The Objects of My Depression (Post-Feminist Is Not Post-Consumerist)

(I've been away for awhile, going through a drug trial that proved way successful, but sadly I had to back off the drug once the trial was over and resume a standard anti-depressant, so just now I've gotten back to the point where I've got things to write, ironically since Nancy and I leave on May 20th to backpack for two months, so I doubt I'll be able to blog from the trail:  my iPhone requires laborious typing.  Anyway, this post has nothing to do with my depression . . . or does it?)

Our culture creates a gaze, a giant Eye, primarily through media but also through the way our media selects what stories or episodes of "human interest" to reflect, and our Eye has always been - though in the era of assertive feminism was slightly, significantly less - proudly consumerist.  Now, when we read "our media" we are tempted to see "elite, rich, Liberal-North-East-educated," based on the success of right-leaning rhetoric, but that reflects the owners of our media rather than the consumers of our media.  Instead, our media reflects what sells, and what sells equals what sells the most, and the most consumers are all the regular folks, the non-elites, the heartland-educated, the me's and you's of ordinary, everyday folk.  And one primary consumerist strain - and since the primary consumer tends to be a man, the patriarchal strain - through the regular folk is this:  men's bodies are private property, to be covered and respected and left alone, while women's bodies are public property, to be exposed for evaluation, respected only if they pass some standard of reproductive value = "hotness," and even then used as a commodity for whatever purpose men acquire them for.  Don't believe me, look how universal standards of clothing - males in baggy shirts and pants and hats, females in tight, short skirts baring legs and arms and hair flowing free and heavily made up - appear not just among media-types - celebrities, athletes, video stars - but among college students, high school students, even - and here's the "get 'em while they're young" terror - among elementary students and kindergartners.  The Eye consumes females - women and young women and girls - reflecting an unashamed Male gaze, and men in turn are encouraged to commodify women's and young women's and girls' bodies and, thus, women and young women and girls themselves.

I have had feminist tendencies as long as I can remember, primarily (I think) because for the first ten years of my life (before my Mom married my Dad) I was raised by frightfully independent and capable regular-folk women - my Mom and my Grandmother.  This does not mean I'm innocent of joining rapturously with that Eye:  I'm not, by a long shot.  I remember when I was five and learning to draw, one of the things I drew was a naked girl chained face-down on a conveyor belt (I am not making this up, though I may be sharing too much information) because I got some kind of thrill (certainly not fully sexual at so young an age, but surely pre-sexual) looking at the Coppertone add (reputed to be Jodie Foster) where we see the cute little dog pull down the cute little girl's bikini bottoms (she wears no top, being pre-pubescent) at the moment when we get to see her shock and surprise and helplessness while getting to appreciate the marked tan lines that emphasize her bare bottom, and to this day I don't know where the conveyer belt came from except that in some way I realized even then, even at a young age, that I was drawing a product not a person.  Now, you may say, "Jeff, from a young age you were creeping on women," and you'd be right.  But I make a claim to feminism or at least the feminist impulse because of how ashamed I was of that drawing:  I had a naggingly clear sense that what I drew was wrong, I just didn't know why.  You see, feminism - or, if you want to be more universal, humanism - or, if you want to be almost as universal as you can get, beingism (gee, if I add non-beingism I'll reach the Tao) - speaks to that deep place where we know we shouldn't be made into a consumable so we shouldn't make anyone else into a consumable, and the place where all that starts is in how much we get to see of another person - whether their skin, or erogenous zones, or genitals, or even - and horror is never far from commodification - their blood and viscera.  And all these little viewpoints - as feminism so rightly told us making us even more conflicted by strutting braless and proud and holy - add up to one big giant all-seeing Eye.

