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~ Occasional Thoughts on Contemporary Christianities and Cultures

A Christian Thing

Monthly Archives: February 2013

Disagree with Christians? That’s fine. But do not silence them.

27 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Canada, Christian persecution, human rights, office for religious freedom, religious freedom, religious minorities

holy-postLast week the Canadian Government announced the creation of a new Office for Religious Freedom, an entity devoted to highlighting the rights of those suffering religious persecution internationally. The online reaction to the office has, to put it mildly, been mostly negative. In so doing it highlights a growing Canadian intolerance for the religious and the belief that religion is something best confined inside believers’ homes—that one should not dare to bring it out in the open.

That concern lies behind my recent article for the National Post’s “Holy Post” blog. It’s entitled “Disagree with Christians? That’s fine. But do not silence them.”

Faith, it seems, is now to be understood as a concession made to backwards, backwoods yokels. If you must be religious, then for heaven’s sake do it in the privacy of your own home, where no one else has to see or hear you; religion has no place in the public sphere. Having government step forward to publicly defend religious freedom abroad, therefore, has critics gnashing their teeth.

Even those who have been cautiously optimistic about the office have betrayed a surprising indifference to the plight of persecuted religious minorities. Some pundits have warned against the office spending “too much” attention on Christian issues. To be sure, other groups facing religious persecution — Buddhists, Muslims, Bahai, Sufis, and, yes, atheists — must be just as vigorously defended. But what exactly is so verboten about speaking honestly about the severity of Christian persecution in the world and seeking to redress these wrongs?

I go on to discuss the current level of persecution facing Christians worldwide, before declaring my own faith and explaining that these beliefs “make me who I am” and “inform my decisions and actions in the world.” “Disagree with me?” I pose the question. “That’s fine. But do not silence me. Do not tell me my voice is not allowed in the public forum.” Especially when its raised in support of those who have no voice of their own—those suffering for their faith elsewhere in the world.

Read it all over at the National Post.

Note: There’s an error in the text as it currently stands over at The National Post. It says that Open Doors counts one hundred thousand Christians as suffering persecution. It should read one hundred million.

———————

Dantean Peregrinations

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Anglo-Saxon, Beatrice, Bible, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Edward Scissorhands, God, Hunger Games, Lent, mental illness

Nearly ten years ago now, I took a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Much has changed since then. Since then, I have gotten married, become a father, experienced the deaths of two friends, one of whom was as close as family. I have encountered various forms of mental illness in myself and others to a degree I don’t think I had experienced before. I have completed an MA on Paradise Lost, and am nearly finished a PhD in Old English literature, a kind of literature very different from Dantean allegory. Now, during the season of Lent, I am returning to Dante via a study group through our church; we meet weekly, and so I consider it fitting to report weekly on thoughts emerging from our reading and discussion.

Reading Dante after being steeped in Old English poetry for many months is a shocking thing indeed; it is a little like reading Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon back to back. Both OE poetry and the Comedy baptize, as it were, a particular aspect of secular (by which I mean not churchly, rather than necessarily evil) life. Old English poetry baptizes the heroic tradition, and there is little that is romantic here – indeed, the most emotively affective relationship in OE poetry is arguably the relationship between one’s one and one’s lord, a relationship that comes to be a way of talking about our relationship with God. The poetry is spare and it is haunted by doom and vanity. There are battles.  Moreover, I would add that the OE imagination is hardly anti-Biblical, for it simply elaborates upon seeds of images it finds in the Bible. The description of Christ as lord is so Biblical that we even talk about Him as such in an age when the term “lord” has come to be a rather hollow title. Doom and vanity are thoroughly Biblical themes, as evident in texts such as Ecclesiastes and Job. And battle is found literally in the Old Testament and figurally (against powers and principalities) in the New Testament.

Against the backdrop of OE poetry, Dante can seem (and I only say seem, because I know he is not) decadent, with a love of material, place, and romance. Certainly, the primary thing baptized here is the courtly love or fin amor tradition, so very odd from both an Anglo-Saxon and modern perspective. After the tonic of OE poetry, it does not feel stern enough; from a modern mindset, we need only imagine how surprised we would be if we asked for someone’s testimony of their relationship with Christ and they began, “Well, you see, I was at this party, and there was this girl…” To be fair, though, Dante’s chosen theme has Biblical seeds as deep as those of the Anglo-Saxon imagination; one need only consider books like Song of Solomon, and the celebration of the wedding feast upon Christ’s return at the end of time.

