A fallen thing, we
land in open hands, as soft
as they are strong.
During the first year of the pandemic there were times I felt a sense of abject failure. I remember sitting at my desk one morning (after the adrenaline of crisis had worn off and the compassion fatigue had settled in), drinking a cup of black tea, staring blankly at my journal, and thinking I'm depressed. Again. It was like waking up after a long car ride when you've arrived at a familiar place but aren't entirely sure how you got there.
There was a degree of numbness, but that didn't keep me from feeling drenched with shame. I had worked really hard not to end up at this place again--I had a therapist, developed healthy coping skills, increased my distress tolerance, sorted through past traumas. So why did I keep ending up in this place?
As anyone who's experienced depression knows, it's really easy to disparage yourself. So thoughts like What is wrong with me? can quickly spiral into thoughts like I'm so messed up, I'm such a burden to my family, they would be better off without me. It's a downward trajectory that I'm aware of, but being aware doesn't always make it easy to stop.
In fact, the more aware I am, the more exhausting it becomes because it takes an incredible amount of energy not to be pulled under. If you ever wonder why people experiencing depression can't get out of bed, it's because most of their energy goes toward this mental fight for clarity, a little bit of truth, trying to hang on to some light.
So that morning, when I found myself in the middle of it again, I felt defeated and ashamed. I have a hard time turning to people in these moments and an even harder time turning to God. I feel utterly tiresome--come on, Bethany, we've been here before; you've already had your allotted existential crisis; time to move on.
When I think back to this moment during the pandemic, sitting at my desk realizing I was depressed and had been for a while, another poem I began writing (a while ago) but never finished came to mind.
During my last year of college, I was taking a poetry class and one of our assignments was to write an ekphrastic poem about a Rembrandt self-portrait of our choice. We went to a gallery in Columbus and wandered through the room lined with various images of Rembrandt in all manner of headwear--"Self-portrait wearing a toque," "Self-portrait with velvet beret," "Self-portrait with gorget and helmet" (why all the hats?), but I stopped before the one where he paints himself as another person--"Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul."
What struck me about this painting was Rembrandt's interpretation of Paul--he was sitting there looking like a tired old man who'd written a letter but wasn't sure if he should send it. I could sense the weariness and hesitancy--this Paul was a far cry from the energetic, bold man I was used to reading about. This was a Paul to whom I could relate.
There are a few lines from that (unfinished) poem that still feel true:
You hold your words
in your hand, half-hidden
by your shadow.
The lines above your brow
read more clearly;
sojourn furrowed
from temple to temple,
years spent casting
seeds of reconciliation
among the nations.
And yet,
your body rends;
you cannot reconcile
yourself; you carry
sorrow in your flesh,
at your side.
The arch of your brow
suggests a question...
I know I'm getting a little meta here--talking about a poem I've written with another poem I’ve written. But for so long I've felt the weariness I saw in Rembrandt's face when he painted himself as the Apostle Paul, as a human being who gave his life to the ministry of reconciliation and yet who describes himself as afflicted with a persistent thorn in his side.
I know the kind of tired that leads a person to ask, "Who will save me from this body of death?"
I grew up learning that when we sinners fall we land in the hands of an angry God. To be fair, I’ve never actually heard or read Jonathan Edward’s sermon by this title, but the message in the churches I attended could be summed up in that succinct little phrase, the message being: you are a sinner, depraved from birth, an enemy of God and his wrath has been stored up for you, and your only hope of salvation is faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (who is also God, which didn’t make sense to me even as a child and, honestly, still doesn’t now).
At the same time that I was learning about this wrathful God at Sunday school and being scared out of my wits about going to hell, real-time images of wrath were being embedded in my brain and my body as I encountered a particular kind of sinful brokenness in the world.
[Trigger warning: this next bit mentions child abuse, although not in detail.]
