Theology That Drops Down into the Heart
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
THUS FAR WE HAVE NOT DISCUSSED IN ANY DEPTH THE ISSUE OF HEALING. In this conclusion, we will reflect, if only briefly, on the practices of healing as they relate to the kinds of issues we have encountered in the previous pages. To do this, we must clearly define what we mean by healing. The temptation is to conflate healing with curing. When we do this, the quest becomes the eradication of troublesome experiences with a view to initiating a return to some kind of perceived psychological norm that, as we have seen, is often determined by the expectations of culture rather than by the actual nature of the experiences of individuals living with mental health challenges. However, thinking about healing in terms of cure is only one way the issue can be addressed. Theologically, we might think of healing as much more than cure, if in fact it includes cure at all.
Scripture has no equivalent term for biomedical understandings of health that equate health with the absence of illness. The closest term is the Hebrew term shalom, which has a core meaning of righteousness, holiness, right relationship with God.2 From this perspective, to be healthy is to be in right relationship with God regardless of one’s physical or psychological state. One can be the world’s fittest athlete, the world’s richest, most hedonistic individual, or the most psychologically stable person on the planet and still be deeply unhealthy. Health in this perspective is not a medical or psychological concept but primarily a relational and theological concept. Health is not the absence of anything; it is the presence of God. In Judges 6:24 we discover that Yahweh is shalom: “Gideon built an altar to the LORD there and called it Yahweh-Shalom [which means ‘the LORD is peace’].” In Ephesians 2:14 Paul tells us that Jesus is shalom: “For [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
Health is therefore not an ideal, a concept, or a humanly achievable goal. Rather, it is a person. When Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life in all its fullness,” it is this shalom life to which he is referring: life with Jesus in all times and in all places. Shalom is abundant life; it is what enables us to hold on to Jesus in the midst of the storms. Mental health, biblically speaking, is not defined by the presence or absence of “symptoms.” Psychological distress is therefore not a sign of the absence of God. It is perfectly possible to be with Jesus even in the midst of deep distress. It is also the case that psychological disorder can bring about the experience of God’s abandonment. However, as we have seen, this is not a sign that one’s distress is caused by anything any individual may or may not have done. The absence of God is mysterious but not uncommon within the experiences of the people of God. It is distressing but not indicative of personal sin or transgression. God has promised never to leave us, but it doesn’t always feel that way. That is so for all of us, even if it feels more acute during times of psychological distress. The pastoral task is to help people hold on to Jesus in these difficult times without unnecessary guilt or blame.
I remember giving a talk about this understanding of mental health at a conference in Edinburgh a few years ago. After it, a man came up to me and said: “You know, I have lived with schizophrenia for twenty-five years. I never realized that I was accepted just as I am without being cured…. I just thought I was a bad Christian.” How sad that the people of God had not been able to help him find the healing presence of Jesus without blaming him for his distress or demanding that he be cured of it. Shalom is liberation from false ideas about mental health and ill health, misguided expectations around curing, and unrealistic expectations concerning the nature of the good life we are called to live out with Jesus.
Within such a description of mental health, healing becomes something that may include cure but is not defined by it. Healing relates to those forms of practice in which the church engages, which can enable people to remain connected to Jesus at all times and in all places. In closing, let us consider seven dimensions of healing that have emerged from the narratives explored in this book and that can help us begin to respond to the issues in creative and thoughtful ways.
Our discussions around schizophrenia and hearing voices revealed a pathogenic dimension to Western cultures that is deeply troubling. There is something about the way Westerners respond to this form of mental health challenge that causes an exacerbation of pathology and an abandonment of hope, which in turn results in deeply negative perceptions of and responses to schizophrenia by individuals and by culture as a whole. Cultural pathology requires cultural healing. Cultural healing requires exemplars that offer an alternative paradigm. Only as we come to see alternatives can we as a culture begin to see the possibility of alternatives and change.
The missiologist Lesslie Newbigin concludes his important book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society with a short essay titled “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel.” In it, he argued that the only way the world can understand the gospel is if Christian congregations live it out in the world. He didn’t mean that we show who we are through our works. His point was that no one will believe the message of the church if what it says it is, is radically different from what it is actually seen to be doing in its day-to-day life in the world. Newbigin writes:
I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. I am, of course, not denying the importance of the many activities by which we seek to challenge public life with the gospel—evangelistic campaigns, distribution of Bibles and Christian literature, conferences, and even books such as this one. But I am saying that these are all secondary, and that they have power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in and lead back to a believing community.3
The gospel is intended to reveal a new counterculture: the kingdom of God. This new culture is a place where people love one another, a place filled with people who live by the virtues of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Newbigin reminds us that when people look at the church, this is what they should see. The physical manifestations of the church are the interpretative principle by which the faithfulness of the world (understood as that aspect of creation that has not yet recognized Jesus) is discerned and assessed. When we look at the church, we should at a minimum see beautiful reflections of Jesus.