Years ago, before I had studied feminism academically and found my place there (ask me sometime about being the only male in a class on "Feminist Christian Ethics" and I leave it to you to speculate why I was the only male in the class even though it was while I was at Candler which some called a rather "liberal" school of Theology), I saw a perfect presentiment of today's Post-Feminist Eye that in the depths of feminist vigor I never thought I'd see return.  Again, this is probably telling too much but if I've learned one thing being a feminist, it's that feminism needs male feminists to speak honestly about male conflictedness, so I'm willing to speak openly about maleness even if it's shameful.  Around 1985, a good friend was getting married, and believe it or not none of the five of us had ever been to a strip club.  So, after tucking into massive steaks and potatoes and drinks, we hopped down to a locally infamous joint to ogle the women, and we all - my four friends and I and everyone in the place - so vigorously ogled, but - here's an example of conflicted - surreptitiously, if you can believe it, glancing here and there, pretending not to see, or looking determinedly into a stripper's eyes instead of where we wanted to look.  Except for this one guy, seated at the dance stage, an ordinary Joe telling by his dress - oops, clothes - but one willing to hold out a $20.00 bill to a woman dancing on the stage, holding out the bill until she had danced to his satisfaction, naked except for a g-string (sound familiar), and only after she had turned her back and done the splits two feet in front of his face did he nod without a smile on his face, signaling his hard-won approval, and slip that twenty into her string.  I am so heartbroken today, because the Eye I experience - the pervasive, media-centric, consuming Eye - is the same Eye he wore in his hard, hungry face.

The Eye is Post-Feminist, not because women have gained a commodification-free autonomy so that the Eye has morphed into my Mom's tearful eyes as she gazed on my childish, "it's wicked and it's wrong" sketch of female bondage as commodity, but because though I can't believe I'm typing this twenty years after my feminist education the male objectifying gaze has snapped back with such fury not over the protest of women and young women and even girls, but because the Eye depicts women and young women and girls as happily complicit, willfully submissive, and it's all in good fun and body-forward and healthy (provided you're "hot"), though I know that can't be the truth, that no one really wants to be an object, a commodity, though our culture's assertion that we must "brand ourselves" and the fierceness with which so many of us (even me, I confess) uncritically adopt such language certainly questions my supposed knowing, and I find it's not just women, but it's men, too, men like me who seek attention and notice, and who want to parlay that into income, and fame, and brand-loyalty, Post-Feminist because I and us learned nothing from the Feminist movement (though it still lives, quietly), particularly Feminism's most humanizing lesson:  we are in our essence free and beautiful persons, all of us, I and Thou, until one of us looks at another as a thing to be consumed, possessed, owned, then we both become objects of critique, and scorn, and assessment, and price, advertised in selfies and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and the seemingly infinite ways we can take pictures of ourselves for another's appraisal, unwitting but still-for-some-reason-slightly ashamed parts-per-billion that make up that sleepless, unblinking, derisive, degrading, all-consuming Eye.

Med-Free Heaven On My Mind

I've been coming off my meds because I'm taking part in a clinical trial of an enhancement to Cymbalta, an antidepressant that I've had good success with but that is too expensive for me since I do not have prescription insurance, and I have to dry out (as it were) from my old regimen before I begin the new.  On Monday I begin taking the new meds, but today is Friday and I stopped taking meds last Sunday and on waking up this morning I could feel immediately the desperation that comes with being med-free, the frantic search for a mental place that doesn't hurt.  Today is Friday:  I dread these next several days.  I hope writing about it will help.

What would heaven be like?  I read people's posts on Facebook, hear people speaking about heaven after someone has died, and they don't speak of pearly gates and streets of gold.  They don't speak of angels with wings and harps and St. Peter ("Saint Who?" says Butthead) checking off names.  Instead, they speak quite simply of the grandest family reunion one can imagine, one where all the family attends, even back to those funny-looking relatives in the antique black-and-whites that used to hang on grandparents' walls, but really they're longing for more immediate family, usually grandparents and parents and themselves and children and, maybe, grandchildren.  And they don't speak of doing anything together:  simply being together is enough.

Funny thing, but our life here on the mountain comes close to that.  My mom and dad, my brothers and their wives, my nephew, two sets of cousins, we all live together on the same ten acre plot.  My daughter is nearby in Birmingham, my son was until this past June when he moved to Bronxville, New York.  My grandmother was until she died in April at the grand old age of 95.  We see each other every day, we eat together each evening, we watch football on Saturdays and Sundays and Mondays and this year sometimes on Thursdays, actually we can watch football every day but Tuesday (they re-run the Alabama games on Wednesday).  So listening to and reading how a lot of folks envision heaven, you could say that up here on the mountain we've got a taste of heaven on earth.