When I was in first and second grade, my after-school caregiver, who ran a daycare out of her home, was also a foster mom, and while to the best of my knowledge she never laid a finger on any of her clients’ children, we all had to watch her shame, humiliate, and abuse her foster daughter Vicki, a thin and withdrawn girl with dark hair and dark eyes the same age as me.
Suffice it to say, I did not feel safe in that home. I did my best to remain invisible so as not to draw Eleanor's wrath in my direction, but this felt like an impossible endeavour, because the things Vicki got in trouble for didn’t make sense--they felt so arbitrary. And even as a child, I could tell Eleanor enjoyed finding reasons to punish Vicki. The look on her face when she punished Vicki was one of contempt mingled with satisfaction.
And so Eleanor's particular brand of wrath became the definition of wrath for me. Predictably, as a result, I was rather scared of God. Any time I heard stories in Sunday school of God's wrath, this was the image that came to mind--arbitrary anger meted out in unpredictable ways with some perverted sense of satisfaction at the result, which with Eleanor was the helpless terror of a young child.
Those were a long two years, and knowing what we do about the brain now, how neural pathways are formed, it makes sense that I've spent of a lot of my life trying to remain as invisible as possible in as many contexts of my life as I can. If I can just keep everyone happy, including God, maybe I'll feel safe.
Failure, then, of any kind is incredibly scary. And, unfortunately, in the churches I've been a part of, depression has often been viewed as a spiritual failing. For a long time I tried to ignore it or muscle my way out of it by being a good Christian, a good wife, a good mother.
I've learned, however, that this way of treating depression leads to death, not life. And that's where I found myself six years ago (long before the pandemic) during my first major episode of depression--not wanting to die, per se, but also not wanting to live.
Then I received a piece of jewelry in the mail--a brass cuff with a lightning bolt on one side and a flower on the other. The note that came with it said,"Just a reminder that after every storm comes the flowers." So cheesy, but also so timely. For me it was like God gently telling me,"You have a choice. You can choose death or you can choose life. But it's a choice and you are the only one who can make it."
I chose life, and it was one of the hardest choices I've ever made, because I knew it meant I needed to get some serious help. I met with my counselor and shared with her very candidly where I was at, and her response was so full of compassion: "You've suffered long enough." After that appointment, I went home to kiss my husband and kids goodbye before self-admitting to a mental health hospital.
After coming home from the hospital that summer, I spent a lot of time walking alone in the woods, reading the New Testament alongside books by Eugene Peterson, and moving very slowly through life. During that time, when I felt vulnerable and weak, and at times like a failure of a mother or failure of a human being, I heard God say to me, "You're good. I made you good."
This was a new experience of God for me, the start of an important shift in my understanding of who he is and who he says I am. I'm still untangling narratives from my childhood of human wrath and God's wrath, and I still struggle with the God we see in the Old Testament, but I've also seen in the New Testament that Jesus Christ has strong and healing hands. He used them to wake a dead girl, hold a child, lift the chin of a destitute woman, touch a blind man's eyes and give them sight, share bread with his friends and wash their dirty feet.
His hands are capable but gentle and he allowed them to be pierced. And not only his hands but his feet and his side. He endured pain and humiliation on behalf of all creation. He laid down his life, and took it up again, and when he did the marks of his willing sacrifice were still there in the palms of his hands, his feet, his side.
He knows the agony of violence that wounds us in a myriad of ways. And he does not rebuke his disciples for their disbelief at his having risen from the dead, their doubt that he is who he says he is. Instead he invites them to examine his scars, to touch them. He is infinitely gentler with us than we are with ourselves. And that's why Paul can ask in light of his brokenness, "Who will save me from this body of death?" and follow-up with the answer "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! [...] There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 7:24-8:1).
And that's why, when I realized I was depressed again (which is not unprecedented considering we were in the middle of a pandemic), and despite the shame I felt as this realization, I didn't have to try so hard to hold myself up. I knew the hands I would land in are as soft as they are strong.
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