The tragedy revealed in the stories of people with mental health challenges is that such a noble aspiration is not always lived out. Loving-kindness is not always the church’s first response toward them. Rather than functioning as an antipsychotic, many church communities tend to reflect the kind of pathogenic culture that is so destructive for people with schizophrenia, but ultimately is destructive for everyone. Nevertheless, Newbigin’s plea for the church to reveal a counterculture has vital aspirational significance for the mental health ministry of the church. A pathogenic culture requires alternatives if it is to become shalomic (revealing of God’s shalom) and healing. If the church is to become an antipathogen that understands and responds differently to mental health challenges, we need to be formed differently. Cultural healing requires liturgical healing.
Liturgy and the experience of worship are events of deep formation for the people of God. As we sing, pray, praise, sermonize, and form our bodies into the gestures of worship, we are shaped and formed into liturgical people who come to see that the shape of the liturgy is the shape of our lives. When we looked at depression, we discovered some of the issues that emerge from lopsided liturgical practices. If our liturgical practices do not take onboard the full breadth of human experiences, our formation will be incomplete. Liturgical healing relates to creating practices of liturgy and worship that bring about deep connections between human beings and God and names the silences for those who struggle to hold on to God in the midst of their mental health challenges. Such healing requires the creation of liturgical resources that people can use actively and passively. “If you are struggling to pray, find somebody else’s words instead of your own.” Holding one another in worship is a fundamentally healing practice.
Liturgical healing means holding one another in prayer and praying for everyone. As Jen put it: “People with mental illness aren’t generally prayed for in the list of prayer concerns. You can sign up if you’ve had a heart attack or if your child’s in the hospital, but rarely do we pray for people who are going through a depressive episode or who have had a psychotic break or any of those things. We don’t name, we don’t lift up mental illness in our litany of concerns, so people feel invisible.” The suggestion that some people may become invisible in worship is deeply troubling. If worship is a place of formation, re-formation, fellowship, and holiness, and if some among us “disappear” because of the shape of our worship practices, then all of us are failing in our task to honor God and to love our neighbor. It is vital that we learn how to talk in public about mental health issues. When we learn how to talk, things change. Pat helps us see what that might look like: “My colleague developed an entire liturgy for people with depression. The church had never identified mental health directly, but because he named the fact that many people in the church lived with depression, he brought out the issue. He wrote a beautiful service using Scripture, candles, anointing with oil, prayers that he wrote specifically for people with depression. And I think things like that go a long way to making people with mental illness feel welcome in a congregation.”
This is a beautiful practice. But what might it look like to do the same kind of gentle liturgy for people living with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? What might that look like, feel like, be like? Worshiping in the fullness of the human experience—in lament, joy, confusion, elation—is a blessing for everyone. It helps the body of Jesus truly to be the body of Jesus.
When we think about biblical healing, we tend to focus on the miracles of Jesus and the eradication of particularly troublesome physical or psychological issues. Important as this dimension is, biblical healing is thicker than simply the desire for cure. Biblical healing involves developing an exegetical sensitivity to the purpose of the Bible and to its impact on those who hear its words and struggle to interpret it in ways that are healing and releasing. We have seen that the experience of mental health challenges can deeply impact the way Scripture is interpreted and acted out. The whole point of the Bible is to help us understand the things of God and come to love God, neighbor, and self more fully. If the ways in which we use the Bible contradict that goal, we need to contemplate a different hermeneutical approach. This might, as has been suggested, mean a person putting the Bible down for a season and allowing others to use it in faithful and creative ways to bring healing and relief to the person. This is a temporary move that requires a community that can hold an individual who is struggling under the weight of negative hermeneutics and desires to help get that person to a place where the Bible can once again bring blessing and positive connection.
Biblical healing has another dimension that relates to the practice of preaching. We might call this homiletical healing, that is, a deep pastoral sensitivity to the power of preaching and to the ways the preached word can bring both blessings and curses. The absence of preaching on mental health issues leads to a gap in the spiritual lives of a congregation in which the power of the gospel is not brought to bear on a fundamentally important issue in many people’s lives. The word of God needs to be preached into all areas of human experience. Deep, thoughtful, and pastorally sensitive biblically infused sermons can be transformative forms of healing for individuals and communities. On the other hand, insensitive, ill-conceived, and uninformed biblical preaching can be deeply destructive. Careless preaching on healing, sin, demons, and the causes of mental health challenges brings unnecessary sadness and alienation and can be avoided if we just take a little time to think through the issues. Similarly, Bible study and preaching that do not take lamentation seriously deprive people of a powerful biblical resource—the psalms of lament—that has the potential to bring about the holy articulation of pain and sadness, which leads to a sense of shared experience belonging in the midst of brokenness.
