technological environment, but these accounts often focus (understandably) on the big players like the US and the EU. It would be interesting read an account of what Zuboff’s surveillance capitalists have been doing in poorer nations, especially since it’s generally accepted that the behavioral surplus (the “raw material” produced by our search and social media actions) that come from rich nations is more valuable to buyers than is material from a developing market. (Like what insights have been gleaned or what experiments have been done in the areas where Facebook made their services free to access even without data subscriptions?) Maybe that book exists somewhere already.
With that, how do you live ethically or virtuously in a Technical society or in the age of surveillance capitalism? That’s as far as this thought goes. I haven’t finished Zuboff’s book yet, but I do hope she provides a nudge in the right direction (besides grand, macro policy recommendations).
There are films that are interested mainly in saying something (e.g., documentaries, satires). There are films that are interested mainly in showing something (q.v., Zack Snyder). There are also films that are interested in showing something in order to say something.
The newest film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), about the traumatic experience of German soldiers in World War I, doesn’t say anything new—war is evil. But it says its message the way the best war films do, by showing in order to tell.
the wide-angle closeup—taken from the trailer
One of the striking things about director Edward Berger’s take is the use of wide-angle closeups, as seen in the image above. This isn’t a common shot, although it is associated with a few cinematographers (Emmanuel Lubezki comes to mind). It’s a bit awkward, since it requires the camera to be very close to the subject. It requires well-planned choreography if the actors are moving. It’s more dramatic than flattering (a camera farther away but zoomed in would be more “natural”-looking, or at least more comfortable). Horror or thriller films make use of it to increase the tension of a shot.
But it’s precisely the closeness of the camera to the subject matter that makes the movie so intense and visceral. We the audience can only see what the camera shows, and where the camera is, there we are, too. When the camera is up close to characters in the trenches of World War I, we are brought up close to the trenches—mud, blood, shrapnel, corpses, explosions. It’s a level of intimacy with the characters and their environment that incites a visceral reaction from us. (I wonder whether this technique has been employed successfully in war documentaries.)
This film doesn’t use the wide-angle closeup all the time, but he consistently employs it to show in an extreme way what war feels like. Berger, like the novelist Erich Remarque who wrote the book this film is based on, wants to translate the stress of war not just by observing it, but by situating the viewer in the middle of it. Wide-angle closeups are one choice, as are long takes that compound the tension and havoc with each second. In some ways All Quiet on the Western Front feels more like a horror/thriller than a simple war film.
Like 1917 (2019), the anti-war-ness of All Quiet almost suffers because of its haunting beauty. Cinematographer James Friend did almost too good of a job. The cinematography seems to reveal something perversely attractive in war (David Shields makes this point in his book War is Beautiful). And this is confirmed in a way by the young characters in the film, who without having seen a war film are enticed by the glories that war offers because of how war is presented to them.
But there might be something else being said. The film is well-shot, yes, but it strips its subject matter of glory or heroism. Its aesthetic energy is spent primarily to humanize its characters, to situate the viewers in the action, and to horrify and sicken. Any special effects used are there to heighten the chaos and the dirt and the general repugnance of the battlefield. War is chaos, and it is futile. It makes an ugly point with beautiful language.
I appreciate that All Quiet is well-made because (anti-)war films aren’t convincing unless they’re well-made. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s just that: another well-made (anti-)war film. It will be heralded as “timely” in the age of the Ukraine war, but we will always need films and other media to remind us of the errors of the past and of the present.
When I was younger, I met a number of authors who shaped who I am now. These authors gave me back my faith. They showed me a nuanced, vibrant, and, crucially, more honest way of being a follower of Jesus and/or being a human being. One of them was Frederick Buechner (beek-ner). I’m not sure which of his books I read first. Godric certainly has had the most enduring effect on me, mostly as a story about sin, repentance, and the presence of God in a person’s life. His other works, spanning genres, have stuck with me in smaller but nonetheless formative ways.
Buechner was maybe most famous for being a pastor who wrote. He didn’t preach, at least not in the way most of us understand preaching. Buechner was a storyteller. In any story he told, Buechner spoke out of his life, wherein death and life were so entangled; more than most, he understood the intimate relationships between beauty, joy, pain, and loss.
He did not initially want to become a pastor, but the words of a Presbyterian pastor led him to enroll at seminary, a decision which surprised and concerned some (including the same pastor who inspired his decision). He never stopped being a writer, thank God, and his roles as author and minister influenced each other.
