EXPLORE
YOUR FAITH
How
can God help me when I'm in the midst of depression?
When
one is in the middle of severe clinical depression, it is difficult,
even impossible, to experience God's reality, let alone God's
help. At least, that is the way it has been for me. But, at the
same time, I have found myself in the middle of depression crying
out for mercy with some of the most earnest prayers I have ever
prayed. So I find it hard to know whether I do or do not believe
in God when I am deeply depressed! Perhaps the answer is that my
ravaged mind rails against even the idea of God, but something
deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. "There
are no atheists in foxholes," I guess, and depression is
the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've ever been in. It may be
the "dark night of the soul" that the mystics talk
about—but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost
in the dark as that one becomes the dark. I have never been able
to "do theology" when I am in that state; the best
I've ever been able to do is to hang on. Only later, in the light
of day, am I able to understand that God walked with me in that
darkness even though I could not feel God's presence at the time.
--Parker
Palmer, Ph.D.
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