I recently visited a church in Vancouver, Canada, where, before a preacher delivers a sermon, the preacher is required to run it past a committee that offers feedback and suggestions. Wouldn’t it be interesting if such a group included people with mental health challenges? Imagine the richness of our preaching if we were able to capture the highs, the lows, the oddness, and the blessings of people’s experience in ways that liberate all of us from stigma and open up the whole congregation to perspectives and understandings that could be transformative as together we strive to live faithfully and lovingly. Liturgical healing comes to the whole people of God when we begin to notice the liturgical significance of all of God’s people. Developing a healing mental health hermeneutic at a pastoral, liturgical, and theological level may be the key beginning point for developing communities within which everyone has a sense of belonging. Such biblical and homiletical healing leads to theological healing.
Many of us in the church, and particularly those of us who engage with the academy, tend to focus on reason and intellect as fundamentally important for theological understanding. Clarity of thought, sharpness of reason, doctrinal awareness, and conformity of spiritual expressions and experiences seem to provide us with a sense of security that enables us to know, understand, and feel comfortable within the boundaries of life with Jesus.
However, as we have seen, Christians have all sorts of unusual experiences, all of which require serious consideration. I’m not saying we need to become unorthodox or unthinking. All I’m saying is that orthodoxy is more complex than we sometimes assume it to be. If all of us together are to minister faithfully with those living with mental health challenges, we need to develop a theological flexibility that recognizes the creedal parameters and boundaries of our faith but at the same time takes very seriously the ways in which these boundaries and parameters look different when different questions are asked of them. We need a theology that drops down into the heart.4 By that I mean that we need to think clearly and carefully about the things of God while at the same time letting our thoughts about God, self, and others drop down into our hearts. Henri Nouwen describes the heart in this way:
From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, mood, and wishes. The heart, too, has its reasons and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality, and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person and thus affects the whole of our humanness.5
A theology that drops down into the heart recognizes that all theological construction is intended to increase the presence of God’s sovereign neighborly love. It realizes that the test of a good theology is not simply its intellectual coherence but the way it enables the people of God to see God more clearly and love God more dearly. Theological healing occurs when we learn to develop a type of theological flexibility that allows our theological understandings to move our hearts. If we find ourselves thinking that people hear voices because they are demon possessed rather than because they have been treated terribly in the past, we need to expand our intellectual and spiritual knowledge and become more aware of the significance of our hearts. Theological healing requires epistemic healing and epistemological generosity.
Epistemic healing has to do with learning to understand and value the perspective of other people. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept everything that people say. We need to enter into holy alliances with the mental health professions within which all of us together (including those bearing the mental health experience) can work through issues of meaning and significance. Epistemic healing does mean that we have to respect the things that people say and experience. Clearly, there is a tendency to downgrade or reject the opinions and perspectives of people with mental health challenges simply because they have mental health challenges. This is epistemic injustice, and it is the essence of stigma. If we do not take time to understand people’s unconventional mental health experiences, we will never come to know them. If we never come to know them, we will never love them. If we never love them, then we have failed in our fundamental gospel task. There is, of course, a problem with that last sentence: Who are “we” and who are “them”? What we have learned in these pages is that there is no “we” and there is no “them.” Even the most unusual experience that those who live with mental health challenges encounter is shared by many of us in different ways and to different extents. The call to love those with mental health challenges turns out to be a call to love everyone. What better way to describe the gospel? What more powerful mode of healing could there be? Epistemic justice leads to epistemological generosity, which leads to the possibility of love. In turn, epistemological healing leads to testimonial healing.
One could frame this book as a book of testimonials in which people with difficult life experiences testify to a different way of describing their mental health experiences. Testimony is intended to inform, illuminate, entice, and bring about change. The intention of this book has been to try to do all these things. By listening to people’s testimonies and trying to interpret, communicate, and theologize their experiences, I have tried to bring a degree of theological illumination that has the potential to make our mental health practices more faithful, potent, and healing.
Testimonial healing occurs when a person is freed to give his or her testimony in all its fullness without fear of judgment and retribution. John’s Gospel is the gospel of testimony! The idea of testimony runs like a golden thread throughout that gospel. Those who know Jesus, those who have experienced his transforming presence, are called to testify to what they have seen. Testimony is a legal metaphor that originally related to standing up in court and telling the judge what you know and what you have seen. Testimonial healing comes about when you are able to stand before the people of God and honestly tell them what God has done and what God has not done in your life. We are used to the idea of testifying to all the wonderful things God has done in our lives. That is good, proper, and beautiful. But when was the last time we heard a public or private testimony that suggests that God is good but that God has not done the things we might want God to do? Being with God includes disappointment.
