One afternoon last week, I found myself discussing confession with a Catholic. She wasn’t sure it was a good thing if it was all about believing in an angry God. I agreed but thought confession could be helpfully reassuring; confession could mean unburdening your conscience, hearing the assurance of God’s forgiveness and perhaps finding a way to change. Then she told me a story about an elderly lady visiting Spain for the first time and going into a church. She asked to make her confession to the priest but he more or less told her that she was too old to have any sins worth confessing. She was quite rightly rather cross. And so then our conversation lead on to the possibility of one’s having different things to confess at different times in one’s life. There might be certain sins more associated with youth and others more associated with growing old. And in passing I suggested that depression can sometimes be something to confess. The person I was talking to was I think a little shocked by my saying that depression could be a sin; she was certainly puzzled by the idea and I felt perhaps I hadn’t spoken clearly or used quite the right words. Can depression ever be sinful – something one should confess and ask forgiveness for?
I would certainly want to say that clinical depression is not sinful; there are certain forms of depression for which we should go to the doctor and the psychotherapist to find help. But perhaps there are other forms of depression for which a priest might be more helpful or a wise friend. I think the Old Testament knows something about this. There is the verse from psalm 42 ‘Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within me?’ Or then again from this evening’s passage from Isaiah, ‘Why do you say and complain, My way is hidden from the Lord; and my cause is disregarded by my God?’ There is a form of spiritual depression which consists in a sense of being neglected and overlooked, whether by God or other human beings. This can then lead two ways. One way leads to a desperate need for recognition – for activity which makes one feel needed. The other way looks downwards and inwards all the time, a being curled in on oneself. There is a kind of introspection which becomes preoccupied with telling one’s own story, with seeking explanations for why one’s life is like it is. And in this way the narrative of one’s past life becomes almost more important than the life one has to live in the present.
The early Christian spiritual masters of the desert monasteries in Egypt had a special word for this kind of spiritual sickness. They called it accidie. Accidie can mean a kind of weariness, listlessness, apathy or boredom. It made the monk restless, unable to concentrate on work or prayer. It made him seek for distractions, to wander round disturbing other monks; it could even lead him to think of giving up the monastic life altogether. Described in this way it may seem not altogether unfamiliar. Though maybe our society doesn’t quite think of boredom as a sin and certainly looks for the wrong answers to boredom. We might look for distractions, excitement, ever more stimulating activity as the answer to such boredom and apathy; things to make us snap out of it. The Desert Fathers would disagree. Their remedy for this kind of depression translates as patient endurance or perseverance. And they saw this remedy being aided by manual labour and the regular patterns of prayer – in other words keeping to a routine and not looking for distractions to take your mind off how you are feeling. Work and prayer are both intended to keep the mind looking outwards and not focussing on itself.
Their other remedy might strike us as positively perverse – remembrance of death. And yet here to there is a kind of wisdom when you think about it. If the kind of depression we are dealing with consists of a round of compensatory activity, or a resentful or self pitying introspection, then to put one’s life in the framework of eternity changes the perspective. To prepare for death is to prepare for that time outside time when we shall see our lives through God’s eyes. And to think in terms of the clear but loving and forgiving judgment of God is to approach a maturity of vision which has the power to overcome the dragging downward of apathy and spiritual depression.
The Desert Fathers sought to lead transparent lives as a way of preparing for this final encounter with God. Because they believed that in the end everything would be made known they got on with the job here and now. In the Garden of Eden after the eating of the apple, Adam and Eve knew they had done wrong. They thought God would be angry. They couldn’t cope with what they had done, so they thought God wouldn’t be able to cope either. And yet perhaps their eating of the apple wasn’t the worst problem. God being God could have coped with that. No, the tragedy of Adam and Eve was that they hid.
The Desert Fathers knew that. They knew that one of our chief characteristics is that we think we can keep things going by hiding and pretending. They saw that Christ hides nothing, and promises that all will be made known; they took him at his word and got on with making it all known by talking regularly to a spiritual father or mother. Our salvation becomes possible only when we come out of hiding in order to become real people before a real God. All the rest is illusion. Humility, honesty, overcoming self judgement and shame, and simply talking; that is the way towards being spiritually healed.
Which brings us back to where we began and the question of confession. And here to finish is a useful confessional prayer written by Evelyn Underhill, which gets at some of the roots of the kind of depression we have been looking at:
O Lord, penetrate those murky corners where we hide memories and tendencies on which we do not care to look, but which we will not disinter and yield freely up to you, that you may purify and transmute them’ the persistent buried grudge, the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smoldering; the bitterness of that loss we have not turned into sacrifice; the private comfort we cling to; the secret fear of failure which saps our initiative and is really inverted pride; the pessimism which is an insult to your joy, O Lord; we bring all these to you, and we review them in your steadfast light. Amen.
And if we can pray such a prayer and mean it then we may discover something of Isaiah’s promise to those burdened by the weariness of depression. ‘Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow wary they will walk and not be faint.’