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

Tags

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.

---

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.”

---

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.

Terrified

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, evil and suffering, Jesus, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Protestant

It was Good Friday, and I was doing, for the first time really, the stations of the cross. This was my first time, not because as a Protestant I had had any major problems with it, and not even because I was not attracted to it, but simply because, as a Protestant, doing the stations of the cross would have involved making a fuss of the emergent or high-Anglican variety. Anglo-Catholicism was the closest I could get to Rome outside of Rome, but it always seemed to involve a certain kind of hyper-ostentation, distinguished as Anglo-Catholicism is by such loudness. It is thank God possible to be quietly and anonymously Catholic (in humility rather than shame), but, as an Anglo-Catholic, one needs to be very loud about how Catholic one is, perhaps with a shrillness designed to convince oneself of something about which one has doubts.

In any case, it was Good Friday, the day before my reception into the Church, and I was doing the stations of the cross with my RCIA group. I was kind of hoping to slide into the Church – quietly, and without much fuss – and I knew my relationship with God well enough to know that I needn’t expect anything of the mystical or experiential variety – my relationship with Him was and remains enough, and it was sufficient for me to take this step He called me to without much ballyhoo or other diversion of the experiential, spiritual, or social variety. As is typical of my experience of God, he disappointed my expectations.

To contextualize this, I will need to backtrack a bit regarding the ongoing saga of my struggles to understand matters of faith, suffering, and death. As someone with a longtime history of depression and OCD (in the official fancy language my condition would cheerfully be termed “comorbid”), and further with various family members and friends suffering from such things, the question of the place of suffering in faith has always been much less easy for me to ignore than it seems to be for some Christians. Add to this the death of a close friend three years ago, deep alienation from Christian community (too Catholic for Protestants, too Protestant for Catholics, and deeply wounded by the effects of some nasty church and parachurch politics), and a tendency to always put my worst foot forward when it comes to interviews or applications in the area of my vocation, and it is fair to say that frustration is not likely to be something I can forget anytime soon. A fever pitch of suffering would be a bad way to describe it – that happened in the much more volatile period of our younger romance – and now Suffering and I had settled into the familiar routine of destroying each other even while relying on each other for stability like an addictive drug when the exotics and passion are gone, and all that is left is bathetic routine. Not only did I know Suffering, but I made myself an expert in all her ways – I would be the prophet proclaiming her existence to a stubborn and obstinate church. I could, quite literally, say what most could only say figuratively – I really did do a Doctorate on suffering.

But I return to the stations of the cross and Good Friday, with a caveat, which is this. When I describe what follows, I do not necessarily mean that all this hit me on the head at once, or that I immediately came to this realization. I’m pretty sure that every moment we mark of deep significance in our lives is preceded by so many other important moments we don’t notice, and, furthermore, may not even be initially understood – the post-experience reflection on the experience is as much a part of the experience as the temporal moment when one first marks it. What follows is the totality of my impression – thus far – of what happened on Good Friday.

What happened was that, at some point while we were doing the stations, I realized that I had met my match when it came to the understanding of suffering – in this church, in this place, I was becoming part of a people that knew suffering in her bones. Not in the sense that the Church has necessarily suffered more than other groups – indeed, in her imperfection here on earth, she has on a number of occasions been the cause of suffering – but rather in the sense that here, in Christ’s body, a body I could taste, touch, and smell in the sacraments and in my fellow Christians – here, in this body, suffering was understood, in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word. Yes, other churches I had been part of had the crucifixion narrative as well – but the crosses were bare. In contrast, here was a devotional practice that was not trying to be radical or prophetic or sexy or relevant or any of those other things – it was not screaming for attention, as was my own “prophetic” bent concerning suffering – rather, it simply was. It was not some radical thing (except in the most literal etymological sense) that would strike like lightning and change my life fifty different ways to Sunday. No, it was a basic and humble grammar of suffering. And I, the expert, the self-proclaimed seer, with the Doctorate on Job, stopped my mouth, and was silent. No longer could I say, “But you don’t know what it’s like” – because She did. The Church did.

