My Accidental Devotions: Bl. Louis Martin and the Materialist Mind

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Catholicism, depression, mental illness, prayer

I am grateful to Churl for asking me to expand a facebook post on the upcoming canonization of Bl. Zélie Guerin and Bl. Louis Martin into this short essay; it has been a welcome opportunity to further my research and my thoughts on the topic. Today, the 12^th of July, is their wedding anniversary and the day the Catholic Church observes their feast.

My memories of traveling in Europe in the summer of 2013 are centered on the relative friendliness of manuscript librarians and the quality of Skype connections. Five months pregnant and traveling alone through Europe to finish manuscript research for my doctoral dissertation, I would call my husband online whenever possible, relying on the free wi-fi in visitor information centers to send e-mails when it was not. Alençon is particularly clear: I stayed at a business hotel and the connection was good, and I wept to be so far away from my husband when he shared bad news. An older couple to whom we were close had received two bad diagnoses in the same weeks— she cancer, he a neurological condition, and she was not expected to live long.

The next morning found me at a building I had been directed to by the guide at the town visitor center, but had not expected to visit: the shrine built at the childhood home of St. Thérèse. I am embarrassed to admit how surprised I was when I was directed to the shrine when I asked about things to see: I knew that Alençon was famous for lace, and I knew that her mother had been a lacemaker, but I had not connected the two. After all, she was “of Lisieux.”

My ignorance may be attributed to the fact that I find St. Thérèse discomforting. I read “Story of a Soul” as a college freshman, on a four-hour plane flight the week before my baptism, and the binge imparted a kind of spiritual indigestion and despair. I had not returned to it until this essay. I can intellectually appreciate the value of her focus on small sacrifices and the beauty of her devotion, but French spiritual writings of her era rarely help me and devotion to her always seemed saccharine and unchallenged in a way that did not touch upon the inner struggle that shapes my own way of belief. Much more for me, I thought, was my confirmation saint, St. Teresa of Avila, who arose from her chronic illness to become tough as nails and didn’t really start spiritually maturing until her thirties. (This is yet more comforting now that I am 30 and not very spiritually mature.)

Knowing Thérèse better does not help my anxiety: if you want to be disillusioned of the aspartame sweetness that accompanies so much talk about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, I recommend Heather King’s memoir of her time researching the life of St. Thérèse, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. An adult convert and former alcoholic, King doesn’t shy away from the traumas endured by someone who endured them with—as becomes clear— a remarkable faith, from losing her mother at a young age to her father’s later illness, ending with a young death from tuberculosis, without morphine but still able to look at a crucifix and declare her love. This doesn’t make me feel closer to St. Thérèse. It makes me scared. As St. Teresa is claimed to have said, “if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.”

As a result, I had no real intention of visiting the childhood home of St. Thérèse in the limited time I had to see Alençon. Wandering about after seeing my manuscript on my first day, I had encountered a shrine to St. Thérèse in the Cathedral of Alençon, where she was baptized. More out of a sense of duty than devotion I had placed an intention to Thérèse, asking her intercession for me as an expectant mother, and that, I thought, was enough.

My conversation with my husband, however, sent me to the narrow chapel beside the house in an abject desperation that will be familiar to some—  how do you leave a chapel when you are praying for someone’s life? A comfort to me, and a confirmation that it was the ‘proper’ place for my prayers, was that the shrine was not only devoted to Thérèse, but also to her parents, Zélie Guerin and Louis Martin, whose cause was then awaiting the final steps to move from beatification to canonization. A basket was out for requested prayers that would be offered to the couple, and in my grief I left my intentions there. It was only later I realized the confluence: Zélie, too, had died of cancer; he of a neurological condition. Against predictions, our friend’s wife is still living. It may not be miraculous, but it is a gift and a grace.