Testimonial healing requires that the fullness of people’s testimonies is acknowledged and that together we both lament and celebrate the presence and perceived absence of God. Such honest testimony resonates closely with the psalms of lament and the psalms of joy and has the potential to open up spaces of healing and illumination, that is, assuming that we can overcome our uncomfortableness at the presence of dissonance in the lives of our brothers and sisters. Testimonial healing also means taking people’s spiritual testimonies seriously. We have seen that it is very difficult for people to make sense of their spiritual experiences when they are in the thick of things. It’s just too difficult and confusing to work out where God is and whether there are enduring spiritual things to be learned from these experiences when life feels chaotic and out of control. But as we have seen, after the fact, we can make sense of things and discover new and sometimes challenging things about God and God’s presence. Testimonial healing requires that we develop the practice of retrospective spiritual direction. By this I mean finding ways to help people to work through what was and what was not of God in the more acute phases of their experiences. It’s not enough to insist that all spiritual experience within the context of psychosis, bipolar, or major depression is inevitably invalidated by the fact that people were “ill.” God was with them, and people need to understand what that might mean for the past, the present, and the future. Retrospective spiritual direction is a mode of spiritual discernment that allows people to see what God has done within contexts where at first glance it might appear that God has done nothing. Retrospective spiritual direction allows people to see where God was in the midst of the storms and to help them use that knowledge as an encouragement and source of hope now and for the future. Testimonial healing demands that we take people’s spiritual testimonies seriously. Retrospective spiritual direction is one way in which we can move toward such a goal.
It is true that everyone in this book, apart from Allen, is anonymous. After his tragic death by suicide, his mother gave me permission to use his real name as a tribute to him. Andrew Solomon, in his work on depression, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, states that the people in his study, for the most part, are not anonymous. He suggests that anonymizing people’s experience is to reinforce stigmatizing attitudes that suggest that one should hide mental health challenges. I take his point, but I think he puts the cart before the horse. Before one can testify honestly, one needs to feel safe. For now, testifying to having a mental health challenge is not safe. As one of the participants in this study put it: “It think it’s probably easier to come out as gay or LGBTQ than to come out as mentally ill. If I was to tell my employers that I had bipolar disorder, that would be the end of my career. When I told them I was gay, they thought that was great! So they think I’m a bit odd at times, but they will never know why.” There is a time and a place for honest testimony. My hope is that this book helps move us a step closer to that time and that place. But for now, anonymity may be the best way to bring about love.
All these things lead to relational healing. Healing comes to us from God, but it also comes to us from other human beings. My kids often ask me what superpower I would like to have. I always tell them I’d like to have the power to be gentle and kind … at all times. They just laugh, and I can understand why. But I am serious. Such a superpower seems rather weak in the face of the ability to fly, to shoot spider webs from your wrists, to scale tall buildings, or to defeat the powers of darkness while talking to your beautiful girlfriend on your state-of-the-art mobile! But I think my superpower (even though it is more an aspiration than a reality) is more interesting. Imagine a world where people didn’t judge one another, a world where gentleness, kindness, and tenderness were our priorities. Within such a world, being different or seeing the world differently would not be an occasion for rejection, humiliation, demonization, and loneliness. Rather, such experiences would be seen as an opportunity to practice kindness. It seems to me that is precisely the superpower that is given to us by the Holy Spirit and is manifested so beautifully and movingly in the life of Jesus: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29). Jesus is gentle. Wow!
In Galatians 5:22–23, Paul informs us that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” The process of understanding and responding faithfully to those living with unconventional mental health experiences is complex, but at heart it is not complicated. People living with mental health challenges, like all of us, just want to be understood, respected, and treated with love and kindness. What more can any of us desire? Such kindness is the essence of healing and the substance of Jesus’s promise of life in all its fullness. As Margaret put it in relation to her experience of bipolar disorder: “Mental health ministry means finding a way to exhibit some ordinary human kindness. You don’t have to be a special individual to do that; you’re just a human being, and you’re letting the God within you see the God within the other person. The church is meant to specialize in human kindness, isn’t it?”
There is a tremendous power and beauty in the suggestion that the church is called to be a specialist in human kindness. Small acts of kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness bring healing. It’s really not that complicated.
1. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 57.
2. For a further development of this understanding of health, see David Wilkinson, The Bible and Healing: A Medical and Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
3. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 227.
4. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Bethany McKinney Fox for this lovely phrase.
5. Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 77.