I don’t recall too precisely the exact moment this all came upon me, but I do feel it had something to do with the third time Christ stumbles in the stations. I knew enough of them prior to know that this is the part I most valued, the part where Christ looks at us, after having stumbled twice before already, and we have no clue what to do. Is it about us? Are we selfish enough to be glad for Christ’s suffering because we suffer too? On the other hand, when he looks into our eyes like that, the cross breaking his back, is there anywhere we can flee to evade that look that says it has everything to do with us? Is it an example? An act of empathy? The suffering servant? The broken beast of burden? Christ is physically naked, but it is we who are ashamed – he has looked into our souls. To stumble once might be a token example – even the best stumble. To stumble twice is a little more, but perhaps just another token – we can draw on his forgiveness if we happen to fall a few times, so long as we are generally consistent. But a third time. That is the clincher. He means it. He will really be there. Every time. Seventy times seven times, and more, if necessary. Every time. The face full of sorrow that is also mercy and grace. Eye to eye, and heart to heart.

That is a broken description of the glimpse I had into the Church – the place where suffering is uniquely understood – and the place where I covered my mouth. At that same moment, I felt a kind of release. It is a heavy burden to think of oneself as a prophet on behalf of all suffering everywhere, and suddenly I saw – Christ’s body, the Church, was carrying this burden. It was not mine to carry. I could help or participate or pray or not – I could understand or not – but whatever I did, God had suffering and death taken care of. And it was then I realized the most terrifying thing, that I was free, free to explore that thing far more frightening and unpredictable to me than any kind of pain or suffering: joy. I still have very little idea what this means – particularly as I am accustomed to associate the word “joy” with the facile glossing and painting of pain. And I don’t like joy, because it comes at all the wrong times, and doesn’t come to everybody equally. But it is a treasure, of Christ and His Church, and having retired from the position of self-proclaimed prophet of suffering and pain (though I make no promises concerning relapses), I am at liberty to explore it – joy – the greatest problem that we face as humans. I am terrified.

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

Tags

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

Tags

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.

It would not be funny if I said that Rick Warren was the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’

Tags

Asian, Asian American, Chinglican, Deadly Vipers, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, Lifeway, Mee Maw, mental illness, orientalism, orientalization, psychology, Rick Warren, Rickshaw Rally, Soong-Chan Rah, Southern Baptist, trauma

UPDATE: The contents of the following post concerned a post by Pastor Rick Warren that has been deleted on the afternoon of 24 September 2013. It also coincided with an apology on Sam Tsang’s blog, Engage the Pews, which Tsang has accepted and on which he has written further reflections. Following the examples of other bloggers such as Sam Tsang, Kathy Khang (More Than Serving Tea) and Wm. Darius Myers (Death Pastor), we will be leaving this post up in order to maintain the integrity of the public record. After all, contrary to the comment by L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang that appeared on all of our respective blogs that the post was ‘immediately and personally removed’ by Warren, we acknowledge that while the apology may have been personal and may indeed be encouraging for a catholic way forward, a response following two business days is not ‘immediate.’ Indeed, given this post’s attention to the historical genealogy of these Asian American interventions into the orientalizing practices of prominent American evangelicals, it is an imperative that this post, as well as the others, remain up as a record of this episode so that we can propel further conversation that would lead to a radical de-orientalization of American Protestant practice. As Tsang and Khang have said on their respective blogs, the apology may be accepted, but the conversation is far from over.

UPDATE #2: We recognize that Rick Warren has issued a public apology on his public Facebook page. We welcome this. Following the reflections given by Professor Sam Tsang and by Kathy Khang to this apology, we have also decided to maintain the integrity of the public record by leaving this post up.

The recent Facebook photo posted as a joke by Pastor Rick Warren describing the staff at Saddleback Church as members of the Red Guard at the height of the Cultural Revolution is a bit difficult to process. Indeed, its invocation of the Cultural Revolution has troubled many a Facebook friend of mine for what they are now terming ‘cultural insensitivity.’  I should thus post a trigger warning, for I have reproduced it here.

Indeed, that he then used the comments section to lecture this Thing’s good friend Sam Tsang on humour in New Testament exegesis makes the situation even more ironic. I mean, one would have thought that Sam Tsang’s composition of the foreword to the new Chinese translation of N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God would position Tsang as the exegete. To the extent that our friend was then incensed by this reply, he wrote a response lambasting Warren for his culturally insensitive humour.

