Christmas

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together

A Christmas Curmudgeon  

Driving home yesterday, I spilled my large cup of Starbucks all over my lap causing me to swerve slightly, it seemed like inches, into the lane of a grouchy driver to my right: an eighty year old guy with a face like a overdone waffle wearing thick glasses who rolled down his window and let out a shrill scream, “Merry Christmas to you too, buddy!!”  Wow, I guess he had a tough day at the Mall!  I had a good laugh telling my friends about it later.

Mark Twain, who must have crashed into a few horse-drawn buggies in a dirt Yuletide parking lot, once wrote:

“The approach of Christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent people. They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit down and cry. Then they give thanks that Christmas comes but once a year.”

The Holidays are tough for many people.

While Christmas and the New Year come but once a year, it’s really a month long reverie of parties, music, eating and spending time with friends and family. During this stretch of time, Christmas isn’t so great for lots of people and there are good reasons for it.

Despondency is common during the holidays for many.  The most famous example of this is none other than George Bailey in the timeless classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.  I believe so many people relate to George because he’s the archetype of a good man who is befallen by undeserved tragedy – the prospect of financial ruin – and learns through an angel what his life would have been for others if he’d never been born.  George develops a new found appreciation for what’s really important, the love of family and friends.  He leaves his guardian angel, returns home only to find his family heartily welcoming his return and, because George has helped so many in his lifetime, they come through by helping him with enough money to solve his financial crisis.

Maybe most of us aren’t on a precipice of financial ruin, but there are many parties, celebrations and gatherings that require the spending for food and drink. This creates the need to put the hands deep in the pocket, both for gifts and to pay for the restaurants and bars. The temptations such as food, the cocktails, purchases and gifts is high and leads many people to feel stress for the consequences of their actions (gain more weight, headache, depression, overdrafts). These effects remain after the end of the holidays and cause even more stress and depression.

Everyone who struggles in today’s economy is George Bailey; stressed and wondering if they can support their families and provide a happy Christmas.  This can take a toll on many.

They may be lonely, whether surrounded by loved ones or not.  For those struggling with depression or just profound loneliness, Christmas can be so tough.  They’re expected by others to be Merry and when they’re not, they are prodded to “Cheer up.” That’s one of the confounding things for those who have never experienced depression:  that you could possibly feel so down when surrounded by circumstances that appear, to those with no reference point to understand, so great. But, there it is.  Even when not told by others to snap out of their funk, folks who are lonely and depressed feel this way because the holidays trigger some memory of loss, of loved ones not there that should be there or their inability to pull themselves out of a down mood.

There can also be family turmoil during the holidays. Usually people want to gather the whole family together for Christmas, but everyone has plans and sometimes there is conflict because people prefer to spend the holidays in their own home. There is also the possibility that people have high expectations these days from other people. People might expect perfect conditions with expensive gifts and positive response by all. This is not usually the case and this increases the chances to feel disappointed and the risk of sadness and depression are increased.

People are too pooped to party. One of the main reasons that the holidays bring with them intense stress is that suddenly there are many requirements and people have to do many things in a short period of time. Even when the activities are basically pleasant and enjoyable, they are a change from the daily routine that people are used to, and this situation is pushing the person to do more things than it can normally do. Shopping, the need for finding gifts, participation in various social events and obligations, the preparation of Christmas dishes and other sweets all create stress and fatigue.

The Spiritual Dimension of Christmas

While there are a lot of things that can bring us down this time a year, we all need to remember that, just like an elevator, there are plenty of things to bring us up: small kindnesses that fall on us like snow throughout a day: children with wool caps on running across the street with mittens while a volunteer crossing guard swooshes them along, someone says “Thanks” or “You’re welcome” and really meaning it, a Christmas song plays and takes you back to a sweet childhood memory of the holidays or you just plain old feel the ineffaceable lift of your spirits being part of the a time during the year where there’s some sort of fellowship, a sense that we all are part of God’s family, and wish each other well.

Because I am Catholic (a very liberal one, mind you), the holidays offer another gift to me – a sense of Joy.  I have always found the month leading up to Christmas enjoyable, what my church calls Advent, in some sense a salve on the short days and chapped skin from too much cold wind that hurdle through Buffalo salt covered streets.

