Depression and Spiritual Healing: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Hold your when or how long or where before God. Make space for your disappointment, frustration, and unfulfillment to come out of hiding and present themselves in the light.
—Brian McLaren

Monday
Those of us who suffer from depression call it many things. The fog. The black dog. The darkness. The unholy ghost. We dance around it with metaphors and paint pictures of the pain with our words.
—Diana Gruver

Tuesday
The infinite love of God can come welling up, and something of the depth dimension can begin to shine through in our dilemmas. It isn’t just that we’re caught in the middle of a dilemma, but we have a felt sense of knowing that we’re not alone.
—James Finley

Wednesday
With therapists, medication, meaningful studies, a small church community, a pastor who cared, friends who understood, and a name for my condition, God was knitting me. God was knitting me back together.
—Monica A. Coleman

Thursday
When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can learn not to invade or abandon ourselves.
—James Finley

Friday
The spirituals give me a way to be sad without being alone. Because they are sung in community, they say: It’s okay to suffer. We know how you feel. We are suffering too. We all are.
—Monica A. Coleman

Praying without Words

For author and Episcopal priest Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, it’s during times when words fail us that turning to wordless prayer can help sustain our faith.

God is not a figure outside of our experience and in need of information about it. We don’t really need to pray about anything; we’re not in charge of much of what happens in the world. We can content ourselves with prayer from within it all.

So if prayer’s efficacy is not measured by whether or not we get what we ask for, it’s probably safe to stop asking for things, especially if doing so seems to feed the desperation and despair that take root in the soul of a depressed person—if prayer has become little more than worry with an “Amen” tacked on at the end. Here is a suggestion:

Maybe we could try not using words at all.

Never is this permission to be wordless more important than when depression strangles even the everyday words of human interaction. At such a time, a spiritual practice may be needed that will allow your emptiness, rather than fight to fill it. The ancient practice of centering prayer is one, like other meditative techniques from other religions and cultures: the quiet, gentle abdication of all one’s illusions of personal power and control. It is not measured by the quality or quantity of emotion it produces. Prayer doesn’t have to be measured by anything.

We invite you to join CAC teacher Brian McLaren as he leads a silent meditation.

Reference:

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 114.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—CAC Staff Exercise in Grief and Lamentation credits from left to right: Jennifer Tompos, Jenna Keiper, Jenna Keiper. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Finding Hope in the Depths of Depression

Diana Gruver writes of finding solace and hope through others who share their experiences:

As I slogged through seasons of depression … I have found the stories and presence of others who have experienced depression to be invaluable. I hear a hint of something I recognize—an aside, a metaphor, a clue that points to those marks left by the darkness—and I zero in on them. There is someone who knows, I think, someone who understands. They, too, have walked through the valley of the shadow of depression….

They remind me I am not the only one to walk this road, that this experience is not an alien one. The lie that “surely no one has felt this” is cut down by the truth that others, in fact, have, and their presence makes me feel less isolated. These fellow travelers are my companions in the darkness of night.…

They give me hope—hope that this is not the end of my story, that I, too, will survive this. Hope that depression will not have the last say. [1]

Theologian and minister Monica Coleman finds comfort and healing in the spirituals of the Black church:

The further I’m away from Southern black churches, and the more I understand depression, the more I need spirituals. Created by enslaved Africans in the United States, spirituals express both suffering and dependence on faith…. Like the Psalms of the ancient Hebrew community, the slaves took their emotions to God, putting them to music….

The spirituals give me a way to be sad without being alone. Because they are sung in community, they say: It’s okay to suffer. We know how you feel. We are suffering too. We all are.

They aren’t afraid to linger in the painful places. They have no need to rush to praise. They can be slow … drawing out one syllable over tens of seconds … taking their time … waiting.… They knew how to take moans, make them hums, and then turn them into words. They knew how to give voice to pain and how to do it together.

