Loneliness, and Being Alone

Loneliness in church isn’t something we often think or talk about as faith communities. After all, we exist intentionally for fellowship, for gathering and being together in and around our worship. What are we about if not community, fellowship, and friendship? The people who join us are obviously not alone, because we are all here, together.

We acknowledge that worshipping God is not something that can or should be done by oneself, except of course for those pesky desert hermits, especially those annoying ones who climb up on posts in their attempts to ignore us. Stupid hermits, missing the point: God is for people, together. But I digress.

The reality is that for people who suffer from depression and other mental illnesses – people like me – going to church is often a very lonely experience even though we are surrounded by people. Obviously I can’t speak for everyone living with depression, and I’ve certainly at times found my churches to be a source of great comfort. But the fact is that the times when I feel more tightly gripped by sadness, darkness, and despair are also the times when I feel most isolated in the midst of my community. Maybe that’s because my own mental illness isn’t something that I feel comfortable discussing. Maybe that’s because I’ve heard a lot of misinformation from clergy people over the years, or because I have trust issues that the people I confide in won’t take advantage of me, or ‘out’ me when I’m not ready. Ultimately, maybe the reasons aren’t that important to what it means for living the experience.

I've had a difficult year as I moved to a new congregation, one that also happens to be very different from any other community I’ve belonged to. It’s massive, and I’ve always belonged to small, close-knit churches, where everyone knows who you are and the feuds can be multi-generational. I’m not quite sure how to fit in, or if I do. To some extent it helps that I joined smaller groups that have the added advantage of helping me avoid the minefield that is coffee hour. To some extent I shot myself in the foot because by avoiding the minefield of coffee hour I haven’t really met anyone and there’s not a lot of time for real conversations about faith and life and God.

It can be intensely difficult for people who already live with social fragility to find themselves experiencing liminality in a space where there is an implicit emphasis on togetherness, unity, and friendship. It can be hard to feel like an outsider and not know how to fix it. For me personally, it is a struggle when I’m depressed to fight the urge to retreat, to hide, to withdraw and be by myself. I know that for many others, this is an unavoidable urge, and I count myself blessed that I feel by myself but am not actually by myself.

Christ, too, is no stranger to loneliness. Imagine what it must have felt like growing up so different from everyone else. Fully human, fully divine, different from everyone around him. We know he started looking for answers, that he knew he had a mission, from a very young age, when he ditched his family to stick around the temple (Lk 2:41-52). Early in his ministry, large groups of disciples abandoned him because what he was teaching was too difficult (Jn 6:35-66). Jesus was constantly confronted by people who didn’t understand what his ministry was about or what he was trying to tell him, most painfully by his closest friends on the way to Jerusalem as he tried to tell them about his death (Mk 10:35-40).

He faced temptation in the desert by himself. In the garden of Gethsemane, his friends fell asleep while he kept watch. Jesus knows what it’s like to be alone. Obviously, my loneliness is not like Jesus’ loneliness: to believe so is absurd, arrogant and grandiose. I don’t better understand Jesus because I live with depression. But because Jesus was lonely, he understands me. I am never alone even when I am, even when I am alone in the middle of a crowd, because Christ is with me. I might not be able to feel it, but I believe it with all of my heart. 

New Creation and Old Pains

2 Cor 5:17 “Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

In some Christian circles, there’s a huge emphasis on the life-transforming impact of faith. You’re born again, and this new belief in Jesus Christ changes your whole life, your whole outlook, your way of being in the world. Everything is shiny and better. This transformation is often testified to as radical, an extreme and overwhelmingly joyous putting aside of all the things that were unhealthy and that troubled you, in a sudden sweeping away of your old life. This kind of understanding of Christianity is extremely attractive to people who are in pain, or lonely, or living difficult lives, because it emphasizes a new start and the absolute power of grace. But it can also be heartbreaking, and at times lead to a breakdown in practiced faith, if the changes of the new life in Christ fail to manifest themselves so openly.