To defend Rick Warren as ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans (and by this, I include the Asian Canadians who are posting all over my news feed, as i take ‘American’ to be indicative of the ‘Americas,’ not only the nation-state styling itself as all-encompassing American) simply because he is an older white pastor living in Southern California is no defence at all. Indeed, at least as he is cited in geographer Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions, he claims that his own church is largely composed of Asian and Latina/o Americans. In fact, Wilford points out that Saddleback’s whole idea of the ‘small group’ where members meet in homes to discuss Christian spiritual formation is drawn from Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho’s ‘cell group’ model; whatever one may think of such a model, the point is that Warren is no stranger to Asia-Pacific churches. Moreover, Southern California itself could hardly be described as an Asian American terra incognita; in fact, Metro Los Angeles boasts a high concentration of Asian Americans, and one of its cities in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, in fact served as the key case study for geographer Wei Li’s doctoral work on Chinese ethnoburbs in North America. Finally, Saddleback has itself planted a church in Hong Kong, which itself is no small feat, for The Purpose-Driven Church calls church plants to research their social surroundings in order to be relevant in their local evangelism. Indeed, Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions reveals that Saddleback itself is ingenious in its transformation of the postsuburban landscape’s fragmented geographies into purpose-driven sites through which God teaches Saddleback members how to reframe their scattered lives into purpose-driven ones. One would expect no less of its Hong Kong incarnation.

Any question that we ask about this situation, then, should not focus on why Rick Warren is ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans. It should instead interrogate why he ignores them.

After all, this is not the first Asian American challenge to orientalization in American evangelicalism. Indeed, in light of previous excursions into evangelical antiracism, one might be able to illustrate how Warren’s declaration that Asian Americans are humorless because of a joke taken at our expense might be understood if Asian Americans were to make a joke at his expense.

That joke is: who would find it funny if Warren were the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’?

That I now have to explain this joke suggests that it is probably not funny. In fact, now that I have likely offended you, I need to explain to you why you have been offended.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Publishers’ ‘Rickshaw Rally’ curriculum was but one of the episodes in contemporary Asian American evangelical challenges to the white privilege that has gone long uncontested in American evangelicalism. Published as the Vacation Bible School (VBS) material in 2004, the theme featured a white girl in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair, a karate-kid key chain, and name tags shaped as Chinese take-out boxes. As Soong-Chan Rah puts it in The Next Evangelicalism, Lifeway ‘caricatured and generalized all Asian cultures with various stereotypical images’ and was met with protests from Asian American pastors, some of whom were themselves Southern Baptist. However, instead of apologizing, Lifeway made a few minor changes and issued the material as its 2004 VBS curriculum all the same, all to the chagrin of those who decried the material both within and without the denomination.

Unsuccessful as the attempt to derail Rickshaw Rally may have seemed, though, it served as the first of several similar challenges that have propelled the conversation about orientalization in American evangelicalism forward. In 2007, Soong-Chan Rah wrote to Zondervan’s Youth Specialties for its book, Skits That Teach, that featured a skit similar to Rickshaw Rally, this one titled ‘Mee Maw.’ which featured a Chinese delivery person with a very demeaning accent as part of a church skit book. As Rah recalls, Zondervan recalled (to its credit) all of the extant copies and did away with them, issuing an apology on its blog. In 2009, Zondervan found itself again in hot water, this time over the publication of a book titled Deadly Vipers, a book for men that portrayed sins that men faced as ninjas sneaking up on them. Leading the charge this time was Seattle pastor Eugene Cho, whose campaign convinced Zondervan to again pull the book, destroy the copies, and have the authors remove their website.

What we should find hard to believe is that Rick Warren has not seemed to have heard of these high-profile cases, one of which affected his own denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) and his own publisher (Zondervan).