But I've got two problems with that.  First, I'm depressed, way depressed today, so I don't tend to see the good things right in front of me, I don't tend to give the good any lasting credence, as if the good is an aberration in an existence where bleakness is the norm, where gloom is palpable and real.  I tend to see each relative and think, "How long until they die?"  I watched my older brother yesterday walking his dog (a greyhound retired from the track) way across the field about to disappear into the path in the woods that leads down by the pond, his back to me and the dog sniffing the way, and I thought, "That's the last time I'll see him."  My depression - and I can only speak of mine, no one else's - tends to neglect the present, no matter how good it is (and it is very good), and anticipate the inescapable future when I or they will certainly die.  So I don't feel my life as a foretaste of that great gettin'-up mornin' soon to be.

Second, I don't believe in that heaven at all.  Sure, it's a comforting thought that one day we'll be reunited with all our loved ones, this time never to part, always to be together, though I find such beliefs short on details on what we'll do with all our time together instead of just be.  But I get the thought:  that I'll see my grandmother again someday, not like the last time I saw her on her deathbed, but in her prime, sharp as a whip, I'd love for that to be.  But I just don't believe it.  I don't believe in an afterlife at all.  So for this reason, too, I don't see our life here - good though it is - as a mild foretaste of that truer, eternal life that we will all someday share, a mere shadow, Paul says, of a greater reality.  Instead, I see this as a brief time of intimacy, of sharing daily each other's life, that we live under a cloud of destiny that could descend on us any day now.

Nihilism is the technical term for what I feel (and my nihilism is more a feeling than a system of thought).  "Nihil" means "nothingness, void," but nihilism tends to see our life here as ultimately mortal and finite, untranscendable, no afterlife or eternity or immortality, just a brief time of existence before which was nothing (excepting those mother and father parts that combined to make me) and after which will also be nothing (at least as far as "I" am concerned - my son and daughter will hopefully go on long after me).  Same thing goes for this earth and all that is in it, for our sun and solar system, perhaps even our galaxy (though I have difficulty conceiving that such a huge thing can ever fully pass away).  And I guess my nihilism takes the form of belief, too, like so many of our beliefs that grow out of feelings:  I have no data to base it on, I just feel this way so strongly I have to think the world is made this way.

But being nihilistic doesn't mean I'm not faithful.  Some folks have assumed that about me:  since I don't believe in heaven, I don't believe at all.  But that's not true at all.  I do believe in God, I do trust that God loves me, I just don't think I get eternal life out of the deal.  As a Christian, I do believe that Jesus accomplished something in his life that offers me a life of meaning and worship and service, a life that I can live in spite of my conviction that this life is all I've got, so that my life can be one of giving without expecting anything in return, of serving without expecting to be served.  I guess you can call my nihilism a faithful nihilism, if that doesn't sound too contradictory.  And I guess I have to ask you this question:  if you did not get eternal life from your faith, would you believe?

There, I do feel better, much better than I did this morning while I was huddling in the bed gritting my teeth and flinging my head from side to side fretting that Monday will never get here (not to mention the lag between taking an antidepressant and having the benefits kick in, sometimes two weeks to a month after beginning though I hope I get a boost way sooner than that).  The craft of writing helps:  though this is only a small thing, writing so short a blog entry is really an act of creation in which I add something new to the world, and that helps.  But the cognitive work of writing helps, too:  to communicate to you what I feel and think means I have to feel and think through them, and it helps me to see myself type these things openly, to encapsulate these thoughts in letters and words and sentences.   The process clarifies.  And I'm not left only feeling nihilistic, I'm left feeling a little hopeful, too, feeling faithful.  Thank you for reading.

Count Our Days Rightly

"Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart."  Psalm 90.12, TANAKH

I've thought a lot about this verse lately - what it means to count our days rightly, what it means to obtain a wise heart.  At first blush, it reminds me of a science fiction story I read in high school.  At a meeting of scientists, one of their number presents a device he invented that can identify the exact moment of a person's death.  Being skeptical, the scientists ask for a volunteer to demonstrate the machine's capabilities.  After assessing the volunteer, the machine returns a date in the near future for the volunteer to die.  So the scientists table their meeting until the date predicted by the machine to see if the machine actually works.  Sure enough, on the prescribed date the volunteer is killed.  When the scientists reconvene, to a man they demand the machine be destroyed.

