Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
— William Cowper, Light Shining Out of Darkness (God Moves in Mysterious Ways)
The Problem of William Cowper
In Evangelical circles, the story of slave-trader-turned-pastor John Newton is well known, as is his justly famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Lesser known in these circles is the story of his friend, William Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”), an evangelical Christian and poet who suffered from chronic depression throughout his life. In his autobiographical memoir, he describes his first experience of depression in terms that will be familiar to many who suffer from this illness:
I was struck not long after my settlement in the Temple [district of London] such a dejection of spirits, as none but they who have felt the same, can have the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair. I presently lost all relish for those studies to which I had before been closely attached; the classics no longer had any charms for me; I had need of something more salutary than amusement, but I had not one to direct me where to find it.
This harrowing description is all the more difficult to read in light of the knowledge that Cowper never fully recovered from depression even after his conversion. Like most who are chronically depressed, Cowper went through various ups and downs. In his better moments, he could process his experience through hymns and poetry, as evidenced in the above lines from his hymn popularly known as “God Moves in Mysterious Ways.” In his worse moments, he was convinced God had unequivocally rejected him for committing the unforgiveable sin, and he attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Tragically, he died a committed Christian, convinced that God had specially chosen him to be damned. In one of his final poems, “The Castaway,” he compares his situation to that of a sailor washed overboard to drown alone in the sea:
No voice divine the storm allay’d,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.
Cowper’s 21st Century Heirs
Though Cowper’s generation would not have used the modern term “depression” to describe his illness, descriptions of it match those of modern patients diagnosed with depression. I therefore suggest that our Christian response to this story (or lack thereof) is an indicator of our response to depressed persons in our own Christian communities. Their testimonies are rarely shared publically in church. Even when they are shared, it is often in terms of past experience; Christians seem to prefer stories of people who have already recovered from depression rather than stories of those who are still depressed. Deep down, there is a part of us that is uncomfortable with the threat such people pose to our faith: the awful and insidious experience of chronic depression seems to testify against all the things we proclaim about God — where in the scheme of God’s mercy, grace, and healing can there be room for that darkness? Faced with this apparent threat to our faith, we do our best to ignore depression and consequently do little to acknowledge those suffering from it. Our lives are shaped by the stories we remember from the Bible and broader Christian tradition, and when we forget stories such as that of William Cowper, our lives reflect such negligence. In response to this negligence, how might the church develop enough theological girth to honor the stories of depressed Christians, and make space for ministry to them?
At a Loss For Words: Evangelical Silence in the Face of Depression
The first question, of course, is whether one ought to make such space in the first place. In some theologies, depression is interpreted in entirely spiritual terms; such traditions usually suggest that those who suffer from it do not have enough faith, or have given in to spiritual despair, often demonically induced. Such thinking is usually paired with a belief that nearly everything can be reduced to matters of spiritual rather than physical causality, so that physical responses to depression, such as medication, are avoided. Relying on medication is seen as a compromise of faith, a reliance on medicine rather than on God.
Although such theology is only marginally discussed in many Evangelical churches, it often remains the backdrop for the discussion of faith and depression, a presupposition left innocent until proven guilty. Pastors might not proclaim from the pulpit that depression is a sign of sin, or that there is a problem if one takes medication or is not healed, but in many such cases what is not stated can be as damaging as what is. Many churches, like the societies around them, mistake the appearance of happiness for the truth of Christian joy, and so are not comfortable with Christians who disturb this appearance. Members of such communities are not, in theory, opposed to addressing issues of depression — they simply avoid it by refusing to share with their congregants a theological grammar for dealing with sorrow and pain. In this avoidance, they do not address the theological problems with overspiritualizing matters of depression, and so let the more extreme voices in the church set the implicit tone of the conversation.
Working in tandem with such implicit theologies is the more sophisticated “worldview” conversation popular in intellectual Christian circles. As James K. A. Smith points out in Desiring the Kingdom, such conversations favor the intellect and mind over all other parts of the person; a correctly held worldview is the determining factor in the success or failure of a Christian’s faith. The problem for those with depression, however, is the very cognition with which they are expected to wield their worldview. From a worldviewish perspective, how can one offer hope to someone whose mind is so tormented that the cognitive formulation of a “worldview” is a burden too heavy to bear? Though not necessarily intentional, “worldview” discussion often ends up alienating those struggling with cognitive and emotional issues such as depression.