But even more dumbfounding should be Warren’s inability to participate in solidarity with Asian Americans, even while many Asian Americans participated in solidarity with him and his family when they lost their son, Matthew, to a suicide due to mental illness. Contrary to popular perceptions that Asian Americans are unfamiliar with mental illness, the legacy of political and cultural trauma in the Asia-Pacific–including the Cultural Revolution–should itself be a signal that Asians and Asian Americans are all too familiar with mental illness, which is likely why we felt ourselves in such solidarity with the Warrens in the first place. The authoritarian rule of emerging nation-states in the Asia-Pacific were not the natural results of an ‘Asian culture’ that promotes hard work and obedience to authority. They were attempts at state formation whose efforts to dislodge these emerging nation-states from their traumatic pasts of European colonialism exacerbated the cultural trauma and psychological damage that began in the nineteenth century. If it weren’t from the direct trauma of elite state initiatives at nation-building–such as China’s Cultural Revolution, among many other similar projects in other nation-states–then there was the overwhelming sense that these nation-states and their citizens needed to catch up with the modernity of the West, resulting in authoritarian ideologies that framed citizens as patriotic hard workers whose objective was to make the nation modern overnight. While these efforts at subjectification led to some economic successes, one of the prices that was paid was the spread of mental illness; indeed, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that the frequency of demon possession reported on the Malaysian shop floor that she studied can be attributed to these efforts at capitalist state subjectification. The same could be said of the Cultural Revolution; in fact, my grandfather, who saw the decimation of his family in Shanghai through the double trauma of the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War and the Communist takeover of his family’s property (not to mention the news of his surviving family’s treatment through the Mao years right on into the Cultural Revolution), was plagued with manic depression for the remainder of his life. Indeed, the first time that I ever learned as a kid that there were pills that you could take that helped you with your moods was from seeing him take them.

That the rise of early Asian American studies at the San Francisco State College Strike in 1968 was done by Mao-jacket-wearing students from the Third World Liberation Front in solidarity with the Cultural Revolution does not blunt this point. For one thing, they were protesting the trauma of racism that ghettoized their communities in America; as Ling-chi Wang points out, Chinatowns were the result both of racist planning policies that kept Chinese people literally in their place and Chinatown elites who used this ghettoization to maintain their own power. The strikers protested both. However, to post a picture of a woman wearing a Mao jacket cannot be justified even by this fact, for though even members of mainline Protestant churches in Chinatown participated in these protests, migrants who had experienced the Asia-Pacific traumas transformed these churches after the strikes, bringing their trauma to bear on the real life experience of even the most liberal churches in these Chinatowns. By the 1970s and 1980s, then, counseling psychology became a field of great concern among Asian and Asian American Protestants themselves as they dealt with the traumas of colonization, state subjectification, racism, modern ideologies of Asians needing to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the resulting family dysfunction, and it has now become a commonly discussed stereotype that second-generation Asian American evangelicals seem to be disproportionately interested in psychology as a field of study because of how often these traumas are discussed in our churches and parachurch organizations.

In short, we as Asians and Asian Americans know mental illness intimately. That was why we really felt ourselves to be in solidarity with the Warrens when Matthew died.

If what I am saying is true, then, what is needed is not simply ‘cultural intelligence’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ It is an acknowledgement that just as we as Asian and Asian American evangelicals stood in solidarity with the Warrens when they confronted the abyss caused by mental illness in their family, so the Warrens stand in solidarity with us when we confront mental illness and the memory of trauma in ours. Indeed, it would not be funny if I called Rick Warren the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’ precisely because of this solidarity that we have with him. By the same token, the trigger for memories of cultural trauma should not be funny if indeed he acknowledges his solidarity with us. That he then complains that we do not find his joke funny is not only a failure of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ It is a failure of catholicity, a denial of his participation with the church catholic that is composed in no small part by Asians and Asian Americans. Indeed, that is what’s at stake in choosing to ignore the protests of Asian Americans who have challenged the orientalization that is latent in much of American evangelicalism: it is to deny that the Spirit is moving the people of God into greater oneness by shattering the ideologies that have long kept us apart. To reduce this to ‘political correctness’ on the one hand while calling for ‘sensitivity training’ on the other would fail to comprehend the movement of God in making his children one, even as he is one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. To fail to understand that such reconciled unity–such ecumenical catholicity!–lies at the heart of the evangelical mission is to miss the purpose for which the church exists, for she is a prophetic witness to a modern world traumatically divided by racializing ideologies (among many others) that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all into one in his body.

To put it plainly, waving the trigger of our traumatic memories in our faces on Facebook is simply not funny. But even more curious is that Warren is neither a stranger to Asians and Asian Americans, and it is hard to believe that he hasn’t heard of the debacles like Rickshaw Rally, Mee Maw, and Deadly Vipers. The only conclusion that we can draw from this circumstantial evidence is thus that Warren is not ignorant, but is willfully ignoring Asians and Asian Americans in order to make a joke at our expense. And yet, hope against hope, we do not believe that in his heart, Warren is malicious enough to be that much of a schismatic; after all, to fail to have even a flicker of love for his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters would jeopardize his own place in the church catholic, for he that does not love does not know God, for God is love. It is thus for the sake of the healing of the catholic union and continual solidarity that we share in Jesus Christ that we demand that Rick Warren issue an apology.

