Diana Gruver writes of finding solace and hope through others who share their experiences:   

As I slogged through seasons of depression … I have found the stories and presence of others who have experienced depression to be invaluable. I hear a hint of something I recognize—an aside, a metaphor, a clue that points to those marks left by the darkness—and I zero in on them. There is someone who knows, I think, someone who understands. They, too, have walked through the valley of the shadow of depression….  

They remind me I am not the only one to walk this road, that this experience is not an alien one. The lie that “surely no one has felt this” is cut down by the truth that others, in fact, have, and their presence makes me feel less isolated. These fellow travelers are my companions in the darkness of night.…

They give me hope—hope that this is not the end of my story, that I, too, will survive this. Hope that depression will not have the last say. [1] 

Theologian and minister Monica Coleman finds comfort and healing in the spirituals of the Black church: 

The further I’m away from Southern black churches, and the more I understand depression, the more I need spirituals. Created by enslaved Africans in the United States, spirituals express both suffering and dependence on faith…. Like the Psalms of the ancient Hebrew community, the slaves took their emotions to God, putting them to music….  

The spirituals give me a way to be sad without being alone. Because they are sung in community, they say: It’s okay to suffer. We know how you feel. We are suffering too. We all are.  

They aren’t afraid to linger in the painful places. They have no need to rush to praise. They can be slow … drawing out one syllable over tens of seconds … taking their time … waiting.… They knew how to take moans, make them hums, and then turn them into words. They knew how to give voice to pain and how to do it together. 

Thus I’m convinced that when Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross (Matthew 27:45–46), he wasn’t making a profound theological statement about the hidden God. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, the spirituals of his people. He was in pain, and he began to sing. In my sanctified imagination, I see the people at the foot of the cross joining him as we do today in my faith community: slowly at first, one voice, then another, humming, then forming words. It sounds like this:  

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  
sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  
sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  
a long way from home…. 

They remind me that if you stay in a spiritual long enough, you’ll hear God, you’ll feel hope. In the depths of depression, I can think of no greater spiritual gift.  

____________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

King Jesus, The Light of the gospel of Your Glory is an astonishingly rich treasure! What makes the gospel such amazingly good news is that it opens the way for me to know You in Your majestic Glory. When I trusted You as my Savior, You set my feet on a pathway to heaven. Forgiveness of sins and a future in heaven are wondrous gifts, but You provided even more! You made Your Light shine in my heart to give me the Light of the knowledge of the Glory of Your Face. Help me to seek Your Face wholeheartedly—delighting in the radiant knowledge of Your glorious Presence. One of the meanings of knowledge is “awareness acquired by experience or study.” Knowing You involves awareness of You—experiencing Your Presence through the Holy Spirit. It also involves studying the Bible to learn more and more about You. Though the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, I can perceive You clearly through searching the Scriptures and enjoying the Light of the gospel of Your Glory. In Your wonderful Name, Amen

2 CORINTHIANS 4:4; The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

2 CORINTHIANS 4:6; For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God …

PSALM 27:8 NKJV; When You said, “Seek My face,”. My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 153). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

For James Finley, therapeutic work can help us trust in the divine depth dimension of our lives. He presents a model offered by psychologist Carl Rogers (1902–1987):  

Carl Rogers created something called the “Rogerian triad.” [1] He taught there are three points of a triangle representing the beating heart of the therapeutic relationship. The first point on the triangle is unconditional positive regard. It goes like this: the therapist sits with the patient in therapy. The therapist lets the person know that no matter what you share with me about yourself, it will not diminish my deep respect for who you are as a human being. Little by little, the therapist’s deep respect and unconditional positive regard for you can transfer over to you. It can start becoming your renewed sense of unconditional positive regard for yourself. You internalize it. 

The second point is empathy. The therapist says, “I hear you saying …” and they say it back in such a way that you know they heard you. When you know you’ve been heard, you also know that you’ve been understood. The experience of being understood can deepen your capacity to hear yourself and understand yourself and to have empathy with yourself. 