The reality is that not everyone experiences this sort of change as a result of discovering, feeling, or rediscovering belief. And yet 2 Corinthians tells us that we are new creations, that the old has passed away and the new has come. Not even that we’re becoming new but that we already are: “he is a new creation.” What can this mean for people who feel mired in their ‘old’ lives?

To be “in Christ” is layered with meaning. One thing it means is that you’re in Christ and you’re proclaiming the Good News. Paul is writing about himself, his fellow apostles, and the new believers: “So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20). Professions of faith are a way of openly being in Christ and can be signs of God working in us. You are a new creation because you’re living a new holiness of life, a new kind of worship of God, that doesn’t rely on the observance of the Law but on the unfolding and outworking of the love of Christ by grace. So you are in Christ, a new creation in the sense that you’re living the new life that is Jesus’ life in you. You’re not ‘in Christ’ because you profess Him; you can’t gain this for yourself by behaving faithfully any more than you could lose it because depression takes away your ability to do so. Being in Christ is the work of God, not man (2 Cor 5:18-19).

We are “in Christ” when we give ourselves over to Him in trust, choosing to believe that God will do the work that needs to be done. Paul beseeches us to “be reconciled to God” (5:20). In the deepest sense we are already reconciled to God because “Christ reconciled us to himself” (5:18); when we reconcile ourselves to God, it reflects a choice to trust and to lean on God regardless of what seems to being going on around us. We are “in Christ” in the way that we feel and believe that it is God who will pull us through, and not our own effort. We become able to see that our lives are being used for another purpose than our own, and that we have a place in God’s plan which is for the whole world. Paul expresses this belief when he describes the dichotomy of having death at work in himself so that the life of Jesus “may be manifested [in] the mortal flesh” (4:11). We are a new creation because our lives are for others and for God rather than for ourselves. Where, under the Law, each person was working out salvation for themselves, as new creations we are a part of the greater saving action of God that encompasses our lives as part of the transformative work of grace in the world.

We are “in Christ” because He loves us: our lives are hidden in Christ with a secret being-ness that we do not always see nor profess nor understand, and which has nothing to do with us and everything to do with God. We are in Christ because He loves us before we can ever begin to love him, when we are still being knit together in out mother’s wombs. This being-in-Christ is the ground for the other layers, the professions of faith, the decision to trust.

Receiving Christ in His act of self-giving love, giving His life for us and for the world, we have something new in us that isn’t part of the old man, and we are a new creation. The old man, the human reality before the Incarnation, no longer exists: “the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” At the same time, the fallen-ness of the world has not disappeared, because the kingdom of God is still coming into being, growing like a mustard seed. Although we can say that the old has passed away, it is at the same time still-here and passing-away, the conflicting realities the Bible struggles so mightily with.  For while we are new creations, we are still part of a world “groaning in travail” (Rom 8:22).

In 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, Paul talks about his and the apostles’ struggles as part of the knowledge that we are still mortal and all that this entails. He describes the old and new life as inner and outer nature, which has less to do with a sense of something better lodged inside our human body than the difference between the seen and the unseen (2 Cor 4:16-18). Both are here at once, as the old nature remains even while the new nature is already here as the life of Christ in us. Both are important and meaningful and real: we will face Christ with the full force of our bodily life (5:10), which for Paul always symbolizes the old life of our fallen natures.

We are being and are transformed, are and are becoming new, but Paul is at pains to point out that the new nature is secret, unseen, invisible, though the effects can at times be dramatic. The problem is that some Christian theologies assume the effects of this grace are always and necessarily visible. It can lead people to claim they ‘know’ they are saved and, more disastrously, can lead those who are suffering from the effects of depression and other hardships to believe that they don’t have the new life within them because their lives are still the same.

People ask themselves, “Why isn’t my life transformed and my suffering ended? Does this mean I don’t really believe in God? Does this mean Christ doesn’t dwell in me?” In reality, the question we all should be asking ourselves is why we think we should be able to dictate to God what the new life looks like. “My life isn’t transformed enough yet, hurry it up;” “I want to be better, isn’t that the outcome of faith;” “I want to be happy, that’s what your love should mean.” Of course this is ridiculous and the height of arrogance. No one but God decides what grace will outwardly work and transform in the lives of his people. Paul explicitly tells us to stop judging things by outward appearance and worldly standards (5:16). But we continue to do it each time we build a theology where faith and new life is connected to a necessary, visible, positive change that people can point at and say “that’s the work of God right there.”