Later in his life, Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” He found the place God called him to. Situated in an increasingly post-Christian northeast USA, he understood that his calling was to those who doubted the relevance of Christianity, to those whose ears were deaf to Christ. Yet he spoke as well to many followers of Jesus who were afraid, or unwilling, to recognize their own wounds and their joys. His insight into our common brokenness and his skill with words enabled him to communicate both to the most devoted of Christians and to the least religious of readers.
True, he was a Christian writer—and one of the best—but he was also simply one of the best writers (religious or otherwise) of the last 100 years. There is no one who sounds quite like him. His long career spanned decades; he died two months ago at the age of ninety-six.
Being a product of a mid-20th century US mainline church, Buechner was a Christian in a way I probably can’t fully be. Yet through the uniqueness of his imagination, I found my own imagination transformed. Here’s a passage of his remembering how one of his teachers spoke about the Bible:
[I]f there is a God who works at all, his work goes on still, of course, and at one and the same time the biblical past not only illumines the present but becomes itself part of that present, part of our own individual pasts. Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, Muilenburg said, you have not really understood it. The Bible, as he presented it, is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings… .
Listening to Your Life
Buechner wrote first out of the story of his own life, which he saw as connected to the story of the Bible, which for him was ultimately the story of Jesus. He invited his hearers and readers to imagine their own lives as being part of Jesus’ own life, and that opposite was also true: that Jesus’ life was entwined with their own. This is why “Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole”; he does not stand far off, but is in our everyday.
Recently, there has been a movement in some Christian circles of finding the sacredness in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred (Tisch Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary being an example). Few authors reveal the sacred charge of our everyday lives than Frederick Buechner, to whom this more recent movement owes some debt, I think. “There’s nothing too commonplace for God,” Russell Moore writes in his tribute. Buechner, to me at least, a model of how one might see God in moments big and small, in moments holy and profane.
In his fiction, Buechner’s protagonists, whether biblical like Jacob or historical like the English hermit Godric, are never the saintly figures we might imagine them to be. They are human, sometimes appallingly so. Jacob, in his novel Son of Laughter, is presented as cowardly, self-serving, and fearful as much as he is loving and devout. Godric, revered now as a saint, is presented as a doubtful man, struggling with pride and lust and regret, yet who still clings to God and prays without ceasing. Our heroes are human. But the gloom of their sinfulness only makes the grace of God shine brighter. God is not frightened of their capacity to doubt or to betray him, and remains in their lives. Their brokenness is entangled with their blessing. Buechner reminds us that these people, for Christians, are part of our heritage, part of our story. Our brokenness, too, is entangled with our blessing.
As Alan Jacobs writes in his remembrance, Buechner was more than just open-minded; he was “open-hearted, and continually aware of the ways that the world, like the [God] who made the world, can both hurt us and bless us.” God permitted Buechner to suffer the suicide of his father, to suffer the suffering of his daughter; yet he saw his own life as blessed. This open-heartedness finds its confirmation in the God who became human and opened himself up to our wounds and our joys.
All is grace, Buechner believed. All things are gifts. Godric prays in Buechner’s novel:
‘PRAISE, PRAISE!’ I croak. Praise God for all that’s holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. […] Praise him for dying and the peace of death.
Elsewhere in the book, Godric says: “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
“Choose life,” the writings of Buechner seem to say, “and praise, though you have lost much. Praise him for the losses and praise him for life.” He said in a sermon, “Rejoice is the last word.”
If there is one thing I’m grateful for that Fred Buechner gave me, it is this insight: that your life is not something to hate. “All moments are key moments, and life itself is grace,” he famously wrote (Now and Then). That’s why he gives the invitation: “Listen to your life.” God is speaking there, the God who is breaking you and blessing you.
On my birthday, I found myself reading historian Mark Noll’s Turning Points, which begins with a discussion on the value of learning from Christian history. He closes the opening chapter with Psalm 90, as a prayer.
This psalm has become dearer and dearer to my heart with each year. Reading (aloud) the opening words—”Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations”—made me tear up a bit. And there is the poignancy of the request “Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us.”
Noll’s translation (not sure what it is) renders the final words as “establish the work of our hands for us.” This spin uncovers a new meaning, or perhaps better, makes the true sense of the request clearer to me.