One may wonder if such imaginative elaborations of Biblical imagery are not dangerous, and all I can say to that is that it is indeed a dangerous thing to play with a double-edged sword. Too often in the church past and present the heroic imagination of the Old English type has metamorphed into something it is in its best instances not – a means of justifying violence unjustifiable on Christian grounds. Similarly, we need not look far to find places where spiritual experience and romantic/erotic love are being mistaken for each other in unhealthy ways; I think of the kinds of youth groups I grew up in, where the boundaries between hormones and the Holy Spirit were not always clear – I also think of Heloise and Abelard. Such dangers, of course, are why we learn swordsmanship, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in the training grounds of the traditions and disciplines of the Church past and present. Nonetheless, I do think the instance of Dante is interesting insofar as it is simply odd; put another way, had I been Dante’s friend, I would have advised him to get over his silly infatuation with Beatrice and focus on God – advice for which the church would have been much poorer.

The last time I read Dante, I think I was too cynical to understand such odd “Beatrice moments.” I think this was in part because I was exposed to too many poor ways of understanding them by my Evangelical background. Generally, speaking, it was understood (though never overtly stated) that the “Aha” moment we were all looking for was one of pure, personal experience with God. This happened through worship, prayer, reading one’s Bible etc. There was little room for those who had such “aha” moments elsewhere. There was also little room for those for whom “aha” moments were scarce or non-existent. As someone with OCD and depression, I fell largely into this latter category, though I tried very hard to have such experiences. The day I realized that Christianity was about much more than such a very limited Evangelical “aha” experience was a very freeing day indeed, though it did not of course happen in a day. And I still struggle to know where such experiences and emotions fit in the spiritual practice of someone who also has mental illness.

So, last time I approached Dante, I think I was suspicious of this instantaneous experience that changed Dante’s life, given how much it resembled the suffocating conversion and experience stories I had heard and tried to force in myself in Evangelical circles. What I am seeing this time around is that Dante’s experience is different from this. Dante finds grace in an odd and unexpected places, or at least what would seem so in terms of an Evangelical conversion narrative. Moreover, his experience is always open rather than closed. It always felt to me as if there were a number of things vying for my heart, and they were mutually exclusive – if I were to experience God, I should be careful not to experience other things. Dante’s love, however, is one that embraces rather than excludes other “aha” moments. Rather than avoiding them lest they distract one from the “aha” moment one is supposed to have with God, one allows them to be absorbed into the higher love of God. For Dante, we avoid idolatry, not by closing our eyes, but by looking up.

I think another thing that has changed for me is my general recognition that “aha” moments really can have worth. Being an older brother type (from the parable of the prodigal sons) and having been burned by a pressure cooker environment that expected God to appear as personal experience, I tended toward a dark-night-of-the-soul kind of theology, informed far more by the kind of loyalty and commitment prized in OE poetry than by an experiential faith, Evangelical or otherwise. What I have begun to see is that there are watershed moments; there are moments that matter. But they are not earned. Grace spills unexpectedly out on those who have not sought to experience it. And it can elude for a lifetime those who seek it very earnestly. Christian life is not about making these grace-experiences happen, nor is it about assuming that we are not Christians if we don’t have them. Rather, it is about being open to discovering them, thankful to God when they are there, and patient and prayerful when they are not. We must neither scorn them for their brevity nor cling to them as an anchor.

I do have one final thing to say, and that regards the very weird experiential faith of Dante involving Beatrice. I have been thinking about it, and I think that in a postmodern age we may in fact stand a chance of understanding this better than those in modernity, though perhaps not quite so well as a premodern person. There are two examples that come to mind of similar “Beatrice moments” in modern popular culture. Admissibly, they are much further away from blossoming into an allegory of faith, though there is the potential there.

