The Darkness and The Light: Mental Illness and the Coming of Spring

I get excited this time of year when I realize that the days have started getting longer. Especially in Manitoba. There’s nothing like the feeling of getting up in the dark and going home in the dark and feeling like it’s never going to end as we drag by December 21^st, the longest day of the year. I make crafts.  I watch TV. I wait.
But today is January 22^nd and it’s still light out as I hurry for the bus after work. Even though many weeks of cold still lie ahead, I know the end is coming. The dark winter will be over, I will wear less than 6 layers in the morning, and I will wake with the feeling that it isn’t still night. Yes, summer is on the way.

Yet, thinking of the hope that comes with the longer days- even 5 and 10 minutes longer- reminds me of my friends, family, colleagues, and students whose days are not becoming any brighter just yet. The ones over whom mental illness has settled like December 21^st itself, that long and dark day which seems to never end. Apparently, we’re in sight of “mental health awareness week,” and I keep hearing a cheerful voice on the radio from Bell Network saying, “Fortunately, you can make a difference! Just text this number…” Every time I hear the voice, I find myself yelling back at it, “No! You can’t make a difference!”, annoyed by the simplicity of the idea that sending a text could somehow put an end to the darkness faced by so many dear ones.

The truth is, mental illness is on the rise at an alarming rate in this country- particularly among our students. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, suicide… sometimes I feel like a walking DSM5 just because of the people I interact with and love on a daily basis. There seems to be an epidemic of hopelessness which refuses to be quarantined. Just as I cannot make spring come any faster, so do we seem utterly helpless in the face of the darkness of mental illness. Perhaps it is all the more confusing, since we Canadians have become accustomed to having a degree of relative autonomy and control, that something so debilitating can escape us. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it too.

It is often at these darkest times that people find themselves stumbling into the strange world of faith, with its metaphors of dark and light, valley and mountaintop, wilderness and homecoming. Because mental illness is something quite outside our ability to categorize and understand, it is frequently with metaphors and bodily memory that people are able to trudge their way through it. Ideally, the world of faith forces people outside of themselves, so that they can see themselves as part of a bigger story in which light and darkness come and go and in which the light of resurrection always has the final say.

When we are overcome by our own darkness, Christ promises to be light for us. When we wander through the wilderness, lost and alone, Christ will be our homecoming. And when it seems like the darkness itself is caving in on us, God has promised to fight on our behalf.

It is a miracle of life that those who find themselves weakened by mental illness are often the ones who do community better than those of us who are self-sufficient enough to forge ahead on our own. They are often the ones with hearts big enough to love the stranger and forgive the unlovable. Because wisdom and endurance are developed in the wilderness. Sometimes, during cold Manitoba winters, we talk about how hearty and strong our ancestors must have been and I can see some of that hearty endurance in the courage of those who suffer the dark days of mental illness.
But while I’d like to say there’s some great purpose to the darkness, some greater good which will be worth it all in the end, that would be naïve. Sometimes, there is no endurance developed in the wilderness, but only chronic pain. It shouldn’t be. And when God’s kingdom comes in its fullness, such suffering will be no more. But until then, the Holy One really will be spring for us. And spring won’t be long now.

Epiphany Feast: Being World-Changers

I used to think that God was looking for people who could change the world. (Okay- most of the time I still do). We’ve all been inspired by the likes of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi, but my youth has been jammed full of these kinds of figures. When I was five it was my grandmother’s stories of heroic missionaries who cured the sick, wrote down languages for the first time, championed education, and connected the story of Jesus with the spiritual teachings of far-flung tribes in unheard of places.

When I was 12, it was Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, the prophet Micah calling his people to care for the poor, and St. Paul heroically braving prisons and beatings and shipwrecks. At 18, I began looking to Paulo Freire, transforming an entire continent through the power of education; Heather Mercer, imprisoned in Afganistan; and my own uncle, born in Uganda to a family of 18, who now develops innovative ways for the poorest countries to grow more and better food.

When I went to Colombia to change
the world, I discovered new heroes.

God, it was clear to me, is looking for these kinds of people: giants who can really make a differencein the world, pulling it toward the place it was made to be, the world I’ve come to call “the kingdom of God.” But here’s the problem: when you or I stand beside such people we are lost in their shadows. When we set out to be Ghandi  or Freire, we are not becoming the people God is looking for. No, God is not looking for people capable of changing the world: God is looking for people who know they can’t change the world.

I know, it sounds ridiculous. God NEEDS us. We are God’s hands and feet. But two things have convinced me that these are the sorts that God is looking for: the realization that we are created for community, and the truth that God is the one who changes things, not me. Each of the people I’ve mentioned above as heroes were members of movements; large, extended communities that changed the world together. Not one of them acted on their own, and (to my knowledge), not one of them tried.

Why? Because these people knew that God is the one who changes the world; God is the one who builds the kingdom, the one who calls us to be part of what God is already up to. When I try to be the person who changes the world (whatever that looks like), I end up pulling myself away from community and from the movements God is already creating.

Tomorrow, we will celebrate the Feast of Epiphany, a season which reminds us that God shows up in unexpected places among unexpected people. In Epiphany, God is revealed to the world as a “light to lighten the Gentiles.” The significance of this can be hard for us to understand today, but the fact that it was Gentile wise men who brought gifts to the toddler Jesus is very important. The seers were not the types that might have been expected to be world-changers that day and neither was that their intention. Instead, they were merely doing their job, following their God, and working together. God asks no more- and no less- from you and me.