“God sustains the church,” Noll writes, “despite the church’s own frequent efforts to betray its Savior and its own high calling.” This is true of both the body and of the individual. God sustains who we are, though we resist him. A popular song goes “I will build my life on You alone,” which is a noble declaration, but which could obscure the more fundamental truth that “You build my life.” I am not my own; as Jesus says, “I will build my church.” We can do our best, but on a deep level, beginning to end, he establishes our work for us.
Always good to begin a new year with a de-centering truth like this.
Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’ – ‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.
[H]umility is not an exercise in self-loathing. It is rather the honest admission of personal life as necessarily enfolded within and dependent on the lives of others and the gifts of God. Humility equips us to see creation in its interdependent wholeness. [Alexander] Schmemann says, “Humility alone is capable of truth, of seeing and accepting things as they are and therefore of seeing God’s majesty and goodness and love in everything.” We are not to despise ourselves or each other because the humble person appreciates how every creature is loved and nurtured by God. Humility makes possible the true enjoyment of others because we now perceive and receive them properly: namely, as gifts and blessings meant to be cared for, celebrated, and shared. Without humility, in other words, it is impossible to love another.
Norman Wirzba, “Preparing for Joy”
I remember a friend talking about humility once. He described humility as seeing yourselves and others properly—not too lowly nor too highly. Which runs a bit contrary to how most understand “humility,” which generally is a low view of oneself. The etymology of the word, humus, “ground,” seems to lean toward this, and it’s in this sense that G.K. Chesterton wrote his often quoted line, “Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
I didn’t agree with my friend at the time, but now I’m more inclined to understand humility within the bounds of grace. To reference one of Marilynne Robinson’s book titles, there is a general givenness of things, a general state of being sustained by God’s love and providence. With this, humility acts not as a bully who makes you to be smaller than you are, nor as a sycophant who underhandedly puffs you up (see: humblebragging). Humility asks you to see others and yourself properly as gifts and as gifted uniquely. It asks you to see yourself not as an isolated case whose self-advertisement must be managed, but as someone located within a web of people who are dependent firstly on God and then on each other.
Of course there remains a sense in which to be humble is not to hold yourself in overly high self-esteem, or to consider others better than yourself (Philippians 2). For many, the default temptation is towards pride. But at the same time, others suffer from something of a permanent debasement, always thinking that they’re good for nothing or chronically incapable of doing anything well. Humility as a correct(ed) view of things would ask the proud person to come down, and the self-loather to rise up and stand; it would ask both to stop focusing on themselves so much and to pay attention to their neighbors.
Norman Wirzba’s words quoted above reminded me of that conversation with my friend. They’re also immensely helpful for the start of Lent 2022, and I highly recommend reading the entire essay.
Religious despair is often a defense against boredom and the daily grind of existence. Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience. It is among the most difficult spiritual ailments to heal, because it is usually wholly illusory. There are definitely times when we must suffer God’s absence, when we are called to enter the dark night of the soul in order to pass into some new understanding of God, some deeper communion with him and with all creation. But this is very rare, and for the most part our dark nights of the soul are, in a way that is more pathetic than tragic, wishful thinking. God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him—to find him—does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All too often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.
Like many other unseen things that can somehow enflesh us, depression is captured somewhat, but isn’t always served well by dictionary definitions. The challenge for a dictionary editor lies in the wideness of the depression experience. See, for example, a definition from the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
a serious medical condition in which a person feels very sad, hopeless, and unimportant and often is unable to live in a normal way
This certainly is serviceable as a definition, but what might serve to capture depression better are various “sketches” of it. This blog is essentially my public sketchbook, a collection of incomplete thoughts on whatever I write about. No single “sketch” that follows will capture everything a depression can be. And it goes without saying that I can only speak from my experience. At the end of 2020, I fell into a depression borne of unpacked baggage after returning home after four years abroad.
I wish it were the case that I could say to every other depressed person “I know what you feel,” but every depression flows out of a different source and so flows into each individual’s life in varying intensities and manifestations. Not everyone goes through depression with others nearby who are ready to comfort, as I did, or with a sense of the providence of God. To claim absolute empathy here would be to claim sameness.
And yet there exist features which unite depressions into a recognizable beast. These are my sketches, and as such will make more sense to people who dwell in similar imaginative or religious spaces; but at the same time, they are sketches of a valley that many others have been flung into, though their experiences of it may differ from mine. These descriptions are attempts to capture snapshots of that valley.
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It is the experience of finding your mind a hostile place. Your dialogues with your own self shift from those between the warmth between host and guest to the biting harshness between prisoner and torturer. This is exacerbated by an inability at times to find respite from these dialogues in sleep.