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Zélie Guerin and Louis Martin will be canonized this coming October. They are justly popular among the young couples I know as a model for developing holiness in family life and a sign that lay couples, too, can achieve the heights of sanctity. Zélie leaves more surviving letters, and the fact that she ran a business has given her a fama among observant working mothers. Less is known about Louis, and unlike his wife, I have rarely seen him discussed without his spouse. He had wanted enter religious life as an Augustinian canon but had no Latin. He was a watchmaker and known for sanctity throughout his life. Beyond the welcome addition of a middle-class married couple to the canon of the saints, however, there is something to be said about the value of holding up Louis as a model of sanctity despite his struggles with mental illness near the end of his life.

Canonizations come with lag time, and it takes much longer for someone to be declared a saint than it does for our ideas of mental illness to change. (One may consider, from the perspective of intellectual history, that the short life of St. Thérèse (1873-1897) coincides with the training and early career of Sigmund Freud.) It will be many years before there is a saint with a substantial body of supporting evidence who has endured the challenges of the conditions we recognize today, and the traditional options like Saint Dymphna, while not without value for many, can be unsatisfying. A declaration of sanctity for public veneration comes with its own challenges— so much of our language and understanding of religious devotion and holiness is focused on intention, the will, as well as emotional experience. Mental illness makes clear—particularly to those who have experienced it—how unreliable these ideas can be. It also, for these reasons, makes it a challenge to decide whether someone’s life has approached the accepted ideals of sanctity.

Changing ideas of the mind and the reticence of the past have made it hard to determine what, exactly, Louis Martin experienced. In The Story of a Soul, Thérèse writes that they feared he would suffer a ‘cerebral paralysis,’ and that “words can’t describe our agony, so I shan’t try to write about it.” A 1949 edition of her letters refer only to “the family trial,” and paralysis. The only hint that his losses have been more than physical are a letter in which Thérèse asks her sister to have their father bless the wreath she will wear when she makes her vows, and says that her request “is not difficult to grasp, and if at moments he understood, he would be so happy!”

Once again, Heather King gives an evocative description of the bitter cup, explaining that Louis Martin suffered not only from paralysis, but from a mental decline that lead to him disappearing for days at a time, and eventually to his being admitted to a mental hospital for several years. It is not clear whether Thérèse, in the convent, was shielded from the rumors that her father had syphilis, or had been driven mad by her young entry into religious life. In her letters, she would declare this period a “family martyrdom.” Louis died in 1894, under the care of two of his daughters.

Rereading in preparation for this post, I discovered that the endpapers in the used copy of  St. Thérèse’s letters I bought as a college freshman are covered in pencil notes, marking passages the previous owner found important. The first is from an early letter, and reveals a principle that underpins the spirituality of both St. Thérèse and her father, and one which may help free those of us more troubled than aided by Thérèse’s ability to embrace suffering: namely, the willingness to do so weakly:  “Martyrs have suffered with joy, and the King of Martyrs suffered with sorrow.”

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How to talk of souls? How discuss our being? It is common— but erroneous—to identify the soul with the mind, and focus entirely on the mental categories of religious experience. With a rising awareness of mental illnesses from depression to dementia, it becomes ever more important to clarify the position of mental illness in our understanding of the human person, and where God’s grace stands in relation to our weaknesses. Saint Thérèse was no stranger to the “spiritual dryness” familiar to mystics throughout the history of the Church, and this traditional acceptance of the dark night of the soul is a crucial reminder that—as a Carmelite once told me— grace is not conferred through emotion. But how can one patiently sustain one’s devotion when your dryness seems less a spiritual step than a problem within; when one’s swinging emotions make you distrust consolations; when abilites begin to fade?

Meditation on the life and sanctity of Louis Martin may be a consolation for those of us who endure such questions. He achieved recognizable sanctity in a very traditional model, despite his illness and the accompanying slander. His elevation to the altar is a validation of marital life, but should also stand as a reminder that we are not far from God, even when we are farthest from ourselves.

Alice is a postdoctoral researcher in Medieval History, working on conceptions of human rationality—and irrationality— in twelfth-century theology. She converted to Catholicism in 2004 and has herself suffered from depression and anxiety; her last (and first) post on A Christian Thing was about Miriam Ibrahim and Saint Perpetua. She’s recently returned to very intermittent blogging at The Accidental Philologist.