I am never preachy about my faith (I don’t care for it when others do so about theirs’) because I feel there are many paths to God.  But I do feel it’s important to seep yourself in whatever your spiritual tradition leads you to be a better, more kind and decent human being.

In my faith, Christmas is a month of anticipation culminating in the birth of Jesus; the seminal event in human history where God intervenes in human time to send his only Son to save a broken and lost humanity from itself. This belief is expressed so beautifully in the Old Testament by the prophet Isaiah who writes:

 “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.”

My parish priest, captured some of the mysterious dimension of Jesus’ birth when he wrote:

“Contemplate, with me, the mystery that is Christmas. Like all mysteries, it bears innumerable levels of meaning and of presence. The core truth is that God, in person of Jesus, takes a specific place, Mary’s womb, and time (c. 4 B.C.E.), and becomes one with humanity. It stretches the imagination to think that God would so choose to be identified with us that a transcendent/immanent communion issues forth through a simple woman, Mary, as “the Christ,” the anointed one. Nothing in the story of human creation before this event/birth, a recorded history of c. 6,000 years and an unrecorded history of probably 500,000 years, prepares us for this wonder.”

Thousands of years have passed since Isaiah’s psalm, we all still walk in darkness and all are in need of a “great light” to illuminate our steps as we walk through life.  There’s a yearning in all beings to be guided by something or Someone bigger than their limited self.

For me, the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, brings a profound sense of hope into the world; hope that we all can grow as a people and know what it is like to feel the light of God’s love.

Coping with the Holidays

Be Generous and Mindful of those less fortunate to you.  It is funny how years later particular events stick in your mind.  One Christmas Season, a homeless man well-known to hang out in front of a coffee shop I used to go to, came inside.  He would do this on occasion and ask for money in tattered clothes and mangled hair. His name was Wesley.

I later learned that he was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. I had given him change on occasion, but didn’t feel like it that morning. He asked, “Do you have any money?”  I said, somewhat brusquely, “No, I do not.” He then paused for a moment, a look of kind concern in his eyes, and said softly, “Do you need some.” This man with so little offered me what little he had and in doing so taught me the true heart of Christmas.

Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely.  There is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them. But like all feelings, they pass. It might just be that the holidays, with all its high expectations of happiness, intensify these feelings.  Just hang in there.

Have a little faith in the goodness of life. We can all get weary from the drubbing we get at Christmas in our too materialistic, too focused on stuff society.  But let that not dampen your spirit too much because beneath it all, there’s simply too much goodness in this world to appreciate all around you.

The humorist Garrison Keillor wrote:

 “To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth, that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard. But a little faith will see you through. What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time? When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word. What is the last word, then? Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”

God bless you all and have a Merry Christmas.

I’ll Be Eating Humble Pie on Christmas

Bow, stubborn knee — Shakespeare

I walked into an old church downtown yesterday.  Its edifice was old and craggy, its stones walls worn by a century of wind, pelting snow and acid rain.  I walked through its medieval-like doors, the smell of melted wax, a dollop of frankincense and recently fallen snow wrapped around my newly chapped face.

No one was there. I sat in a well-worn pew near the front.  I looked up at the vaulted ceiling full of stars, angels and saints.  I thought of the tens of thousands of souls over the past hundred or so years that had worshipped here, sought answers and sought peace.  Now here I was.  

A conundrum of faith is that we never really know.  That’s why we must rely on faith, I guess.  It seems like we’re given just enough light to see our next footstep in life, but never full illumination to see the entire journey ahead of us. It’s not reason to despair; it is reason to feel humble before the mysterious grandeur of all we don’t know.

It’s okay to have doubts.  One of Jesus’ disciples, a guy aptly known as “Doubting Thomas,” had his for sure.  But the opposite of faith isn’t doubt – it is fear.  We’re all on some kind of existential thin ice wondering if and when it’s going to crack and our lives fall apart.  It isn’t odd or strange to feel this way.  It’s part of the human condition. 

Henri Nouwen wrote:

“As we look at the starts and let our minds wander into the many galaxies, we come to feel so small and insignificant that anything we do, say, or think seems completely useless.  But if we look into our souls and let our minds wander into the endless galaxies of our interior lives, we become so tall and significant that everything we do, say, or think appears to be of great importance.”  

We have to keep looking both ways to remain humble and confident, humorous and serious, playful and responsible.  Yes, the human being is very small and very tall.  It is the tension between the two that keeps us spiritually awake.