To count our days in this manner would mean living with a horrible truth.  I often wonder how I would deal with such knowledge.  Would I throw all caution to the wind and live hedonistically, trying every debauchery known, wallow in excess?  Or would I have a wise heart, allocate my time intelligently in order to accomplish something meaningful?  Or would I doubt the sum of days, deny that my time approached and die surprised?  If it were possible to count up our remaining days, would we do so and face living a daily countdown to our demise, or would we run from this terrible knowledge and deny its hold on our lives?

Happily, knowing the moment of our deaths is impossible, so counting the days between today and that day is also impossible.  The Psalmist recognizes this, so he (the Psalm is ascribed to Moses) offers instead of a particular count a generalized estimate of our life's span:  "The span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years."  Indeed, the Psalmist's estimate is good for men and (more so) for women in this country today:  each of us, if we want to play the averages, can consider our total span of days to be about seventy-five years.  By this estimate, I've got about twenty-two years remaining, so I could chart out a wise plan to spend these years well.

The problem is, as a depressive, counting my days like this just leads to regret.  On the one hand, I look back at over thirty years of being depressed without clinical or pharmaceutical relief (even today, I do not think I function as well as an undepressed person, I find myself limited and hobbled by depression) as time wasted, as life wasted by my not being fully functional.  Each morning I wake up and find I have to spend another day depressed (I'm not depressed in my dreams), so I count another day until I can begin to live fully, wholly, then I look at my remaining twenty-two years and regret that I will probably spend them much as I've spent the last thirty, that I will always be emotionally crippled.

On the other hand, I don't really believe that I'll last another twenty-two years.  Though I try to envision a new next thirty years, beginning today, if I'm honest with myself I expect I only have a couple of years left at most.  While the women in my family usually beat the average (great-grandmother mid-eighties, grandmother mid-nineties, mother going strong at early seventies) the men don't do so well (grandfather mid-fifties, father mid-fifties).  Further, I'm depressed, so I even fear that Nancy and I will buy it in a plane crash when we go see our son in New York in early December.  Or I fear I'm harboring some undetected cancer, or West Nile virus, or some other disease that will spring one me fatally any day now.  I wake up and count each day as my last, each day a depressed day like all those of the past thirty years, each day a day without redemption, and all this leads to a pervading regret for all the life I've missed.

All of the above are examples of counting our days in the sense of "numbering" them, of seeing our lives as having a particular sum of days and subtracting each successive day from that total.  Numbering our days in this sense leads to a focus on the diminishing number remaining.  And focusing on the total and our daily approach of one more day closer to it leads, as the Psalmist realizes, to a familiar feeling that even thirty years "pass by speedily, and we are in darkness."  We've all felt that, haven't we?  I just attended a thirty year college reunion, where it seemed not just to me but to those I spoke with that thirty years had passed in a blink, that it seemed like no time at all ago that we all were college students together.  And though my peers seemed to take a lot of joy in reconnecting so effortlessly with one another, I was left with a feeling of bleakness, of "darkness" that even should I make another twenty-two years, they, too, will pass as speedily as did the last thirty.

Perhaps this is exactly what the Psalmist has in mind.  The subsequent verses surely point to such a numbering when they demand the Lord turn and show mercy, when they beg the Lord to "give us joy for as long as You have afflicted us, for the years we have suffered misfortune."  And though as a depressive I'm way sympathetic to this sentiment, yet these verses seem to result from miscounting our days, not from counting them rightly.  The demand for God to "satisfy us at daybreak with Your steadfast love" so that "we may sing for joy all of our days," though an admirable ideal, seems to spring from an unwise heart, an immature heart, a heart that demands of God reassurance each morning that God loves us so that we can get on with our day.  Again, an admirable ideal, but wouldn't a wise heart embrace God's steadfast love without needing such daily reassurance?  Rather than demonstrating how a wise heart speaks, the Psalmist seems instead to show the demanding nature of the unwise heart.

Rather than "numbering," another way to "count our days rightly" has the sense of "account for our days rightly."  Whereas numbering our days is impossible (its only possible to estimate our days remaining), accounting for our days is certainly possible:  given that nothing is certain, that you or I could go out of this life unknowingly in our sleep, accounting for each new day we're given means seeing each time we wake up to a new day as a gift.  And accounting for our days as gifts leads not to regret but to gratitude.