Academia and Mental Illness: Some Personal Reflections on the Guardian Article

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academia, Academics, culture of acceptance, depression, guardian, mental illness, OCD

I have a Doctorate, and I managed to get through it alive. For many this, I suppose, would be a metaphor; for those who do or have done a graduate degree with mental illness, it may be a literal fact – and for some, getting through alive does not happen. Our attention has been brought to this most recently by the recent article in The Guardian examining unhealthy attitudes toward mental illness in the academy, which relates the story of J. To determine the exact cause of a person’s suicide is impossible, but, as the author of this article notes, one of the contributing factors in J’s suicide was an academy that has in places fallen into overlooking mental illness and its complicated intersection with graduate school.

As someone who has OCD and depression, I do know what it is like to go through the academic steps needed to get a PhD as well as grapple with such issues, but I have not hitherto written about the intersections of mental illness and the academy in my life. This in part is because it has been mixed; where I have at times felt aware of a certain systemic coldness toward the issue, I have also managed to find individuals and mentors who care. But it is also because the deepest part of what I need to say concerns those things that can’t be handled systemically, the things that remain silent. They probably come out in public academic and administrative matters as quirks or character traits or peccadillos if one (as one is always inclined to do) can sufficiently mask the icebergs of mental illness lying below the iceberg tips that consist in these only subtle clues. But the icebergs are always below the surface with far more girth than we see.

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that beneath the term mental illness there is a complicated web of things that we don’t fully understand, and that affect us well beyond the surface issues that we are forced to deal with when we can no longer suppress them, and it is these we are unwilling to talk about in the academy – perhaps for good reason – because were we to see them clearly, they would terrify us.

Another way of putting this is that the way we deal with mental illness on campuses is by tricking ourselves into the belief that it is a small thing that can be cured very easily. I can understand this impulse – most of us who have experienced mental illness know viscerally the reasons for such a fear and such measures against it – but this really means we end up with a system that favors “treatable” cases and silently weeds out those affected in the most deep and complex ways, those who may not even know how to look for help. Yes, there are systems in place, but my own experience, when helping a friend once deal with a diversity service office regarding depression, is that such administrative offices want a plan rather than an inexplicable mental illness. They want timelines and charts and goals, exactly the sort of things students can’t do WHEN THEY ARE DEPRESSED. If students could fit neatly into this administrative model, they would not have nearly so much trouble working, which would mean they would not need diversity services in the first place. And then there are the signs. Cartoony signs, advertising that all you need to do is talk to someone and it will be better. It may be. It may not be. Both are possibilities, and because mental illness is as much a mystery as it is something we know about and control, this isn’t a promise one can make. My friend felt as if the signs were mocking her – promising something and then offering help that may be no help at all.

And yes, of course, it is assumed that things like diversity services are not there to take care of the root problem – that’s what doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are for. Except progress with these specialists varies. When we break bones, some breaks are more serious than others, and some require more drastic surgery or long term treatment. Having policies in place that assume someone can just get mental illness “fixed” ignores this fact – that each case, while having a number of general things in common with other cases, will also be unique according to environment, personality type, friendships, and the skill of the doctor etc. To further the comparison, it would be a lie to put up posters saying that, if you suffer from broken bones, all you need to do is see a doctor and that doctor will categorically fix it. It depends on the break. It depends on how much strength you have. It depends on what medicines you may or may not be allergic too. And you may never fully recover. You might get somewhat better, but you might always walk with a limp.

Then what should we do? I suggest we should do what universities have always been good at doing when not infected by utilitarianism, whether modern or ancient – stand in the presence of complexity and allow it to be complex where it is complex, silent where it is silent, simple where it is simple, and articulated where it is articulated. Don’t come up with a theory to try to “contain” the problem. Instead, let the problem be the thing you are looking at. Because this is one thing I have learned – about my own mental illness – from university, that is, from those gracious persons in the midst of a less caring system willing to teach me what academics is really all about. It is not about having all the answers. It is about listening – and listening carefully – to the problems, whether these are pieces of literature, scientific equations, historical data, or – yes – mental illness. The academy has driven home for me the absolute necessity of being quick to listen and slow to speak. It has not “fixed” my mental illnesses, nor is it its business to do so. But it has taught me some things about them. And most curiously, the places I have learned these things are not from promotional posters or services promoting awareness and implemented into the system. Rather, I have learned these things because various people at the university taught me how to listen. I can only – for my own sake and that of fellow sufferers – wish that those in charge of access and diversity etc. would learn a similar lesson. We have become so used to shouting that we have forgotten how to shut up and listen – and when we pause for a brief moment and claim that we have heard everything there is to hear, we overlook things because we have not been patient; we have not given it enough time.