Thus I’m convinced that when Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross (Matthew 27:45–46), he wasn’t making a profound theological statement about the hidden God. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, the spirituals of his people. He was in pain, and he began to sing. In my sanctified imagination, I see the people at the foot of the cross joining him as we do today in my faith community: slowly at first, one voice, then another, humming, then forming words. It sounds like this:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

a long way from home….

They remind me that if you stay in a spiritual long enough, you’ll hear God, you’ll feel hope. In the depths of depression, I can think of no greater spiritual gift.

Reference:

[1] Diana Gruver, Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 13.

[2] Monica A. Coleman, Not Alone: Reflections on Faith and Depression—A 40-Day Devotional (Culver City, CA: Inner Prizes, 2012), 17, 18–19.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Story from Our Community:

I’ve struggled my whole life with depression, anxiety, complex trauma and many years of addiction. My therapist introduced me to Richard Rohr and his teachings have been monumental in my healing. Although recovery has been long and hard work—and always will be—I am now better able to find peace and love with God and slowly with myself. A very heartfelt thank you to Fr. Richard, the CAC, and the whole community. You truly inspire me to find meaning from my suffering and help others with a loving heart. —Erika C.

Infinite Love in Our Brokenness

For James Finley, therapeutic work can help us trust in the divine depth dimension of our lives. He presents a model offered by psychologist Carl Rogers (1902–1987):

Carl Rogers created something called the “Rogerian triad.” [1] He taught there are three points of a triangle representing the beating heart of the therapeutic relationship. The first point on the triangle is unconditional positive regard. It goes like this: the therapist sits with the patient in therapy. The therapist lets the person know that no matter what you share with me about yourself, it will not diminish my deep respect for who you are as a human being. Little by little, the therapist’s deep respect and unconditional positive regard for you can transfer over to you. It can start becoming your renewed sense of unconditional positive regard for yourself. You internalize it.

The second point is empathy. The therapist says, “I hear you saying …” and they say it back in such a way that you know they heard you. When you know you’ve been heard, you also know that you’ve been understood. The experience of being understood can deepen your capacity to hear yourself and understand yourself and to have empathy with yourself.

The third point of the triangle is congruence, which is that the therapist is always honest with you in a respectful way. The therapist might say, “You know, quite honestly, I’m concerned about you when you talk like this. I’m really concerned about where you are.” And in that kind of compassionate honesty, little by little, you learn to be honest with yourself. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can learn not to invade or abandon ourselves. In the alliance with the clinician, you can be re-parented in love.

What I’m suggesting is this: If we take the three points of the triad, lay it flat on the ground, and draw three lines down, we find each point connecting to God.

The clinician’s unconditional positive regard for you incarnates the abyss-like infinite positive regard of God for you as the beloved. The presence of the clinician then becomes an incarnate manifestation of the welling up of this depth dimension, letting you know that you’re invincibly precious in all your wayward ways. To summarize Thomas Merton, there is something within you that is not subject to the brutalities of your own will, for it is that in you that belongs entirely to God. [2]

The truth is that God is infinitely in love with you and infinitely aware of who you are. With infinite wisdom, God lovingly understands you through and through forever. Congruence is truthfulness, compassionately stated. You can be truthful with yourself. What is the truthfulness with yourself? It’s that you’re an infinitely precious, broken person. This infinite love for you permeates your brokenness through and through. It’s with you unexplainably forever.

Reference:

[1] See Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), chapter 14.

[2] See Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1966), 142.

