The Depressed Christian

A cautionary tale for those dealing with depression

Old Woman Sitting, Mednyánszky, Ladislav, c. 1883

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror… as if [your] very life depended on describing the sun but [you] were allowed to describe only shadows on the ground.¹

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Depression is putting on ten lead jackets, buttoned to the nose.

It is like throwing a stone at the large glass of Life so that the Good Stuff sputters and spills onto the street.

Like a skyscraper, condensed to a marble, hung around the soul.

Depression is somehow hollowing and ferocious, like a tiger, and yet blasé and sleepy; an indolent tax agent shuffling papers like an ancient tortoise minutes away from expiration.

It is pain unworthy of honor.

A sickness that makes you ashamed you have it.

A snake bite that makes you want to sleep and forget and wake up only to sleep.

And, above all, it is a net that cinches so tight that no one else can get in there with you. You are alone. You cannot explain your interiority to anyone else.

The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy. - Prov 14:10

And somehow, while feeling paralyzed, you also feel responsible for that loneliness and pain and overwhelming sadness.

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Sometimes, the Lord takes Christians through seasons of depression. Charles Spurgeon, “the prince of preachers,” struggled his whole life with depression. He shared of one of his bouts with darkness in a sermon:

“My spirits were sunken so low that I could weep by the hour like a child, and yet I knew not what I wept for.” ²

I am a Christian which means that I experience seasons of melancholy, but that is not the sum of my life. My metaphysics cannot be reduced to my emotional state of the moment. I laugh with my children and turn the radio up to a good song, too. There is light and beauty that shines no matter how dark the rain clouds may be. I may feel despairing, but that does not mean that Reality is Despair. Nor does it mean these feelings are forever. Life is complicated. Sorrow and joy (2 Cor 6:10).

There have been plenty of times where I have felt something strongly that was entirely false. As a child, for instance, I felt terrified of the groaning creaks of my house at night. Those feelings were real. But they were really unfounded. Even though I was trapped in a cocoon of mortal terror at the age of eight, that did not make the concept of wood expanding and contracting from fluctuating temperatures false. It did not make ghosts real.

And the dark night of the soul does not abolish the Light.

Feelings don’t mean everything.

But they do mean something. Where does overwhelming sadness come from?

• I am a creature, so I have limits. I need friends, and food, and exercise, and fun, and sleep. And there may be seasons of my life where I have been pushed for so long beyond my limits that I reach an exhaustion point; where adrenal glands have been overtaxed and I have not rested as I ought to. So, I will get sad.

• I am a sinner, so I sin. And that will plug up the air-intakes of my soul and clog the gears and everything will become sluggish and hard and I will wince at how hard it is. And I will get sad.

• Other people are sinners, and they will sin against me. And I won’t always respond with the kind of mature, loving heart that rises above it more than it stares at the wound in angry disbelief. And that will make me sad.

• I am simple, so I don’t understand everything. And there will be times where I will not be able to diagnose why the engine is slowly losing power like a balloon losing air. I don’t always know. So, I will get sad.

Sadness is not all, but it is certain in life. But what matters most is what you choose to do with your sadness. And while (depending on the cause) there may be many things you need to do—take a nap, confess your sin, go on a walk with a friend, etc.—I want to recommend one thing to avoid.

Don’t Do This

Bo Burnham, Inside, Netflix

Novelist David Foster Wallace wrestled with a lifelong battle with depression, tragically resulting with him taking his own life in 2008. In his short story, The Depressed Person, he offers a kind of cautionary tale for those battling depression. “There is a lot of narcissism in self-hatred,” Wallace warns.

The main character, “The depressed person,” is nameless through the whole story; she is her depression. Her mind is a kaleidoscopic house of mirrors where she is not only aware of how pathetic and miserable she sounds, but also aware that her awareness of her own pitiful state does not absolve her from being totally wretched and overwhelming and exhausting to be around—and even then that awareness of her awareness does not stop her, like a drowning person pulling others under, from grasping desperately at friends and therapists for any kind of emotional help, no matter how abject she comes across…or what price she exacts.

She calls her friends incessantly day and night and rehashes her childhood trauma with at them. She spends thousands of dollars a month to meet with a therapist so she can have therapeutic banalities repeated back to her. She goes on “Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekends.” But the more she leans on her friends or meets with her therapist, the more unconditional validation and nonjudgmental listening she receives, the more miserable she becomes. With every call, every session, she is aware of how much she is a veritable black hole of a human being: sucking all the life, vibrancy, and joy out of everyone else with her interminable neediness.

“The depressed person” is hyper-self-aware. But the labyrinthine convolutions of inner analysis do nothing to help her. It only makes her hate herself even more and slip into even more nightmarish levels of inner-pain. Her self-hatred does nothing to change her fundamentally narcissistic perspective: everything is still about her, even her revelation that she is being self-centered in it all.

The ascetic impulse of introspective self-hatred feels humble—even righteous; it has “an appearance of wisdom” but at the end of the day has “no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh,” (Col 2:23). “The depressed person” simply uses her self-awareness as another log on the psychic fire consuming her.

There are few things that depression does to us more significantly than lead us to ruminate on our misery. Like the weird desire to press on a wound to feel the pain, we can try to wrap the darkness around ourselves even tighter. We talk to ourselves of how we shouldn’t be feeling this way, get angry at ourselves for being so selfish, maybe even make an attempt to enjoy something. But if we stretch up for Light…only to feel the same tomb-like sadness? Then we can surrender even further to it. I guess this is it. And as we stare at ourselves staring at our sadness, thinking of how tragic and lost we sound—and how much we hate ourselves for it—the darkness deepens. Words mouthlessly uttered become binding enchantments, fortifying the depression and solipsism further still: look at how sad and pitiful you are.

