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.

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