Testifying to the Presence of an Absent God
About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
IN HIS BOOK THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE PSALMS,1 WALTER BRUEGGEMANN draws attention to how the psalms are intended to structure and form our experiences of the world in ways that enable us to remain faithful throughout the vicissitudes of life. He notes that some of the psalms, particularly the lament psalms, are intended to function therapeutically in enabling people who have experienced deep trauma, suffering, and injustice to articulate their pain and find new ways of perceiving their situation and understanding the world. Brueggemann schematizes the psalms according to a threefold pattern meant to facilitate different ways of looking at, perceiving, and responding to tragic situations and feelings of alienation from God. The schema runs from orientation to disorientation to reorientation:
1 Psalms of orientation—Orientation is found particularly in the royal psalms (e.g., Pss. 2; 18; 20; 21; 45) but also elsewhere, such as in Psalms 8, 23, 24, and 33. These psalms assume and proclaim that the world is good and stable; God is in God’s heaven, and the covenant is being faithfully upheld. Psalms of orientation speak to a way of being in the world that is safe and homeful. Homefulness, Brueggemann says elsewhere, “stresses both being with and belonging with God and being with and belonging with the neighbor in community.”2 Homefulness is precisely what is lost when one encounters tragedy and suffering.
2 Psalms of disorientation or lament—The majority of the psalms are lament psalms. These psalms speak powerfully of the disorientation that is the lot of human beings at various times and seasons, and for some, for most if not all times and seasons. Periods of disorientation can be devastating and completely bemusing. The old maps just don’t fit; the old coping mechanisms simply don’t help the psalmist to cope. “Why me, oh Lord? How long!” The old visions seem to make no sense anymore. The psalmist no longer sees the world in the ways he used to. When disorientation hits, you don’t sing Psalm 23:
The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake. (vv. 1–2)
Instead you turn to Psalm 137 and you cry:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land? (vv. 1–4)
The suffering of exile requires a certain kind of language. The psalms provide just such a language.
3 Psalms of reorientation—Brueggemann’s third typology relates to a movement from disorientation into a new mode of life. He describes this movement as reorientation. There are two ways this movement occurs. In most but not all the lament psalms, there is (eventually) a profound change in the way the psalmist perceives the situation. For no obvious reason, something changes in his way of viewing the situation, and he moves from the language of lament to the language of joy and worship:
But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing the LORD’S praise,
for he has been good to me. (Ps. 13:5–6)
What initiates this change? The psalmist remembers God’s hesed—God’s unending and faithful love. The psalmist looks out at the same situation, but he sees it quite differently. The pain of the suffering event is not taken away, but it is reframed in the light of the revelation of God’s gracious, loving presence. As he takes a second look at the situation by allowing the lens of the love of God to change the way he sees things, he understands and responds differently. Grace and redemption did not enter the situation; they had always been there. The psalmist, for whatever reason, hadn’t been able to recognize them.
In this chapter, we will explore some of the ways Brueggemann’s typology of psalmic suffering can help us understand the experience of people living under the description of major depression.
One of the most difficult things in relation to living with enduring depression is its cyclic nature. It is possible to go through all of Brueggemann’s schema in a single day! This makes the point of orientation fragile and tentative. Coreen describes it in this way:
My normal, the point where I think that everything is more or less normal, you know, when I know that God is still with me, is kind of weird. Depression is a wee bit like an abyss. You know, a deep dark pit that you can’t ever get out of. So, you have to sit there and just wait. When I’m in there I need medication. It sometimes lifts me up and out of the pit, and eventually I get to the point where I can cope, and I am able to be normal. That is great! But it is always like this very tentative kind of healing, very much like you’re on this very, very fragile ground. So, when I’m ill, I’m in the pit. But when I am well, I imagine myself sitting on the edge of the abyss, knowing that I could tumble in at any time. So, my normal is probably not like your normal (laughs).
For Coreen, an Irish businesswoman who had lived with depression for most of her adult life, the place of orientation had an impending sense of disorientation built into it. She never really felt certain that “God was in God’s heaven and all will be well,” even when she was well. God was, of course, in God’s heaven, but her place before God’s throne always felt wobbly. The presence of God is very real and very important to Coreen. But whether it can be trusted to stay that way is a question always on her mind.
When the shakiness of her orientation begins to slip into darkness, things start to change. The usual points of orientation begin to fall away, slowly dissolving into nothingness. When this happens, the first thing that shifts is her language. Depression is powerful, overwhelming, and very difficult to articulate. In many ways, it defies language. Coreen tries to articulate her feelings in this way:
It’s almost as if my body starts to close down. I stop being able to concentrate, and I guess because I’m not concentrating I forget stuff, so I have chunks of memory loss. Normally when I get a bit spiritually down, I turn to Scripture or remember a passage that helps me. But when I am moving into depression, I can’t remember anything and even if I did I’m not sure that I can make any real sense of it. I find it difficult to articulate things. My fiancé can tell when I’m getting bad because I stop being able to form sentences properly. Which makes it very difficult for me to tell people what’s going on. And the more I withdraw, the more I can’t tell people what’s going on.
Language becomes stretched and forced into odd and dissonant shapes that wrap around her experience as she struggles to capture and articulate what she feels acutely but has trouble saying out loud.
It’s hard. My feelings are a kind of range between gray and black, although I guess feelings aren’t really colors, but that is the only way I can describe it. It feels something between numb and just raw pain, and ironically, it’s like both can happen kind of at the same time. I’m completely numb and yet in real pain. And just everything is completely overwhelming, everything is very far off and distant and … at the most intense points, it’s a kind of visceral experience of isolation. I remember being in a room with some of my closest friends and just being in real pain. I was screaming out inside, but no one could hear me. Feeling it physically and yet not being able to express it, or if I did, it appeared to be quite incomprehensible. From appearances, my life would have no reason for sadness or for upset. And so not being able to explain yourself, not being able to give just cause seems to make no sense, not to me, not to anyone! It just sucks the energy out of you, and I didn’t feel like there was any point to doing anything anymore.