Correction update: the original version of this post read that the woman in the posted photo was from the People’s Liberation Army. This was an error because she was part of the Red Guard. We thank the readers of A Christian Thing for their vigilance. I am also thankful for the presence of Not a Dinner Party on this Thing, for she is a China scholar and a truly competent one at that. See for yourself.

On Suicide, Part 1: A Response to Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Illness and Health

Tags

Christ, Christian, Christianity, church, Epistle to the Romans, Faith, God, Jesus, Mental health, mental illness, Paul, suicide

Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Health

Research suggests that religious faith protects against suicide. Why do you think that is in light of how your community responds to suicide? How can we tread the fine line of discouraging suicide while not making the grief of family members worse?

The devil took me up on a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he gave me a research statistic. With this, he said, you will conquer the kingdoms of the world for you faith. Under this sign you will conquer.

As the prior creative bit might suggest, I think a statistic like this must first of all for Christians and others of faith included in the research be a great source of temptation. It is tempting to use it in a triumphalistic way. After all, in a culture of death (as the late John Paul II described it) it is no surprise that suicide is prevalent, and it is no surprise that faith is a deterrent in such a culture. If we would turn back to God, have a revival, become a Christian nation again, we would answer the problem of suicide. As usual, God has the answer all along, and we are just ignorant of it. Of course science supports us.

Before interrogating this attitude, I would like to say a bit about the research itself. From my own experience, it rings true. It is always difficult to play the “what if” game, but, as someone who is often depressed, and for whom suicide seems at times the least unattractive option, I do think it is possible I am alive because of the habits of hope that are part of Christianity. I say habits because I am not good a feeling hope, but there is something in the Christian insistence that one must get up again after falling, and being steeped enough in the church has instilled that in me, to my benefit. But then, I also wonder what kind of study produced this information. What if it is statistically true but only because those who do end up killing themselves are alienated in church and leave long before they actually do it. What if it is just because the church does not have a place for those so troubled they are on the verge of suicide?

But to return to the prior point, suicide is complicated, and a church that merely rests on its scientific ability to discourage suicide (and implicitly or explicitly blames secular culture alone) will be marvellously ill equipped to deal with depressed people, particularly as such churches are modelled on a culture that presumes there are “normal” people and then those ill people who want to kill themselves. For a moment I want to turn this on its head. We presume that the reasonable thing is to not want to commit suicide, and that people in their natural state are and should be happy, wanting to live life. But I actually wonder if this is the case.

I wonder because for very sane people throughout history, suicide, far from being a categorical sign of madness, has in fact been a deep philosophical puzzle – we need only think of Donne’s Biothanatos or Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus to see that suicide is not only taken seriously by “crazy” people – it is perhaps also taken seriously by people who can actually see the groaning world around them. And I would suggest that at least some of the attitude that distinguishes the modern division between “normal people” and “suicides” is the result of a great modern whitewashing of the world via a media that acts as an opiate of the masses. We do not consider suicide reasonable because we have swept under the carpet all the ugly bits that might in fact drive us to it. Modern society is a culture of death. But it is a culture of the kind of death that wants eternal life, and suicide is a chink in its armour. We do not appreciate the suggestion that the world might be so bad we might not want to live in it, and we appreciate it less for the nagging bit of our soul left that reminds us there might be parts of this critique that are true. (For further clarification here, please see Addendum)

As long as Christians do not see the compelling nature of suicide and simply think of it as a madness that their own sane faith can cure, they will not be helpful. And I hope to demonstrate this via Romans 7 and 8. Read Romans 7. But omit verse 25. I suggest that the picture painted here, minus the turn to God, leaves little option but suicide. Yes, this chapter is talking about a particular kind of despair pertaining to our inability to perform the law. But I think there are lots of ways one can take this. Biblically speaking, all such frustration is the result of original sin; for instance, though the degree of my culpability is something only God can know, I feel exactly like Paul here when I look after my son, knowing how many stimulating, encouraging, and beneficial things I could do with him, but sitting there paralyzed by fear and sadness while he watches TV. The good I want to do I cannot do, or so it feels.