Is it difficult to do academics with a mental illness? Yes. But I suggest the problem isn’t so much academics as what the academy has become – indeed, if there is a place in society where complexity (of mental and other varieties) can and should be acknowledged and not forced into prepackaged boxes, the university is where it should be. But we have lost our sense of mystery, of standing in awful silence before the complexity of the thing, whatever that thing might be – and with it we have lost our sense of compassion and love.

Praying With Mother Theresa in Room Nineteen: Depression, Spiritual Darkness, and the Problem of Christian Worldviews

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Be My Light, Catholic, Culture of Death, depression, Doris Lessing, Literature, mental illness, Mother Theresa, To Room Nineteen, Worldview

A long time ago, in an undergraduate degree far, far away, I studied Doris Lessing’s short story “To Room Nineteen.” I was in the first bloom of being a newly minted English major, and was quite taken with the story, if in a fairly simplistic manner. For those who don’t know the story, it is, as the opening line highlights, a story about the failure of a certain kind of intelligence. Susan and Matthew Rawlings are a progressive, reasonable couple, who live in what reads like a suburban version of Eden. Despite having done everything “right,” however, and being ever so enlightened about “insignificant” matters such as marital affairs, Susan’s life begins to unravel from the inside, to the point that she invents a fake lover to hide from her husband the fact that, when she sneaks off during the days, she is really sneaking off to sit silently and obliviously in room nineteen of the seamy and generically titled quarters of Fred’s Hotel. At the end of the story, when her husband (being “enlightened”) suggests that they should meet each other’s lovers, she instead goes to room nineteen and turns on the gas, killing herself on account of the vague and mysterious “thing” that has driven her from her family and that haunts every inch of her life.

My first interpretation of this story focused on the historical context. This is what happens in “progress,” when humans think they can best everything with an enlightened reasonableness, and think they can simply slough off real human urges, such as the urge to be angry when one’s spouse cheats on one. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, my first thoughts were along the lines of those of Pope John Paul II when he described the modern world as a culture of death; it is no surprise that a world stripped of transcendence and meaning should end in a self-imposed gas chamber of a tawdry hotel room gauded by the stains of habitual lusts that had no wherewithal to become love.

To a certain degree, I still feel this is what the story is about. Yet, when I taught it the other day, a good ten years after first encountering it, I noticed something else – everything that I had once attributed simplistically to moral decline in culture and the overarching master rhetoric of postmodernity could be equally attributed to depression. It is even accurate as a description of depression down to the smallest details; it knows, for instance, that those in the deepest depression never feel sad – sadness would be a mercy. No, they feel blank. And it is that blankness that is held in room nineteen.

I will not here get into the complications of what causes depression – it really is all sorts of things, such as environment, biology, relationships, etc. etc. – so one cannot entirely discount the idea that part of this depression is in fact induced situationally; unrealistic ideas about the ideal and “perfect” intelligent life have led to a break with reality. And yet, if this is a factor, I think I may have been mistaken when my younger self saw this as the only thing going on in the story, because things, it turned out, were more complicated than this. Figuring out the world was not simply a matter of showing up an instance of despair that one could then, in the margins of the pages, patch up with Jesus. This is what I had initially assumed, but the reality is more complex.

My assumption of this for the most part came out of something that I imagine many of my readers will be familiar with, a school of thought that approaches Christian thinking as a process of identifying various “worldviews.” The various worldviews are then assessed by the degree to which they do or do not match up with the so-called “Christian worldview.” By doing this, one could see how various cultures, literatures, etc. were implicitly protoevangelia, pointing up the failure of non-Christian worldviews and gesturing toward the truth of the Christian worldview.