Now, I'm a depressive, so this is difficult for me.  But recently I've been trying to wake up each morning thankful that I've woken up, that I have a new day in front of me.  And even if this new day is my last day, nonetheless I'm so thankful that I have it.  Further, I know I have it, I did not pass away unknowingly, I am not living this day oblivious to its graciousness.  I am counting this day, too, like I'm trying to count all my days with humble gratitude that, even though I've been depressed, nonetheless I've had these days to live and breathe and work and play.  To account for each day wisely, to realize each day is a gift, perhaps a gift from God, means to see a growing sum in the grace column of our balance sheet:  countless days I've lived (unless I want to break out the calculator), and each one has been a gift.

Further, accounting rightly only begins with early morning thankfulness.  Accounting rightly extends throughout the day.  Today I shared breakfast with Nancy, saw her off to work, visited with my brother, get to write this blog entry, will have lunch with my mother and dad, will prepare a sermon during the afternoon, will share supper with my extended family, will watch "The New Girl," will cuddle with Nance before we drift off to sleep ("I pray the Lord my soul to keep").  Each breath may be my last, so each new breath is also a gift, a very gracious gift (what "right" do I have to live?).  So I should greet each event in my day with the same gratitude I greet each new morning on waking up:  accounting for such wonderful events in my life means I'm overwhelmed by gratitude, by wisely recognizing that God is indeed so gracious to give me this life.

To have a wise heart is this:  to know we can go out of this life at any moment (we are like grass renewed at daybreak that withers and dries up by dusk, says the Psalmist), so we account for each moment we're given as a gift from God.  Such counting is surely "living in the moment" and also living in gratitude.  One day, our last moment will come, hopefully we'll recognize it when it does.  And hopefully, after being thankful for each moment of each day, after counting our days rightly, our last moment will be filled with gratitude long-practiced and the darkness and bleakness of regret will be far from us.  Then, truly, the "favor of the Lord, our God," will be ours.  Thank you for reading.

Pain Tolerance

I like to think I have a high tolerance for pain.  When I was in junior-high and high school, I played football, a sport that demands a lot of pain tolerance:  seems like every drill, every game includes pain that one must simply play through or else sit out on the sidelines.  I've played through a lot of pain, even a broken hand (which I learned about fourteen years later when I re-broke it lifting cast iron skillets), so I tend to think I can tolerate quite a lot of pain.

Two events recently have made me question just how much tolerance I do have to pain.  First, I ran out of Abilify.  Since I'm unemployed and have no prescription drug insurance, my psychiatrist has been supplying me with Abilify through medical samples.  A couple of weeks ago, I ran out and decided, rather than stop by my psychiatrist's office for a refill, I'd see how difficult my depression would be without Abilify.  Whether because of how abruptly I stopped or the efficacy of the med, after three days or so I hit a disastrous low emotionally, so painful it seemed that I had actually regressed since my relapse a year ago, that I now hurt more than I did a year ago.  I was able to tolerate this for only two or three days before I got more Abilify and, gladly, took it.

Then, the very first day of my and Nancy's backpacking trip on the Appalachian trail, as we were climbing five miles of uphill out of Davenport Gap, I pulled a muscle in my left hip.  Now, I've pulled plenty of muscles in my life, not the least playing football for six years, so my pulling one hiking is not necessarily a sign of advancing age (as I seem to react much more often these days).  And the palliative is pretty standard:  give the muscle two day's of rest, then gradually work back up to full participation or, not having that luxury, take pain meds as much as needed.  Sadly, Nancy and I had neglected to refill our supply of ibuprofen (good ol' Vitamin I) before we began, so we were without pain meds.  On our second day, during an initial two miles of uphill, I simply couldn't go on, so we had to come off the trail (hiking an additional eight miles to do so, and being preserved from hiking an additional fifteen miles to the nearest town by the chance passing of friendly locals in a pickup truck, who drove us all the way to Newport).