But now I want to pars Romans 8. On a surface read, one might feel this is saying exactly the kind of thing I caricatured before. Everything is despair, but when we turn to Christ it will all be hunky dory. But I am not quite sure this is what Paul means, and I think the distinction hangs on what is meant by Christians having “the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of creation groaning in expectation. The problem from a very practical perspective is of course this – there are very much some kinds of help that one can get for such despair outside the church, and I do believe that in the best instances these constitute real help. At the same time, there are those in the church who are very much being not helped – where is the glorious freedom we seem to be talking about?

What I want to say is that, though what is primarily talked about here are the “first fruits” of Christ, that is, his personal adoption of us, there is in this passage an implicit sense of second and third and fourth fruits. Though Paul describes what is probably the highest form of Christian interaction with Christ, we can imagine the Spirit (who hovered over the water) at work in so very many aspects of the creation we don’t understand or can’t trace, even as he is at work in so many prayers beyond the groans of our understanding. My point is that, if every good and perfect gift is from above, the business of us who have what Paul calls the first-fruits is not simply an act of entrenchment against everything else happening in the world, but rather an act of looking for places where the Spirit is working in the world – the flesh here does not in fact mean created material but rather the improper use and orientation of it. It is a Christian’s business to look for and applaud places in society and the world where God’s Spirit is working in and with material, even as it is the Christian’s business to ensure that those within the church can benefit from such material work (e. g. medicine, psychology, etc.). The church is the place where God’s first fruits have been endowed, and is thus the instrument capable of naming most fully such blessings. But the blessings themselves, like rain, fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, the hardened atheist clinician and the habited nun, and the church’s business is not so much to have a corner on this grace as to recognize and name it when they see it.

Hence, Romans 8 answers the suicidal impulse, not by suggesting the Christians have a corner on the kind of grace, hope, and discovery that helps fight it, but rather by highlighting the first origin of all these secondary graces in Christ, as well as the Christian ability to name them and recognize them in their fullness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the rocks cry out, and it is I think not untrue to say that the infinitely more odd things of God’s creation – psychologists, medications, treatment etc. – also glorify God in their way too.

This being said, the effect is not immediate. Paul still speaks of suffering (v. 18). The full redemption of creation is a long time coming. And so sometimes we need to wait with each other. There is no good excuse for sitting amidst suffering that can be avoided or helped in a healthy way, and many churches are culpable in this area. But when created matter has not caught up with our spirits, when (as with the experience of only partially treatable OCD), the tic in our brains has not yet caught up to the deeper spiritual knowledge of a graced world, we must wait with each other, weeping and laughing by turns. For this, I think, is what it means to be the church amidst a world still realizing the freedom Christ has bought and its extent into the deepest reaches of some of the very darkest corners of creation.

Addendum: I want to here clarify that I do not here mean to imply that depression is always due to societal problem that are ignored or not redressed. Indeed, depression in its most biochemically potent form will cause depression even in what is ostensibly the most perfect of external situations and environments. Of course, it is often the very fact of such an experience that many in the church implicitly or explicitly deny, for things that do not fit formulae trouble us, and when not confronted by them directly, we find it more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist.

A Response to the Patheos Conversation on Faith and Mental Illness Via St. James

Tags

Awareness, Christianity, Evangelical, Mental disorder, Mental health, mental illness, Patheos, religion, spirituality

A response to the Patheos conversation on Christianity and mental illness, question 1:

How has your religious community historically seen mental illness? – And how does your faith, today, shape the way you see mental illness?

My background is the Evangelical tradition, so however far from it I may be at the moment (being an Anglo-Catholic), it is probably the tradition I am best able to speak out of and address. As someone who grew up suffering from some Frankensteinian hybrid of OCD and depression, and as someone who had family members who were also suffering from depression, OCD etc., I can say that, in my experience, there really was no place for people with mental illness. To be sure, if we had perhaps been more candid about it we may have found some comfort – I don’t know. But in some ways this highlights exactly the problem that has been typical in Evangelical churches. It is only in extreme situations that they actually go out of their way to say something against mental illness or against talking about it; no, the most damaging thing, at least when I was growing up, was what was not said. What was not said is that not all problems can be fixed by a spiritual high, or a neat testimony. What was not said is that some problems are as physical – biochemical – as they are spiritual. What was really not said was that it was okay to be in pain. It was of course okay provided you could reflect positively on it in retrospect – things were bad until God the deus ex machina leapt in and made everything better. But chronic suffering was not okay.