And of course there is a sense in which a Christian can’t believe anything other than this; if the fullness of truth is found in Christ and His Church, it makes sense that those means by which we engage the world around us would analogically point back to these, as per the old idea of the “Book of Nature.” However, you will notice a slight difference between what I just said and the “worldview” perspective I presented prior, and that is that “Christ and His Church” are a good deal different than a “Christian worldview.” Both of the former are mysteries, insofar as, while they can be understood sufficiently, they cannot be circumscribed in their entirety by human reason. But a Christian worldview, it seems to me, comes across more as a neatly packaged set of instructions, a little like the programs we install on our computers – install the right software, and things will be good, but install the wrong software, and there will be problems.

And this brings us right up against the problem with worldviews. Worldview thinking too easily permits us to construct a narrative of the world wherein deep depression – like that found in Lessing’s room nineteen – is a problem that can be magicked away if one just replaces the nihilism with the right “worldview.” In many ways, it is the intellectual version of the prosperity gospel: think rightly – have a Christian worldview – and things will go well. Get the wrong worldview, and things will be dismal. It is something very comforting to imagine for those who do not get depressed or who have not experienced deep suffering. For those who have – and here I think of the book of Job – it is like acid poured on an open wound.

And this is what I realized as I taught the story the other night, something I have been learning for a long time now but that very much crystalized in this experience: a Christian worldview is no talisman against sadness and deep incomprehensible suffering, and those who spoke as though it were, largely had, for the price of a messless world, underestimated the deep suffering of their Christian brothers and sisters who do have Christ and who also know the inexplicable hollowness that can simultaneously occur within their hearts. The recognition of this, though, raises another question: if this hollowness is not dealt with simply by an easy adjustment of one’s worldview, how is a Christian to deal with it?

It was at this juncture in my thinking that I thought of the recently published book on Mother Theresa, Come Be My Light. My reason for recalling this is that what she describes – a deep spiritual darkness that haunted her for much of her life – is a little like what Lessing identifies in room nineteen. The circumstances are of course very different; Susan Rawlings is a suburban wife in an “intelligent” and “progressive” family, whereas Mother Theresa gave her whole life to serve the poor of Calcutta. But their experiences have in common a certain terrifying darkness and a particular kind of incommunicability – of the relatively few things we know about Theresa’s darkness, one is that she sometimes found it impossible to explain to others, leaving her often feeling even cut off from her confessor. Thus, the life of Mother Theresa puts the lie to the kind of thinking that suggests a change in worldview is all we need to guard against such darkness. Theresa knew Christ – and that did not keep her from also feeling the confusing frustration of his apparent absence so palpably that she could barely speak it.

Such darkness is indeed terrifying to us, unprotected as we are from it by our faith in Christ. Yet I think it is in the midst of such darkness – in the lives of those who experience it, such as Mother Theresa – that we see a Christian alternative to a simplistic worldviewish read on this hollowness. What we find in the life of Mother Theresa is that her practice was to consecrate this internal darkness as a sacrifice for Christ, to make this internal blank itself a marker for her faith, and a prayer to the One in whom she trusted. This it seems did not make it any easier for her – and it would in fact by definition not be such deep darkness if this approach magically took it away. But it does suggest to me what a real Christian approach to Lessing’s bleak enigma might look like. What it looks like is the figure of a woman willing to offer room nineteen to God as a house of prayer. It does not take away the tawdry blankness or soften the seamy scents of ruined lust, the unholy sacrifices of other inhabitants. But it does allow us to rest in the – I don’t want to call it knowledge, but something in fact beyond knowledge – that this space in our hearts so little understood can in fact become the central altar of the temple of ourselves, our bodies. It can be lifted up to God, if not triumphantly, at least in faith, and it can become – even if not seen by ourselves – a testament to the love of God. It can mean that even for those who feel their legacy is darkness – when they trust in Christ – there is even hope for them. And it finally means that there are other options than denial or turning on the gas. We can withdraw into our closets – into the seedy and disreputable room nineteen of our hearts – and pray to our Father Who is unseen. And He who sees what is done in secret will reward us; he will turn our darkness into prayer.