Adapted from James Finley, “An Introduction to Depression and Spiritual Healing,” 2023 Daily Meditations: The Prophetic Path, Center for Action and Contemplation, April 4, 2023, video, 24:44.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Story from Our Community:

The Healing Work of Community and Service

Womanist theologian and pastor Dr. Monica Coleman writes openly about her experience with bipolar depression:

I either felt sad or I felt nothing at all. I couldn’t feel happy or look forward to things I wanted to feel happy about. I couldn’t even remember what made me happy anymore. Feeling nothing was better than feeling sad, but eventually I felt sad. I was losing my ability to function. I had to detach myself emotionally from everything just to keep from crying all the time, and still sometimes that didn’t work. It took all my energy to get up and get dressed and be there and not cry through the day. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in months and months. [1]

In her quest for healing, Dr. Coleman joined a church-based knitting group that created items for homeless individuals. They met monthly, and—after struggling with depression for years—Coleman began to experience the presence of God again in a community dedicated to serving others.

Revelation did not come to me in thunderbolts. God was just there. In the hot cup of tea. In the women who gathered. In our laughter. In the knitting. God was in my uniform rows of stitches. God was also in the dropped stitch that created an imperfection.… There is something holy in the movement of yarn through fingers and needles. It grounds you. It keeps you from falling through the chasms around you…. God is in every cell, every person, and every activity. Whether I know it or not. Whether it feels like it or not. God is creating. With yarn and needles, hiccups, unraveling, do-overs, a rhythm, and individual stitches, God is making something new. Something beautiful. I thought that my prayers and good intentions in knitting for homeless men were divine activity. I was knitting God into the hat and scarf. No. God was knitting me. With therapists, medication, meaningful studies, a small church community, a pastor who cared, friends who understood, and a name for my condition, God was knitting me. God was knitting me back together. [2]

Coleman reminds us that our diagnoses do not define us but are part of our lifelong journey of discovering our true worth in God:

I don’t want to be reduced to my symptoms and diagnosis. Tied down. I am learning the difference between captivity and rest, between an illness and a condition. There’s nothing wrong with me. After all, this is the only me I’ve ever known. But sometimes I need to slow down, check to see if I’m okay; look at the emotional heap of yarn in my lap, undo a few rows, and try again. I need to know that the things I drop, the things I can’t do the way I want, the hard parts of my life are not failure. They are evidence that I’m human. [3]

Reference:

[1] Monica A. Coleman, Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey in Depression and Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 281.

[2] Coleman, Bipolar Faith, 332–333.

[3] Coleman, Bipolar Faith, 340.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Story from Our Community:

I am a hospice chaplain in ____. As a spiritual guide to the dying and a companion to their family members, there have been times in which my own spiritual longings get lost. That was especially true during the social distancing measures of the Covid-19 pandemic. In those most difficult moments, I was often alone in my home, on the phone with others. I could not hug them or offer them a healing human touch. It also meant that I did not receive the comfort of human presence. I longed for spiritual community that would fulfill my desire to connect. The Daily Meditations eased my work in those most desolate moments. They were a reminder that I was never truly alone in my home; that Divine Love surrounded me—her simple grace and compassion continues to bring awareness of the birdsong outside my window to this day. —Jon F.

The Divine Dimension of Life

CAC teacher and psychotherapist James Finley provides a helpful image for us to think about how our lives and struggles intersect with the ever-present love of God:

Here is an image that helps me think about spirituality as a resource in the healing of depression. Imagine drawing a horizontal line. This line represents our experiences of ourselves and our passage through time, from birth to death. This is our human experience going through our lives. As we go through life, we seek to experience happiness, fulfillment, security for ourselves and others, which creates feelings of well-being and gratitude. But likewise, life is such that we’re not always able to live in conditions conducive to happiness. There can be traumatizations, there can be betrayals, there can be losses, there can be injustices that take their toll. We can withstand anything as long as the center holds. But it gets really scary when these invasive, hurtful, and threatening energies that are going on in our lives start getting near the center. We start to lose our balance. We start to lose ourselves in a state of crisis.