As the darkness descends, her prose shifts into metaphor, a mode of language that speaks about something in a way that is not literal but still enables the hearer to grasp what is going on by comparing it with something familiar:
It just feels very nebulous, like it’s just this big nebulous, black, bleak, horribleness. I grew up on the [Scottish] Island of Orkney, and it’s kind of like a wintery December day in Orkney, there’s just unrelenting wind, rain, and you’re powerless against it. It’s like a storm that just overwhelms you. It’s like you’re like going through treacle; like you can’t move, and you use so much energy trying to move that you just get exhausted. I mean I used to lie in bed all day, and all I would be thinking all day was “I’ve got to get out of bed.” But the amount of energy that it took to actually get out of bed … it was like, “I’ve got to get out of bed! I’ve got to get out of bed!” That would be all I’d be trying to do because I had to get out of bed to do something. But it was actually impossible. You know in your head what you should be doing; you know that actually lying in bed is not the best thing, but physically you feel like you’ve got lead weights on your body and you’re actually stuck there, it’s like somebody’s pushing you down on to the bed and you just can’t physically get up. I remember walking around the village and feeling completely separate from it; I was just functioning. I would say it was like I was living, but I wasn’t alive.
This strange combination of numbness and pain is disconcerting and discordant. How can two polar opposites be present simultaneously? Coreen continues: “It doesn’t ever seem to make any sense. I think, I mean I know there are points where I was just numb and wasn’t feeling pain. And then there were other points I was just in pain and not feeling numb. But I think it’s like your brain feels gray and like it’s flatlining, but your emotions feel pain. Which perhaps doesn’t make any sense, but my response to the world around me was numb, but my response to my internal world was pain.”
This tension between inner pain and numbness toward outer life makes it difficult to grasp any potential goodness in life. People can talk all they want about someone being loved and valued, but if you can’t feel that or if your inner pain makes it impossible even to consider such a thing as being possible, words make little difference.
What it feels like for me is that there is a separation between my inner life and my outer life. There is an internal narrator and an internal judge (my inner troll) and an incessant internal negative commentary that separates me from any goodness I may find in my external life where the love, where the friendship, where the connection is. And that gulf just widens in depression, so that I feel like I’m trying to reach from a deep interior place outside to all the places of love and goodness in my world and I can’t quite get there. I am stripped bare of any notion that I can identify myself with my thoughts or with my feelings, because those two areas of me become so unreliable as reporting tools on the nature of my life. I basically have to rely simply on faith at that point.
When everything within Coreen is saying that life is negative and everything outside of her seems gray, black, and alien, the only thing to hold on to is faith and the hope that her way of processing the world may not be the only way. However, eventually even the hope of faith becomes problematic.
The descent into darkness has a profound physical, psychological, social, and relational impact. However, the spiritual dimensions are perhaps the most disturbing. The feeling of God’s presence sometimes seems to vanish. James explains:
God is nowhere to be found. Depression isolates me from people. Although I believe in a sovereign God who can connect with a person—it seems to isolate me from God as well. That feels awful. I came to faith as an older man, and it was a very slow process. My mum’s a Christian, and I really didn’t come to faith until about fifteen to twenty years ago, so it was halfway through my life. And when I did, it was a very cognitive process for me. So I’ve never been a heartfelt Christian, and that’s unfortunate because I think as I came to terms with the fact that God was not going to heal me of this affliction, at least I would like to know his presence in the midst of it, and I can’t, because depression strips you of that one relationship that you should be able to rely on. And it strips you of the buoyancy that is talked about in Scripture that allows us to get through things. It strips away everything.
The experience of depression strips away the things that Scripture informs us should bring us joy and security. “If you can’t feel the presence of God, then that’s devastating. Throughout Scripture, the presence of God is considered the rock, you know, that’s your foundation. I mean from Job to Jeremiah to what Christ talks about, and if you can’t have that, it’s really disenchanting, it’s really bewildering.” James’s whole being resonates with the psalmist’s cry:
Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters;
the floods engulf me.
I am worn out calling for help;
my throat is parched.
My eyes fail,
looking for my God. (Ps. 6:1–3)
Depression is a bewildering affliction that tears away all your certainties about God, self, and others and replaces them with … nothing. The prophet Isaiah’s haunting statement, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior,” takes on a whole new meaning.
In her book Awaiting God, the philosopher Simone Weil reminds us that the great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. She describes affliction as “an intensity of suffering that empties out our sense of self, destroys all our hopes, shatters our sense of being at home and safe in the world. In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery…. There is no real affliction unless the event which has gripped and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical.”3
Affliction is not simply a mode of suffering. Affliction is “inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct.”4 Weil uses the example of toothache. The suffering that toothache brings is horrible but transient; it does not mark our souls.
Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. If there is complete absence of physical pain there is no affliction for the soul, because our thoughts can tum to any object. Thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death. Here below, physical pain, and that alone, has the power to chain down our thoughts; on condition that we count as physical pain certain phenomena that, though difficult to describe, are bodily and exactly equivalent to it. Fear of physical pain is a notable example.5
Stephen Plant points out that for Weil, physical pain “included several kinds of experiences in which the body is outwardly undamaged…. For example, fear of torture should be regarded as causing physical pain, even though the body remains untouched. Similarly, when a loved one dies, even though there is no bodily wound, the grief that follows is experienced as though it was physical pain, with difficulty in breathing, a sensation of unfulfilled need, even of hunger for the person who has been lost.”6 In this sense, depression is physical pain: “My whole body aches. It’s just such a deep pain—a feeling of grieving without end. I want to sleep because it is just too painful to be awake. I can’t feel God; I can’t feel myself; I can’t feel anything.”