Now, it would seem, things are changing. Talking about mental illness among formerly repressed Evangelicals is now all the rage. Like our secular society beside us, we presume the way to do this is to do lots of talking – have lots of awareness etc. And neither talking nor awareness are bad things per se. But they become bad when they become a way of making us feel good about ourselves rather than actually doing something. As we know from the book of James, talk can be very hollow indeed. I suppose the question for me is whether all this talk will translate into substance. That Christianity has the resources to do this I have no doubt; whether Evangelicals wishing for further discussion and awareness are willing to pay the price of becoming Christ’s instruments of grace for those with mental illness is a question that will only be answered by their actions; by their fruit we will know them.

This may sound harsh, but I say this because, if Evangelicals have become willing to talk about mental illness rather than stay silent, they have I think been less willing to give up their wedding to simplistic fixes for things. It seems, for instance, that in many instances, the former quick spiritual fix for something like depression – you just need to have more faith etc. – has merely been replaced by a quick medical fix – you just need to see a doctor. This is of course not unique to Evangelical Christians – the majority of secular “awareness” types are also addicted to a fairy tale ending for mental illness, and we can see this “redemption story” in Obama’s speech for Mental Health Month, quoted in the original call for the Patheos forum. In the past, so the story goes – those nefarious dark ages – we never used to talk about these things. But if people will just come out and talk about them they will be cured by doctors and everything will end happily ever after. In many ways we – both secular and Christian – seem to think it is necessary to offer a unified insistence that things will turn out all right in a this worldly sense. But what about when they don’t, when medication doesn’t work, when there is an incompatibility between patient and counselor, when side effects become nearly as problematic as the illness itself? And what about those instances in which there is only a partial fix? Or those instances where other complicating factors such as homelessness and substance abuse combine and send someone into the cyclical pattern of being in and out of the hospital again and again, always caught between a world that cannot fully “fix” them and another world that doesn’t bother to love them? What then? It is perhaps a lovely middle class dream to be able to send our mentally ill of to the doctors who will “fix” them and send them back good as new, like repaired cars. But it does not always work this way. And I do not think it fair to tell half-truths about the help on offer just so more people will seek it; indeed, setting people up for a happy ending that may not be as simple as proposed is a good way to make patients already suspicious of doctors twice as unlikely to return. I had a friend who once sought help for her mental illness at the diversity office of a certain institution. Seemingly, this institution could afford large glossy signs featuring troubled youth with depression-filled thought bubbles around their heads; the implication was that these invisible problems could become visible and helped if you went to the diversity office. She went. And found no help.

So this is the question I really want to put to the Evangelicals so ostensibly interested in raising awareness about mental health issues. By all means talk about mental illness. By all means encourage sufferers in their faith. By all means send them to doctors. But if none of these things “works” in the simplistic sense you were expecting, are you willing to stick with them in their suffering? Are you willing to let a part of yourself die with them? Because it might cost you that. You might end up like Mary, a sword piercing your own soul as you weep over a person you deeply love contorted in pain you cannot imagine let alone fix. And you may find yourself crying out with Christ, with the person you so deeply love so deeply in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us.” For this too is a prayer of the church.

Put another way, I think at bottom the problem is not just with awareness but with the Evangelical theology (or non-theology) of the cross. Are we going, like we used to do in our city-wide Evangelical service, acknowledge, if somewhat uncomfortably, that yes we maybe have to talk about the cross, but then skip as fast as possible to a triumphalist read on the resurrection? Or are we going to do what Christians in fact do, which is stay by the person on the cross even when it seems all bets are off and we would do better to abandon that person for something or someone more cheerful?

Even for myself, I have a hard time answering these questions. I will with all my heart to be such a Christian, and hope there are times when I have shown such grace. But I pray for the future in the knowledge that this is something I can never do by myself. I need, and need daily, the grace of the Christ who knows what it is to suffer the full extent of suffering, the God who knows what it is to feel the pain of watching the person you love most die an excruciating death – the God with whom creation mourns, the God for whom such an act merits the ragged tearing of the temple curtain as one in mourning might tear his clothes. I need this as I daresay will anyone who is going to take on the task of caring – that is, really caring – about those who suffer from mental illness.