I think real faith, is humble faith.  To be otherwise is great hubris; a belief in one’s certitude to the exclusion of others.

Sister Joan Chittister writes:

“The opposite of humility is arrogance, something we are all guilty of at one time or another.  Arrogance corrodes our awareness of the power of interdependence and leaves us to die incomplete.  It reduces the creation of others to dust. It makes it impossible for us even to see our own knees.”

Many, many people around the world – good folks – have no one, are alone or are living under very difficult circumstances. They are the poor, both in body, spirit or material goods. A man seeking a donation in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, says to the grouchy crank:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. … We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.”

We should feel humble before such a reality; cognizant of all the blessings we’ve been given and maybe determined, perhaps for the first time in a while, to share our blessings with others in want as we speed toward the New Year.   

The bible is usually tough for me to read.  I don’t get a lot of the historical facts and how they play into what I am supposed to learn from the teachings. Maybe it’s in admitting that I don’t really know much that I become more open to everything.  The Zen call it “beginner’s mind;” a state where we let go and empty ourselves of ourselves. There is something authentic in our coming to life on our knees rather than our heads that try to figure everything out.  As U2’s Bono wailed, “If you want to kiss the sky you’d better learn how to kneel.”

It’s when I meet real people who have lived these words that I feel a greater sense of the reality of the in the bible – it’s the reality of word made flesh.  That was the whole point about Jesus, wasn’t it? It wasn’t enough for God to send prophets with plumes of grey hair firing out of their heads and scary wooden staffs.  No. God had to crank up the volume loud enough so we could hear. And the message was intimate and personal.  He sent Jesus into our troubled world so “. . . that the people who walked in darkness [could] see a great light.”

In my own brokenness, sometimes I listen too closely to the voice of depression; the sad parrot on my shoulder that tells me I will always feel crummy and never really feel good about myself.  Then I think about that part in the bible where Jesus says to one of his followers, “Who do you say I am?”  The disciple replies that he is the Christ, the savior.  Similarly, I think we can all ask Jesus “Who do you say I am?”  The response is surely not the one depression would con us into believing. It’s a loving and authentic voice, one that says we are cherished and belong.

Jesus’ birth was a humble birth, indeed.  As Thomas Merton once wrote, “There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.”

Sister Joan writes again:

“It is our need for one another that teaches us our need for God.  It is our down-deep incompleteness that cries out all the days of our lives to be complete – by those around us, by God.  We must pray for the humility it takes to find our wholeness in our littleness.”

Beyond the gifts, the feasts and the holly and the ivy, remember to be humble.  It is this humility, this lack of ego that allows us to be part of the healing mysteries at Christmas time.

As for me, I’ll sit around my Yuletide table.  And after the turkey and mashed potatoes, eat some humble pie.

The Grace of Good People

In the rough and tumble world of the law, it’s easy to become jaded; our classmates and colleagues are competitors for grades, jobs or victories. Clients can be tough and demanding; judges unyielding.  Life being what it is, things can and do go wrong despite our most valiant efforts.

Not surprisingly, lawyers are pessimistic thinkers – problem solvers extraordinaire. People come to them in some sort of trouble and want solutions.  Dr. Martin Seligman writes that the law is one of the few professions where pessimistic thinking is rewarded.  We are trained to see potential problems and pitfalls lurking around every corner and cubicle. And this skill helps us to plan, prepare and strategize — good stuff. But we often take it too far.

In an article he wrote for Lawyerswithdepression.com, Dr. Richard O’Connor states:

Because of their experience with the law, most attorneys have lost their rose-colored glasses some time ago. (Or else they never had them and chose the law as a career because it suited their personality). Attorneys know that life is hard, and doesn’t play fair. They’re trained to look for every conceivable thing that could go wrong in any scenario, and they rarely are able to leave that attitude at the office.  They see the worst in people (sometimes they see the best, but that’s rare). They tend to be strivers and individualists, not wanting to rely on others for support. They have high expectations of success, but they often find that when they’ve attained success, they have no one to play with, and have forgotten how to enjoy themselves anyway.

Pretty glum assessment, don’t you think?  It’s unlikely that we can change the difficult nature of our craft, but we can mitigate its stressful effects on our bodies and brains.