The new creation doesn’t erase the brokenness of our world or its consequences, and doesn’t promise that every tear will be wiped away from our broken lives. Our lives hidden in Christ, we touch the Kingdom, so it is both here and coming; but it is held by God and working itself out for God’s purpose of reconciling the world to Himself, a work so big and miraculous that we can’t begin to comprehend or predict what it will do in something so small and infinite as one person’s life.

God and Mammon

“For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs” (1 Tim 6:10).

This passage in Paul’s first letter to Timothy contrasts piety and a God-centered life with the impiety that comes from a self-centered life of wrong loving, putting things like money and conceited pride ahead of the love of God. As the letter points out, it isn’t money that’s bad but the love of it: the wrong love that makes an idol of money, that makes it a thing to be sought as a good-in-itself. The kind of love that puts materiality and self-importance at the center of a life. In short, the kind of love that sets up something or someone other than God as the central defining point of one’s life. What is it but worship to build your life around something that crowds God out?

As Luke puts it, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Lk 16:13).

Sometimes, for some people, depression can become a sort of false God. It can become the center of your identity, the point around which your life is built. Ironically, depression can be something to hide behind, an all-encompassing space that allows you to avoid facing the troubles and difficulties of your life. If you’ve suffered from depression for a long time it can become comfortable, not because it isn’t painful but because you know what to expect.

There are many explanations about how and why this can happen, and to be clear we are talking about people who can still function while they’re depressed, not those who are completely overcome by it.

Depression, like any other uncomfortable state of being, can become familiar – and, so, comfortable – over time. You begin to inhabit it in the drive towards rest and inertia. From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, this tendency toward inertia is part of the death drive which can override the pleasure principle. People feel an urge to restore things to an earlier state, and an inclination toward death and decay can be manifested as stasis. When this urge is stronger than that of growth and life, a person becomes stuck in an unhealthy and unhappy pattern because they derive a sort-of comfort from it.

The point of psychoanalysis and other psychodynamic psychotherapies are that recognition of these patterns is the path toward freeing yourself from them. Rather than the inclination to blindly trust in feelings – I am depressed all the time, therefore I am meant to be depressed, my feelings don’t lie and there’s nothing I can do – analysis of the thoughts underlying them offers a chance for change and freedom.

It’s all well and good to understand why some people unconsciously get stuck in depression, and it’s obvious why getting unstuck would be good, personally, for them. But there is a real spiritual impact to being in a state where you choose depression over God, and that is what we, as Christians, need to begin to explore.

1 Timothy 6:10, using the example of the love of money, tells us that this unnatural all-consuming love turns us away from God and is the “root of all evils;” this turning away causes us pain. We are created to love God with all our hearts, minds, and souls, and choosing to love something else in His place leaves us empty and hurt, reinforcing the feelings we have turned to as the defining meaning of our lives. God wants us to love Him for ourselves, that we might be truly happy and right and fulfilled. We crave things other than God because of sin, but when we feed this craving by setting up false idols we hurt ourselves and mire ourselves deeper in pain by not living the true life to which we are called. God wants us to be whole, to do everything we can to help ourselves get better. God wants us to love God for us. And part of what that loving entails is the refusal to set up any false idols, including the idol of depression. As Christians, we have a moral responsibility to love God, to strive to define ourselves as lovers of God, to not build our lives around something that doesn't flow from Him as if that something else makes us who we are and supplies the meaning of our lives.

Are, then, people who are stuck in depression, either because they haven’t found a way out yet or because it is so all-consuming that it has nothing to do with comfortable discomfort, slaves to that illness? Does it own them? Is it their master? “You cannot serve God and mammon.”

