The Burden of Oppression, The Deceptiveness of Despair

 When I experienced my first major depression in my early twenties, nothing--and I mean nothing--really helped me. Not prayer, not scripture, not words of encouragement. There were only two dim lights that kept me floating on the surface of the water of the living: planting seeds and watching them grow in a little window greenhouse from Home Depot that a friend bought for me; and reading from Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Nothing made sense those days--but that book, and growing those little seeds, made sense and was within my diminished capacity to function, respectively.  

Solomon's book was an admirable weaving of painstaking research, clinical denseness, and raw personal experience. Nothing makes sense because depression is a scrambling of the airwaves, the way you would catch a word here and there but unable to string together a cohesive sense of meaning from the narrative. 

In one section of the book, the author recounts his desire for passive death (admitting that he lacked the resolve for a deliberate suicide attempt) was so strong at one point that he sought out anonymous homosexual encounters in an attempt to infect himself with HIV. Not that that was my cup of tea, but at the time the thwarted logic made complete sense to me, and a part of me nodded in admiration at this creative 'solution' to the problem of a mental suffering that can be so intense that if one hasn't been through it, such an objectionable action would make no sense. If you have experienced that despair, though, the question is not so much "Why?" but "Well, why not?"

The seedlings were another flicker of hope for me. My friend J (recounted in The Day That Cost Me My Friend) drove me to Hope Depot and helped me pick out the little greenhouse with the little prepackaged potting soil pods. I couldn't control anything in my life, or care for anything or anyone, but I could take care of those little seeds in the upstairs bedroom. It gave me a shred of hope that I, too, might not shrivel and die, but come alive again someday. Some day. 

These early years when my illness was in its virgin bloom were the days when it took grit, spit, and grinding the enamel from your teeth just to stay alive. Because there's no good reason that you can see, so you have to trust others who tell you that truth, like your family and close friends, and the Church. The fight against your own mind--who has become a shadowy sparring opponent--is a difficult one, because you have to outwit it, correct the faulty logic, rather than strap some TnT to it. For those who don't, can't, or won't, the specter of madness writs large. 

Today, through medication, healthier habits, and remaining in a state of grace, the good Lord has largely nullified these wild fluctuations in mood, temptations to destruction, and self-abusing tendencies. He has quieted my mind and lifted my spirit so that I can serve Him in spirit and truth. The blips are still there, but largely leveled out which allow me to function as a more or less normal human being.

When a tempest does stir up the dust, however--and sometimes severely so--I am largely caught of guard. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason, and sometimes it may be that I have laid my guard down, left a hole unguarded in my spiritual fence. Sometimes, as of lately though, when I have spending more time with the Lord in prayer and adoration, the tempest blows in from the outside. It's my first thought to suspect mental illness, though, and sometimes rightfully so. Any good exorcist would do the same, to rule out the psychological. 

Over the years I have gotten slightly more adept at differentiating the things of the mind and the things of the spirit, when they are, in fact, distinct. I have noticed that historically, at least for myself, depression comes on slow and steady, like a front, that stays for weeks or months at a time, like a wool blanket that won't dry out after being submerged. Mania can creep up on you, but thankfully there are pretty clear diagnostic criteria to identify it. Sometimes, the malaise doesn't fit a psychological mold, which can be confusing, because the symptoms are similar. 

When I consider the spiritual (rather than the strictly psychological) elements at play, however, things start to come into focus a little more clearly, make more sense. I often have to rely on some of my more spiritual trusted friends to help diagnose such problems in lieu of a spiritual director (which I don't currently have), and the writings of the saints. St. John of the Cross said that the Devil is mightiest and most astute enemy, his wiles more baffling than those of the world and the flesh; he is "the hardest to understand" and no human power can be compared to him. (Spiritual Canticle, 431)

I will share that this is not the first time this has happened. As I wrote in Bring Me My Weapon, the temptations to suicide have come from the outside-in, rather than the inside-out, in brief but strong temptest of spiritual oppression that rendered me materially impotent. Days before undertaking spiritual combat manifest in "Night At The Masoleum", I was afflicted with a stomach pain so acute and unexplainable I thought I was having a burst appendix and went to a GI doctor who could find nothing wrong (I later read that such physical afflictions in this part of the body have been attributed to the devil oppressing various saints throughout history). Right before the night I set out, the pain disappeared as quickly as it had come.

I write this because this malaise can be hard to make sense of, and you can't talk about it with just anyone either, esp when the temptations (again, which seem to come from outside of the self) to things like suicide would cause a lot of--well, complications, esp among friends who feel it would be their responsibility once told to call the police, EMT, etc. So, you keep it in and try to grit through, but that often makes it worse. 

But like I mentioned above with the book and the seeds--worldly things that helped when nothing else would for a psychological ailment--spiritual issues (if they are truly spiritual, and not psychological) are aided by spiritual remedies. So, things like oppression is countered by personal and collective prayer, confession, fasting, reception of the sacraments, Mass, etc. For that I am grateful that my wife reached out to our friends and community of faith to solicit prayer. I do think they helped lift what felt like a strange and curiously onerous oppression, in which the past few days the temptation to despair was so great, that I would catch myself thinking and saying "I am Judas," and that I deserve his fate. 

It was only after these collective prayers, I think, that the fog kind of cleared a little enough to see that maybe these were not truths but lies, and to try to get to the source of where they were coming from. That is when I found the story, that I had not heard of until now, of the exorcism of Anna Ecklund in 1912 by Capuchin Father Theophilus Riesinger (think a kind of Fr. Ripperger of the early 20th century). The exorcism of Ecklund was a wicked grind and a brutal trauma of the power of evil for those who witnessed it. But this line in the story really stopped me in my tracks:

"When asked what business the spirits had with her, a voice claiming to be Judas Iscariot finally replied, "To bring her to despair, so that she will commit suicide and hang herself!"

Wow. Now, this was a case of full blown possession, but as many saints through history have recounted, oppression can occur by various demons as well. It made sense--if I had been going regularly to Adoration multiple times a week, Mass, confession, First Fridays, First Saturdays, daily rosary, etc--that maybe this was the Devil's way of mobilizing his entourage to knock one off the path. "He is the hardest to understand," St. John of the Cross wrote. Maybe part of his strategy is to attribute his actions to the self of the person afflicted (the mind, depression, etc) to hide himself there. Then with a Judas-spirit, one attacks the good (the self) like a spiritual auto-immune disease, the accomplish the work of evil (self-destruction, despair). Once he's found out, though, and exposed to the light of reason and a sound mind, well--like it says in scripture "Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you" (James 4:7).

Despair is deceptive, but oh so affective when combined with a darkening of the mind and spirit, and firm resolve. This is when suicide is a dangerous and imminent reality. I don't think this was the case for me, but like I said, the storm came in quick and intense, and I think now I'm just drenched but breathing. The thoughts however, were of the same essence and breed, emanating from the same wretched family. As Padre Pio may have said at one point, "wake up and smell the sulfur." Despair is deceptive, because it can never get us into bed with it without making us drunk and lying to us first. 

When I received my diagnosis in my early twenties, it was one of the biggest reliefs, because the scariest Viet-Cong type enemy is the one you can't identify. Once you do, you can treat it. I imagine it's the same in the spiritual life, once you know what' causing the malaise. I just got back from Adoration and Holy Mass on my lunch break, and prayed binding prayers for myself; thank you to all who stripped the façade by their prayers as well. Despair is deceptive, but once recognized and unmasked, a hearty guffaw and a get-back-to-business attitude will send it scrambling away naked as the day it was conceived. I feel bad for Judas--but not enough to keep him company for all eternity.