It is loss of good rest, of good sleep.
It is a feeling of intense un-at-home-ness. It is a seemingly permanent homesickness. It is restlessness even when all your former conditions for deep rest have been met. It is the loss of place, which comprises much of the loss of your sense of purpose.
It is loss and a chronic condition of feeling lost.
It is like grief, but you are unsure about what you’re grieving for.
It is losing the ability to find pleasure in hobbies. For me, it was finding movies hard to follow, books impossible to read, and music difficult to play.
It is finding once routinary actions extremely taxing. It is loss, to varying extents, of your ability to recall memories and to focus on meaningful tasks.
It is pain in the mind, an almost physical pain, an extraction of the mind out of its abstract hidden place and into a presence of unseen, but deeply tangible oppression.
It is having “normal” days be good days, and bad days be normal days.
It is wanting to be anywhere else, and not knowing how to move your feet. It is wanting to be someplace else, and having no idea where.
It is the loss of a capacity for joy. For gratitude at times. Laughter becomes obscene, and all the happiness in the world transmogrifies into a personal insult to you.
It is feeling worthless. It is the terror of powerlessness, and the shame of uselessness. It is despising yourself.
It is the loss of the sense of the inevitability of your own life (as Andrew Solomon puts it). Your future-looking gazes discern increasingly obscure paths. As the depression progresses, the future appears to be nothing at all. You become mud-stuck in an unmoving present.
It is finding recovery, or the “other side,” improbable or impossible.
It was, at first, an unease at naming myself "sick." Depression doesn't try to kill you the way pneumonia or cancer might kill you, the suicidal thoughts notwithstanding.
It is at times finding basic chores like washing yourself or eating or drinking water to be the most difficult task you have ever faced, regardless of how disgusting or hungry or thirsty you feel.
It was wondering where I would cut myself next, often when I managed to shower. It is a proclivity toward harming your own body. It is finding a twisted kind of relief in seeing some tangible wound, which distracts from your unseen inner chaos.
It is being spoon-fed despite your protests so that you eat at least something within the day.
It is dependence on others, because you cannot depend on yourself.
It is an unending torrent of questions and insults hurled at yourself by yourself, or by internalized voices.
It is, when you’re able to, trying (or being forced to try) various remedies to your mental illness, and finding it nigh impossible to believe that it will be fixed.
It is a sense of abandonment, though you might be surrounded by people, even people who love you. Reaching out for help seems futile, or attention-seeking, or more harmful than helpful. More often than not, you will not do so.
It was, for me, the experience of God’s silence and of God’s presence at the same time. It is the resonant silence of the psalmist’s “pit,” and the experience of God entering the pit in which I lay. As I’ve written elsewhere, the answer God gives to suffering is rarely a reason; the answer God gives is himself.
It is an invitation to become friends with your wounds (as Fr. Greg Boyle says).
It is coming into extremely close contact with your emotions. It was, for me, fighting to believe that I am not wholly my feelings, that my emotions do not sustain the entirety of who I am.
It was coming to understand that, in some deep sense, nothing in me could sustain myself.
It is letting go of a need to know “why.”
It is an un-at-home-ness with your environment—with a place or with people, even those places and people which have been home for you in the past. In my case, it was coming to understand better what Moses means when he names the LORD our dwelling place (Psalm 90).
It is wanting to give up, and hating the knowledge that you likely will not.
It is a lacuna, a gap in your life.
It is something you would wish on no one.
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Though I say I experienced God’s silence in my depression, I did “hear” a few things from God. One was this: “I will heal you gently.” Another, during a bad night in which I listed ways in which I felt unlovable: “I love you. I have claimed you as my own.” Which struck me immediately as an extremely baptismal thing to say. Another: “Stop fighting. I want to befriend you.”
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Once, on the verge of crying, I felt a presence beside me. It didn’t stop the tears, but it kept me from weeping tears of despair. Sometimes, while on my bed, I would feel unseen arms embrace me. No voice—just the action of presence.
More often though, the love of God, my family, and my friends felt inaccessible, though I “knew” I was loved. I was often numb to and unaware of the embrace of God and the words and prayers of others.
I could never keep my hold
Through life's fearful path
For my love is often cold
He must hold me fast (Keith and Kristyn Getty, “He Will Hold Me Fast”)
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For a long time, I thought I was fighting God in my depression. It may be more of the truth that I was fighting myself, or something within myself.