The spiritual dimension is this: We now imagine drawing a vertical line intersecting right in the middle of the horizontal line. The vertical line is the divine dimension, divinity, God, the Holy, the sacred. And the infinite love of God, the Holy, is welling up, presence-ing itself and pouring itself out as our lives on the horizontal line. This is the God-given, godly nature of every breath and heartbeat. It is the sun moving across the sky, our breathing in and breathing out, the miracle of being alive and real in the world. Religious experience is the experience of tasting it and realizing this miracle. By following a path of faith and reassurance, God illumines us on the horizontal line. The difficulty is that as depression increases, it closes off experiential access to that vertical line, the upwelling of God’s presence in our life.

If we have religious faith and we experience depression, often our faith doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. It ceases to be relevant. Not only do we feel we have lost our own way in life, but we’ve also lost the felt sense of God being present in our lives. The absence of feeling God’s presence radicalizes the sense of our loss. A lot of therapy, then, isn’t only about moving along the horizontal line to reduce the symptoms of depression—although it is that—but doing it in such a way that it starts to open up the depth dimension. The infinite love of God can come welling up, and something of the depth dimension can begin to shine through in our dilemmas. It isn’t just that we’re caught in the middle of a dilemma, but we have a felt sense of knowing that we’re not alone.

Reference:

Adapted from James Finley, “An Introduction to Depression and Spiritual Healing,” 2023 Daily Meditations: The Prophetic Path, Center for Action and Contemplation, April 4, 2023, video, 24:44.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Recognizing the Signs

CAC teacher and psychotherapist James Finley describes basic signs of one widespread form of depression. If you or someone you love suffers from depression, we encourage you to seek help. [1]

As a psychotherapist, my task has been to diagnose, assess, and treat psychological symptoms that embody suffering. One of the most common categories of mental disorders are mood disorders. These are things such as anxiety and depression that impair our sense of feeling whole, free, and healed in our own lives.

The milder form of depression common today is known as dysthymia. There are many other forms. Symptoms for dysthymia are a persistent pattern of sadness or feeling empty and hopeless. It’s a long, slow, underlying chronic feeling, like there’s a great cloud over your head. In addition to feeling sad and empty inside, people often feel a sense of low energy and tiredness. Also, there are changes of appetite that usually show up as a loss of appetite but can also show up as overeating. There can be disturbance in sleep, either when someone wants to sleep all the time, or when someone is not able to sleep. These depressed moods last for most of the day. It’s these chronic, low grade, ongoing, long-standing feelings of depression, sadness, emptiness, loneliness, and so on.

Feelings of low self-esteem are also associated with dysthymia, feeling like I don’t matter, I don’t count, I’m “less than.” There is difficulty concentrating and problem solving. Symptoms can go away for a couple months at a time, but they tend to come back again. Dysthymic disorder, persistent depressive disorder, tends to respond very well to medical treatment. The optimal treatment is the combination between talk therapy and medication. [2]

Author Diana Gruver describes her felt experience of depression and return to well-being:

Those of us who suffer from depression call it many things. The fog. The black dog. The darkness. The unholy ghost. We dance around it with metaphors and paint pictures of the pain with our words. The word depression is too clinical, the list of symptoms too sterile.

Diagnostic guidelines cannot describe the sensation that your heart has stopped beating, has been torn from your chest, while your body continues to move mechanically, numb, without its lifeblood. I am a puppet. I am a ghost. I float invisible, unfeeling, watching the alive ones laugh and love. No mere definition can explain that feeling of emptiness, of isolation, of vacant pain….

I survived. With the help of therapy, medication, a good support system, and God’s grace, the light slowly dawned. Life gradually became easier, the days less daunting. My mind could focus and process once again. I could turn loving attention on other people. Sleep was no longer elusive. The sensation of joy once again took up residence in my heart.

I felt like one of the lucky ones—like I had barely survived my brush with depression’s darkness. I was thankful to be alive, returned once again to the sun. [3]

Reference:

[1] If you are or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline, 911 for emergency services, or go to the nearest emergency room. For further resources on depression and spiritual healing, see: Depression Sourcebook, 5th ed. (2020); Monica A. Coleman, Not Alone: Reflections on Faith and Depression, and Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey in Depression and Faith; James Finley, The Healing Path; Gerald G. May, Care of Mind, Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spiritual Direction; Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet.