The answer is resoundingly “no.” Depression can never truly own you: you are created by God and purchased at an incalculable price. God is your master, and though at times you may be a terrible servant who is devoted to something else, you truly belong only and always to God. Although sadness, darkness, and despair may feel like they own you, may determine who you feel and believe you are, what you can do and who you can become, although it may feel like the truest thing in the world, finally, at the root of things, it isn’t the truth. You belong to God, always and forever.

Not Empty, But Full

“Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty” (Ruth 1:20-21).

Naomi calls out to God in pain: I have lost everything. I was full, and you have made me empty. I had, and now I do not have.

Before these words, we read the story of Naomi going to Moab with her husband, Elimelech, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion. Her husband dies, and her two sons take Moabite wives, dying 10 years later themselves. Naomi returns to her own land, and Ruth chooses to go with her. Upon returning, Naomi utters these heartbreaking words: “I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.”

One of the hallmarks of our modern understanding of depression is the recognition of cognitive change: people gripped by depression often cannot and do not see the good in things. Life narratives are re-written under the oppression of darkness to form a trajectory of despair. The person who is depressed cannot remember feeling happy, or idealizes the past as a perfect, unrepeatable time whose wonders have disappeared. The person who is depressed does not see the blessings in their life. This cognitive bias toward perceiving all things through the lens of sadness and worry is typical, and knowing that helps us begin to comprehend why and how people suffering from emotional mental illnesses often do not perceive their own lives with anything approaching reality.

Naomi doesn’t see her life fully and truthfully. She says “I went away full,” and while it’s true that there was a lot of good in her life it’s also true that she and her family were driven from their homes by famine. She was literally not full. Naomi says, “the Lord has brought me back empty,” and it’s true she has lost much. But she is also returning to a people who have been blessed with food (1:6). She is literally returning to be full.

Most importantly, Naomi has not lost her family and received nothing in return. She had gained Ruth. Ruth, who leaves everything behind to journey with her mother-in-law. Ruth, whose love and devotion propel her into the unknown.

Naomi tries to send her daughters-in-law away again and again. She has so many excuses, but probably the most truthful is that she feels cursed by God and they don’t fit into her self-pitying narrative: “it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the LORD has gone forth against me” (1:13; emphasis mine). She hurts and sadness them and tries to send them away, as though the future of a childless widow is any more certain in their homeland than with her. She is wrapped up in her own sadness and grief.

Though Orpah turns aside, Ruth stays, saying, “Entreat me not to leave you or return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you” (1:16-17). Her profession of love sounds like marriage and covenant. Like covenant, it is profoundly unearned and unearnable, given freely in the binding together of one who loves selflessly and one who needs greatly.

Naomi doesn’t return empty, but she feels she does because she doesn’t see her blessings. She receives Ruth and her devotion silently, without thanks or remark. Like so many swallowed by the darkness, Naomi doesn’t see the good things. It’s true of so many people living with depression: we tend to see our lives as stories of decline, without hope of repair, and we don’t see the blessings we’ve been given because we don’t feel blessed. We have a lot to learn from the story of Naomi and Ruth.

Like Naomi, we’ve lost a lot. Like Naomi, we have a Ruth. Ruth figures the love of God: God Who binds Himself in covenant with us in selfless, abundant love. God Who gives Himself to us without need of recognition or thanks, and for Whom we can never do anything to earn the love that is given. And, like Naomi, we never journey alone no matter how much we protest we’d prefer to.

That doesn’t mean it’s okay to be blind like Naomi, silently taking love for granted as it works itself out in our lives. God commands us to rejoice, to give thanks, to praise, all of which help us to embrace the blessing of His love. But in those dark, bitter moments where we cannot thank Him, God is there, loving us beyond measure. In realizing this, we can begin to create new narratives.

Though God’s presence doesn’t erase or undo sorrow and tragedy – just as Ruth, who is more than seven sons, cannot bring them back – the love of God is hidden in the midst of the darkness, catching us on its branches as a wildness of joy.