The first is the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands. What is related in this film is an experience the narrator had as a child. She loved Edward, but clearly married someone else (she has a granddaughter), and Edward is still in exile making snow. In any case, the narrator at the end of the film says with poignancy of her experience of snow (which reminds her of Edward), “Sometimes I still catch myself dancing.” I don’t think this takes away from any relationships or loves that the narrator had after Edward. But the complicated relationship she had with Edward led her to an “aha” moment that stuck with her the rest of her life.

The second example is from The Hunger Games (warning: spoiler alert). The “aha” moment in this series is Katniss’s early encounter with Peeta, when he conspires to give her bread and thereby hope. The love here does in fact end in marital love, but for a while the series suggests that it need not. Katniss is conflicted between her love for Peeta and her love for Gale. In an alternate version of the story, Katniss could presumably have ended up with Gale and had no less appreciation of the earlier effect of Peeta’s love that was something different than simple romantic love. Though not perfectly analogous, I think these two modern narratives might give us a glimpse of what Dante is about in his love of Beatrice.

Some Boethian Musings on Lent

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Boethius, Christ, Consolation of Philosophy, Desert Fathers, evil and suffering, God, Gospel, Jesus, Lent

I am in a particularly difficult situation right now – looking for jobs in a very tough job market and overall trying to figure out my vocation – and I often hear from people that “God has something out there for me, so just keep going.” This by the way is perfectly good theology – I cannot fault it – and I also cannot fault those who wish to give me comfort in this way, well meaning as they usually are. However, whenever I hear it I can’t help wondering about the bigger question of the nature of the “something” out there for me. Implied in the statement is that this something will be something I want, something that people can immediately recognize as a blessing. And when I think of this, I think of Boethius.

For those who are not familiar with Boethius, he was a medieval philosopher and politician in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was accused of conspiring against his emperor, Theodoric, and was imprisoned. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, opens with the imprisoned Boethius’s lament. Very soon, however, he receives a visit from Lady Philosophy, who takes him to task for his fruitless and immature self-pity, and undertakes a dialogue with him, leading him through a gauntlet of questions and answers that cut to the philosophical heart of his problem, often leaving behind exactly the kinds of question we most care about in the twenty first century, which is how we deal with suffering and loss emotionally. In fact, there is a sense in which Boethius is speaking of something that I think we have nearly lost the cultural capacity to imagine, an inexorable reality that is both good and does not cater to each and every of our whims [rather, people in general seem to believe in an inexorable reality that is by and large evil and destructive, and a progress fighting against this reality and for our whims – the idea that a) the cosmos might be good and b) that it provides a pattern to conform to rather than an imperfection to be perfected is very alien to a modern way of thinking]

In any case, I think of Boethius at times like these because Philosophy will not let him remain under the delusion that the “something” out there for him must necessarily be something he will like or something most people would consider a blessing. It includes both the top and the bottom of the wheel of fortune, and some brutal facts about the way things work. Boethius, for instance, must realize that though he was in his own way seeking to do something he considered good through politics –to “change the world,” so to speak – this change is not ultimately in his hands – from Boethius’s perspective, he left behind a corrupt government. Moreover, the end of Boethius’s own personal story is something of a case study in what he was trying to show in The Consolation – Boethius was eventually executed for his alleged crimes rather than reinstated.

Despite its name, The Consolation is hard reading. It is hard because all those things we want, such as emotional comfort, reassurance, and diversion are not there. In fact, the first few times I read it, I, coming out a good emotive Evangelical background, kept wondering: “Where is personal experience? Where is the incarnational Christ that meets us where we are at? Isn’t it He whom we turn to for consolation?” This sense was in fact so pressing for me that I gave a paper approximately oriented around it to a society of Boethian scholars, and scandalized them by suggesting that there is no consolation at the end. For a while I wondered if Boethius in fact had not been a little too influenced by Greek philosophy and not enough influenced by Christ. What I did not recognize but hopefully recognize now is that, whether or not there was consolation, there was certainly truth, and it is a truth that we need to hear particularly around the season of Lent.