Affliction is a condition of the soul insofar as it seems to consume every aspect of one’s life, leaving one with a deep sense of nothingness, a deprivation rather than a present thing. Affliction forms an ever-deepening abyss that can never be filled. Affliction is ultimately defined by its totalizing dynamic. It affects every aspect of a person—relationships, social behavior, psychological activity, spirituality—everything.
The psalms of orientation were intended to enable people to gain and sustain a sense of homefulness. When we feel at home, we experience God’s presence, and we live under God’s peace. Affliction is the exact opposite of homefulness. Affliction engulfs one’s very soul and makes a person feel eternally homeless. Affliction shatters one’s sense of homefulness and makes peace a dream that cannot even be imagined. With the psalmist, the afflicted cry out:
Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.
You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
darkness is my closest friend. (Ps. 88:16–18)
Sitting at the heart of the experience of affliction in depression is the silence of God. Karen experiences her depression as an unbearable sense of perpetual mourning within which God often remains absolutely silent: “It feels like you’re always mourning for something, but you don’t know what it is that you are mourning for, so it can never end. How can you find resolution when you don’t know what or who has died? You ask God to take it away, and God says … nothing.” In the darkness of affliction, God is silent: “I remember being really low and one night telling God that if he didn’t intervene, I was going to end it, because I’d had enough. And nothing happened, and there was no sense of intervention. And yet actually I guess God did intervene because I didn’t take my own life.”
Karen cries out for relief. God is silent. But looking back, she discovers that perhaps God was not as silent as she had thought he was when she was in the thick of it. Perhaps God did intervene, even if not in the way she expected or desired. Either way, God’s silence remained mysterious and fearfully troubling.
As one reflects on the experience of affliction, one begins to understand somewhat the depths of the alienation and desolation that depression can bring, and why the desire to end it all can creep to the surface of people’s thinking. This is not to attempt to justify the act of suicide, but understood in the light of affliction, suicide simply becomes more understandable. Laura puts it this way: “Depression is just exhausting. It’s grinding. Day after day after day. You begin to think ‘Well, if God has gone; if God has left me, and my friends and my family think I am a waste of time, and if I am going to feel this miserable forever, then …’ Well, you know? It just seems like the right thing to do. I know it’s not! But I just get so tired.”
This mental and physical exhaustion and the sense of abandonment begin to open up previously unthinkable options for her: “The more I withdraw and the more I can’t tell people what’s going on … it’s like my inner being is screaming out to be heard and understood, but I have no way of doing that. And I have had a number of times when I’ve been suicidal, where there’s an element of—I go kind of almost passive suicidal—so if I die I don’t really care, to a very active thinking, right: it becomes, the way I describe it, it’s as if the instinct to survive flips, and it becomes the instinct to die.” When this begins to happen, even the normally safe space of the Scriptures can become a place of danger.
Peter Herman, in a fascinating article titled “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam: Thoughts on Depression, Race and Theology,” talks about how his experience of depression resulted in the development of a “suicidal hermeneutic,” that is, a way of reading Scripture in the midst of deep depression that casts a particularly negative light on its meaning and implications. He offers the example of Mark 8:34–36: “He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?’” (NRSV). Normally we might interpret this passage as a call to forgo the riches of this world and follow Jesus. But when he is depressed, Herman interprets this passage in a quite different way:
The cross isn’t something to be borne during my life—life is the cross. The act of being alive—breathing, eating, speaking with others—is a burden. I don’t want to save my life; my life is my cross. Even though I know that there is a world of difference between martyrdom and suicide, I find myself wondering whether Mark’s Jesus is letting me know that it might be OK to let go of that cross. After all, I suffer by living, and Jesus promises to end suffering, doesn’t he? This question suggests a somewhat unorthodox reading of these texts—a hermeneutics of suicide is not listed in theology textbooks or preached from the Sunday pulpit. Yet this theological perspective has marked my twenty-five-year struggle with major depressive disorder.
Herman reflects on how these days his suicidal thoughts come and go and are more of a nuisance than a threat. However, it has not always been that way, and it may well not be that way in the future:
In the quiet hours of the day, there is an inaudible yet persistent voice that answers Jesus’s suggestion that I must hate life itself with “Yes, I do hate life. I hate it so much. Life itself is my cross. Let me lay it down, Lord. Please, let me lay it down.” I argue back against this urge. I resist. I rationalize. I take the pills. I go to the sessions. And then that internal monologue is quieter, but it’s still there. I doubt it will ever be silent. “He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?’” ([Mark] 8:34–36 NRSV). When my depression is heightened and my internal struggle especially fraught, my hermeneutic of suicide dominates my encounters with Scripture.7
Scripture is fundamental to Christian spirituality. Contextual theologians have long informed us (quite correctly) that the interpretation of Scripture is deeply influenced by culture and context. As we strive to understand the gospel and God’s mission, recognizing the contextuality of our interpretative endeavors is of great importance. Everyone interprets from somewhere rather than nowhere. Herman points to the shadow side of contextual interpretation in the context of depression.
Interestingly, Herman’s wrestling with Scripture in the midst of depression finds a potential solution from a somewhat unusual source, namely, the Anglican priest and Puritan Richard Baxter. For Baxter, as a Reformed pastor and theologian, Scripture was fundamental and totally indispensable. The Bible is God’s word, and disciples are to make sure they live lives that are deeply biblically informed. Bearing this in mind, we discover something quite remarkable in his pastoral reflections on how to deal with depression faithfully:
Meditation is not a duty at all for a melancholy person, except for the few that are able to tolerate a brief, structured sort of meditation. This must be on something furthest from the matter that troubles them, except for short meditations like sudden, spontaneous prayers said out loud. A rigid and protracted meditation will only frustrate and disturb you, and render you unable to perform other duties. If a man has a broken leg, he must not walk on it until it is set, or the whole body will suffer. It is your thinking faculty or your imagination that is the broken, hurting part. Therefore, you must not use it to reflect upon the things that so trouble you.8
In 2 Timothy 3:16–17, the apostle Paul informs us that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” The power of Scripture lies in the way it leads us toward God and toward good works. When we experience depression, our interpretative faculties can become so clouded and deceptive that we can be tempted to use them not to justify good works but to define good things (like living) as bad and to act accordingly. Baxter does not act judgmentally toward people in such situations. Rather, he acts pastorally and recognizes their interpretative difficulties and the way they can actually act against the intention of Scripture to bring us closer to God and neighbor. In the same way that a man should not be forced to walk on a broken leg, so a person living with depression should not be forced to engage in a practice that can actually cause the person harm. In order for Scripture to do its good works, it is sometimes necessary to lay it to one side until one is well enough to receive and enjoy its benefits. This is not to degrade or downgrade the centrality of Scripture for the life of a Christian.