Even the Demons

“The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!’” (Lk 10:17)

When you live with the darkness of depression, it’s easy to turn to the Bible and despair. It’s easy to read passages like this one and say to yourself: If God has power over everything, why hasn’t He made me better yet? Do I not believe? Have I not prayed? Why has the Lord not cast this darkness from me as the disciples cast out demons in His name? Does not God have power over this darkness?

There are many facile answers to these questions. We can say that depression, and other mental illnesses, are not demonic so this is not a useful model. That’s true. Though depression remains to a large extent unknown and mysterious, we can be pretty confident in saying that a person isn’t depressed because they’re possessed by the devil. But this doesn’t take away the question of why God doesn’t cure the faithful.

We can say that, as with the disciples’ instructions to shake the dust from their feet where they are unwelcome and to heal the sick where they are (Lk 10:8-11), that faithful Christians who aren’t healed simply don’t have enough faith. But this ignores the truth that many Christians suffer from depression while believing in and worshipping God. Though it is of course impossible for anyone but God to see into a person’s heart, we can’t simply dismiss those who are suffering as victims of a lack of belief.

We can say that God simply hasn’t cured people because it isn’t part of His plan, as it is true in this passage: the disciples are sent only to a few towns that Jesus intends to visit, but not all over every town in Palestine (Lk 10:1). Now, finally, we are getting somewhere nearer the crux of things. It is all about God’s plan, isn’t it? God cured me of my depression, God didn’t cure me of my depression: who’s to know why one way or the other, except to refer to God’s mysterious and unknowable ways?

This both is and isn’t an answer. And like so much of what it means to keep the faith from within the darkness, it is less than satisfying even when it is the truth. It’s probably the reason people hate theodicy. How can you reconcile the fact that God allows suffering with the real feeling that you don’t want Him to, and it would at least be nice to have a solid, case-by-case explanation?

Why does God not make the darkness go away? Why doesn’t God cure everyone’s cancer, set everyone’s broken limbs, end hunger, end grief? Why, for me personally, will God not take this burden from me though I know it is possible were He to wish it?

Luke 10:1-20 tells us about the sending of the seventy, the preaching and healing they are called by Jesus to do. It tells us that the kingdom of heaven is near (v 9). It tells us that the seventy healed, that they had power over the demons, and that they condemned and abandoned those who did not express faith in Jesus.

This passage gives us a glimpse into Jesus’ ministry and the ongoing work of God for and in the Kingdom, a kingdom both here and not-yet, near and impossibly far, a world both God’s and apart from God. It cannot be said that the seventy are curing people and casting out demons for people’s own sakes. It is for the glory of God and the work of the kingdom as that work is embodied in the ministry of being sent out.

As Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Lk 10:2). Everyone is the harvest, but the labourers are few: though the power of the kingdom is manifested to those who already believe, the passage is more clearly directed at those whom God wishes to send out. It is about the power of God for the labourers, that in the name of the Lord they can cast out demons, and not about those who have been delivered. The power of the kingdom is first and foremost to call and send disciples. The work of curing others and casting out demons in Jesus’ name convicts them of God’s power, but says nothing about fixing everything that is wrong with their lives or eliminating their suffering and hardship by one iota. They are sent with no money, no extra clothes, and no supplies for the journey; they are sent to be rejected, to experience hunger and loneliness and the despair of having failed. The seventy experience the power of God and the nearness of the kingdom not in a release from suffering but in plunging into it for the sake of God’s work.

God’s power on earth points to the greater reality of what has already been accomplished: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Lk 10:18). Power over demons and the gift of healing draw their strength from these cosmic truths working themselves out in a creation that is being renewed. But we still live in a broken, fallen world, and for all of God’s power manifested among us we are not free from suffering and are not meant to be. Though we are meant to ask and ask again and again for God’s help and healing, as Paul did when stricken with a thorn in his side, more often than not God’s inscrutable purposes are not for the removal of our suffering but that we continue the work to which we are called. Our suffering is transformed through God’s grace into the outworking of God’s kingdom when we, as labourers, go out in the midst of this darkness to proclaim the kingdom in Jesus’ name.