While it is nice to come up with a comfortable juxtaposition wherein we have the cold, unfeeling God of the philosophers on one side and the personable buddy Jesus on the other, I can’t help seeing the point Boethius was driving at at the very heart of the Gospels – part of faith means recognizing that God’s blessing and salvation are not the same as personal or national success. At one point, Christ is talking about the crucifixion and Peter, being a good Evangelical, stops him and says, “Don’t go talking about crosses and suffering. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And surely it cannot be that.” Christ’s response is to address Peter as Satan. And we see it elsewhere in reverse: when asked whether a man went blind on account of his own or his parents sin, Jesus says it is neither – it is so God can be glorified. And those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them were not worse people than those who did not. The God revealed in Christ is the same God who speaks out of the whirlwind in Job.

Like Boethius and Christ in the Gospels, I often wonder about those who are not blessed. I have heard from various Christians stories about how God has brought about a particular set of circumstances to bless them in a particular way; moreover, I have no doubt that God is behind these things – every good and perfect gift is from above. But I sometimes can’t help wondering about the flip-side of these stories. What about the other people who were killed because they did not leave the country at just the right moment when the tsunami hit? What about the people who were not protected from the stray bullet by the Bible in their pocket? I can’t help thinking that, for every person who experiences miraculous healing through prayer, there are many others who die with prayers no less fervent. Once in fact I heard someone listing the things they were thankful for. They were in the hospital for something at least treatable, and one of the things they were thankful for was that they were not like so and so in the next bed who was dying of such and such a disease etc. Apparently, God is praiseworthy because he did not give me that illness, and we can move on without dealing with the fact that someone – anyone – suffers from it.

Lent looks these problems square in the face. With Christ we set our faces like flint toward Jerusalem. I imagine that none of the Desert Fathers went into the desert because they could not find one – deserts were plentiful and barren in the minds and hearts and cultures of the affluent societies around them. Rather they sought a physical environment that in fact reflects the way God’s world really works, at least in this time between times. People are parched and hungry in the desert. Yes, people die. And in faith we say that, yes, God made this world and it is good with all its mysteries and tragedies, though that does not keep us from asking once or twice now and then if this cup cannot be taken from us. Some like Pilate think truth is illusory, a vapour that does not really exist. Others seem to think of it as an objectively solid club to beat people over the head with. I suggest that it is a nail that pierces our hands and feet, and penetrates even to dividing joint and marrow. And there will not be resurrection until we have tasted it in our blood.

Back when I was part of Evangelical circles, there was not much talk of Lent. I have a theory that this is because there was a popular theology asserting that Christ not only died to take away our sins but also our suffering. If you take away suffering – the long, slow purgatorial path of painful penance – you can do away with Lent. From the perspective of such theology, Christ celebrated Lent once for all, and it is finished.

I and the liturgical calendar would like to submit otherwise. The blessing is not that Christ takes away our suffering, but rather that our suffering in a way as miraculous as transubstantiation can become part of the suffering of His body, the church. Pain and suffering will not go away this side of the apocalypse, and there are always people, Christian and otherwise, who will suffer. In Lent, we as the church do not come to fix this, though goodness knows we will do as much as we can. Rather, we witness to an alternative way of suffering, a way that shatters the illusions and vexations that we take comfort in, a way that exposes us to the searing whirlwind of truth in the desert of repentance. And the deepest secret of all is that there is a strange tenderness, even in the heart of the whirlwind.

 

Dust Thou Art, and Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Ash Wednesday, Christianity, dust, God, Lent, Poetry, Religion and Spirituality

Converting Philomel

 

How can it turn to praise?

Not the lamenting, or weeping,

Or anger, or elation, or any of that;

But the dead dullness

That blankets my heart, I’d say,

If “blanket” were not too active a word?

How?  Mourning can turn to joy,

Sorrow to laugher,

But death breeds death,

Sterile;

 

A seed must die

To be reborn,

But some die otherwise

Ground to dust.

 

Shall the dust praise You?

 

Once, God wrote with his finger in the dust,

And surely this is a start?

I never heard what he wrote

But they say it was enough

To melt the stones

In raging hands and hearts,

And make these rocks cry out:

Selah.

 

Others are used for noble tasks

Beyond such common use;

But perhaps it is not nothing

To be

A tablet

Etched by the hand of God,

Then scattered, dust and ash,

On the listing wind?