So how much pain can I really tolerate?  The question is important to me, because part of my depression is to imagine horrible ways to die - a slow, painful death by stomach or colon cancer being among those I fear the most.  As I have romanticized my depression, I've seen it as training in pain tolerance:  so much of my life I have lived in emotional pain - just as real, I assure you, as physical pain - I figured myself for one hardened and wizened, capable of bearing the most agonizing pain.  Now, I'm not so sure.  It's so hard to measure pain:  did my pulled muscle hurt so bad that I couldn't continue to hike because it was, say, a seven or eight out of a possible ten (as I imagined it to be), or was it really a two or three and I was just weak?  Same with my emotional pain:  am I severely depressed, as I certainly felt once the Abilify had worn off, or only mildly depressed and simply can't handle a lot of emotional pain?

Ultimately, there's no comparing one's pain to another's:  we each feel our own pain, and what feels bad really feels bad no matter any "objective" measurement.  Our pain scales are always subjective:  what feels like an eight is an eight for that day in those circumstances.  But I fear that very subjectivity, I fear not really knowing what an eight feels like, and that some day I will truly and fully feel an eight, or a nine, or a ten.  Perhaps my years of emotional pain have not hardened me to pain, but, like constantly worrying an open sore, have actually made me more susceptible to pain, less tolerant.  As I try to imagine the next thirty years of my life, and my imagination does not include pain-free years, I would like to be able to imaging a life much less hobbled by pain than the last thirty years.  If I'm growing more susceptible, then the life I imagine grows less desirable.  Pain hampers my imagination.  Thank you for reading.

To Live vs. Not To Die

Look, I know the difference between living fully and trying not to die:  in the former, I engage life in all of life's dimensions, experiencing life as fully as possible; in the latter, I hunker down in safety, not risking engagement in return for a potentially longer life.  In experiencing life, I may indeed die prematurely due to accident or mischance, but I will have lived more than if I  avoid life's risks and concentrate on safety and security even though I may actually live longer.

Take travel, for instance.  Nancy and I flew to Spain and spent forty days walking the Camino de Santiago, five hundred historical miles across Northern Spain following in the footsteps of over a thousand years of countless pilgrims.  Foreign travel is inherently more risky than staying home:  the flights across the ocean, the prospect of being strangers in a foreign nation, anti-American sentiment, you name it.  But the rewards, ah, the rewards:  traveling through ancient Spanish villages, getting by with only a smattering of Spanish, meeting people from all over Europe as well as from North America, even traveling five hundred miles on foot, all of these enriched our lives immeasurably, we are better people because of them.

But depression, at least in my case, pushes me towards trying not to die at the expense of living, even when I am, in fact, living fully.  For instance, Nancy and I are about to return to the Appalachian Trail to hike one hundred miles from Davenport Gap to Erwin, Tennessee.  One could fairly call this "living."  Yet I have been trying to feel anything but dread, steeling myself for the hike, remembering all too well how my depression came crashing back down on me while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Main during 2011.  Adding to the difficulty I'm having throwing myself into the hike, I'm out of one very helpful medication that my psychiatrist has been giving to me in the form of free samples because it's too expensive for me and Nancy to afford on our own, so my thoughts and feelings for the past several days have been bleak to say the least.  I fear that I will hike these one hundred miles in an attitude of trying not to die rather than living fully, that I will look back having completed the hike and, rather than being enriched, I'll be entrenched further in doing my damnedest not to die.

Or consider the way Nancy and I live:  we live in a very "green," five hundred square foot strawbale cottage that we built by hand, a way radically different from the norm.  Nancy, I'm sure, takes great pride and satisfaction in the way we live, freely of our own volition:  we don't have to have all the trappings of American excess, we have no debt aside from a small car loan, we can drop everything and go hiking for nine days because we live so inexpensively.  But I find myself wanting a "mac-mansion," the status of big home-owner, the camaraderie of a mortgage, not because I value those things but because, in some way, I feel like a large brick house will be a more lasting testament to my life after I'm gone than a small strawbale cottage that will eventually, after we're gone and presuming our children don't want it, dissolve back into its constitutive parts and melt into the ground.  I find myself overly anxious about cracks in the plaster, natural results of a new building settling but in my feverish mind evidence that our cottage is going to fall down around our ears.  All of this is due to depression, specifically due to this last, dreadful year:  before my relapse, I, too, took great pride and satisfaction in the way we live.  Now I dread too much.

