Sermons for the Month
When Your Roots Don't Reach the Water
DATE: May 7, 2000
SERVICE: Easter III
TEXT: Psalm 4“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
Electro convulsive therapy. In the vernacular, it's called shock treatment. Nurse Ratchet's cure du jour when McMurphy went manic in the 70s movie classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Since then, however, the therapy has secured some respectability, especially as a treatment for severe depression. You sign up for 8-12 sessions in which electric current is sent through the brain. A seizure results which in turn induces the desired therapeutic effect. Side effects are possible. Steve Dworak (real person, not real name) felt better after the treatments but lost portions of his memory. He has no memory of his oldest son's early childhood, for example. Would you be willing to exchange loss of memory for a loss of depression? Not Jeffery Smith, author of Where the Roots Reach for Water (New York: North Point Press, 1999), an account of a journey with depression. Smith considered electro convulsive therapy, but decided against it. Roughly 20 percent of people suffering from depression get no help from Prozac and Zoloft. Smith is one of them. Driven to find an alternative treatment and approach to depression, he encountered a wide spectrum of possibilities from astrological theories to the black bile treatment of the ancient Romans to William James' "sick soul" to the Buddhist belief that "pain is inseparable from life." In an attempt to cure himself without drugs, Smith tried "talk therapy," homeopathy and Christianity, all the while studying genetics, natural history and mysticism. His description of his depression is depressing: "At the office, every phone call, every home visit, every bit of documentation felt like drudgery. I was a month behind on my paperwork. At home, I'd toss my mail, the bills along with the letters, into a corner, unopened. I hadn't balanced my checkbook in a month. A pile of overdue library books sat on my kitchen table". Today he sifts through his family history, fell in love with a woman who tolerates his foibles, quit his job at a mental health center, built a garden and takes long walks. At the end of March, two 15 year olds appeared in the news for having made a Romeo and Juliet suicide pact that resulted in Juliet putting a bullet through own head using a gun supplied by the young Romeo who either backed out at the last moment or was stopped before he could recover from the blood of his girl friend and find the gun which was covered by her body. Both, it was reported, had been individually suffering with a history of depression that once they found each other now fed off each other. Perhaps you've felt depressed, too. Perhaps you've even said it out loud like the author of today's psalm: "Answer me when I call, O God ... !" (v. 1). A cry for help. A passionate plea. A prayer for deliverance. "Answer me, God!" And what's the answer? Nothing. The sound of silence. So we say, "O that we might see some good! Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!" (v. 6). Still nothing. This is depressing and the psalms know depression. Whether it's a poignant plea ("Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer," v. 1) or a desperate cry ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Psalm 22:1) the psalms know silence, sadness and sorrow. The depression doesn't go away and Smith knows it won't. So the issue is: What can Smith do to live a meaningful life with a problem that is with him for life? The same question faces us: Can we fashion a life to accommodate soul-crushing gloom? Can we deal with the depression that comes when God seems strangely silent? Can we handle the spiritual dryness we feel when our roots aren't quite reaching water? Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that card-carrying Christians simply don't get depressed. Despite the apostle Paul's exhortation to "Rejoice in the Lord always" (Philippians 4:4), people of faith have often been a gloomy bunch. Smith himself does a convincing job of listing some of the spiritual superstars who have dealt with a fair share of depression. Consider: . The lamentations of Jeremiah, filling a whole book in the Bible; . The melancholy of Saul, soothed only by the music of David; . The memoir of the great mystic John of the Cross, called the Dark Night of the Soul; . The depressions of the reformer Martin Luther, which led him to discover justification through faith; . The melancholia that pops up in the writings of Wesley and Calvin, and in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where the pilgrim must traverse a very melancholic sort of swamp before he can find salvation. The bottom line is this: Believers are going to get blue; disciples will face depression. Spiritual seekers will sometimes encounter the silence of the Lamb, and committed Christians will often need to muck through melancholy on their way to the kingdom of heaven. We can holler for help, but when the reality check is cashed, we discover that sometimes we are not going to be healed. About the best we can hope for is a sense of God's peace. So how do we get there? How do we control our cravings for a cure, and instead find meaning in the midst of melancholy? For Smith, help came when he realized there was no cure. He would not be