The third point of the triangle is congruence, which is that the therapist is always honest with you in a respectful way. The therapist might say, “You know, quite honestly, I’m concerned about you when you talk like this. I’m really concerned about where you are.” And in that kind of compassionate honesty, little by little, you learn to be honest with yourself. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can learn not to invade or abandon ourselves. In the alliance with the clinician, you can be re-parented in love.  

What I’m suggesting is this: If we take the three points of the triad, lay it flat on the ground, and draw three lines down, we find each point connecting to God. 

The clinician’s unconditional positive regard for you incarnates the abyss-like infinite positive regard of God for you as the beloved. The presence of the clinician then becomes an incarnate manifestation of the welling up of this depth dimension, letting you know that you’re invincibly precious in all your wayward ways. To summarize Thomas Merton, there is something within you that is not subject to the brutalities of your own will, for it is that in you that belongs entirely to God. [2] 

The truth is that God is infinitely in love with you and infinitely aware of who you are. With infinite wisdom, God lovingly understands you through and through forever.  

Congruence is truthfulness, compassionately stated. You can be truthful with yourself. What is the truthfulness with yourself? It’s that you’re an infinitely precious, broken person. This infinite love for you permeates your brokenness through and through. It’s with you unexplainably forever.  

_________________________________________________________

Sarah Young …Jesus Listens

My delightful Lord, This is the day that You have made! As I rejoice in this day of life, it will yield precious gifts and beneficial training. I want to walk with You along the high road of thanksgiving—discovering all the delights You have prepared for me. To protect my thankfulness, I need to remember that I reside in a fallen world where blessings and sorrows intermingle freely. When I’m too focused on troubles, I walk through a day that’s brimming with beauty and brightness while seeing only the grayness of my thoughts. Neglecting the practice of giving thanks darkens my mind and dims my vision. Lord, please clear up my vision by helping me remember to thank You at all times. When I’m grateful, I can walk through the darkest days with Joy in my heart because I know that the Light of Your Presence is still shining on me. So I rejoice in You—my delightful, steadfast Companion. In Your bright, shining Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 118:24 ESV; This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

COLOSSIANS 4:2; Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful, 

PSALM 118:1 HCSB; Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. 

PSALM 89:15–16; Blessed are the people who know the joyful sound! They walk, O Lord, in the light of Your countenance. 16 In Your name they rejoice all day long, And in Your righteousness they are exalted.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 152). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Healing Work of Community and Service

Womanist theologian and pastor Dr. Monica Coleman writes openly about her experience with bipolar depression:  

I either felt sad or I felt nothing at all. I couldn’t feel happy or look forward to things I wanted to feel happy about. I couldn’t even remember what made me happy anymore. Feeling nothing was better than feeling sad, but eventually I felt sad. I was losing my ability to function. I had to detach myself emotionally from everything just to keep from crying all the time, and still sometimes that didn’t work. It took all my energy to get up and get dressed and be there and not cry through the day. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in months and months. [1]  

In her quest for healing, Dr. Coleman joined a church-based knitting group that created items for homeless individuals. They met monthly, and—after struggling with depression for years—Coleman began to experience the presence of God again in a community dedicated to serving others.  

Revelation did not come to me in thunderbolts. God was just there. In the hot cup of tea. In the women who gathered. In our laughter. In the knitting. God was in my uniform rows of stitches. God was also in the dropped stitch that created an imperfection.… There is something holy in the movement of yarn through fingers and needles. It grounds you. It keeps you from falling through the chasms around you…. God is in every cell, every person, and every activity. Whether I know it or not. Whether it feels like it or not. God is creating. With yarn and needles, hiccups, unraveling, do-overs, a rhythm, and individual stitches, God is making something new. Something beautiful. I thought that my prayers and good intentions in knitting for homeless men were divine activity. I was knitting God into the hat and scarf. No. God was knitting me. With therapists, medication, meaningful studies, a small church community, a pastor who cared, friends who understood, and a name for my condition, God was knitting me. God was knitting me back together. [2] 