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When I was deep in depression, the one semblance of a routine I had, the only structure to my days, were the morning, midday, evening, and compline prayers from a common prayer book. The morning prayer ends with a blessing from the Northumbria Community:
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you,
wherever He may send you;
may He guide you through the wilderness,
protect you through the storm.
May He bring you home rejoicing
At the wonders He has shown you.
May He bring you home rejoicing
Once again into our doors.
The midday prayer begins:
Draw us into your love, Christ Jesus: and deliver us from fear.
The evening prayer begins with the words of Job:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked will I return.
The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
The morning and evening prayers included a time for prayer for others and no time for prayer particularly for oneself. These times of outward-focused prayer provided reprieve from the interminable and debilitating inner monologue.
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Reading Psalm 23:4-5 backwards produces this scene:
The LORD provides a table for me in the presence of my enemies,
and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil; he is with me.
The enemies are not taken away. What the LORD offers is not absolute safety, but his presence and the possibility of good things in any time.
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It was coming to understand better why the Man of Sorrows frequently hid himself away to be with the Father, who is the home of all sorrowful people.
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I don’t want to speak about my depression in terms of progress or growth, as if it were some obstacle I overcame such that I could put it on a resume. I hesitate even to say that my depression happened for a reason. Doing so seems as though this could mask its pain. Maybe giving an appropriate reason for the depression might dull the pain, but it may do more harm than good to call it “meaningful.”
There might be a sense in which a depression can lead to something meaningful or good, without itself being meaningful. Any meaning, coherence, or sense which comes out of mental illness (or any illness) would be from God, for all meaning is of God (as Kathryn Greene-McCreight, a priest who lives with bipolar disorder, tells us). A deeper, experiential understanding of mental illness perhaps, or a sort of empathy for those who suffer from mental illness, or a more tenacious love for God (which for John of the Cross is the end of the dark night of the soul). Many things which have become clearer to me now would not have come to me without experiencing the pit.
Depression was for me an invitation—an aggressive invitation—to articulate pains stemming from both unrealized expectations and actualized past hurts. I wish the invitation had never been sent to me. Yet without having responded to it, I would not be where I am on this sojourn with myself, others, and God—though again, I wish I could have sojourned without going through the valley of death’s shadow.
None of this is to say that we are able to reverse the evil nature of depression. Nor that meaning is something to be demanded or even expected; the books of Job and Ecclesiastes tell us this.
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Bookending Andrew Solomon’s book The Noonday Demon, subtitled “An Atlas of Depression,” is the statement “Depression is the flaw in love,” by which Solomon means to say that our capacity for full human experience necessitates both the richness of love and the existential poverty of depression. Which might be to say that to be fully human, we need to be able to be depressed.
I don’t know exactly that that is entirely true, but I will say this, though: what brought me out was, I think, love. Other things helped to varying degrees—counseling/talk therapy, meds, exercise, diet. But what gave me relief and eventually release was the love of others: the actions of presence, of tears, of listening, of speaking, of silence. And one way in which I sensed that I had “recovered” was that I felt a capacity for love again.
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There’s the importance of a community, especially a community of faith. The depressed person suffers from a temptation toward imagining that his or her suffering is all that there is and will be. The child of God who suffers might imagine God in the equation, but only as distant, or as a tormentor. How do you talk about faith, hope, or love? I think now that to bear each other’s burdens (Galatians 6) may sometimes simply mean to bear each other, to be life vests to each other.
Like the crippled man carried by his four friends to Jesus for healing, I was brought to God by the prayers and ministry of others. For a long while, I wanted to cry, but could not do so, and so had to accept the tears of others. In weakness, I had to depend on the faith, hope, and love of others. Which doesn’t constitute a loss of faith, hope, or love per se, but rather an outsourcing of actions, attitudes, or emotions which I could no longer sincerely do or have.
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The psalmist writes “Where can I run from your presence?” (Psalm 139). The psalmist finds God even in the realm of death, as I did and many others have. But for the depressed person, at times the presence or action of love seems impossible, or like something fake. Sometimes the depressed person thinks that it would be better not to be the recipient of love, if only so that the pain he or she thinks is caused on others close to them would end. But this thought is untrue.
To cease to hold on to the love others have for you is, in a way, to die. To continue holding on, and to love as you are loved, is, in a way, to keep living. Though all the evidence seems to point to the contrary, God loves the world, and we who live in it go on under the shade of that love.
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