Do This Instead

The Sower, Jean-François Millet, c. 1865

Rather than pressing your eyeballs against the mirror of self-reflection, turn them away, and scatter these seeds in faith:

1. Accept that your current emotional state is not the Arbiter of Reality. Picture yourself tethered to a pole in the middle of a river. Reality is the pole, the river is your feelings. (This analogy isn’t perfect, but take it for what it is.) You will feel the pull of current, but you are fundamentally bound to reality. Feeling the pressure of the river does not mean the pressure is reality itself. If you feel like there is nothing good in life, force yourself with mechanical rigor to think—say the words out loud if necessary—My feelings do not determine Reality.

2. Tell yourself what Reality is. God is good. He has forgiven me of my sins, united me to His Son, and indwelt me with His Spirit. I am never forsaken or alone. He is with me. He has placed me in His family, the Church. I do not need to bear these burdens alone. Sin and sorrow are real, but they have an expiration date. But what is good will continue on forever and ever. In fact, God has promised me that He will take this very season of sorrow and bend it towards my good in the end. I can enjoy this world—splinters and all—without fear about what tomorrow will bring because God has pledged His allegiance to my good, and He cannot fail. Soon and very soon, I will be home with Him where I will no longer stand in that river that pulls me away from Reality; I will be swept up in the River of Life that flows from the throne of God itself towards Reality. There will be no disparity between my emotions and the world around me, no dislocation—I shall see and feel with perfect congruity and what I shall see and feel shall be rapturous delight.

3. Remind yourself that freedom is found outside yourself. The most psychologically healthy people in the world are the people who tunnel into themselves the least. They do not ruminate on themselves much, but work and suffer and play and laugh and serve, thinking primarily about God, other people, and this world. They forget themselves. The continual field trips into our own psyche (Am I happy? Am I sad? Am I flourishing?) has not created a generation of healthy, happy, and well-adjusted people. God has made this world full of ten thousand wonders that I have taken for granted today, and if I pay attention, I can find something incredible to look at or consider that will shut the inner-analyzer off for a moment.
   Try this: go find a piece of fruit near you. Stare at it. Actually stare at it. Don’t stare at yourself staring at it. Don’t think about how you are thinking about it or what this reveals about yourself. Absorb your focus onto the fruit. Notice its texture, color, imperfections. Feel its weight in your hand and the sensation of its skin. Consider the wonder of how this came into existence by the alchemy of dirt, water, and sunshine—and somehow, through more magic of modern production and distribution, it wound up in your hand. 99% of mankind throughout history have not had access to the produce you have access to. Eat it. Notice its tang, its sweetness, its crunch, its pulverized flesh in your mouth.
   Now, consider: God could have made a world where we did not have such things. Now consider the sheer variety of fruit available: kiwis, mangoes, pineapples, bananas, apples, grapes, cantaloupe, watermelon, blueberries, dragonfruit, papayas, lemons, oranges, cranberries, honeydew, etc. Fruit is a display of God’s prodigal tastes towards indulgence: His generosity, creativity, and goodness. Now, consider how many other spectacular things (and people!) there are like this that you and I walk by every day because we are so fixated on ourselves?
   “The feeling self is not the center of reality. God is the center of reality. To surrender to God, however contrary to our emotions, will lead to liberation from self and will open us to a world that is much bigger and grander than we are.”³

4. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You are not that important, not that tragic in the grand scheme of things. The melodrama of your mind that casts yourself as the main character of some Shakespearean tragedy has no one in the audience but yourself. Your fourteen levels of self-awareness and self-hatred disguised as ironic detachment are pretty silly. You can only hate yourself if you think yourself grandiose and important. If you catch yourself spiralling into multi-layered levels of introspection and gloom, try telling yourself: You are being fairly ridiculous right now; take a break, man.

5. Lament and hope. Of course, bring your sadness to the Lord. Tenderly lay it, all broken and ugly, before the Almighty. Even as you confess that He is sovereign and good and will work all things together in the end, tell Him that you wish things were different. Tell Him your woes and sorrows. You may be unable to articulate the internal anguish you are experiencing to anyone else in any manner that comes close to accurately describing the depth and complexity of sadness you have felt—but you can to Him. He knows your pain. He knows how hard the struggle has been. He sees. And let that thought cheer your soul with hope. You may feel alone, but you are not. The Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, is your friend, your counselor, and your ever present help. He has been there. And while He may have mysterious purposes for why He is taking you through this darkness, why He isn’t offering you a quick fix to get out of it, you can be certain that this pain is not blind or meaningless. It comes through His nail-scarred hands for wondrous purposes that you will one day be grateful for. You may not feel it, but there is always reason to hope. Remember the promise: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

1. The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace

2. Speaking of the unique burdens of being a pastor, he lamented:

Our work, when earnestly undertaken, lays us open to attacks in the direction of depression. Who can bear the weight of souls without sometimes sinking to the dust? Passionate longings after men’s conversion, if not fully satisfied (and when are they?), consume the soul with anxiety and disappointment. To see the hopeful turn aside, the godly grow cold, professors abusing their privileges, and sinners waxing more bold in sin—are not these sights enough to crush us to the earth. . . . How often, on Lord’s-day evenings, do we feel as if life were completely washed out of us! After pouring out our souls over our congregations, we feel like empty earthen pitchers which a child might break.

3. Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised