Gaudete

It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything.

I go to the hospital for a week, and it is mostly the usual nonsense, but by the third day I notice that the option of suicide being inaccessible has made me stop thinking about it, and I suspect that having that break is good for my brain. That’s really the one solidly helpful thing that being locked up can do for me. But it is a short break. It is only a few days after I am discharged that I realize that I am finding it hard to breathe again. I go to therapy. I go hiking. I write. I try not to isolate. I do the things that at least in the past have helped. But I am drowning. Sometimes, especially late at night, I wonder how I will possibly last another day of feeling like this. I don’t know what to do.

The nurse practitioner who does my meds puts in a referral for me to see a doctor and discuss ECT. She tries to make it sound as urgent as possible, in hopes that will help get it fast-tracked, so she thinks of all the symptoms of depression that she can to ask me about. I say yes to almost everything. Honestly, I don’t have any hope that ECT would make a difference, even knowing that the research shows promising results for treatment-resistant cases like mine. I don’t even know if I’ll do it; I am scared to mess with my brain in that way. At the moment, it feels irrelevant anyway, because I am incapable of thinking that far ahead. I read something once about people with suicidal depression having a “foreshortened sense of the future,” and that phrase always comes to mind when I land in this place.

It is Advent. There are many things I appreciate about Advent, but usually the aspect of it that most speaks to me is the sense of waiting in the dark. Not knowing how long you will have to wait, and maybe not even knowing what to hope for, or what form redemption might take, or if redemption is even possible. There is a subduedness, a quietness to it that I find soothing. I like the penitential, contemplative mood of the season. But the third Sunday, halfway through Advent, is traditionally a break from the solemnity. It is called Gaudete Sunday. It is a day for joy, of all things. (“Gaudete” is Latin for rejoice.) I’m not sure it is has ever hit me so hard how completely absurd this is. The days are still getting darker. We are still waiting, and maybe we are wondering if God will delay indefinitely, or whether God has forgotten about us. It feels too soon for joy. It feels too risky to rejoice, in the middle of so much ambiguity and uncertainty, when it is hard to see anything past the sheer blinding brokenness of the world.

I realized a strange thing this year. I realized that I often have an unquestioned assumption that God is at least as depressed as I am. I mean, I see a tiny fraction of the awful things in the world, all the ways that we humans find to hurt each other, all the things that are going terribly wrong, and I fall into complete despair. But God sees it all, every excruciating detail. How can God stand it? And I do believe that God mourns the injustice and the sorrow, that God is in the very thick of it with us, that God does not keep human suffering at a safe distance. But I have never really considered what it means that God sees and experiences all of that . . . but God is not a God of despair. That God unfailingly calls us to hope. And even to rejoice! Seriously, to rejoice! I can hardly get my head around that. Obviously I don’t think this at all the equivalent of, “Oh cheer up, have a positive attitude, it's not all that bad!” Because God knows that is in fact that bad. And yet one of the attributes of God is joy. The more that I contemplate that, the more I am absolutely astonished by it.

Still, I think I am uneasy about joy not just because depression is so regularly eating me alive, but also because it feels—insensitive, maybe? Like I have an old script that says you are not allowed to feel good when so many people are suffering in the world. Like you might even have a moral obligation to feel terrible. But I find myself asking surprising new questions. What if joy is actually a sort of radical resistance to all those pieces of awfulness? What if joy is a force that shakes things up and opens up new possibilities? What if joy is a source of potential transformation? What if joy isn’t a denial of the darkness, but the fuel for walking through it?

There’s a line in the Westminster catechism that says that the chief end of [the human] “is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” The first time I came across this, I was really taken aback. We are supposed to enjoy God? What nonsense is this? Surely God exists to be worshiped and feared and obeyed and all of that. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me, ever, that joy would play any role at all in a relationship with God. It’s a completely wild thing to me still.

I’m not saying that I know the way to joy, certainly. In fact, looking at my ECT referral, I feel like a textbook case of someone who is clearly lost. But now I’m getting to something that is very hard to put into words. The best I can say is that in the middle of one of the hardest depressions of my life, for reasons I can’t explain at all, I have been hit with a profound sense of the abundance of God’s joy. I know I keep going back to the absurdity of this, but how do I begin to convey how ridiculous it feels? I mean, I am barely managing to get through the days, happiness feels very far off and maybe just made-up, and suddenly I am struck by joy? That’s where God wants to go? What the what? I am utterly flabbergasted by the experience, but it is searing. It is undeniable.

But still, I have to wonder what on earth God has to be joyous about. And the thought comes to mind that incredibly, God finds joy in us, that God delights in God’s creation, all of it. As messed up as we can be, God finds joy in a relationship with us, in the utter uniqueness of each one of us, in every time we awkwardly try to make the world better, and most especially in our reaching back to God and letting God in. I keep thinking, oh my heck, Julian of Norwich was right about all of this, she really was. We are God’s joy and God is ours, and those words don’t even begin to capture the immensity of what that means. Damn, this is heady stuff. I’m not saying I’m all fixed now; I still can’t think even a week ahead with my battered and broken brain, and I know I’m going to lose sight of all of this again. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t see it. And maybe it will keep shimmering somewhere.

Gaudete.

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“The Hour Before Sunrise” is a newsletter that discusses religion, mental health, and the connections between them. This is a public post, so feel free to share it. And if you want to see more of and support my writing, please do subscribe (it's free!). Thanks for reading!