Coleman reminds us that our diagnoses do not define us but are part of our lifelong journey of discovering our true worth in God: 

I don’t want to be reduced to my symptoms and diagnosis. Tied down. I am learning the difference between captivity and rest, between an illness and a condition. There’s nothing wrong with me. After all, this is the only me I’ve ever known. But sometimes I need to slow down, check to see if I’m okay; look at the emotional heap of yarn in my lap, undo a few rows, and try again. I need to know that the things I drop, the things I can’t do the way I want, the hard parts of my life are not failure. They are evidence that I’m human. [3] 

[37] The Use of Dryness God does not, by the instant gift of His Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. Therefore either He will not, or He cannot. If He will not, it must be because it would not be well to do so. If He cannot, then He would not if He could; else a better condition than God’s is conceivable to the mind of God…. The truth is this: He wants to make us in His own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should He effect this if He were always moving us from within, as He does at divine intervals, toward the beauty of holiness?…For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence; made our apartness from Himself, that freedom should bind us divinely dearer to Himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality, and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to Him who made his freedom.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 20-21). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Divine Dimension of Life

CAC teacher and psychotherapist James Finley provides a helpful image for us to think about how our lives and struggles intersect with the ever-present love of God:  

Here is an image that helps me think about spirituality as a resource in the healing of depression. Imagine drawing a horizontal line. This line represents our experiences of ourselves and our passage through time, from birth to death. This is our human experience going through our lives. As we go through life, we seek to experience happiness, fulfillment, security for ourselves and others, which creates feelings of well-being and gratitude. But likewise, life is such that we’re not always able to live in conditions conducive to happiness. There can be traumatizations, there can be betrayals, there can be losses, there can be injustices that take their toll. We can withstand anything as long as the center holds. But it gets really scary when these invasive, hurtful, and threatening energies that are going on in our lives start getting near the center. We start to lose our balance. We start to lose ourselves in a state of crisis. 

The spiritual dimension is this: We now imagine drawing a vertical line intersecting right in the middle of the horizontal line. The vertical line is the divine dimension, divinity, God, the Holy, the sacred. And the infinite love of God, the Holy, is welling up, presence-ing itself and pouring itself out as our lives on the horizontal line. This is the God-given, godly nature of every breath and heartbeat. It is the sun moving across the sky, our breathing in and breathing out, the miracle of being alive and real in the world. Religious experience is the experience of tasting it and realizing this miracle. By following a path of faith and reassurance, God illumines us on the horizontal line. The difficulty is that as depression increases, it closes off experiential access to that vertical line, the upwelling of God’s presence in our life. 

If we have religious faith and we experience depression, often our faith doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. It ceases to be relevant. Not only do we feel we have lost our own way in life, but we’ve also lost the felt sense of God being present in our lives. The absence of feeling God’s presence radicalizes the sense of our loss. A lot of therapy, then, isn’t only about moving along the horizontal line to reduce the symptoms of depression—although it is that—but doing it in such a way that it starts to open up the depth dimension. The infinite love of God can come welling up, and something of the depth dimension can begin to shine through in our dilemmas. It isn’t just that we’re caught in the middle of a dilemma, but we have a felt sense of knowing that we’re not alone.  

[36] Dryness

So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing…. And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic efforts to rouse them?

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 20). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Longing for Consolation

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.  
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. 
When shall I come and behold the face of God? —Psalm 42:1–2 

This week, the Daily Meditations explore the topic of depression and spiritual healing. We begin with CAC teacher and author Brian McLaren’s reflection on Psalm 42 and the sense of spiritual abandonment and grief that the psalmist expresses: 

The psalmist’s thirst, it turns out, has been mockingly quenched—not with “flowing streams,” but with his constant flow of salty tears. Just as his tears mock his thirst, so others mock him for his spiritual depression: Shouldn’t his God be meeting his needs? Their words, he says later, are like a mortal wound to his body (Psalm 42:10).  