Perhaps you will say, “That is profane, neglects God and the soul, and lets the Tempter have his will!” But I answer, “No, it is simply to refrain from what you cannot presently do, so that by doing other things that you can, you may later do what you cannot do now.” It is merely to postpone attempting what (at present) will only make you less able to do all your other duties. At present, you are able to conduct the affairs of your soul by sanctified reasoning. I am not dissuading you from repenting or believing, but rather from fixed, long, and deep meditations that will only hurt you.9
Reading Scripture is a practice designed to help people learn how to enjoy God’s glory. Along with the vital habit of reading Scripture, it seems that we also need to learn the equally vital habit of knowing when not to read it. We read Scripture together as the body of Christ. If one of our brothers and sisters cannot do that for a season, then the body reads on that person’s behalf. Learning the skill of using Scripture pastorally is a vital aspect of ministry that is not always given the consideration it deserves.
Herman highlights that it is not just Scripture that can play an ambiguous role in the lives of those living with depression. Faith can also play itself out in ways that are double-edged. Robert is forty-two years old. He is a laboratory technician and a musician, and is married with two children who are now grown up and live in the city close to him and his wife Cheryl. Robert lives under the description of “double depression”: “Double depression is a complication of a psychiatric illness called dysthymic disorder, or dysthymia. Dysthymia is a chronic, depressed mood accompanied by just one or two other symptoms of clinical depression (such as low energy or low self-esteem) that lasts at least two years in adults.”10 Robert’s normal mood is equivalent to what others might think of as clinical depression. He has lived with depression since he was twelve years old. Robert, like Peter Herman, sometimes feels suicidal. However, he talks about the strange frustration of feeling suicidal and at the same time recognizing that his faith simply won’t allow it to be an option:
For me in an odd way faith became a trap, because I knew [suicide] was wrong, and I knew my Bible and I knew Jesus loved me. I knew that he died for me, but it was like a trap because all I wanted was to die. I knew the consequences of taking your own life from a biblical perspective. That’s my belief system! You know, so basically, I’d be going against my own belief system. In my belief system the consequence of suicide would be damnation, I suppose. Hell. (pauses) I know that sounds very old-fashioned. You shouldn’t take your own life, it’s up to God when you’re going to die, is my belief. So, I’m trapped into life. I’m trapped! What do I do? You know, if I go that way … I end up in hell, and yet at the same time, I’m actually living in hell! One is permanent, the other is eternal. So, what do you do? You try and keep living. I have to say I had amazing help from my doctors. My psychiatrist was an American woman, and she basically got me through. But she couldn’t get to the core, she couldn’t actually get to the bit that needed healing. It was like the sticky plaster [or Band-Aid] over the top. But then again, God wasn’t much help either. He just doesn’t show up sometimes.
Robert has lived with this condition for over twenty years. He was no stranger to the abyss of affliction. Suicide sometimes seemed like the best response to his deep, afflicted disorientation. But he does not yield and says that he never could. However, it is not the love of God that prevents James from taking his own life. Rather it is the fear of God. For the lamenting psalmist, recognizing the loving presence of God became a turning point that led him into praise. But for Robert, recognizing the presence of God didn’t so much lead him to praise as trap him into life. It didn’t take him out of the pit, it simply located him within the pit in a way that paralyzed him. The presence of God saved his life and continued to protect him, but it didn’t make him feel any better. It just prevented him from taking a course of action that he felt held the possibility of release. It is good that he was alive, but he desperately needed help to move from simply being alive to actually living life. Robert needed to find a point of reorientation.
Robert found his point of reorientation in a way that, at least initially, doesn’t appear to be particularly spiritual. For Robert, there were three levels to his movement into darkness.
John Swinton: Do the psalms help you connect with God in the midst of your darkness?
Robert: It depends on the level of darkness. Yeah, it depends on how bad it is. If you were to break it into thirds, the upper third being the least severe, I would say that during those times—when I am feeling that upper third—are times when I can usually connect with the psalms and really read them and think, Yeah! This is what I’m experiencing. Because depression can sort of bring on a mental fog. It reduces my ability to cognate and to think clearly, so when it’s really, really bad—that lower third—it’s very difficult to connect with text, I think. I’m not confused to the point of not knowing my name, you know … but more complex metaphor is more difficult to connect with.
John Swinton: So, what do you do in terms of holding on to your spirituality when you are in level 3?
Robert: During those times, I do read the psalms and I do go to church. To be honest, those upper third times are my happier times. I’m still what somebody else would consider moderately depressed, to the point where they would probably seek medical attention. But those are my better times. So that’s when I’m going to church and taking it in and agreeing [with God] in my spirit, as it were.
John Swinton: And what about when you are in the lower third? Is there anything that you can do there when you are really at the bottom?
Robert: Drugs! [Psychiatric medication] Yeah, literally when I’m there, I’m in a real scary [place]; it is scary. When I’m in my darkest places, there is no God; there’s no help, or at least there has not been when I’ve been there. And my greatest fear when I’m in those places is that I might die without knowing God more.
John Swinton: Medication then in some senses has a spiritual role in getting you out of that place?
