Good morning…
“Sue, I am so glad you posted this,” she wrote after yesterday’s message Depression Varies. “Making peace with mystery runs counter to our culture. Sharing this truth with others can help open the door to honesty in God. And, usher us out of the false phrases that stand in for those things we really don’t/can’t understand…but feel compelled to try to understand. When we offer ‘junk food’ in those times we are desperate to offer something. It is so helpful to be reminded that the ‘real food’ of honest admission that we don’t have the answer, can be the doorway to freedom. And, in that freedom, God’s transcendence that passes all understanding has room to come in and teach His paradoxical truths. The ones that do not fit into tidy boxes of human helping.”
She continued: “Your post reminds me of a time with a client whose story was the most traumatic, horrific account of bizarre abuse that I had ever heard. All I could say was, ‘I am so sorry. So very sorry.’ She told me that was the most helpful response she had ever received. It was the heart in it. Not the words. And, junk food words did not interfere with the real food of compassion.”
My friend’s genuine expression resonates with truth taught by Parker Palmer on page 60 of Let Your Life Speak.
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“Depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both ‘religious’ and ‘scientific,’ and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the heart’s darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can ‘straighten things out’ makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes – and when we pretend that they do, life become not only banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.
Embracing the mystery of depression does not mean passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of forces that seems alien but is in fact one’s deepest self. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can – and then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult. One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one’s selfhood and resisting things that do not… It’s a demanding path, for which no school prepares us.”
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Parker’s honest answer to why some survive suicidal struggles, “I have no idea. I really have no idea,” is similar to my friend’s heartfelt response to the expression of excruciating abuse, “I am so sorry. So very sorry.” God’s Spirit in us can minister to deep, dark hurts when we wait and watch, listen and suffer together through the discomfort of having no fix, no power, no clear understanding. Pushed to the wall, I called to God; from the wide open spaces, he answered (Psalm 118:5, MSG).
…Sue…