My tears have been my food day and night,  
while people say to me continually, “Where is your God? (42:3) 

One senses the bitter contrast between the delayed presence of comfort and the constant presence of unfulfillment. Meanwhile, each good memory of joyful times—those bright days when he felt spiritual fulfillment together with his peers—now only darkens his long nights of alienation and pain.  

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:  
how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. (42:4) 

Then comes the refrain:  

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. (42:5–6) 

The “why” of this refrain—addressed to his own soul—is mirrored by another even more disturbing “why” question, addressed to God: “Why have you forgotten me?” (42:9). 

All these questions go unanswered: “When?” “How long?” “Where?” “Why?” Yet above the prayer of aspiration [and desperation] a tattered flag of faith and hope still flies: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.” That simple word “again”—vague and undefined, but real—seeks to answer the painful question “When?” It doesn’t dare claim “soon”; instead, it more modestly claims “someday.” 

McLaren counsels us to create room to bring our desperate feelings before God: 

You ask, “When? How long?” because you know—or at least you believe—or at least you hope—that your panting, gasping, famished feelings of unfulfilled longing, abandonment, and confusion won’t go on forever. A sense of peace and fullness will come again, someday….  

Hold your when or how long or where before God. Make space for your disappointment, frustration, and unfulfillment to come out of hiding and present themselves in the light. Don’t rush, even though you’ll be tempted to see these times of spiritual dryness and aspiration as a mistake, a sign of failure you want to put behind you. Instead, slow down and hold this moment as an opportunity to express and strengthen spiritual desire.  

Recognizing the Signs

CAC teacher and psychotherapist James Finley describes basic signs of one widespread form of depression. If you or someone you love suffers from depression, we encourage you to seek help. [1] 

As a psychotherapist, my task has been to diagnose, assess, and treat psychological symptoms that embody suffering. One of the most common categories of mental disorders are mood disorders. These are things such as anxiety and depression that impair our sense of feeling whole, free, and healed in our own lives. 

The milder form of depression common today is known as dysthymia. There are many other forms. Symptoms for dysthymia are a persistent pattern of sadness or feeling empty and hopeless. It’s a long, slow, underlying chronic feeling, like there’s a great cloud over your head. In addition to feeling sad and empty inside, people often feel a sense of low energy and tiredness. Also, there are changes of appetite that usually show up as a loss of appetite but can also show up as overeating. There can be disturbance in sleep, either when someone wants to sleep all the time, or when someone is not able to sleep. These depressed moods last for most of the day. It’s these chronic, low grade, ongoing, long-standing feelings of depression, sadness, emptiness, loneliness, and so on. 

Feelings of low self-esteem are also associated with dysthymia, feeling like I don’t matter, I don’t count, I’m “less than.” There is difficulty concentrating and problem solving. Symptoms can go away for a couple months at a time, but they tend to come back again. Dysthymic disorder, persistent depressive disorder, tends to respond very well to medical treatment. The optimal treatment is the combination between talk therapy and medication. [2]  

Author Diana Gruver describes her felt experience of depression and return to well-being: 

Those of us who suffer from depression call it many things. The fog. The black dog. The darkness. The unholy ghost. We dance around it with metaphors and paint pictures of the pain with our words. The word depression is too clinical, the list of symptoms too sterile.  

Diagnostic guidelines cannot describe the sensation that your heart has stopped beating, has been torn from your chest, while your body continues to move mechanically, numb, without its lifeblood. I am a puppet. I am a ghost. I float invisible, unfeeling, watching the alive ones laugh and love. No mere definition can explain that feeling of emptiness, of isolation, of vacant pain…. 

I survived. With the help of therapy, medication, a good support system, and God’s grace, the light slowly dawned. Life gradually became easier, the days less daunting. My mind could focus and process once again. I could turn loving attention on other people. Sleep was no longer elusive. The sensation of joy once again took up residence in my heart.  