Robert: Absolutely! Only because … Ahhh … how do I put this? … I need a good metaphor for it … it’s like, as a Christian I’m supposed to climb a ladder and I can look down this long wall and there’s thousands of other Christians climbing their ladders. That is the spiritual effort/journey/direction, and I can’t climb the ladder, and then someone comes along with a lift or [elevator] and carries me to the top of the wall. I’m now on the top of the wall. It is the spiritual wall. It’s real. I just didn’t get there the way everybody else gets there.
It is Robert’s medication that helps him find a spiritual place, which he simply could not inhabit without its assistance. For Robert, the taking of medication is much more than an engagement with pharmacological products. Taking medication functions as a deeply spiritual act. It is a part of a process in which he can reconnect with God, self, and others. Robert’s closing remark—“It’s real. I just didn’t get there the way everybody else gets there”—is important. There is no way for him to climb the ladder on his own. His biology simply won’t allow him to. His medication steps in to help lift him from deep disconnection with God to a place where he feels reconnected.
We do need to be careful with this metaphor. Christian spirituality, like depression, is not just about feelings. As we have seen, the object of the spiritual life is not to feel better or to feel happier, desirable as these experiences may be. The object is to encounter joy: to be with Jesus—something not defined by the presence or absence of feelings but by the presence of Jesus. If pharmaceutical intervention becomes a substitute for joy, then we have a significant theological problem. As my friend and colleague Gerry McKenny put it when I presented Robert’s situation at a conference at Duke Divinity School, “Does that mean that we can have a pill for Jesus?” His concern was a fair one. As Barshinger, LaRowe, and Tapia once framed it: “Can a pill do what the Holy Spirit could not?”11
Nevertheless, Robert’s problem was not a resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit or an attempt to substitute chemicals for the Spirit’s work. He had a recognizable form of mental health challenge that not only plunged him into the depths of depression but actively separated him from the love of God. The evidence for the precise etiology of depression may be mixed and varied, but few would argue that people pretend to be depressed or that the experience of depression is unreal or inauthentic. The experience is very real, and the consequences of that experience are very real and not bound by the will of the sufferer. Robert’s desire was not to enhance his spirituality through chemical means. Antidepressants are not like mescaline.12 Taking them to help escape the pit of depression is not the same thing as taking something to experience a spiritual high. For Robert, psychopharmacology was a necessary aspect for healing and maintaining his spiritual well-being. There are two aspects of this suggestion that we need to draw out, one theological, relating to who and what we are as human beings before God, and the other spiritual, relating to the kinds of practices that emerge from such a theological position.
In our discussion on affliction, I mentioned that affliction affects the human soul. There is an important connection between the nature and significance of the soul and the faithful taking of medication. In teasing out such a suggestion, we might begin with the question: What is the soul? Human beings are inexorably biological creatures. Our biological nature, however, must be carefully framed. In the Genesis account of creation, God creates Adam out of the dust by blowing God’s ruakh into the dust. God breathes God’s ruakh into Adam’s nostrils, and “man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7 KJV). The meaning of the Hebrew word ruakh is “breath” or “wind” or “spirit.” God “gives breath [ruakh] to all living things” (Num. 27:16). Before God blew God’s ruakh into the dust, there were no bodies (Gen. 2:7). When God blew God’s ruakh into the dust, bodies came into existence. We come from the earth, and we live on the earth in bodies that are fundamental to our ways of being in the world. Matter matters! As Christians, we recognize that we are creatures and that our bodies are wholly contingent upon the creating and sustaining power of God. First there was God, then there was creation, then there were bodies. The movement of God brings about the movement of bodies. This is a crucial observation. Human biological existence is inevitably, thoroughly, and unavoidably theological in its origin and intention. God is not in any sense apart from our biological existence. God is the very sustenance that holds it in place. We don’t have a realm “over here” that is biological and another “over there” that is theological. The two are one: the biological is theological.
In his paper “Finding God in Prozac or Finding Prozac in God: Preserving a Christian View of the Person amidst a Biopsychological Revolution,” Michael Boivin notes that, “according to Old Testament thought, persons do not ‘have’ bodies but are bodies such that all the important theological dimensions of personhood (that is, soul, spirit, will, conscience, mind, heart) emerge or emanate from our physical beings.”13
We are our bodies, as we are our souls. What we encounter here is a picture of a human being as, at precisely the same time, thoroughly biological and deeply soulful. Our bodily existence is soulful existence; our soulful existence is bodily existence. Within such an anthropology, the fact that emotional and spiritual well-being may be deeply affected by changes in or to our biology is neither surprising nor reductionist. Such changes operate within a theological framework. The biological dimensions of spirituality and soulfulness do not in any way detract from their theological significance. Pharmaceutical intervention, soulfully aligned, is a practical theological enterprise that relates primarily to facilitating the positive movements of the soul toward its true desire, that is, reorienting our bodies in such a way that we can be open to the glory of God. To suggest that experiences of God are related to brain states is not in and of itself a problem as long as we bear in mind this theological context.
Biological existence is thus seen to have a purpose and a trajectory. The Westminster Confession of Faith states that the chief end of human beings is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.14 Human life before God is thus seen to have a quite particular intention and direction. Engaging in practices such as offering medication to alter people’s experiences goes on within a theological context, with the efficacy and intention of the outcome ultimately determined by its contribution to the nurturing and realigning of the human soul toward God’s glory. When the chemicals that compose medication touch the cells of the human being, they engage in deep spiritual activity and in a real sense encounter the pull and presence of God’s ruakh. For a drug to function faithfully, it must affect the human body in a way that enhances the intentions of the ruakh (which is why there is a difference between heroin, alcohol, and antidepressants, at least when the latter are faithfully prescribed). If a drug blocks or prevents the soul from communing with God, it inhibits faithfulness. However, if it aids in the process of communion with God and the enjoyment of God, it may be functioning faithfully. The criterion for judging whether a drug “works” is therefore not only or even primarily the alleviation of symptoms (although this may well remain an appropriate goal) but the way it affects the person’s soul.