We must take time to reaffirm the goodness in our lives.  It’s just as important to recovering from depression as a hot bowl of chicken soup on a frigid day or lexapro in your lunch pail.  There are lots of books on gratitude.  To me, this is a reminder that all of us –some more than others – are ungrateful much of the time.  I am not so sure that we can be taught to be grateful.  But I do believe we can be reminded.  I believe that we all have within us a deep need to express thankfulness – we just need to open the shutters.

It’s hard –very hard—to be grateful when one is depressed. In a deep depression, it’s not only unlikely — it’s impossible. Let me be clear, this piece is not written for those in a biochemical free fall.  It’s writte for those who want to prevent relapse, remain or get healthy, or for the lawyer who is simply stressed and unhappy.

Depression can obscure our vision and prevent us from seeing the goodness in our lives – especially the kindness and decency of other people.  This may be colleagues and friends, or maybe family members. We need to identify these people and cherish their goodness.  Their lights are like homing beacons in the fog of our struggles.  Like a good laugh, they are like salves that can heal our wounds.

The humorist Garrison Keillor, in his book We Are Still Married, wrote:

To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth, that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard. But a little faith will see you through. What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time? When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word. What is the last word, then? Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

The goodness of others is grace. It’s the universe’s way of reminding us not to fret too much, that things will work out, that our important jobs are just a part of life and not all of it and that uplifting fortune cookie messages sometimes do come true.  If I could, I would stick this quote by author Anne Lamott on one of those skinny wrappers:

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it greets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Think of the kind people you’ve had in your life from your past and today; the everyday saints who were dropped into your life for no other reason than to remind you that life can be good, that you are special and that life is worth living.

These people always leave us feeling better than when they found us.

Stepping Over Depression

The currents of depression run fast and deep, indeed.  The water isn’t crystal blue, but a muddy green.  We can’t see the jagged stones, the severe topography that lay beneath.

We wake at the beginning of our days, knowing we must wade through our despair.  We must cross the river of depression, feel its force against our bodies.  We pray that we get to the other side; hope that we finish the day with some semblance of having felt productive, of having lived a “normal day.” 

Back in the days of my deepest depression — what seems like another lifetime ago — I would look in the mirror in my bathroom late at night when I couldn’t sleep.  My face ashen, my eyes lifeless, I felt I just couldn’t do it again – I just couldn’t face another day battling depression.  It wore me out.  I was tired.  I had had enough. Often, for comfort, I would turn to the faith which had sustained me and my ancestors in times of great trouble.  My grandmother, long since passed away, would read me this short prayer as a child:

May God support us all the day long

till the shadows lengthen

and the busy world is hushed

and the fever of life is done.

Then, in God’s mercy,

may God grant us a safe lodging,

and a holy rest

and peace at last.

I’d take peace, I thought.  A few crumbs would do.  I didn’t need happiness at those dark moments.  Merciful peace, yes, I could take solace in that.   The moon shone through the bathroom window one starry cold night.  I felt some peace, the memory of my grandmother’s sweet hands on my round face.

We don’t always have to fight the river.  We just have to find a way to get across.  We can’t step over the expanse of water all at one time. We need some steeping stones, pieces of rock that can take us over one step at a time.

One such stone of wisdom is to not look down at the water as we walk.  We can get mesmerized or paralyzed by depression’s swirling rapids.  It sucks us in to a garbled dialogue with our melancholy and we become paralyzed.

In his new book, Beat the Blues before They Beat You, Robert Leahy, Ph.D., writes:

Depression has a mind of its own.  When you are depressed, you think in generalizations (nothing works out), you don’t give yourself credit (I can’t do anything right), and you label yourself in the most negative terms (loser, ashamed, humiliated).  You set demanding standards that you will never live up to.  You may think you need to get everyone’s approval, or excel at everything you do, or know for sure something will work out before you try it. Your thinking keeps you trapped in self-criticism, indecisiveness, and inertia.

Yup, that pretty much captures depression . . . .

But it doesn’t always have to be this way.  Author Henri Nouwen, who suffered many bouts of depression in his life, in a piece called “Stepping over Our Wounds” from his book, Bread for the Journey, wrote:

Sometimes we have to ‘step over’ our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on.  The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there.  Then we become the ‘offended one,’ ‘the forgotten one’,’ or the ‘discarded one.” Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them.  It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on.

If we’re not careful, we can get stuck in our identities as depressed people.  We don’t so much experience depression – – we become depression. 