I felt like one of the lucky ones—like I had barely survived my brush with depression’s darkness. I was thankful to be alive, returned once again to the sun. [3] 

[35] Creeping Christians

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments…. Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own. Or, having committed a petty fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we mourn over the defilement to ourselves, and the shame of it before our friends, children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due confession and amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our own paltry self with its well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 19-20). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Father Richard teaches that despite the presence of evil permeating our world, we are invited to commit ourselves to the common good:  

Both Jesus and Paul invite us to live a vulnerable human life in communal solidarity with both sin and salvation. 

• Neither sin nor salvation could ever be exclusively mine, but both of them are collectively ours! 
• Universal solidarity is the important lesson, not private salvation. 
• Human solidarity is the goal, not “my” moral superiority or perfection. 

I know that doesn’t at first feel like a strategy for successful living, and it is certainly not one that will ever appeal to the upwardly mobile or pure idealists. It first feels like capitulation, but that is not Jesus’ or Paul’s intention at all—quite the opposite. Paul believes he has found a new kind of victory and freedom. He himself calls it “folly” or “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:21, 25, 27; 4:10), as it is for most people to this day. He often calls it a “hidden mystery” that only the wise discover. Paul believes there is a hidden, cruciform shape to reality, even revealed in the geometry of the cross (see Ephesians 2:13–22). The world is filled with contradictions, false alternatives, zero-sum games, paradoxes, and unresolvable evils. It is foundationally unjust, yet we must work for justice in order to find our own freedom and create it for others. 

Paul is an utter realist about life on this planet. We must fully recognize and surrender to this foundational reality before we try to think we can repair the world (tikkun olam in Hebrew) with freedom and love. Paul’s insight is symbolized in the scandalous image of a man on the cross, the Crucified God who fully accepts and transforms this tragic human situation through love. If this is the reality to which even God must submit, then surely we must and can do the same. 

By giving ourselves to this primary human absurdity, which shows itself in patience, love, and forgiveness toward all things, we find a positive and faith-filled way through “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” This is not by resolving it or thinking we can ever fully change it, but by recognizing that we are all complicit in this mixed moral universe. This is perhaps the humility that Christians need in their campaigns for social reform. This is “carrying the cross” with Jesus. 

Through this primal surrender and trust, God can use our own cruciform shape for healing and for immense good—and even victory. True healers are always wounded healers and not those who perfectly triumphed over all evil.  

Humans often end up doing evil by thinking we can and must eliminate all evil, instead of holding it, suffering it ourselves, and learning from it, as Jesus does on the cross. This ironically gives us the active compassion we need to work for social change. My acceptance of a cruciform world mirrors my ability to accept a cruciform me. 

____________________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

My Creator, this is the day that You have made! Help me to rejoice and be glad in it. I begin this day holding up empty hands of faith—ready to receive all that You are pouring into this brief portion of my life. Since You are the Author of my circumstances, I need to be careful not to complain about anything, even the weather. I’ve found that the best way to handle unwanted circumstances is to thank You for them. This act of faith frees me from resentment and enables me to look for blessings emerging from the problems. Sometimes You show me the good that You’re bringing out of the difficulties. At all times, You offer me the glorious gift of Yourself! I realize that living within the boundaries of this day is vital for finding Joy in it. You knew what You were doing when You divided time into twenty-four-hour segments. You have perfect understanding of human frailty, and You know that I can only handle the trouble of one day at a time. I don’t want to worry about tomorrow or get stuck in the past. Instead, I seek to enjoy abundant Life in Your Presence today! In Your joyful Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 118:24; This is the day which the Lord hath made. The thanksgiving day is one which has been fore-ordained of God, and brought into existence by him for a special purpose.

HEBREWS 3:13; But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

HEBREWS 4:15 NASB; For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin.

MATTHEW 6:34; “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 145). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Evil Depends upon Disguise

Father Richard stresses that evil often masquerades as good, and so provides justification for immense injustice:  

The world (or “system” as we say now) is a hiding place for unconsciousness or deadness in the words of Paul. Both Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis taught that the triumph of evil depends entirely on disguise. [1] [2] Our egos must see it as some form of goodness and virtue so that we can buy into it. 