Such a perspective offers a significant repositioning of the psychopharmaceutical enterprise. Within such a frame, pharmacological intervention can be seen not simply as a therapeutic intervention designed to alleviate symptoms and ease distress but as a theological enterprise that can aid in the realignment of the souls of those who suffer the affliction of depression. Of course, such interventions could be abused and the drugs taken for pleasure and selfishly oriented spiritual excitement. But I think we call that idolatry: substituting the capacities of the drug for the real presence of God. Easing pain in the context of cancer care is rightly seen as an act of compassion, even though heroin and morphine can be devastating when taken out of context. It is not clear to me why ameliorating the pain of affliction as experienced within depression cannot similarly be perceived as a theological act of compassion.
The implication of this line of theological thinking is that our understanding of pharmaceutical healing needs to be redirected. We need to stop seeing the practice of giving medication as a purely technical, biological, and therapeutically oriented task within which God is perceived as optional and healing deals simply with symptom alleviation. What is required is a theological interpretation and a spiritual practice in which God becomes central and healing comes to be understood in terms that include the human desire to connect with God. In this way, the faithful giving and receiving of medication might be considered a spiritual practice designed to facilitate reconnection with self, God, and others. Psychological pain separates us from all these sources of healing. Medication faithfully prescribed can reconnect us in a way that is deeply spiritual.
The fact that medication is intervening to bring about biological change that has spiritual significance is but a slightly different example of what occurs in everyone’s spirituality.15 All of us get to the top of the wall by different means. As soulful biological creatures, our access to God is always and inevitably mediated by and through our neurology. Part of Robert’s path to God came through changing the biochemical components of his body via the use of psychotropic medication. This may be different from other ways of beginning our spiritual journey, but it is no less theological in its reorientation and outcomes.
Reorientation does not mean going back to the way things were before. The resurrection did not mean that the passion and the crucifixion never happened or can ever be forgotten. Surely, at least a part of the significance of the scars on Jesus’s resurrected body is to remind us of the cost of our redemption. Suffering changes things.
One significant change that comes in the light of the affliction of depression is the way in which God comes to be perceived. The psalms of glory speak of a God who is in control; a God who will bring happiness, peace, prosperity, and settledness; a God who will take away our suffering and dry all our tears. It is true that in the eschaton this is exactly what God will do: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4). But the God of the present who emerges from the disorienting affliction of depression is different from the God of the royal psalms and, indeed, from the way people used to believe in God. As Anna points out, God doesn’t save you from suffering. God didn’t take Jesus off the cross:
I guess initially a few years ago I probably had this idea that God sort of protects you a bit more, whereas now actually I realize that God doesn’t save you from the really bad stuff. God didn’t take Jesus off the cross. The presence of Jesus in my suffering is incredibly healing—just to know that I’m not alone in this. One of the things that my spiritual director reminds me of is that even when I can’t feel the presence of God, that doesn’t mean that God is not present. It is not up to me at all times and places to be able to feel the presence of God. What I have to do is simply to remember that God is in all times and places. If I based it on what I can feel, I would have killed myself a long time ago. But when I base it on what I believe to be true and know that it’s not always going to feel this bad—there are vicissitudes even in the course of a day—then I can remember that God is present, and not to be alone in this is hugely healing for me. When I can remember that God has infused the universe, even the one that feels so empty to me, it is a powerful reminder. It doesn’t give me hope. I can’t feel hope. That is for others to do.
Anna’s reorientation comes through her remembering God, recognizing God’s place in suffering, and not assuming that the binary of being healed and not being healed is the only way to look at her situation. In this sense, she echoes the psalmist’s recognition of God’s hesed:
But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing the LORD’S praise,
for he has been good to me. (Ps. 13:5–6)
The psalmist remembers God and, in remembering, finds relief. This reframing enabled her to cope and to understand something new about God. “God didn’t take Jesus off the cross.” Jesus’s suffering was like hers: mysterious, deep, painful, and without immediate release. Even in those dark places where God seems to be hidden, she finds Jesus is with her. This theological paradox—God is hidden, but Jesus, who is God, is with her—is something she needs to learn to live with, not something she needs to explain. As a Christian, she finds the paradox difficult to explain. As a person living with major depression, the paradox is difficult to live with.
Anna entered the reoriented world with a different view of God and a different form of trust: “It’s affected my theology in that I think I find it a little bit harder to, not to trust…. I don’t know if I would say I find it harder to trust God, but I find it difficult to have a certain kind of trust. There’s no longer, like, whenever people have theological platitudes that essentially, like, God will just make everything OK if we trust him, I definitely don’t have that sort of a theology anymore.”
Trust in God shifts and changes as the rawness of the experience of depression reshapes and re-forms it. The naïve platitudes that used to make sense—“pray a little harder, it will all be fine”—no longer do so. When you have experienced the abandonment of God, when your cries into the night have gone unheard, your trust in God shifts; it doesn’t disappear, but it does change. No longer do you expect God to come racing in to save you. You still believe that all will be well in the grander scheme of things, but for now, the presence and the absence of God need to be held in a creative tension that may be frustrating but is exactly according to Scripture. Depression is not caused by faithlessness. Quite the opposite: it reveals something very important about faith. As the systematic theologian and biblical scholar John Colwell put it: “Faith is trusting God in the darkness, it is not a quasi-magical means of turning the darkness into light. It’s not that I don’t believe that God can and does turn darkness to light—ultimately he will, but here and now he calls us to trust him, even in the darkness…. Faith is no more a magical power than it is a feeling; faith is a settled trust in God even in the continuing darkness and silence, even when we cannot see and cannot hear.”16
Faith is not something we do alone. It is a gift of the Spirit; it is something that the church does together. Like joy, we hold faith for one another until the darkness passes, even if we have to carry on and prepare for the next cloud of darkness that will inevitably follow. Robert articulates this powerfully:
The Scripture that is the hook that I hang myself on … Sorry! that’s a suicidal metaphor, that’s not what I meant! The Scripture that I hang my faith on is where the apostle’s Christ is talking about being born again. And they say, he looks at them and he can tell by their faces that they’re horrified—but I think, he was also talking about eating my flesh and drinking my blood—and they say, I think it’s Peter who says where else are we going to go? You have the words of life. And that’s what I come down to: there’s something in me that agrees with those words of life, that finds them philosophically the end-all, be-all. And I can’t shake them. And that’s my faith: really, at the end of the day, in the darkest, darkest times, when I can say those things—that’s my faith.