Such caring involves, I suggest, looking among us for the faces of the crucified, for it is in these faces that we will see Christ. This means not just talking, but doing. For instance, spend some time volunteering in some capacity where you will actually meet real people with mental illnesses, though it need not be formal. I have no doubt that all about you there are people suffering invisibly. Pray, and look for them. Seek and you will find. Watch for the ones on the margins, the ones who don’t fit in, the ones that nobody else is talking to. Watch for the popular ones hiding their deep sadness under the paint of superfluity. Watch even for the experts, even those who would seem to have far surpassed you in their knowledge of this kind of love. For these people suffer too, and sometimes the worst; it is so easy to forget that those best at loving and caring, with a seeming artfulness and ease, are also in need of love – at times starved for it. Love the foolish. Love even the wise. But, you will say, not all these people necessarily have mental illness. Yes, but it is certain you will never know which ones do until you begin to see them. Before we can start loving people with mental illness, we need to start loving people. And in order to love people, we are in most desperate need of the cross of Christ.

Judge Not Lest Ye Realize Your Neighbour is a Sinner and You Might Be Too

Tags

Arts, Comedy, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Literature, Mental health, mental illness

One of the strangest aspects of Dante is that his hell is not made up solely of types or famous exemplars or figures, but rather local no-names; even those who were famous in Dante’s time are usually not famous enough to be remembered by the average reader. Similarly, the text is entangled in a politics that now feels obscure – the pressing issues for Dante have become historical footnotes that most of us only know in fact on account of reading the Comedy. This can be annoying for readers; these matters can feel like the inside joke that alienates those not in the know. It is no wonder that such alienated readers have been put off by the text and accused Dante of bringing his own petty concerns into a theological system that ought to be treated as so much “higher”.

But I feel like there is something more than this that discomfits readers – or at least me – upon encountering Dante’s organization of hell. Simply put, I think that, if Dante’s purpose were simply to get catharsis by putting his opponents in hell, he would sound much more like Swift in his more embittered moments. Swift had good reason to be embittered, and much of it was turned to good use, but there are moments when, reading him, we find ourselves cringing at his unabashed spite in some of his caricatures. Dante is different though. We cringe for different reasons.

Particularly, I think we cringe because our encounter with Dante’s figures and politics drives home our own proximity to sin. Modern readers are manifestly comfortable with types and symbols and such because they can remain just that – one can imagine a manifestly proud person, or an unfaithful person etc. while at the same time making excuses for oneself regarding one’s own relation to such vices: “Clearly the Satanic arch-figure is evil, but in my case there are extenuating circumstances and things are so much more complex – there is environment and upbringing and genes etc. to account for…” What makes us uncomfortable about Dante though is that he does not offer us figures that can be magicked away into irrelevant ether. We (post)moderns are polite and non-judgmental in our approach to the characters in the Inferno, but I think this approach is not always so altruistic as we think: We judge not lest we realize that our neighbours might be sinners, which means that we too might be sinners too. This is something we don’t like to think about because, whether secular or Christian, we prefer to hide behind a mask of ostensible morality, and this often involves denying, even to ourselves, the extent of our sinfulness. This I think is not hard to see in Christian circles, what with the many scandals etc. that one encounters in which people have been seemingly living multiple disconnected lives. What I don’t think we as readily notice is that the same thing happens with whatever other so-called values we adopt in society: multiculturalism, environmentalism, liberty, equality, fraternity etc. Society becomes a self-justifying system such that it needs to destroy whatever threatens its facade of progress and good values – and the things that threaten it just happen to be sinners, that is, all of us. In making this claim, I am not I hope simply inventing charges, for it comes out of direct experience I have had with societal treatment of mental health. We are far more interested in demonstrating that we are helpful, and getting the attached funding and accolades, than we are in actually being helpful.

This of course leaves us with the question of what to do about all this muck that Dante dredges up in us. The answer is simple and swift in its striking:

Kyrie eleison,

Christe eleison,

Kyrie eleison.

Dantean Peregrinations

Tags

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.

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

Tags

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.