healed of this affliction; he must instead learn to live with the affliction. The cure comes, in part, from realizing there is no cure. While coming to terms with this new reality, Smith found that walking was a powerful spiritual practice. Over the course of several weeks in Montana, Smith started a series of what he called "walking meditations." He would start early and spend "an hour reading the Bible and then in silent meditation," he recalls. "I would breathe slow and deep and careful and try to still my mind, try to empty my head of its ceaseless rattling. Try to fill myself with love, or gratitude or blessedness." But it was while walking and looking at the sky and the slanting sun and a flying bluebird that he gained, unexpectedly, his greatest insight. Striding down a hillside he realized, "All above me every hour of the day, while I repeated to myself [an] ongoing flashback featuring my own inadequacy and foolishness, there was this great drama of the sky, the endless narrative of the animals. ... What did my wrongs, my faults, my incompetencies have to do with the circle of life all about me, with the comings of this or that season?" What he discovered was that his greatest challenge was to make his own isolated story - depression and all - fit into the larger ongoing story of God's unfolding creation. To see himself not as the center of the universe, but as part of a universe that revolves around God. To live in a routine of commitment to family, work and his newfound Christian faith, not as an upbeat and outgoing modern person, but as a soul that is settled and content. "For now," concludes Jeffery Smith, "just as my foot falls again onto the Montana earth, and far as I know at this instant not another moment beyond that - for no reason I can discern, my story is some part of all this unfolding going on all about me" That's the key to understanding God's strange silence. It's the solution to the problem of unanswered prayer. We cry to God and become discouraged and depressed when he does not reply, but think about it - we are central players in God's cosmic diorama, and if God puts wind under the wings of eagles, why would God do less for us? If you think that smacks of New Age mysticism, forget it. It is the same observation Jesus made when he took a hike on Galilean - not Montanan - soil. "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" (Matthew 6:26). It's also not likely that the apostle Paul could've found help for his problems by popping Prozac. Three times he pounded the portals of heaven demanding release. Only when he gave up his need to be healed did he hear Christ say to him: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Some would call that a cop-out. It's not what we would say. If we were treating Paul or Jeffrey Smith, we might've said: . Hang in there. You have to take the downs with the ups, the rough with the smooth; . Every cloud has a silver lining. Some good will come out of this; . Your suffering dignifies you, and bravely borne, it will strengthen your character; . This is a test of your faith to see if you really trust God. God will have nothing to do with that sort of gobbledygook. Paul is told: "Live with it, and I will be living there with you." Our text also gives us some good news: "The Lord has set apart the faithful for himself; the Lord hears when [we] call to him" (v. 3). We may not get the upbeat and reassuring divine answer we want, but at the end of the day we can "both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety" (v. 8). With God at the center of creation, we can sleep in peace. We are not responsible for making sense of every tragedy in life; we may not pass Joyful 101; we may not reasonably expect to bring order out of chaos in every troubling situation around us. When we find our proper place in God's world and faithfully play our role - no more, no less - we can lie down in safety. "Want to know the difference between God and me?" joked a man who was proud of himself, but able to see his own foibles. "God never thinks he's me." It's probably wise never to think we're God. God is God and we're not. Our egocentric tendency to elevate ourselves above all others and above all else is a kind of death because it isolates us from the work of creation that is going on all about us. The challenge is to do the difficult work of forgetting the self - a struggle, says Jeffery Smith, that has to be enacted in nearly every breath. But to bear that cross of self-denial is "to be born again, to be born into wholeness. It means to yield to some will larger than our own." In the course of his journey, Jeffrey Smith himself became a Christian and an active member of a church. But the depression remained. He concludes: "I had conquered nothing, mastered nothing, transcended nothing. I had simply settled into something that had been waiting for me ... and made the descent it seemed to require. In that descent I had lost all sense of myself; but as that alienation persisted, I'd felt replacing my small self a sustaining kinship with something larger ... now I was in love, and I was trying to live with faith in something unseen." It is in self-denial that our roots reach the water of life. It is in discovering our true role that we yield to a will larger than our own. And it takes a melancholy soul to teach us such a life-giving lesson. AMEN