One last point of reorientation relates to changes in how we understand the presence and the absence of God. One of the most disturbing things for Christians living with major depression is the sense that sometimes God seems to be completely absent. People process this absence in various ways, as we have seen. However, in closing our discussion on depression, it will be helpful to encourage those living with depression to recognize that while some aspects of depression are deeply spiritual, the sense of God’s abandonment is not an indication of errors or sins on their part. Feelings of abandonment are actually a surprisingly common experience encountered by the people of God throughout history.
There is a strange, enigmatic, and deeply disturbing tension within Scripture between the presence of God and the absence of God. At times God is very much present with God’s people:
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (Ps. 139:7–12)
Sometimes God is present and appears to be ever present. And yet, at other times God seems remarkably forgetful of God’s people:
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death. (Ps. 13:1–3)
Reflecting on Jesus’s cry of dereliction in Matthew’s Gospel, Walter Brueggemann suggests that “Popular, easy, reassuring religion imagines God’s constant attentiveness to us. But we know better. We know that to live in God’s world is to live being abandoned, to face free-fall and absence and aloneness that go all the way to the bottom of reality. This Friday cry of Jesus calls us to relearn about faith and obedience and discipleship. Jesus is not the first one to know about being forsaken. He quotes a psalm. Old Israel knew, well before Jesus, about being abandoned by the God in whom they trusted.”17 The psalmist’s lament—“Darkness is my only companion”—is a mode of prayer that was not alien to the people of Israel. The psalms of lament contain precisely the kind of language that articulates not just the presence of God but also God’s absence. They are paradoxical prayers that testify to the presence of an absent God. More than that, they indicate that the experience of God’s absence does not suggest sinfulness—“I wonder what I have done to deserve this?”—but actually reflects an experience that has been the plight of the faithful from the beginning. John Colwell, in his reflections on Jesus’s cry of dereliction in the light of his own experience of bipolar disorder, puts the issue succinctly:
I am calling for a renewal of the recognition that the psalms of lament, echoed in the cry of Jesus, are spiritually normative, that periods of felt abandonment are not to be shunned or misconstrued as spiritual failure. Let us pray that this darkness doesn’t engulf us, in any of its forms, but if and when it does let us not misconstrue it as spiritual failure or mistake our feelings of forsakenness for the reality. As in the case of Job, there is probably vastly more occurring here than we can possibly comprehend and certainly more occurring here than we can immediately perceive.18
We have then a strange tension. The experience of feeling God’s absence is, in some senses, part of our spiritual journey. And yet, the power of the gospel is that God has promised
“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.” (Heb. 13:5)
The apostle Paul is convinced that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). This difficult tension between the presence and the absence of God seems to find its paradigmatic revelation in Jesus’s cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The question is not whether God hears our cries for help. Scripture is clear that
The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them;
he delivers them from all their troubles. (Ps. 34:17)
The psalmist was praying to a God who heard him. The mystery is why God does not answer and deliver them from all their troubles. The answer to such a mystery very often never comes.
Colwell’s assertion that the absence of God may be spiritually normative is evocative, provocative, and slightly disturbing. At points in the lament psalms, the psalmist seems to resign himself to living into the fact of God’s absence. So, when in Psalm 88 the psalmist says, “Darkness is my only companion,” he seems to be articulating a kind of holy resignation that God is not going to rescue him. The darkness that he feels at this moment is not going to be lifted. How he is now is just the way things are. There is no recognition in this psalm of God’s presence, and no recognition of the psalmist feeling God’s unending hesed. There is only darkness, only lostness, only hopelessness. However, we should not mistake the psalmist’s desolate cry for a cry of unbelief. Psalm 88 is a prayer to the living God, not a scream into the emptiness of the void. It is a prayer that bears witness to a God who is both very present and very absent. David knows exactly what that feels like: “There’s some comfort in reading the psalms, because the psalmist talks about that distance from God. He annoyingly talks about the presence of God, and I can’t really figure that out. But then again, in Scripture, the writers talk about being depressed, they talk about feeling completely alone and apart from God. I kind of go through a very prolonged version of that. I ask where God is, but he doesn’t seem to have much to say.” This is indeed an odd paradox. Like Jesus’s cry of desolation, even this profound statement proclaiming God’s absence is spoken with the assumption of God’s presence. If this were not the case, both the psalmist’s and Jesus’s words would be pointless. The resurrection helps us realize that Jesus’s words were neither meaningless nor pointless. Rather, and with a deep strangeness, his cry of desolation indicates that feelings of abandonment are not alien to being in the presence of God. God’s absence may well be a rather disturbing dimension of God’s presence.