If evil depends on a “good” disguise, cultural virtue and religion are the best covers of all. The leaders of both religion and empire colluded in the killing of Jesus (Matthew 27:1–2). In Luke’s Gospel, Herod and Pilate just passed Jesus back and forth and affirmed whatever the other one said (Luke 23:12). Christians were forewarned that the highest levels of power can and probably will be co-opted by evil. 

Is there a culture in this world that doesn’t operate out of this recipe for delusion? This is what Paul means when he names “the world” (what I call “the system”) as one of the sources of evil. What Paul already recognized, at least intuitively, is that it is almost impossible for any social grouping to be corporately or consistently selfless. It has to maintain and promote itself first at virtually any cost—sacrificing even its own stated ethics and morality. If we cannot see this, it might reveal the depth of the disguise of institutionalized evil. 

Consider the religious rationale for the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which helped to justify the conquest of the Americas and the African slave-trade. Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah write: 

The Doctrine [of Discovery] emerged from a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls, which are official decrees by the pope that carry the full weight of his ecclesial office….  

[In 1493], Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera … [which] offered a spiritual validation for European conquest, “that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread.”  

[The doctrine] gave theological permission for the European body and mind to view themselves as superior to the non-European bodies and minds. The doctrine created … an identity for African bodies as inferior and only worthy of subjugation; it also relegated the identity of the original inhabitants of the land “discovered” to become outsiders, now unwelcome in their own land. [3] [4]

Richard continues: 

Evil finds its almost perfect camouflage in the silent agreements of the group when it appears personally advantageous. Such unconscious “deadness” will continue to show itself in every age, I believe. This is why I can’t throw the word “sin” out entirely. If we do not see the true shape of evil or recognize how we are fully complicit in it, it will fully control us, while not looking the least like sin. Would “agreed-upon delusion” be a better description? We cannot recognize it or overcome it as isolated individuals, mostly because it is held together by the group consensus. 

[29] Presumption “If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and cast into the sea, it shall be done.” Good people…have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this saying…. Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits…. But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, “What wilt thou have me to do?” is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten His work…. The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God’s face, as it were, to see what He will do. Man’s first business is, “What does God want me to do?”, not “What will God do if I do so and so?”

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 16-17). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) dedicated his scholarship and life to uncovering the biblical meaning of structural evil: 

The writers of the Bible had names that helped them identify the spiritual realities that they encountered. They spoke of angels, demons, principalities and powers, Satan, gods, and the elements of the universe. Materialism had no use for such things and so dismissed them.… “Modern” people were supposed to gag on the idea of angels and demons. The world had been mercifully swept clean of these “superstitions,” and people could sleep better at night knowing that they were safe from spirits.…  

If we want to take the notion of angels, demons, and the principalities and powers seriously, we will have to go back to the biblical understanding of spirits in all its profundity and apply it freshly to our situation today.  

Latin American liberation theology made one of the first efforts to reinterpret the “principalities and powers,” not as disembodied spirits inhabiting the air, but as institutions, structures, and systems. But the Powers … are not just physical. The Bible insists that they are more than that (Ephesians 3:10; 6:12); this “more” holds the clue to their profundity. In the biblical view the Powers are at one and the same time visible and invisible, earthly, and heavenly, spiritual, and institutional (Colossians 1:15–20). Powers such as a lumberyard or a city government possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, corporate culture, or collective personality…. Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation … as having a spirituality, but they do. The New Testament uses the language of power to refer at one point to the outer aspect, at another to the inner aspect, and yet again to both together. What people in the world of the Bible experienced as and called “principalities and powers” was in fact the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day. 

Wink considered systemic powers as a mix of good and evil that, like humanity, needs redemption: 

If evil is so profoundly systemic, what chance do we have of bringing [institutions] into line with God’s purpose for them? The answer to that question hinges on how we conceive of institutional evil. Are the Powers intrinsically evil? Or are some good? Or are they scattered all along the spectrum from good to evil? The answer seems to be: none of the above. Rather, they are at once good and evil, though to varying degrees, and they are capable of improvement.  

