Sitting in the Dark

By Debie Thomas

           My town has had a sobering week.  A senior at my daughter's high school took his life early Saturday morning — the second student suicide this year. Hardly twenty-four hours later, a middle-aged man jumped onto the train tracks near my home.  My children and I happened upon the intersection ten minutes later, in time to see the stopped train, the police cars, the covered body. 

           As a member of this community, I'm asking the same questions everyone is asking: "Why?"  "What can we do?"  "How can we help?"  My personal questions, though, are more searing: "How must my faith evolve to account for such deep despair?"  "Why am I tempted to flee when I can't fix another person's pain?"  "Why, as a Christian, do I refuse to sit patiently with misery?"

           For several years now, a young woman I love dearly has suffered from depression and anxiety.  Her mental health battles have included Obessive-Compulsive Disorder, suicidal ideation, anorexia, and cutting.  She has tried medications, psychotherapy, and hospitalization.  Dozens of friends and family members have prayed for her healing, and she has prayed herself, long and diligently.  Often, she has copied out pages of Psalms and Proverbs to soothe her mind.  And yet she continues to suffer.

           I don't think anything in my life has so dragged my faith to the edges of doubt and frustration as this young woman's pain.  Her story has broken my heart, and my proximity to its darkest chapters has forced me to reevaluate my Christianity in ways I find destabilizing and scary. 

           Why mental illness?  I don't know.  Physical illness doesn't undo me quite like this.  Maybe it's because depression and anxiety cross into a realm I consider fully God's — the realm of soul and spirit.  Maybe I have outsized expectations of how God should operate in "his" realm.

           Or maybe it's because the Christian vocabulary I've inherited — so rich and beautiful in some ways — is impoverished and even misleading when it comes to mental anguish.  The words I've been taught to trust are almost exclusively bright and shiny: God is light, peace, joy, victory.  The stories I've inherited are happy-ending stories: the deliverance plot, the healing plot, the uplift plot.  The main actor in these stories (God) is always said to play fair, never giving anyone more than they can handle.

           To face mental illness honestly is to confront the heart of my faith. Can I tolerate a God who might not alleviate suffering in this lifetime?  What would it take to reject once and for all the dangerous belief that God "gives" us mental illness, trauma, suffering, despair? What if Christian stories don't always end in deliverance?  What would it look like to accept the mystery — not the sin, not the faithlessness, not the divine punishment — of deep depression?

           As I've witnessed my loved one's journey over the past few years, I've had to get real. In the world of mental illness, there's no room for easy piety, and denial, however convenient, doesn't work.  Nothing has inoculated my spirit against bumper-sticker theology — happy-clappy, "Praise the Lord!" "Ours in the victory!" Christianity — like watching this young woman wince in church.

           These days, I'm trying out a new vocabulary, a harder one.  I'll never stop praying for deliverance, or believing that it's possible.  But I'm learning to pray for other things, too.  Acceptance.  Endurance.  Longsuffering.  Humility.

           I'm also seeing with fresh eyes something that's been true all along: Jesus was well acquainted with grief.  He rarely spoke in exclamation points; he was a Man of Sorrows.  In his darkest moments, he spoke words I'll never understand the way a chronically depressed person might: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

           There's a beautiful compline prayer I make at night, taken from the Book of Common Prayer: "Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen."

           Until very recently, every word of the prayer made sense to me, except these three: "Shield the joyous."  Of course I understood the need to pray for the sick, the weary, the afflicted, the dying.  But the joyous?  Why pray for those who are already happy?  Shield the joyous?  Shield them from what?  And why?

           Well, for many people joy is hard to come by.  It's a beautiful and delicate gift, too often marred by a broken world. Why not pray that God extend it, protect it, shield it?

           Or here's another possibility: maybe, when I'm suffused with joy, when my world is bright, sunlit, and hopeful, I need to be shielded from doing harm.  From assuming that my joy is infectious.  From expecting everyone's psychological and spiritual wiring to look like mine.  Maybe God needs to shield my brightness so that it will not wound those whose eyes, weakened from depression and anxiety, can't bear my blinding light.

           It's a cliche these days to ask what Jesus would do in the various situations we face in life.  But it's a question worth asking.  What would Jesus do in the presence of one who sits in darkness?  Maybe he wouldn't be so quick to turn the lights on.  Maybe he'd shield her eyes from the easier happiness of others.  Maybe he'd sit with her in the dark, a gentle companion in her pain.

           Maybe I can learn to do these things, too.  "All for his love's sake."

For further reflection, see: Book Notes: Darkness is My Only Companion.