Lent: Not giving you up

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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give you up, Lent, rick astley

 

 

Not sure where this (like most memes) comes from, but it’s far too good to not share:

lent

 

Problematizing the story of Sir Thomas More

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Anglican, Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Protestant, Thomas More

thomas-moreToday (February 7) is the birthday of Sir Thomas More, often known as St. Thomas More. He is generally remembered as a brave man resisting the tyranny of king-over-conscience. He was required to take an oath according to the First Succession Act—an act which declared the King supreme, excluded Princess Mary from her right to the throne, and disparaged the Pope’s powers. Yes, he was required to take this oath, but he refused. That refusal cost him his life.

Still, there is some difficulty in painting More as if he were merely standing up for freedom of conscience. It’s a popular picture, to be sure—the kind of thing that comes through in the film A Man for all Seasons. But it’s one I intend to problematize here.

The fact is, Sir Thomas More was happy to enforce his own oppressive tendencies earlier in life, particularly against those who wrote or thought in ways he considered Verbotim. Even before he was made Chancellor, More was commissioned by the Bishop of London Cuthbert Tunstall to begin cracking down on heretics (defined here as those with theological positions contrary to the official position of Rome).

The first result of this work appeared after his elevation to the Chancellorship in his Dialogue concerning heresies (1529). This book condemned (among other things) the use of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, justified the ban on all forbidden books (including the New Testament, Luther’s works, etc.), and approved the punishment of people holding said books/opinions—including with the death penalty.[1] Indeed, More argues in this book that the State has every right to execute heretics “for the protection of its citizens from the corruption of error.”[2]

After More gained power himself, he took seriously that authority to squash erroneous opinions. During his Chancellorship , More oversaw (and participated in) the interrogation and imprisonment of suspected sympathizers with the Evangelical cause. If these Evangelical-sympathizers would not recant, they were to be executed. Indeed, while More was Chancellor, at least six Evangelicals were executed by the State: Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbery, Thomas Dusgate, and James Bainham.

More is certainly responsible for the execution of John Frith as well (More had him declared a heretic, issued a warrant for his arrest, and even offered a reward for his capture); but More had ceased to be Chancellor by the time of Frith’s execution in 1533. The Thomas More scholar Richard Marius once summarized this aspect of More’s life in this way: “More believed that [Protestants] should be exterminated, and while he was in office he did everything in his power to bring that extermination to pass.”[3]

“That he did not succeed in becoming England’s Torquemada,” Marius continues, “was a consequence of the king’s quarrel with the pope and not a result of any quality of mercy that stirred through More’s own heart.”[4] Indeed, More’s Confutation of Tyndale is oft quoted for the grim pleasure More seems to take in contemplating the burning of heretics: “As they be well worthy,” he writes, “the temporality doth burn them. And after the fire of Smithfield, hell doth receive them, where the wretches burn forever.”

This heresy-hunting and support for the execution of heretics seriously contrasts with More’s earlier work Petition for Free Speech (1523), in which he argued that it is in the best interest of king and country to encourage free speech.[5] Regrettably, by arguing in Dialogue concerning heresies that it was the State’s right to execute proponents of error, and by vigorously using his own position as a politician to support that cause, St. Thomas More unwittingly gave the State the moral authority necessary for his own later execution.

Regrettably, by arguing that it was the State’s right to execute proponents of error, St. Thomas More unwittingly gave the State the moral authority necessary for his own later execution.

I have a hard time believing, as a result, the Man for all Seasons depiction of St. Thomas More: that is to say, the belief that More was merely a man opposing the impositions of the State on personal conscience. More was more than happy to exercise the authority of the State when the State’s interests coincided with his own—that is to say, in the defense of what he considered pure doctrine. Rather, we ought to say that More was (for the most part) a consistent man. He would not compromise on what he believed to be true (if, he would include the caveat, the Church had officially declared it true).