Kathryn Greene-McCreight draws our attention to the words of Isaiah 45:15: “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel”: “Even here, Isaiah does not say, ‘Truly he is a God that hides himself.’ Isaiah addresses God directly, even in God’s apparent absence. He acknowledges that this absent God is still his own God and the God of his people. And Isaiah acknowledges that God is Savior, even in hiding. Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”19 The theologian and preacher Fleming Rutledge notes that “the fact that God hides himself in the midst of revealing himself is paradoxically a testimony to his reality. Presence-in-absence is the theme of his self-disclosure. God isn’t hidden because we are too stupid to find him, or too lazy, or not ‘spiritual’ enough. He hides himself for his own reasons, and he reveals himself for his own reasons. If that were not so, God would not be God; God would be nothing more than a projection of our own religious ideas and wishes.” Why does God act in such a way? Rutledge replies: because God is God: “The Lord hides himself from us because he is God, and God reveals himself to us because God is love (1 John 4:8). Does that make sense? Probably not—but sometimes Christians must be content with theological paradox. To know God in his Son Jesus Christ is to know that he is unconditionally love unto the last drop of God’s own blood. In the cross and resurrection of his Son, God has given us everything that we need to live with alongside the terrors of his seeming absence.”20
Such a response may be disappointing for those who wait for an ever-present God who will rush into history to save us. However, for those of us who worship the God revealed in Scripture, paradox, mystery, and absence may be unsettling, but they are not an indication of God’s abandonment even when it seems hard to hold on to God’s presence. It is also strangely reassuring to realize that we share the experience of God’s abandonment with Jesus and the saints.
My reason for ending this chapter with this particular theological reflection is quite straightforward: it is a theological mistake to assume that the experience of abandonment and the absence of God is necessarily a sign of human faithlessness or sinfulness. The situation is much more complex and much too important for quick and easy reductionistic, theologically uninformed explanations that tend to add to people’s distress rather than bring them healing balm. Living faithfully means learning to live well with unanswered questions and to avoid the modern temptation to turn such mysteries into puzzles.
Feeling God’s abandonment is a disorientating aspect of being with God; it is deeply entangled with our discipleship, not apart from it. Strange as it may seem in some respects, darkness and feelings of God’s abandonment are actually normal aspects of a biblical spirituality and of what it means to be in the presence of a God who sometimes hides. Of course, such experiences can be unhelpfully exacerbated when we enter into the dark world of depression, but that exacerbation does not place us outside the experience of the people of God. Instead, it offers a stark and prophetic reminder and warning for those of us who might mistake happiness and ecstatic experience for biblical faith.
In a dark and damp cellar in Cologne, Germany, a place where thousands of innocent Jews hid from the horrors of the Nazi regime, a poem was found inscribed on one of the walls. Translated, the words of the poem are these:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I cannot feel it.
I believe in God even when he is silent.21
In the midst of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, someone had taken the time to think about hope. We have no idea why God goes absent. But we can be assured that God’s presence will accompany us even when it is impossible to feel it. In the darkness of depression, when God seems to disappear, such a reorientation of the presence of God won’t help us feel any better. It’s a blessing that we receive retrospectively, if at all. Drawing from her own experience of depression, Greene-McCreight suggests that even in the midst of God’s absence, there may be blessing, although it may only really become available after the fact: “Sometimes depression can be a blessing, because one can learn about God through his hiding. That usually only comes afterward, because during depression, as during the flood, the waters of death cover the face of the earth.”22 Perhaps what we need are spaces within which we have time and guidance to look back at our spiritual experiences of depression so that we can look forward with the possibility of hope.
1. Walter Brueggemann, The Spirituality of the Psalms (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002).
2. Walter Brueggemann, The Practice of Homefulness (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), ix.
3. Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a un Religieux, trans. Bradley Jersak, 2nd ed. (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2013), 30.
4. Weil, Awaiting God, 31.
5. Weil, Awaiting God, 32.
6. Stephen Plant, Simone Weil (London: Fount, 1996), 47–48.
7. Peter Herman, “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam: Thoughts on Depression, Race and Theology,” Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology and Culture, April 6, 2017, https://theotherjournal.com/2017/04/06/jesus-doesnt-want-sunbeam-thoughts-depression-race-theology/.
8. Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life: Practical Wisdom from Richard Baxter, revised, updated, and annotated by Michael S. Lundy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 86.
9. Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life: Practical Wisdom from Richard Baxter, 86.
10. Double depression refers to a major depressive disorder (MDD) superimposed on dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depressive disorder. Hellerstein and Eipper suggest that around “three quarters of patients with dysthymia have or will experience a major depressive episode and, thus, suffer from double depression.” D. J. Hellerstein and J. W. Eipper, “Dysthymia and Chronic Depression,” in Clinical Handbook for the Management of Mood Disorders, ed. J. J. Mann, P. J. McGrath, and S. P. Roose (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
11. C. E. Barshinger, L. E. LaRowe, and A. Tapia, “The Gospel according to Prozac: Can a Pill Do What the Holy Spirit Could Not?,” Christianity Today, August 14, 1995, 34–37.
12. Mescaline is a naturally occurring psychedelic known for its hallucinogenic effects and in particular for enhancing religious experience. See Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
13. Michael J. Boivin, “Finding God in Prozac or Finding Prozac in God: Preserving a Christian View of the Person amidst a Biopsychological Revolution,” Christian Scholar’s Review 32, no. 2 (January 2002): 159–78. For a further development, see Michael J. Boivin, “The Hebraic Model of the Person: Toward a Unified Psychological Science among Christian Helping Professions,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 19, no. 2 (June 1, 1991): 170.
14. Douglas F. Kelly, “The Westminster Shorter Catechism,” in To Glorify and Enjoy God: A Commemoration of the 350th Anniversary of the Westminster Assembly, ed. John L. Carlson and David W. Hall (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994).
15. We will discuss this in more detail when we come to the issues around bipolar disorder in later chapters.
16. John Colwell, Why Have You Forsaken Me? A Personal Reflection on the Experience of Desolation (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2014), Kindle locations 2152–2153 (emphasis added).
17. Walter Brueggemann, Into Your Hand: Confronting Good Friday (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 18.
18. Colwell, Why Have You Forsaken Me?, 2262–2265.
19. Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness, expanded ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015), 28.
20. Fleming Rutledge, “Divine Absence and the Light Inaccessible,” Christian Century, August 27, 2018, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/divine-absence-and-light-inaccessible. This essay was originally published in Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018).
21. Rutledge, “Divine Absence and the Light Inaccessible.”
22. Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion, 28.