Is There Purpose?

Is there a purpose to my depression?  What's the reason I should feel so bad for so long?  Rather than being a mundane, brain mis-wiring or chemical imbalance, does my being depressed serve some Higher Aim?  

So many ways to begin to answer these questions.  The agnostic empiricist in me warns that Life has no purpose, no driving aim or ultimate goal, no teleology in the classical sense, but that part of me is mistaken.  Life, even in atheistic terms, does have a purpose (though I wouldn't call it Purpose):  to make more life.  From its single-celled beginning, struggling against entropy and disorder, Life presses and surges towards more life, more and diverse forms, utilizing mutations to fill unexploited niches, all without a Guiding Hand, you understand, but nonetheless subsumed into Purpose:  Life swells and recedes, expands here and contracts there, but fills our globe wherever it may.  And I'm sure we're not alone:  this same, indomitable process is undoubtedly universal (we're hardly unique), part of the fabric of being itself, so Life will have grasped a toehold somewhere else, and there it will push for more Life just as hard as it does here.

In agnostic terms, then, my depression is anti-Life, for depression impels me to retreat from Life, to consider ending my part in it; rather than expand, to contract, to shrink until I have no part in Life's outpouring and bounty, so that I am reclusive, remote.  Yet this negativity, too, can serve Life's Purpose, for Life's expansion is based on successful forms, and successful forms are those that lead to more Life.  Given that all forms - successful and unsuccessful, and the agnostic empiricist in me names depression an unsuccessful life form - require resources, the depressive's retreat from life serves Life by freeing up space and place for more successful forms.  I serve Life, for instance, by not serving a church, because my absence makes way for one better suited (read "not depressed") to serve that church.  The unsuccessful retreats from resources on which the successful thrive.

Yet this is hardly satisfying, though one (perhaps me) may find it noble, provided the scale of justice, balancing success against failure, measures truly.  It's also hardly complete, for I have more in me than an agnostic empiricist:  I also have in me a faithful servant, one who is determined to serve the One author of all Life, even if my serving requires my not serving in the pastorate.  So I have to restate the questions:  Does God have a purpose to my depression?  Why does God require that I should feel so bad for so long?  Does my being depressed serve God in some way?

Immediately, faith retorts:  God is not the author of suffering.  Well, faith has not read Scripture.  God punishes extravagantly in Scripture:  read Exodus, or Jeremiah.  Read Job, and find that God - going against God's own law - allows a truly righteous person to suffer for little more than a wager.  Read Ecclesiastes, if you can stand such a stark, nihilistic depiction of the human condition, how God has made both days of prosperity and days of adversity.  Read Mark, where God dangles the very Kingdom like a carrot predicated on how much one is willing to suffer, to take up one's cross like Jesus.  Read Romans, where Paul argues that some are created as vessels to be destroyed just to show God's might and glory, where Paul argues we will share Jesus' glorification so long as we share his suffering.  If God is not the author of suffering, God is at least a willful spectator, a monitor and scorekeeper, a judge who hands out rewards for suffering, which at least makes God complicit, at least according to Scripture.

So I have to say, yes, my depression may serve God in some way, that God may require that I be depressed, that God may have a purpose in my suffering.  Maybe my faith is meant to be an example for others, that I am faithful even though I see no earthly rewards such as career, or possessions, or well-being, certainly a needed antidote to the prosperity gospel.  Maybe my depression is punishment for my sins - God disciplines those that God loves - which gives it purpose, though for the most part my sins are ordinary and common and I can't help thinking God disciplines me too severely.  Maybe my depression makes me holier, that I, too, may be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, which makes me similar (barely) to our Savior, so my depression may be the Spirit's work of sanctification, making me more Christlike with each day.  Maybe my depression will lead me, finally, to a spiritual ecstasy, where I may shout Scripture with my whole being, "I have been crucified with Christ," and know on my final day that mine has truly been a cross-shaped life and, based on that form, truly blessed.

This all may be, but the wicked irony, the viselike catch-22, is that I cannot feel purposeful, cannot feel other than useless, lest I invalidate depression's meager purpose.  I can think these things, but the surety of experience, the body-knowledge that comes from feeling the truth of the matter, escapes me.  Rather than purpose, this all feels vain.  Yet, still, I am faithful, and that counts for something.  Thank you for reading.