As a result, he was consistent in his attempts to impose that Truth on others using the authority of the State (imprisoning heretics until they recanted or, through failure to do so, were executed), while at the same time rejecting the imposition of other’s beliefs on himself (which ultimately got him killed). In the consistency of his beliefs, More was certainly a brave man. And I am willing to call him a saint (much as I, as a Lutheran, feel inclined to call saints of other sinners who trusted in the mercy of Christ). But St. Thomas More was not, perhaps, the “lonely voice against the power of the state,” as he is so often interpreted (and, for example, as a 1999 book title refers to him).


[1] Rex, Richard. “Thomas More and the heretics: statesman or fanatic?” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More. Ed. George M. Logan. Cambridge University Press, 2011: 99.

[2] Latta, Jennie D. “Thomas More on Conscience and the Authority of the Church.” Thomas More Studies, Vol. 3, 2008: Thomas More’s 1529 Dialogue Concerning Heresies: 54.

[3] Thomas More: A Biography. Harvard University Press, 1999: 406.

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Wegemer, Gerard. “More as Statesman.” The Centre for Thomas More Studies. October 31, 2001: 7. http://www.thomasmorestudies.org/docs/More_as_Statesman.pdf.

Roman Catholics and Confessional Lutherans

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Catholic, Catholic Church, confessional lutheran, ecumenism, Lutheran, roman catholic, roman catholics

first-thingsThis is just a brief post to let readers know of an article I wrote which went up on First Things recently. Entitled “Roman Catholics and Confessional Lutherans explore deeper ties,” it highlights emerging talks between the two church bodies. A selection follows:

In noting it was Roman Catholics who initiated conversation with confessional Lutherans, Dr. Klän suggested there was “a deep rooted disappointment [among] Roman Catholics—in Germany at least— with the Lutheran World Federation or some of its member churches.”

While dialogue between Roman Catholics and mainline Lutherans continues, a desire has arisen among Roman Catholics to begin looking to confessional Lutherans for more fruitful dialogue.

For more, read the whole story at First Things. On the same topic, a short article went up today over at The Canadian Lutheran entitled “Lutheran Church–Canada and Roman Catholics begin talks.”

——————–

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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Anxiety, depression, Disorders, Evangelicalism, Faith, Health, Mental health, mental illness, Mercedes Benz, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

I wrote this post a while ago, but was waiting for the right time to post it on account of my already numerous posts on the subject. Now seemed to be the right time, since I keep encountering people I care about suffering from mental illness, particularly now at this darkest and coldest time of winter. This is for you – you know who you are.

So, having opened up the discussion on two counts of different kinds of mental illness/mood disorder, I want to follow this up with a discussion of the difficulties posed by these things when the person suffering from them brings them into Christian communities. What makes this most difficult is that the things that most deeply affect our spiritual journeys and struggles – those very things that one talks about with Christian friends and considers part of one’s Christian witness – are not the things we have made space for discussing in many Christian circles. Let me begin, for instance, with the typical question of “Where are you at, spiritually.” It is a little similar to the most annoying question you can ask a depressed person, “What is going on? Why are you sad?” Because the problem with the deepest forms of depression is that there is no reason. There is not a narrative one can give wherein it makes sense. It is in the truest sense of the word irrational. There is a story about a depressed person who went on a nice holiday to a beautiful location. She opened the door, heard the birds singing and saw all the beauty, and began to weep. This is depression. In its deepest form, it is by its nature an enigma.

So you see how asking the depressed person about their spirituality can bring about a deep state of anxiety and fear. Not only can they often not answer the question, “Where are you at spiritually,” but simply have no answer to the question, “Where are you?” Where did the person go that seemed to have been here but that seems to have dissolved into nothing? Where did that person’s interests go? Where did the pleasure and even the pain go, that seems to have dissolved into blankness? You can see how bringing up something like this is not exactly what people are looking for in prayer groups, or when they ask after prayer requests. Because it is potentially devastating to some people’s lives and even their faith. Wouldn’t the very existence of such an inexplicable thing be an embarrassment to God, and a faith that cannot handle it? To the former I answer emphatically no; to the latter, I answer that a faith that cannot handle such things is rightly embarrassed because it is not fully Christian – Christ is sovereign, even over things we can’t explain or control.