[2] Adapted from James Finley, “An Introduction to Depression and Spiritual Healing,” 2023 Daily Meditations: The Prophetic Path, Center for Action and Contemplation, April 4, 2023, video, 24:44.

[3] Diana Gruver, Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 5, 4.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

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Story from Our Community:

I grew up with a sweet Irish father who was also an alcoholic and a mother who suffered from schizophrenia. Raised Roman Catholic, I was taught that in order to “earn salvation” we had to be sinless and perfect. I grew up believing I would wind up in hell because I was far from perfect. My Dad was my safe place as a child because my Mother often raged at me. But my Dad was also often gone and I never knew when he would come home to “save” me. I have come to understand that at age 79, I have finally been given the grace to feel my deep grief at being abandoned by my Dad. It is a deeply painful experience, but I’m slowly accepting that that God is not the rigid, demanding judge I was told about, but a gentle, loving, and healing entity who exists within me; healing me from the inside out. The Daily Meditations are giving me deep comfort and the grace to be patient, let go, and allow my Higher Power to bring me through the transition to the other side. —Mary W.

Longing for Consolation

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God? —Psalm 42:1–2

This week, the Daily Meditations explore the topic of depression and spiritual healing. We begin with CAC teacher and author Brian McLaren’s reflection on Psalm 42 and the sense of spiritual abandonment and grief that the psalmist expresses:

The psalmist’s thirst, it turns out, has been mockingly quenched—not with “flowing streams,” but with his constant flow of salty tears. Just as his tears mock his thirst, so others mock him for his spiritual depression: Shouldn’t his God be meeting his needs? Their words, he says later, are like a mortal wound to his body (Psalm 42:10).

My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me continually, “Where is your God? (42:3)

One senses the bitter contrast between the delayed presence of comfort and the constant presence of unfulfillment. Meanwhile, each good memory of joyful times—those bright days when he felt spiritual fulfillment together with his peers—now only darkens his long nights of alienation and pain.

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. (42:4)

Then comes the refrain:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. (42:5–6)

The “why” of this refrain—addressed to his own soul—is mirrored by another even more disturbing “why” question, addressed to God: “Why have you forgotten me?” (42:9).

All these questions go unanswered: “When?” “How long?” “Where?” “Why?” Yet above the prayer of aspiration [and desperation] a tattered flag of faith and hope still flies: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.” That simple word “again”—vague and undefined, but real—seeks to answer the painful question “When?” It doesn’t dare claim “soon”; instead, it more modestly claims “someday.”

McLaren counsels us to create room to bring our desperate feelings before God:

You ask, “When? How long?” because you know—or at least you believe—or at least you hope—that your panting, gasping, famished feelings of unfulfilled longing, abandonment, and confusion won’t go on forever. A sense of peace and fullness will come again, someday….

Hold your when or how long or where before God. Make space for your disappointment, frustration, and unfulfillment to come out of hiding and present themselves in the light. Don’t rush, even though you’ll be tempted to see these times of spiritual dryness and aspiration as a mistake, a sign of failure you want to put behind you. Instead, slow down and hold this moment as an opportunity to express and strengthen spiritual desire.

Reference:

Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2011), 151–152, 155.

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise.

Depression and Spiritual Healing: Weekly Summary

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Finding Hope in the Depths of Depression

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Infinite Love in Our Brokenness

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The Healing Work of Community and Service

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The Divine Dimension of Life

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Recognizing the Signs

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Longing for Consolation

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Depression and Spiritual Healing: Weekly Summary

Finding Hope in the Depths of Depression

Infinite Love in Our Brokenness

The Healing Work of Community and Service

The Divine Dimension of Life

Recognizing the Signs

Longing for Consolation

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