I missed a post, mainly because this weekend has been packed. I've visited folks in the hospital and in a retirement community, played a gig, lead worship, and preached. It's been busy and a bit stressful. But it has been full of meaning, and full of joy. The following is the sermon I preached at the Crossroads worship service at St. Luke's Mission Center this evening. The texts were Psalm 30 and Philippians 3:7-14. This Lent, I'm not giving up on joy:
In order for what I’m going to say about
joy and happiness to make much sense, I think I’m going to need to tell you
some of my story. This is a story that many of you know a part of. Some of you
might even know all of it. I don’t relish telling this story again, really, but
I feel safe doing so, and here’s why: once, during the ordeal that I’m going to
describe, I had the chance to visit Crossroads and look at your prayer wall. My
name was on the wall, and had been circled multiple times. This community—whether
you as an individual realized it or not—was praying for me, week after week. I
can never express my appreciation for that enough.
On with the story. It begins about a
year and a half ago. I had just finished my first year of seminary, a highly
successful year marked by good grades and new relationships. I was beginning a
rather intensive summer class schedule, and I thought I was doing quite well.
Reflecting back on things, however, I realize that I should have recognized the
signs that everything was not alright. I had recently ended a relationship in a
messy and ungraceful manner. My beloved roommates of two years were planning on
leaving DC and I was having absolutely no luck at finding new living
arrangements. I was in two intensive summer courses. Looking back, I realize
that something had to give.
It was a Sunday night, and some friends
had come to look at my house and see if they wanted to live there. It hadn’t
gone well. I had a few drinks and then, without thinking, did something I hadn’t
done since high school. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, went downstairs to
my room, locked myself in, and started cutting my arm.
If you’re not already familiar with
self-harm, it’s a remarkably common phenomenon. People hurt themselves for a
variety of reasons. For some people it’s a form of self-punishment; it
certainly has that effect for me. It’s also a means of communication. It says
something like, “This is how broken and hurting I am on the inside. I don’t
know how to communicate this to you. So I’m going to write it out on my skin.”
So for me, I was hurting myself because I wasn’t sure how to tell people how
badly I was hurting. But I was also ashamed that I was doing it. So I went
through a whole week, in the middle of summer, covering my arms up for fear
that someone would see the cuts but on the same time hoping, hoping that
someone would see and know that I was in pain.
Here is how my week went: I didn’t
sleep, much. I woke up early, feeling awful. I went running in the midsummer
heat. I played guitar, loudly, sang hoarsely. I went to my Hebrew class. Did
well in class. I went home with two classmates to study. I came home. I drank.
I cut myself. I tried to go to sleep.
This went on, like I said, for a week.
And finally it was Friday night, and I was staring at a bottle of pills on my
bedside table, daring myself to take them. Some months ago I had saved in my
phone the number of a suicide hotline, on some understanding of past experience
and some premonition of future need. So I called the number, and they talked to
me for awhile, and then they asked me if I had a friend who I could call, and
it just so happened that my friend Lindsey had called me earlier and I had
ignored her, so I called her. She talked me through the night. When I was tired
enough to go to sleep she told me to call her in the morning. I called her when
I woke up, told her that bottle of pills was still looking tempting. So she got
me to call Mark Schaefer, the United Methodist chaplain at American University.
And Mark took me to Sibley Hospital. I joked with him the whole time he drove
me there. And that was the beginning of a six month journey, in and out of
three hospitals, on the way to a new understanding of myself and my mental health.
Any description of that week, and of the
six months that followed, is necessarily going to come across as much more neat
and meaningful than the experience actually was. In actuality it was a broken,
fragmented, mess. But I do have to say that I was so incredibly blessed and
lucky, because I didn’t do it on my own. I had so much support and so much love
during those six months, including from members of this community, even when I
tried to push that support away. Not everyone who goes through mental health
challenges has such support. Once, in the hospital at Sibley, the social
workers asked us to do an activity in which we named 5 people who supported us.
Out of the group of 5 of us, I was the only one who could name 5 people. One
person couldn’t name any. There is such loneliness in this world. We have to
remember that.
I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar
disorder. Bipolar is also called manic-depressive. It can mean a lot of
different things but for me it means that my moods can fluctuate really wildly,
from very high to extremely low. For me bipolar also means that I struggle with
suicidal thoughts and tendencies. I would venture to say that a day doesn’t go
by that I don’t think about killing myself. And there’s that constant
temptation to hurt myself, something I haven’t done now in more than 200 days.
Thanks be to God.