Hipster Openness and the Loss of Christian Covenant
As we might expect, such reticence to deal with depression is tied to modernity’s habit of glossing over realities that might mar its ostensible “progress.” And Christians of our generation are right to abandon such modernity in favor of a more honest and holistic transparency regarding thorny issues. Yet, there is also something in the “emergent” or “hipster” Christian culture that makes me wonder if its communities have the resources to sustain honesty about matters such as depression. The postmodernism from which it takes its cues may be big on openness and “letting it all hang out,” but its greatest weakness is in the area of commitment, what the Bible would call covenant. For ironic and untrusting postmoderns, premature commitment is the deadliest of sins. If Biblical community is based on remembering the covenants God has made with us from creation onward, postmodern “community” is based on the liturgy of the mall, which, as Stanley Hauerwas suggests in his article The Christian Difference, is designed to make us focus on the present and forget that we have histories tying us together.
A Christianity informed by such postmodern thought has little shame; lust, violence, and tyranny are breakfast-table topics. What worries me, however, is that the often arbitrary collage of disconnected fragments held up as the model of postmodern honesty has no narrative through which to process the very topics about which it is honest. The problem is brilliantly typified in the recent film Drive. The violence in Ryan Gosling’s character is very “open,” but there is no narrative strong enough to deal with it. The film offers no history through which it can be understood, and while the narrative of familial ties proves powerful enough to induce the character to take great risks, it has no capacity to deal with the forces that leave him driving down the road alone and dying at the end of the film. The film’s bleak conclusion typifies postmodern “honesty.” Such honesty is arguably bought at the price of the remembered stories that guarantee our covenants with God and each other. In our haste to abandon the caricatured versions of these stories produced by modernity, we abandon to our hurt our only mainstays against the irony and isolation of postmodern “community.” We thereby destroy our resources for dealing with the very issues we are honest about.
Breaking the Silence and Speaking Well of God
So where might we turn for help? With regard to modernity’s habit of overlooking depression, I suggest we might be usefully corrected by the Biblical book of Job. Job’s seemingly impious challenge to God is a scandal, albeit a scandal ratified by nothing less than Christ’s reference to Psalm 22 on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At the end of Job, we learn that the title character spoke well of God where his friends didn’t. This does not mean that Job had the cosy camaraderie so often mistaken for a personal relationship with God. What it does mean is that sentiments such as those expressed in Job do not compromise our testimony to God’s character. Rather, excluding such sentiments is a matter of lying about God, which is the same as taking his name – indeed His very character – in vain.
Taking Creation Seriously
Job also speaks to those who overspiritualize depression by emphasizing the “createdness” of creation. Behind all the argumentative wrangling in Job is the question of the natural world: Are the world and its contents mere pawns in the hands of a God who bats them about according to arbitrary and capricious whims, or are they something more complex? If the former, then Job’s comforters — and by extension those who reduce the workings of the cosmos to merely spiritual causes — are quite right: what one does with the physical world does not in fact matter all that much. Yet God, in his response to Job, shatters such a view. The forces of the created world are real, and often terrifyingly so; you cannot catch Leviathan with a hook. The creation must be reckoned with on its own vexing but God-given terms, and it cannot be bypassed by those who see it as a direct correlative to spiritual affairs in the heavenly realms, or others who want to pass over physiological explanations of depression in favor of purely spiritual ones.
The Church as a Space of Covenantal Refuge and Vicarious Rejoicing
Similarly, the physicality of creation and the physical response required by Job in his suffering – that he may see his redeemer in the flesh — reminds us that more is needed than a mere cognitive reorientation of one’s worldview. What is needed is the communion of saints, bound together by the flesh and blood of Christ, which is indeed real food and real drink. Such a communion resists the postmodern impulse to dither about in a chaos of “honesty” unmoored from history and covenant. As communities we do not lose sight of the hope and joy toward which Christian eschatology always works, and which we remind each other of daily. Yet, within such communities of sustained hope and joy, we also make room for individuals who need to rely on us to hope and rejoice vicariously on their behalf. Knowing the kindness and patience of God toward us, we can care for depressed fellows, not as threats, but as blessings, knowing that their act of putting themselves in the way of Christian hope, even if they may not fully experience it till heaven, is an embodiment of faith, a type of Abraham looking for a promised land he cannot yet see. Such an Abraham will neither pretend to have reached the promised land when he has not, nor will he presume that God is not guiding him because he has not yet seen it. If we can make our churches places of haven and support for such people, we will have come a long way indeed in helping the spiritual heirs of William Cowper, hoping for God yet presently tormented by “the clouds they so much dread.”
This article appears in our Jan-Feb 2012 issue
Flickr photo (cc) by Ryan James Photography
