the promise

The past couple of weeks were pretty bad with depression. I'd been doing so well for so long; I suppose my time had come for another round.

It was different this time, though. As awful as it was, as overwhelming and inescapable, I felt underneath it -- or perhaps encapsulating it -- the current of the presence of God.

A lot of things have turned themselves over in my mind lately as I've processed this. I remember a decision I made, my senior year in college, reading the works and the biographies of Faulkner. He, like a number of brilliant artists, suffered depression and never let it go, because (if I recall correctly) he saw in his psychological misery (which he liberally inflicted on his family) the source of his genius.

I read this at the large central table in the English Department suite, surrounded by books and light and quiet, some bland weekday afternoon. I thought about my own life, and how through my teenage years I had said something similar -- that my best work came out of my horror. I thought about the real plunge into desolation when I nearly lost my sister, and the difficulties that followed with my family, though which I was still struggling at the time. I thought about the presence of real despair, which I had never encountered as acutely as I did in college, and I made a decision: If I had to choose between being the greatest writer the world has ever seen, with the constant void as the price, or living a simple, anonymous life in quiet unmarked happiness surrounded by people I love, I would choose the latter. I would give up all ambition and all hopes of eternal recognition, I would give up my art, in order to live free of the fear, the anxiety, the lethargy, and the nothingness. I would settle for being nothing of significance, if I could be happy.


That decision changed my life. From that moment, I sought not just survival, but health and wholeness. I did give up writing for a little time, and, when I took up the keyboard and monitor again, I discovered that my best work might glean from the horror, but came from my stability. Now, when I go through the periodic round of suffocating melancholia, my writing temporarily dies, and when I come through the tunnel, or break the surface of the water and crawl back to shore, or both, I feel tremendous relief at the ability to return to my art. I think in some ways the promise of being able to write again is like the needle of the compass, pointing north, drawing me forward, keeping me fixed on home.

I realized, too, through conversations I've had, that I can persevere through a lot. I've always had a remarkable amount of strength, and for years I took pride in it, and viewed my psychological affliction with shame, because it rendered me impotent, who had always been strong. I've never had any resources but my own, and coming to the end of those resources has terrified me in the past; I didn't know to whom to turn. My theology has always insisted, God, but in practice I've had a lot of difficulty asking for divine help. I didn't know how. And I hated my weakness.

I don't mistake that attitude for a commitment to health any longer; a lot of that was pride. I've found, in the people I've known, that those with great virtues have correspondingly great flaws, and this particular flaw is mine. I still strive to be healthy, to take care of myself, to push on through those dark days and white nights, when waking is a nightmare and sleeping worse, and I've come to have faith that those bad times will pass, because they always have. But this time around, there was a difference. I finally laid down all pretenses of self-sufficiency and told God, simply, "I can't do this."

And found myself flooded with hope. The bad moments were no less bad, but they were more bearable. And I learned what countless others have before me: that in my admission lay the key to my restoration. And it wasn't till I came to the end of my strength that I was forced to lean on God's.

I'm sure all of this is old hat to people who learned it long before I did. It's taken me awhile to get there; at my core I'm not a very trusting soul, and I do have reasons, but for a long time I haven't really trusted God either. Didn't He let these things happen to me? To my loved ones? As Lewis once said, I believe in A Grief Observed (and forgive the bad paraphrase), "We don't doubt that God is good. We only wonder how much His goodness is going to hurt."

But I have a different idea now. I don't know if I will ever be fully free of depression; I am learning, though, how to live through it, and past it. And I have come, this time around, to a deep gratitude for it -- because without this significant weakness, without this thing that robs me of all the strength I take such pride in, I would probably be an enormous, self-important, self-righteous jerk. Instead, I'm learning humility, and the relief that comes from letting go -- that comes from leaping off Kierkegaard's cliff and finding that there is, after all, a ledge to catch me, which, though I believed it, still surprised me.

And even my strength, before I exhaust it, is something for which I can take very little credit. I have made excellent choices throughout my life and in regard to my affliction, but at its deepest root my strength was given to me. As a man whose opinion I hold in high regard has told me, "My capabilities really had very little to do with me and were, in fact, blessings and gifts from God...I was not a 'self-made man,' as I liked to believe, but 'God-made,' and instead of pride I should be overwhelmed with gratitude toward Him for choosing to bless me so greatly." So my strength is a gift, something I didn't earn; and many times it takes my weakness to remind me of that fact, and to cause me to fall into grace, and find my strength and comfort there. And for that I must be grateful; a life lived only inside, and by, and with, and for myself is more constrictive than I had realized.

I don't love my depression. The times when I go through bad stretches are miserable, full of nameless horror, a loss of something I can't put a finger to, and I would dearly love to be rid of them forever. I've asked to be rid of them. To be rid of it. But God has said to me, these last two weeks, when I've cried about it, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," and I have echoed Paul in realizing that instead of wallowing in grief and shame, I should "boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

I'm still leaning on that strength. Things are improving, I am coming back to health, which I have still and again chosen; but the recovery period from the kinds of weeks I've undergone takes about as much time as the bad stretches themselves, and requires a great deal of rest.

Having been dragged under the water by the millstone of despair, though, and been towed to the surface, I can now survey my life and all the things about it that I want to change. These difficult times usually pave the way to some great freedom, some new and unimagined vista (another cause for gratitude), as if I needed a period of painful refinement to prepare me for what's to come. And I long for the change. I'm excited for newness, for restoration, for regenesis.

This affliction has taken so much from me. These years of blindness, of wandering through the wasteland, seem sometimes to have robbed me of the joy I was supposed to find in my youth. But the joy, perhaps, that I discover in my adulthood is all the greater for knowing its cost. And there is a promise. There are many promises, in fact, but the promise I hold to my heart, as I emerge with wet and shivering wings from the eyeless coccoon, comes from Joel:

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my geat army which I sent among you.

And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wonderously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed.

And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed. (2:25-27)(KJV)

"And I will restore to you the years the locust hath eaten." All of my "affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall" (Lamentations 3:19) will forge in me something new, something deeper and purer, and God will redeem the time, and I will have in plenty what I have long lacked, and will receive back from God's hand what I have considered lost.

The whole experience from life to living death to life again has awakened me to something greater which holds me in suspension, which permeates my being and my consciousness and lifts up mine eyes to the hills I hadn't seen were there, to chariots and flame, to purposes that I in my collapsive isolation couldn't recognize: That something greater is Love. And in the aftermath, the prelude to a further metamorphosis, a further becoming, I am able to realize that, as Eliot has said in East Coker, my favorite of the Four Quartets,

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

And so I am beginning.