I’m hardly alone in all of this. According
to the National Institute of Mental Health, “an estimated 26.2 percent of
Americans ages 18 and older, or one in four adults, suffer from a diagnosable
mental disorder in a given year.”[i] That
includes 14.8 million American adults living with major depressive disorder,
5.7 million with bipolar disorder, and 2.4 million with some form of
schizophrenia. Every 17 minutes in the U.S., somebody kills themselves. Suicide
is the number 3 cause of death for Americans under the age of twenty-one, and
it is number two for college students.[ii]
I am telling you all of this just to say
this: I struggle with the concept of happiness. It’s not that I don’t
experience happiness. I do, and I’m so grateful for that. But I know that the illness
of my mind and my emotions can whisk away that experience of happiness in a
heartbeat. And I was in the hospital with too many people for whom happiness is
a foreign experience. So for the gospel to make any sense to me, it has to be
able to speak into situations where happiness is a stranger.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians, part
of which we heard read earlier, fascinates me for this reason. Many people
consider this to be the most joyful of Paul’s letters. And yet the letter is
written while Paul is in prison. His mission is in real danger. And while
celebrating the ministry of the church in Philippi, Paul goes out of his way to
describe the suffering that he has undergone to carry the gospel message. “Whatever
gains I had,” he says, “I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” “For
his sake I have suffered the loss of all things.” It doesn’t appear as if the
gospel message has brought much happiness into Paul’s life. And yet this is the
same Paul who, a few verses later, will say to his Philippian sisters and
brothers, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.”
How is this possible? How is it that for
Paul, joy and suffering, struggle and meaning are all wrapped up in each other?
And what does this mean for those of us for whom happiness is a struggle?
The pesky thing about the gospel message
is that it doesn’t offer us easy answers. We worship a God who suffers and dies
on a Roman cross. We worship a resurrected Messiah who still has scars on his
hands. For Paul there’s no separating the two: “I want to know Christ,” he
says, “and the power of his resurrection and
the sharing of his sufferings.” For Paul, following Christ does not necessarily
remove a person from suffering. In fact, it might do the exact opposite.
This is a rather shocking message to
those of us who have been raised on a diet of feel-good Christianity. “Follow
Christ and suffer” doesn’t seem like very good news. But what I want to argue
tonight is that, for people suffering, for people struggling to feel happy, the
fact that the gospel emerges from places of suffering is good news indeed.
See, when I'm suffering, when I'm struggling to feel happy, it’s easy to feel like there is something deficient
about me. That I am lacking. “Why can’t I be happy like everyone else?” I ask. “Why can’t I be normal?”
And from there, it’s just a short step
to believing that since I am not happy and normal, I am not really experiencing
God. That I am somehow outside of the boundless love of God. Because surely
God wants me to be happy, right? And if God wants me to be happy, and I’m not,
then I must be doing something wrong, right? And now not only am I unhappy, but
I feel guilty for it to boot. And the long spiral downwards continues.
But then there’s Paul. Sitting, chained,
alone, in a Roman prison. Writing about suffering. And holding open the
possibility of joy.
Because for Paul, joy is a possibility
even when happiness seems like a distant dream. Because, I would argue, joy is
a possibility even when we don’t feel particularly
joyful. Don’t get me wrong. Our feelings, our emotions, are important. But for
folks who are suffering from mental illness, feelings can be enemies, out to
trip you up. Even out to kill you.
So I think joy is something that has to
transcend feeling. Joy draws you out of yourself, out of the habitual cycles
that trip you up, that entangle you. Joy calls you into relationship with
others, relationship that holds up and holds together. Joy provides meaning.
For Paul, joy comes through offering the gospel to people, the good news of a
God who loves us so much that God is willing to put God’s whole self on the
line for us.
Joy has to do with calling. We are all
called. We are called into community. We are called to be ministers, to each
other and to a broken world. And we are called to be ministers, not because we
are happy and not in order to be happy, but exactly because in our places of
hurt we can recognize and stand in solidarity with all that is hurting in the
world.
In the psalm that we read together,
Psalm 30, joy is something that comes in the morning after a night of weeping.
It is something we are clothed in to replace our clothes of mourning. But a
different psalmist—or is it the same one—says in Psalm 31, “my life is spent
with sorrow, and my years with sighing.” For the psalmists, for Paul, and I
would argue for God, joy and sorrow are not at a far remove from each other.
There is joy in a life lived with God, yes. But it might often be joy in the
midst of suffering.
Joy dances furiously, even if off beat.
Joy sings even when her voice is breaking. Joy isn’t afraid to shed tears.
The author Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,
writes about the difference between joy and happiness. Himself suffering from
clinical depression, he has this to say: “The opposite of depression is not
happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when sad. I
may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick
around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to
call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven
years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious
discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder
every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a
lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth
to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I
might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or
I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate those feelings, but
I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to
reason for living. I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life
has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the
moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”
Sisters and brothers. Friends. I began
by telling you some, just some, of my story. I want to tell you that I am in
recovery now. I am healing. And I do experience happiness, and am so grateful
for that. I am certainly not trying to tell you that happiness is a bad thing
or that it is not possible. But for me, and I imagine for all of us, there are
some days that seem like a mortal struggle. In this Christian life, we will not
always be happy. But we will always be called into something beyond ourselves, something
good, something vital. In those moments when we struggle with happiness, we are
not far removed from God. In those moments, there can still be meaning, still
be calling, still be life. In those moments, we are invited to stand next to
each other, even in the midst of suffering, even in the midst of unhappiness,
and to proclaim, loudly, fiercely, boldly: “Yes. Yes. God is here.” Is that not
a rare joy?
[i] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml#Intro
[ii]
Andrew Solomon,
The Noonday Demon: An
Atlas of Depression (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 248.