      Put in stark simplicity:  

      The Powers are good.  

      The Powers are fallen.  

      The Powers must be redeemed.…  

They are good by virtue of their creation to serve the humanizing purposes of God. They are all fallen, without exception, because they put their own interests above the interests of the whole. And they can be redeemed, because what fell in time can be redeemed in time.  

Taking the Powers Seriously

Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) dedicated his scholarship and life to uncovering the biblical meaning of structural evil: 

The writers of the Bible had names that helped them identify the spiritual realities that they encountered. They spoke of angels, demons, principalities and powers, Satan, gods, and the elements of the universe. Materialism had no use for such things and so dismissed them.… “Modern” people were supposed to gag on the idea of angels and demons. The world had been mercifully swept clean of these “superstitions,” and people could sleep better at night knowing that they were safe from spirits.…  

If we want to take the notion of angels, demons, and the principalities and powers seriously, we will have to go back to the biblical understanding of spirits in all its profundity and apply it freshly to our situation today.  

Latin American liberation theology made one of the first efforts to reinterpret the “principalities and powers,” not as disembodied spirits inhabiting the air, but as institutions, structures, and systems. But the Powers … are not just physical. The Bible insists that they are more than that (Ephesians 3:10; 6:12); this “more” holds the clue to their profundity. In the biblical view the Powers are at one and the same time visible and invisible, earthly, and heavenly, spiritual, and institutional (Colossians 1:15–20). Powers such as a lumberyard or a city government possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, corporate culture, or collective personality…. Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation … as having a spirituality, but they do. The New Testament uses the language of power to refer at one point to the outer aspect, at another to the inner aspect, and yet again to both together. What people in the world of the Bible experienced as and called “principalities and powers” was in fact the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day. 

Wink considered systemic powers as a mix of good and evil that, like humanity, needs redemption: 

If evil is so profoundly systemic, what chance do we have of bringing [institutions] into line with God’s purpose for them? The answer to that question hinges on how we conceive of institutional evil. Are the Powers intrinsically evil? Or are some good? Or are they scattered all along the spectrum from good to evil? The answer seems to be: none of the above. Rather, they are at once good and evil, though to varying degrees, and they are capable of improvement.  

      Put in stark simplicity:  

      The Powers are good.  

      The Powers are fallen.  

      The Powers must be redeemed.…  

They are good by virtue of their creation to serve the humanizing purposes of God. They are all fallen, without exception, because they put their own interests above the interests of the whole. And they can be redeemed, because what fell in time can be redeemed in time.  

[24] Various Kinds of Moth

Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon…. It applies to those equally who in anyway worship the transitory; who seek the praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a show in the world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of earth. Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the senses in every direction—whether lawfully indulged, if the joy of being is centered in them—do these words bear terrible warning. For the hurt lies not in this—that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for such they are not;…nor yet in this—that they pass away and leave a fierce disappointment behind; that is only so much the better; but the hurt lies in this—that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to them as its good—clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion to the superiority of its kind.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 13-14). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The voice of doubt, shame, and guilt blaring in our heads is not our voice. It is a voice we have been given by a society steeped in shame. It is the “outside voice.” Our authentic voice, our “inside voice,” is the voice of radical self-love! —Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology  

CAC teacher and psychotherapist Jim Finley explores how trauma causes us to internalize shame, which keeps us from living from our true identity in God. 

This “you”—this internalized identity formed in trauma and abandonment—you start taking on as identity. You start taking it on as if it has the power to name who you are, which is the shame-based identity.  

It’s bad enough you had to go through the trauma, but what’s worse is we’re punitive with ourselves and … it creates the secrecy of a shame-based identity. One is afraid that if anyone would really see what I’m really like inside, no one would love me. Do you know why? Because I see what I’m really like and I don’t love me. Do you know why? Because I’ve internalized the fact [for example] that my parents didn’t love me…. 