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

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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.

Review: Theology of the Body for Every Body, by Leah Perrault

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Catholic, Catholic Church, Christianity Today, depression, Evangelical, God, Good Friday, mental illness, Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body

If you have spent any time with Catholics, or Evangelicals who have become frustrated enough with a quasi-gnostic perspective to look outside their tradition, you have probably encountered John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, whether through reading his work itself, being exposed to populist and less nuanced versions of it, or in magazines such as Christianity Today. Personally, I have encountered all sorts of reactions to it; I have seen it help revive the faith of some, and I have also encountered some who are frustrated by dumbed down versions of it that don’t account for the nuance of John Paul’s work. Of course, there are also those who mistakenly think that the Theology of the Body is solely about a controlling sexual ethics, and they accordingly reject it. Whatever your position, I hope that what I write in the following paragraphs will convince you that it would be a good idea to read a new book by a longtime friend of mine, Leah Perrault – whether you are Catholic or Protestant, married or single, frustrated by populism or elated and waking up to the realization of possessing a physical body.

In my opinion, Leah’s book, Theology of the Body for Every Body, starts exactly where the Theology of the Body should start, and does start for John Paul II. That is, if we only start talking about TOB when we talk about sexuality and marriage, it is I think a sure sign that we have missed what it is about, and have already fallen into a cultural dualism that has come to view romance in near materialist terms and conversely given up on material and bodies in many other spheres of life. What Leah does is defer the discussion of sexuality to talk about all the other ways that people in all walks of life might learn to appreciate the “bodied-ness” that God has given them. In doing this, she implicitly recognizes one of the key insights we should take from TOB; the problem in some of our churches is not so much that we need to change the way we talk about sex, but rather that we need to start talking about (and doing) everything else in ways that are more than thin. Out of this will come changes in the way we think about sexuality, but we may also realize that there are other things in the world – and very embodied things at that – that matter besides sexuality.

One of the most welcome implications of Leah’s book is the way it decenters Christian discourse that conceives of life as meaningless without marriage or sex.  There has been something of a crisis about this in Evangelical circles – what if those who save sex for marriage never in fact get married? (there are statistically three Evangelical women for every Evangelical man) – and thinkers in this area would do well to take a page from Leah’s discussion of John Paul II. She goes out of her way to offer examples of embodiment of people in all situations, not just marriage, and surely thinking about this is part of what we must do if we are to have a cogent understanding of Christianity that does not lean too heavily on marriage as the sole vehicle of meaning.

Another important thing about this book is that Leah does not think a Christianity informed by TOB will be a quick fix for the world. I must admit that, as someone who relates to God after the manner of St. John of the Cross, I sometimes worried that the book was at some points too optimistic (though conversely the book also challenged my own sinful proclivity toward cynicism), but by the end my fears were dispelled. In one of the most moving passages in the book, Leah describes her own Good-Friday reflection as she was going through a very difficult time in her life: “Jesus enters the tomb, and the wisdom of our tradition has us go there with him, every year, commemorating his suffering and death. God goes into the darkness and we can do nothing to change his circumstances. But we can go there with him and he with us. I thought of how supportive my family had been…They could not fix it, change it or take it away. They just surrounded me with care. So many times, I begged God to intervene, to make things go my way, and all of a sudden, on Good Friday, I was moved to tears by the God who simply and respectfully sits with us in darkness as well as light.”