We get something similar with OCD. There are legitimate fears that one can discuss. But the never ceasing fear that someone will go to hell because you accidentally slighted them in a way they could never have noticed is not one of these; it is an embarrassment even to try to explain because the person with OCD knows how irrational it sounds and is, though they also know how reasonable and compelling it feels. And even when one brings things like this up, the usual Christian response to it is to reason with it. Engage the alleged problem directly. And this becomes a problem. Because OCD by its nature demands such engagement again and again and again. Better to quote scripture at it as Jesus does at the devil and then move on. The primary problem with OCD is that it sets up battles that don’t need to happen and then wastes one’s own and others energy in these battles; as long as you are fighting, it wins, but it will do everything it can to convince you that fighting is the way to win. You will see the problem here. On one hand, OCD is generally off limits as a matter of discussion in Christian groups. But when symptoms are discussed, they are usually discussed as the problems that they masquerade as rather than the meaningless and nagging voice that they are. The irony is that simply neglecting them leaves the sufferer isolated and lonely. Simply engaging them can encourage them. The tricky thing is that really dealing with them is a matter of acknowledging their presence but then answering them with something other than the answer they want. For people such as Luther, Therese of Lisieux, and Bunyan, this something was the infinite and deep grace of God rather than a compulsive parry for the thrust of every obsession. But of course OCD is tricky, and I imagine that even achieving a deep understanding of this grace could fall pray to OCD. Coming out of Christian backgrounds that emphasized this, I recall fearing deeply that I had not really “gotten” grace as I was supposed, and fearing that I was still trying to save myself through works so that I was incessantly trying to have a spiritual experience all the more elusive because intangible and subject to my state of mind, and therefore the perfect prey of OCD – just “letting go and letting God,” is as vulnerable to OCD as anything else.

Of course, the even more difficult thing to deal with is the spiritual complications that things like OCD and depression cause. Some people may sin by coveting their neighbor’s wife, or cow, or Mercedes Benz, but personally I covet my neighbor’s sins. I covet the state of dealing with normal struggles that normal people deal with, that make sense when you tell them to others. Although I rarely knew any of them, I recall being somewhat jealous in high-school of the fluffy kind of people whose deepest concern was a shallow relationship with their eighth or tenth boyfriend or girlfriend. I imagine I would not want to be such a person – in fact I imagine I do not have the capacity to be such a person – but I could always wish; the grass of fluffy banality always seemed greener from the side that felt like hell. And even now I wish I had something more glamorous and dramatic to discuss than what can only be called the elusive acedia so hard to pin down and address and yet the most frequent result of paralysis from OCD and depression.

All this to say I am not sure I know how to tell people they can meet the spiritual needs of people with OCD and depression, but listening to them might be a first good step. Personally, I have no idea about the degrees of pscyhology, physiology, biology, and spirituality involved in things like this – in OCD and depression the whole person suffers and so it is a problem on multiple levels. Clearly there is a biochemical element. Clearly there is a cognitive and psychological element. And though I hesitate to say it on account of the ways that various Christians misconstrue it, there is clearly a spiritual element. To clarify for those who think this way, I am not here saying that such things are demonic in the traditional sense that requires exorcism or Neil Anderson-esque type things etc. – I have seen severe problems when people treat mental illness and mood disorder as such. Particularly, there becomes a problem when these things are construed as purely spiritual problems that can be fixed by deeper piety, holiness etc. What I do mean though is that, for instance, the texts that most resonate with me in terms of thinking about my faith are not those lovey-dovey-happy texts we put up on powerpoint – no, they are those benighted and backward texts that speak of fierce conflict with devils. For whatever OCD and depression are, they certainly feel like those fierce assaults that not everyone else can see or understand. Who knows what they are, but for my money the best way I can describe my experience of faith in the midst of these things is to have people read a text like Guthlac A – preferably in the Old English – and then follow it up for dessert with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is often very Christian without meaning to be. It is in the absurdities and inanities that the characters in these texts face that I see most often reflected my own condition: not one that fits happily into the model of struggles we ought and ought not to have according to the norms of a nice Evangelicalism, but one that finds a horrifyingly deep darkness and anxiety matched and superseded only by the grace that does not obliterate but has the power to transform and create ex nihilo.

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