Here's the catch-22:  even though I am living, I feel like I'm dying.  Even though my life is full of promise and wonder, I feel as if I spend each day doing everything I can to stay alive, that all my energy is focused on delaying the inevitable instead of relishing the present.  I know I'm living well:  Nancy and I are still deeply in love with each other, I'm surrounded by my family who love and respect me, I get to spend my days in study and contemplation and writing sermons, good sermons, I'm extremely proud of my wonderful children - I could go on but it reads like I'm bragging.  But one sad thing about depression is the way feeling drives thought, so my feelings of dread tend to push me to dreadful thoughts, and in that thinking I fail to feel alive.  I am living, I know that; I just wish I didn't feel like I am dying.  Thank you for reading.

Stuck

The last couple of days I've been moving my office, combining my books and papers from two locations into one:  whereas I used to have my desk and biblical studies texts in mine and Nancy's cottage and my organizational and leadership studies (less used than my biblical texts) in the workshop, now both are combined in my new office space in the building formerly known as my daughter's cottage.  Next up, I'll go up to our storage facility and get boxes of goodies such as feminist studies and liberation theology, subjects I first studied in 1983 but have used little since, though I still have the (old and outdated now) texts and still display them proudly.  I remember at my ten-year high school reunion (that would be 1988) how I delighted in shocking my old classmates with "liberation theology" and my plans to write a book about "Jesus the revolutionary."  I'm looking at the shelf space I've reserved for those unused texts right now.

While going through my papers, I came upon a poetry collection I put together 'way back in the Summer of 1982, the summer I spent in New Orleans with Nancy before my senior year in college, the summer I studied Old Testament and English Literature at Loyola, and Nancy and I played racquetball on Loyola's courts.  I tried to get some poems published that summer, unsuccessfully, and eventually (by July, actually) I stopped writing and learned how to bake bagels and cook Chinese food.  But today, re-reading those poems, I was struck by how similar one is to the one I posted here under the heading "Suicidal Tendencies," the older of which I reproduce for you exactly as I wrote it on 4-3-82:

i stand

from

a great height

staring

at

the ground

i

stiffen

slicing regretfully

through

the air

breaking and shattering

then die

i stare

at

the ground

from

a great height

and

a black

yawning

void

stared back

just as intently

If you can get past the presumptuous lower case "i" and the confusion of tenses in the second verse(?) ("stare" vs. "stared"), or the staccato line (what was I thinking?) or the question of whether this is a poem at all, I'm sure you'll recognize (a) the similarity to the more recent poem and (b) the same suicidal tone.  I find it shocking to handle a piece of paper I typed on thirty years ago and find thereon evidence that my thoughts have changed so little in the interval.  I get the feeling that I'm stuck in some way, unable to grow, like a bug in a piece of amber . . . no, that's not quite right.  It's like I'm stuck in one of those snowglobes, in a makeshift office vignette, me alone at a desk made out of an old door, surrounded by amateurish shelves and second-hand furniture, pretending to work on astonishing, insightful prose, awash in academic excellence (Maryville, U. of Chicago, Yale, Emory, Princeton), when in reality I'm cataloging the same artificial snow flakes lying around in the same, predictable heaps, coating the scene unconvincingly in a faux romance.  The truth is, I have not grown a lick in thirty years, I'm still just as stuck ruminating on the same existential issues in tired, trite verse and all my experience and education have not led me beyond a childish, "I don't want to die."

Look, depression engulfed me in 1979 and shook my world mercilessly, and the patterns of falling faux snow were new and intriguing, but bit by bit they grew too predictable as my world was shaken less and less, and less severely, so that today I feel like that globe is covered in dust, unshaken, sitting on a shelf somewhere little noticed with me inside railing repetitiously.  Honestly, through this blog I'm trying to rock the globe (my little vignette, not the earth), to jolt it off the shelf so that it falls and shatters, even if that means spilling me stickily across the floor.  Maybe I'm waiting on one of you to seize this tacky, nostalgic trifle and hurl it against a wall, daring to injure the occupant in setting him free.  However it happens, I want to be free, not pain-free or depression-free (I'm resigned that I'll always be depressed) but stasis-free, alive and growing so that the next thirty years resembles the woeful repetition of these prior not at all.  I find the thought horrible that I will be trolling the net thirty years hence and find my writing and thoughts as closely resemble those in this post as do those in these two poems.  That will truly be a wasted life.  Thank you for reading.

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.