Though I am largely Catholic in my theology, I grew up Evangelical and so speak with an Evangelical twang; on account of this, I am not in much of a position to give advice to my Catholic readers, but there is one caveat I want to make for Evangelicals, particularly of the emergent sort. Such emerging Evangelicals have played, and played loudly, the problems of Evangelical neo-gnosticism, and rightly so (cf. Parker’s Back by Flannery O’Conner). However, in disabusing themselves of gnosticism, Evangelicals, with the much chronicled scandal of their minds, do not have the deep liturgical and philosophical traditions of the Catholic church, which is the home of TOB. Thus, whereas Leah and John Paul II can reject gnosticism but also imagine a form of Christian embodiment different from secular materialism, I am not sure that emergent Evangelicals have the tradition necessary to give them the imaginative capacity for this. Let me put it this way: When I go into the Cathedral at Notre Dame U in South Bend, I am certainly called out of my gnostic proclivities – here is an entire building where every stone cries out to God – but there is a difference between this kind of embodiment and the materialism that a secular person might consider embodiment; in the former, heaven and earth meet, while in the latter, there is just earth. However, when I go into an emergent “pub church” or “coffee shop” church, I suppose I am embodied insofar as I am enjoying the material culture of a secular world.  However, I am not made uncomfortable by the fact that there must be something more than coffee shops and pubs – there is no yearning – and so while I may be very embodied, that embodiment might be too comfortable to be church, however commendable it might be as a social activity; the Church should pique in us a longing for embodiment of a holy kind, the kind that hungers for the Eucharist, and that experiences this as an expansion rather than a reduction of meaning. So, while Catholics and other churches with liturgical and philosophical traditions in some ways have built into them a safeguard against mere materialism, I would caution emerging type Evangelicals to be careful because they do not have this safeguard.

I would like to conclude with one of the quotes I most appreciate from Leah’s book, and a brief reflection on my own recent experience of embodiment. The quote is that, “if we take Theology of the Body seriously, then we have to shift our mindset away from issues and start to see, hear and love the people who are affected by them, just as we do when we are the ones facing hunger, fear or oppression.” Recently, I moved from the West side of Vancouver – one of the richest neighborhoods in Canada – to the North side of Winnipeg. We are not in the “rough area” proper, but we are close enough that, when I went to get a new prescription for my antidepressants, the clinic I went to was one that dealt largely with addictions – with helping some recover and turning away others looking for yet another prescription for the painkiller to which they are addicted. And I was struck by how glad I was to be there. Not because I was going to rush in and save these people, or because I romanticize their lives – I know their lives are often gritty and brutal and joyful in ways I do not yet understand. What I do know is that I was glad to be out of a community that prided itself in its issues and ideals but could not recognize themselves in the broken bodies lying on the street.  I will be the first to acknowledge that I am not good at loving my neighbor, but seeing them – and seeing them in the flesh – might not be a bad way to start.

Faith and Mental Illness

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Christ, Christian, church, depression, drug, Faith, Germanic, Latin, mental illness, rational, self, Sin

Today’s topic has been brewing in my head for a while, as it is one that affects my own life and the lives of those close to me.  My purpose is to clarify exactly what the difficulty is in thinking about one’s faith and one’s mental illness.  I will start at what seems to be the most surface part of the tension, and try to work my way into what is actually going on.

Very simply put, the surface issue seems to be this: Christianity speaks to us and calls us to Christ as rational human beings responsible enough to take initiative for things; that, at least, is what we mostly seem to presume when we exhort our congregations from pulpits to be more fully Christian.  Mental illness on the other hand takes away our volition and ability to control ourselves – we are vulnerable and at times not even functional enough to take in the content of a sermon if we would.  This, at least, seems to be the surface tension: we perceive the gospel to be one preached to sane, normal, rational people, and mental illness as something that keeps us from being one of these people; hence, the difficulty posed in this post is knowing what exactly a gospel for normal people might have to do with us who are insane.

