Community for Integrative Learning
1503 West 13th Street
Wilmington, DE 19806
302 651-0223
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."
--Howard Thurman
The Dark Night of the Soul: Spirituality and Depression
Presented at New Directions Delaware, Inc., December 21, 1998
by the Rev. J. Thomas Ledbetter, Pastoral Psychotherapist
Brandywine Pastoral Institute, Wilmington, Delaware
I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you tonight and speak to you and hopefully with you about spirituality and depression. This is a topic that perhaps many of you could speak to from your own experience and I hope you will do just that later on as we share our thoughts about utilizing your depression for your own spiritual growth.
As we are now in the heart of the "season to be jolly" and some aren't, it is an appropriate time to take a look at spirituality and depression. Tonight I want to first look at the nature of spirituality and see what I am and am not talking about when I talk about spirituality. I mean by spirituality the somewhat simplistic idea of "the patterned ways that we relate to what is ultimate in our lives." So each of us has a spirituality or is a spiritual being since we each hold certain things, ideas, beliefs, practices, to be ultimate in our lives. For example, if consumerism is truly ultimatethat is, if it is of ultimate value -- the most valuable thing to you, not in your professed beliefs but in the recesses of your heart and in your practice, your daily living -- then this is your time of the year. The mall or the glossy catalogs are your worship centers if you hold to a consumerist spirituality. Or you may hold technology to be of ultimate value and worship at that altar and then you will have your patterned ways that you relate to what is ultimate for you. Now this may be too narrow a definition of spirituality and it may offend some that it makes of all persons spiritual beings, but I believe there is some truth here. If you will indulge my understanding of spirituality for a short while then, with this understanding it would be important to evaluate spiritual options and we have plenty of them. And it would be important to evaluate spiritualities to determine if they are helpful and hopeful, if they are reliable means for dealing with the difficult and painful realities of living. Some may not be and may actually be harmful to us as we deal with depression, with grief, with sadness, with pain.
First, it seems to me that a spirituality that will help us must be one that helps us move toward wholeness, not fragmentation or brokenness. Wholeness, healing, becoming whole persons needs to be a by-product of our spiritualities or else we can be hurt by what we hold to be of ultimate value. If the spirituality of your minister or friend or colleague is one that results in your persistent guilt or feeling badly about yourself, then it is probably a spirituality that does not have wholeness as one of its ends. There are religious faiths, religious people, and religious practices that do not have wholeness as a value or goal though they may present themselves that way. Some religious people and sermons have only inappropriate guilt and controlling people as their goal and they hurt people and make people feel badly about themselves and their being and that is a harmful spirituality. They do not have a movement toward wholeness as a vital ingredient in their spirituality.
Secondly, a spirituality that can be of help to us in the here-and-nowness of our lives must be one that is not only focused or grounded out there, but one that knows immanenceright here, right now, in this place, as the arena of the Spirit. In other words, it must be an embodied and concrete spirituality, not just ethereal and transcendent. It is an immanent, embodied, concrete spirituality that knows the present, not just the past, as where God is. God is here, now, not just back then, out there. This spirituality knows sex and the flesh as good and sacred and to be used creatively. It knows every living thing to be of value and it knows every occasion to be one that is pregnant with sacred possibility. We live here, now, in a concreteness that must have a spiritual expression. Spiritual practices can be earthy, sensual, delight-full, awe-full, and in this concrete world of embodied persons, not just other worldly.
Thirdly, our spirituality that can be of help to us in the hard places of life is one that has consciousness as its goal. Here I am not talking about the stereotypical meaning of expanded consciousness, but simply the ability to be aware of who one is, what one is doing and the ability to choose to change. I do not mean a harsh self-blaming, judging consciousness, but I do mean one that is willing to step up and "take the hit," that is, to be conscious enough and courageous enough to take oneself on and choose to undergo difficulties in order to grow. When I am doing something injurious to my wife and my marriage, I need to be involved in a spirituality that prizes the willingness to change, to make amends, to apologize, to redress the wrongs, one that allows me to drop my false pride, to take myself on in an open and honest way. It is this kind of consciousness that involves all of me, and requires me to know myself and actually can only really be done by people who love themselves enough to admit being wrong, having failed, and needing to change.
Yet, for a spirituality to be of help to us through the "dark night of the soul," it must also help us be transformed. We must not only see our need for change but be able to push through and do it. Transformation lies at the heart of all the great religionsthe ability to start over, to be forgiven, to change from what we shouldn't do to what we should, to experience death, then resurrection, to know newness of life, to be transformedthis is a spirituality that does not have itself as its own end, but rather moves continually toward change and transformation.
For a spirituality to be life-affirming, not death-dealing, it must also place a premium upon presence. Presencethe ability to be with another, for another, to give of self to another, to be willing to be present, fully present with another who hurts and who needs, this is a spirituality that knows the value of presence of persons with persons, that knows the crucial importance of one human being being present with another human being. A spirituality that is "from a distance" caring, that is well-wishing, but far off, what I call a "Christmas-basket" caring or one that is only full of rules about this and about that, this is not a spirituality that will sit through the dark with another soul. Presence is crucial, for it signals care for persons, not just talk about caring. Presence is crucial, for it gives the lie to religions and religious people who are so focused upon correct theology that they are not present. They are more interested in control than in being with, more interested in right beliefs and correct practices than in serving, more interested in appearance than in substance. It seems to me that there is much in modern spiritualitymore specifically, organized religions to be cautious of since it has taken us so long to move from the dark ages in our views of mental illness. Some are not life-affirming, some are stigmatizing, some are about control, not life-givingness. We need to all be cautious.