Sometimes, yes sometimes, we just need to let go of it.  We need to let go of the darker emotions that often fuel depression’s fury.  We can’t do this all the time, I know; but this way of dealing with it, of not getting drawn into a an exploration of our depressive thoughts and feelings –“Why can’t I do anything right, Why doesn’t anybody care about me, when will this pain end?” – is a healthy alternative to the same old, same old approach.  For years, I would get sucked in by depression. Before I knew it, I had been depressed for weeks.  Depression, and surviving it, consumed me. 

Now, after years of hard work, I know I can often — allright, sometimes — just let it go. 

And travel on.

My Friend’s Shot at Redemption

There’s a complexity to language; words color what we think, say and do.  With our locutions, we praise and condemn, stumble upon transitory meanings and conniptions and try to make sense of things both ordinary and profound.   What words we use to describe ourselves and others says a lot about the world we live in.

“I’m a loser, a failure,” my buddy said through sad eyes as he looked across at me. 

Tom’s 50 years old and been struggling with anxiety and depression for the past fifteen years.  I have witnessed the arc of his demise, his struggle to keep depression’s wolves at bay.  There had been red flags along the way – a bad temper, divorce, drinking too much and a lot of self-condemnation.  But my friend had long felt that these were justified by what the adversarial nature of the law had saddled him with.  He didn’t see – until now – his role in creating the mess that his life was now in.  Only pain, unrelenting pain, had broken him open.  It had humbled him and given him the opportunity to honestly examine his life.

As my friend spoke on, it seemed to me that he wasn’t only seeking better mental health – that seemed to be unattainable for him during this low tide – but a sort of redemption; not in any great religious sense, though he certainly would’ve welcomed any help of the divine variety. 

The redemption he was hoping for and seeking was a second chance at life.  He wasn’t sure whether he deserved it; but he was hopeful that he would be given one.  A second chance to make better choices in his life; to stop going down mental and emotional dead ends that only strengthened depression’s vise-like grip on his life.   Ultimately, the restoration of a fundamental goodness and harmony that had been so long absent.

Tom’s brokenness seemed not just about his depression, but cracks in his soul.  In his misguided efforts to squelch his bottoming-out, he often did self-destructive and self-defeating things – anything to soothe those acerbic rants of depression.  But the rants inside his head didn’t stop – they only got louder.

Perhaps they were trying to tell him something, I suggested.  “No they’re not”, his psychiatrist had assured him.  “It’s just part of the disease of depression, pure and simple”.  Yet I believe that such advice did more harm than good.  No doubt Tom, given his incapacitated state, could probably benefit from some medication.  But he could also benefit from trying to discern the signposts contained inside the depression that might lead him out of the swamplands. 

Author Lee Stringer, in the book Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, writes:

“One grows older and more knowing over time; life’s more facile charms grow dim; the soul yearns, seeking more than could ever be had on this earth, more than could ever be wrought out of three dimensions and five senses.  We, all of us, suffer some from the limits of living within the flesh.  Our walk through the world is never entirely without that pain.  It lurks in the still, quiet hours which we, in our constant busyness, steadfastly avoid.  And it has occurred to me since that perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unfinished business of filling our souls.

The aridity of our soul calls out to be watered by a greater relationship to the Universe, called by many God.  This Mystery is concerned not only with the building up of better mental health, but also our engagement with the larger questions of life:  Why was I born?  Who am I? What is my life’s purpose?  What is the meaning of life?  Why have these Job-like tragedies befallen me?  The ancient Greek’s talked about Fate and Destiny, modern-day philosophy calls it existentialism.  But, they’re all ultimately concerned with the same thing – a jettisoning of friviloius, superficial and hedonistic pursuits and the journeying towards wisdom and a wider vision of what this life is truly about.

In some sense, we can be worn out by such intense probing. But the questions won’t go away, as if demanding our response.  When we give up engaging with these larger questions in life, we are inevitably diminished in some fundamental way.  We “settle” for a more predictable and smaller life that we often regret later on – the roads not taken.  But when we meet these questions, when we finally stop running away from life, we can begin to respond to our soul’s deepest yearnings.

Thomas Moore,  in his best-selling book, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, writes:

“The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors. The “bright” idea of colorizing old black and white movies is consistent with our culture’s general rejection of the dark and the gray. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.”