As one might guess from the above paragraph, part of my means of dealing with this is to trouble the idea that Christianity is for normal people and also that people with mental illness have no volition.  It seems to me that Christianity starts with the basic presupposition that we are all freaks – we are stuck with sin and the effects of sin; please note here that I am not saying that those who have mental illness are so because they in particular have sinned, but rather that mental illness seems more generally to be the sort of thing that could only come about in a fallen world.  In any case, the gospel seems to be the good news that Christ has come to save freaks – from themselves, from others, from their own freakishness – and believing this would seem to be a precondition for receiving God’s grace, so that perhaps the real problem is not how we can help those mentally ill “freaks” receive the gospel, but rather how we can bring the gospel to those who think it is for normal people, that is, those who are probably the majority of people in our churches.  I have been thinking a lot about the parable of the wedding banquet – how the master at the end of the parable brings in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  We often look at this and tell each other how nice it is that God cares even for these people, even for the least of these.  I wonder though if the reality  is not more shocking.  Maybe it is because we need these people at our “normal” banquets to convert us, to teach us what the gospel really is.  Maybe we need to see them to realize that we ourselves are in a worse state than they – not physically affected, but heartblind, crippled in our wills, and poor in righteousness.

So I have troubled the waters of the “normal” church, but now I would like to trouble the waters regarding the helplessness induced by mental illness.  The point I want to make here is that, though mental illness will limit the ways I can make choices, I am never wholly without choice.  A good example is this.  Imagine that I am depressed, and I therefore treat everyone around me miserably.  In many ways, once I am in a situation where depression is in full swing and there is something to aggravate it and make me act bitterly toward others, there is very little I can do – the reaction is sometimes as inevitable as mixing baking soda and vinegar.  But there are some things I can choose.  I can know my own weakness and deliberately withdraw myself (where possible) from situations where the reaction will take place.  I can explain what is going on to others so that they know the damage I may cause is not as intentional as it may seem.  We are also in a society blessed with antidepressants and counseling, which offer yet another choice.  In my opinion, one of the most cruel choices a mentally ill person can make is to refuse treatment and just “get by” when that getting by is taking a horrible toll on those around them.  Christians are often very worried about antidepressants etc., whether it is right to be influenced by a drug.  What they should worry more about is whether deciding to refuse drugs and forcing those around one to shoulder the burdens caused by this refusal is in fact concordant with loving one’s neighbor.  There are of course many more factors than can be discussed here, and I don’t at all mean to suggest that those who refuse medication or refuse treatment are categorically bad people.  But I would suggest that the question is framed wrong and the actions and intentions therefore skewed when we are more worried  about preserving an intact “all natural self” (which we do not preserve in any other area anyway) than about loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

There; I have hopefully upset everyone equally.  I had initially intended to post about my faith and my own particular brand of mental illnesses, OCD and depression, but realized that in order to do that I would have begin figuring out more generally the tension or perceived tension between faith and mental illness; you can expect further on these things in later posts.  As a side note, I have also chosen very deliberately to use words like blind, freak, lame etc. because I think that the more publicly acceptable terms are tools that we use to trick ourselves into believing we are sensitive and caring – we speak of the visually impaired because we would rather not deal with the blind, let alone love them or see ourselves reflected in their condition.  Also, it annoys me that most politically correct terms simply replace a Germanic word with a Latinate based word, and so in our own way we are simply promulgating another longstanding stereotype, that Germanic words are more vulgar than sensitive Latin words.

Hiding in Plain Sight

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communion, community, depression, God, Lauren Winner, mental illness

I’ve been reading Lauren
Winner’s new memoir “Still,” and she has a lot to say about something I would call “hiding in plain sight.”. What I mean by this is that while some of us hide by in fact hiding, others of us hide by being very public about our struggles and our analysis of them; this gives us control over how people perceive our troubles, and also projects the illusion that we are managing to deal with them without the help of others. I suppose I notice this in particular because I recently had the interesting experience of being depressed while writing an article on one’s personal response to depression. I like how it came out, and I’m sure people will read it and think how wonderfully insightful it is, and it is just enough to convince people that surely someone with such deep and wonderful insight does not need further help from them. And this is exactly what I want, you see, because frankly I don’t like to need other people – I don’t want to be vulnerable, so I am very public about my own vulnerability. But I think we need to need (God and others) before we can experience grace, and so hedging ourselves into this space of transparent bullet-proof glass, see-through but unreachable, is something we need to pray about – we need God to rescue us. I suppose that would be my advice to those who recognize this in themselves, but I would also encourage fellow Christians to be on the watch to help those who hide in plain sight – I imagine in many cases they are those you depend on most for spiritual strength.