Every trauma survivor knows the issue isn’t what was done to me. The issue is what everything that was done to me did to me and that I’ve internalized it. It’s just endless, the things that hinder us from becoming the person deep down that we really are and long to be…. In a sense, our real Higher Power is [often not God, but is instead] our shame-based belief that our shortcomings and faults and brokenness have the authority to name who we are. It’s the idolatry of brokenness over the Love that loves us as invincibly precious in our brokenness. This is really the key to this whole thing. It isn’t just that I’m broken; I must also admit that I believe I am what’s wrong with me….  

It’s such a powerful experience to be in the presence of someone who sees our brokenness—maybe because they live with us and it’s obvious, or it’s a therapist, or a friend, or at a recovery meeting—and who sees through the brokenness to the invincible preciousness of our self in the midst of our brokenness. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can come upon within ourselves the pearl of great price, the invincible preciousness of ourselves in the midst of our brokenness.  

Finley describes the healing impact that such an accepting presence can have for us:  

Through a person’s unconditional positive regard for us, we can start to find our footing in an unconditional positive regard for ourselves. And that unconditional positive regard for ourselves is joining God in seeing who God knows us to be before the origins of the universe as invincibly precious, indestructible in God’s eyes.  

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Sarah Young

Jesus, my Hope, Whenever I’m tempted to indulge in self-pity or escape into unreality, trusting You wholeheartedly is my only hope. In the midst of adversity, I find it hard to think clearly and make wise choices. Sometimes it seems as if a dizzying array of choices is swirling around me—waiting for me to grab on to the right one. But I know there is one choice that’s always appropriate and effective: the decision to trust You with all my heart and mind. If I find myself sliding down into discouragement or self-pity, I can put on the brakes by declaring my trust in You—whispering, speaking, even shouting it! As I think about the many reasons I have for being confident in You, I rejoice in Your unfailing Love. When I’m feeling tempted to numb my pain by escaping into unreality, help me instead to come close to You—expressing my confidence in You. This brings me into contact with ultimate Reality! I love confiding in You because You know everything about me and my circumstances. O Lord, You are infinitely wise and understanding. In Your encouraging Name, Amen

PROVERBS 3:5 AMPC; Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding.

PSALM 52:8; But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God; I trust in the loving devotion of God forever and ever.

ROMANS 11:33; Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and[ a] knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths …

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 139). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Purity Is Not Holiness

Pastor and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how emphasizing “purity” leads us away from holiness:  

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….  

To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion…. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue.  

But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.  

Bolz-Weber points to Jesus’ actions to encourage seeking holiness over purity: 

Jesus seemed to want connection with those around him, not separation. He touched human bodies deemed unclean as if they were themselves holy: dead little girls, lepers, menstruating women. People of his day were disgusted that Jesus’ disciples would eat with unwashed hands, and they tried to shame him for it. But he responded, “It is not what enters the mouth that makes one unclean but what comes out of it that defiles” [Matthew 15:11]. He was loyal to the law, just not at the expense of the people.  

Jesus kept violating boundaries of decency to get to the people on the other side of that boundary, those who’d been wounded by it, those who were separated from the others: the motherless, the sex workers, the victims, and the victimizers. He cared about real holiness, the connection of things human and divine, the unity of sinners, the coming together of that which was formerly set apart.  

When I think of holiness, the kind that is sensual and embodied and free from shame and deeply present in the moment and comes from union with God, I think of a particular scene in the Gospels when, right in the middle of a dinner party, a woman cracks open a jar of myrrh and pours it over Jesus’ feet [Luke 7:37–38]. She then takes her unbound hair and wipes his feet, mixing her mane, her tears, and her offering on the feet of God. Her separateness, from herself and her God, is alleviated in that moment. Holiness braided the strands of her being into their original and divine integrated configuration.  

[20] No Comparing

Here there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above one’s neighbor; and here there is no possibility of comparison with one’s neighbor: no one knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it…. Relative worth is not only unknown—to the children of the Kingdom it is unknowable.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 11-12). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.