Looking into my friend’s weary eyes, I don’t tell him he’s mentally ill or that he deserves his pain for all the bad mistakes he’s made – he’s already been told this by others.  I don’t tell him to get help, because he already knows that and is getting help. I don’t even tell him that it’s terrible that he’s experiencing depression

What I do tell him is that something or someone essential –something beyond just recovering from depression – is missing from his life.  I don’t pretend to know what or who that is; we each have a unique relationship with life.  But I tell him that he will have to search for that essential thing or person – and it might not come easy.  But it’s in living the big questions that we are somehow healed, perhaps slowly, and recover a sense of meaning to our lives which is, after all, what our souls truly want.

My friend needs a renewal, a change of course, another chance – a real shot at redemption.

Climbing Out of the Well of Depression

Depression feels like falling into a well.  We’re trapped at the bottom with no way out. We look up and see light at the well’s entrance, but it’s so far away.  It turns the soupy darkness surrounding us into a sluggish grey.

We long to feel the sun’s vitality again, a sense of motion in the rhythm of life.  It becomes clear that we won’t get out of the well by our own efforts. We’ll need help – serious help.

Out of the darkness above, a ladder appears.  Others might not see it, but we do.  It’s a ladder meant only for us, as if it were crafted with knowing hands.  Its railings and steps bring hope, a passage to another place above us.  Yet, we must climb each step ourselves, one at a time.

God drops ladders into our wells all the time, but we’re often not aware of them.  Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small.  Sometimes they’re a new medication that brings solace to our pained bodies; sometimes they’re  in moments of mercy like when we share the shy smile of a stranger on the street.

We often can’t see these ladders because we’re on our hands and knees looking for a key to get us out.  But a key won’t work.  We don’t need to turn a lock so much as to rise from our knees. We can surrender our sadness, our weight as we go aloft.  “Come to me all you who are burdened and I will give you rest” said Jesus.  And in the depths of our depressed souls, that’s what we deeply thirst for – rest.

People with depression feel like it’s their constant companion.  In such a relationship, and it’s a relationship of sorts, we need not destroy depression.  We need to transcend it.  We do so by letting go of our relationship with depression and embracing another sort of relationship.

Yesterday, I went to Mass.  Often, I feel like such a dullard in those worn wooden pews.  I understand some of the readings, but much of it I don’t.  But, I often feel a quality of peace.  Maybe, on occasion, even a peace that “passeth understanding.”  I can’t explain this experience, but I appreciate it.  It’s a Mystery which calls to all of us by name. It seeks to give us a new identity and loosen our grip on an old one.  It asks us to let go of all the ways we limit our daily lives because of depression.

Jesus once asked Peter, as he asks each one of us, “Who do you say I am?”  I always understood this question one way: it doesn’t matter what others say about “who” Jesus is; it only matters who we say he is to us.

I now see another way of understanding this passage.

It’s just as important for us to ask Jesus, “Who do you say I am?”

For those suffering from depression, the illness usually responds to this question. It tries to tell us who we are: worthless, weak and undeserving. 

Are we willing to turn away from depression’s voice? Can we surrender it to find our true value as seen through the eyes of God?  He sees us as worthy and precious beyond measure. 

Are we willing to trade the noxious tirades of depression for the soothing and life offering voice of God?

As we climb the ladder, let’s leave the voice of depression at the bottom of the well.  It’s voice becomes faint as we leave it behind.  As we near the light, it infuses us with a true sense of our true value.  We are precious in His sight.  We can finally rest.

When we leave the well of depression behind, perhaps we find a different sort of well and a different kind of falling.  Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and author of the little book, “The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer”, writes:

“The purpose of prayer is the process of falling into God.  As the mystics say, we are beginning to learn that God alone is enough.  The truth is that none of us really knows where we are going and must never take it for granted that we do.  We can plan our lives but we cannot guarantee them.

When our prayers are not answered, we know one thing for sure:  The challenge of life now is to live it differently.  And it will be through prayer that we discover how to do that.  Seeing Jesus being driven out of town, we come to understand that we cannot expect more.  Seeing Jesus depressed is not the loss of faith, it is the moment of faith.  Seeing Jesus lose favor with the authorities, we learn that authorities are not the final measure of our lives.

Then we come to prayer free of the desires that bind us, free to live life in God, free to choose trust over certainty — which really means free to choose God over self.

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