For sixteen pages Kathryn Greene Mccreight writes a first chapter entitled simply, and bleakly, ‘Darkness’. She attempts to describe the inner world of mental ill health, the deprivations that afflict emotional responsiveness, self-confidence, physical appetites, essential relationships. She walks the narrow path between self-pity and understatement of just how bewildering and threatening depression can be. Throughout her illness she has struggled to ‘make sense of my pain with regard to my life before the triune God..and the apparent incongruity of that pain with the Christian life’.
Sometimes distraction helps, but to constantly know you need to constantly distract yourself is itself both tiring and subversive of the process, because you always remember what it is you have to distract yourself from. And then there is the loneliness. ‘Human love can seem particularly unreliable and fleeting. At times it is unattainable, at others inexpressible, and usually for the depressed human love is unsensed, and indeed nonsense’. Yet she persists against all the emotional and inner sense of love’s absence, to argue at the theological level that the love of God in Christ remains a fact even if all that is experienced is absence.
‘If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that is promised to pull us through, a love that bears out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we, then the statement that love heals depression is in fact the only light that exists in the dark tunnel.’ (page 24)
That is not trite optimism – that is a theologically grounded conviction that acts as a sub-structure to a faith at times searingly tested. And the darkness isn’t only the inner emptiness of a heart scooped clean of hope. There is the mania, the euphoria that threatens to push life beyond control by overspending, dancing wherever, singing loudly whenever. And deciding to be disciplined doesn’t help, ‘mania is almost defined by lack of discipline’.
And so Kathryn tells the story of an illness, which is also her story, and though she would not allow herself to be defined by her illness, there is no doubt that life has had to be lived through it, around it, with it. And that is the truth that Christians need to get clear. Mental ill health is a form of suffering and anguish that requires levels of courage, endurance and sheer resilience often as demanding as, at times more demanding than, many more visible physical conditions with their accompanying pain. What makes this book an important gift to the church is the honesty, courage and theological integrity of the author, whose faith is strong enough to bear the weight of her hardest questions. This is pastoral theology from the edge, the theology of a pastor who is familiar with the edge, and has looked over it, and has come back to speak of what is there with a hopefulness that is theological rather than emotional, and a realism that is both pastorally and personally informed.
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