Religion and Depression: God and Key Lime Pie

Here’s Eric’s logic . . .

"If something’s not broken, a person isn’t going to waste the time to fix it, or make it the best it can be," he said yesterday at breakfast, (referring to his golf swing, while I was contemplating souls and eternal salvation). "Only when something breaks down (he was thinking cars, I was considering the nervous system), is a person going to search for a solution."

"Think about it," he continued. "If you’re happy, you’re not going to pick up some spiritual self-help book on how to improve your life. But if you’ve just run into a wall, you could use a little advice and some spiritual solutions."

I guess that’s why "The Pain of Being Human" sold twice as many copies as "The Joy of Being Human," and why the book Mike Leach and I edited entitled "I Like Being Married," flopped in comparison to the books on how to forgive your spouse after an extramarital affair.

Saint Augustine once wrote, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." I believe that therein lies the clue on why depressives are more spiritual—we are more aware of that human restlessness or inner void (the doughnut phenomenon I described in my post "Ten Days to Self-Esteem") than our happy counterparts (those blessed with functional wiring, like Eric), or maybe we are more restless AND more aware of our unease. And we want to fill that void and settle the restlessness ASAP because it feels about as good as cow droppings on our heads.

So we pray. And we inhale frozen Kit Kat bars. Because both are like sucking on a pacifier to satiate the inner longing TEMPORARILY (prayer the preferred method, of course). Until our Prozac poops out (and our brain’s wiring and chemistry changes), and we need another kind of cocktail. At which time some of us head to daily Mass or join religious congregations, and others go to the hospital, and some (like me) do everything and anything as long as it's not Vinyasa yoga (because that feels worse than the cow excrement).

According to St. John of the Cross--the Spanish mystic who experienced something far worse than cow pies when he was harshly imprisoned in Toledo--the purpose of the dark night is all for love: to become better lovers of God and one another. Furthermore, the dark night takes us from isolation to creativity, from withdrawal to contribution.

"Obscurity and attachment, followed by God-given clarity, liberation of love, and deepening of faith, are consistent hallmarks of the dark night of the soul," writes Gerald May in his fascinating book "The Dark Night of the Soul." "Often this liberation results in a remarkable release of creative activity in the world."

Consider for a moment the three Teresas (not including me) who experienced dark nights of the soul: Teresa of Avila emerged from hers and became the founder of the Discalced Carmelites, a prolific author, and the first woman Doctor of the Church; St. Therese of Lisieux is so popular, dubbed the "greatest saint of modern times" by Pope Pius X, largely due to her articulation of her crisis of faith in the pages of her autobiography, "The Story of a Soul." And now, with the publication of some of Mother Teresa’s personal writings, we are learning about the modern saint’s personal agony that fueled her mission and incredible contribution to goodness, hope, and love on earth.

I keep pondering Archbishop Perier of Calcutta’s response to Mother Teresa concerning her darkness:

This is willed by God in order to attach us to Him alone, an antidote to our external activities, and also, like any temptation, a way of keeping us humble . . . to feel that we are nothing, that we can do nothing. . . . My only wish and desire, the one thing I humbly crave to have is the grace to love God, to love Him alone. Beyond that I ask for nothing more.

I’m not sure I agree with him. Because if I did, I wouldn’t have sought treatment in the 58,094 ways I did. I believe God wants me to be as healthy, happy, and productive as possible, and that he’s on the side of recovery, not illness. However, I can’t deny that my depression has been a refiner’s fire, impassioning my faith one profanity at a time. I can’t help compare it to the way a writer-mom, Linda Eyre from Salt Lake City, described motherhood:

We start our mothering careers as rather ordinary-looking clay pots with varied shapes and curves—and march directly into the refiner’s fire. The fire, however, is not a onetime process but an ongoing one. Every experience that helps us to be a little more compassionate, a little more patient, a little more understanding, is a burst of fire that refines us and leaves us a little more purified. The more we filter, strain, and purge through the experience of our lives, the more refined we become.

If I weren’t always so restless, I might be tempted to sleep in on Sundays more often, to listen to music during my run instead of pray a novena. I wouldn’t think to thank the big guy for a day without tears, to bless him for 24 consecutive PMS-free (hormonally balanced) hours. I’d be less aware of the rose gardens I walk by to get to David’s school (but also less hyper about the bees on the buds). I'm pretty sure that I’d be less spiritual and less inclined to gorge on dessert.