I, Too

I, Too

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

(Source: The Poetry Foundation)

After the apocalypse, a non-dystopia

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. 2014: Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Kindle edition.

Station Eleven confirms my deeply held conviction that influenza will kill us all. It begins with an outbreak of the "Georgian flu," which is not only remarkably contagious, but finishes off the infected within 12-24 hours. And just like that, civilization is gone.

Or rather, almost all the people are gone. Civilization persists, particularly in the form of the Traveling Symphony, a company of musicians and actors which caravans from settlement to settlement around Lake Michigan performing orchestral pieces and the Shakespearean canon. Their motto, taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, is "Survival is insufficient." Or, as Mandel seems to be suggesting, survival has never been sufficient for the human species.

While Station Eleven kicks off with an apocalypse, it's far from a dystopian novel. Mandel uses Arthur Leander, a Canadian actor of some celebrity, to create the book's through-line: all the main characters are connected to him, even if in a minor way, although he dies of a heart attack just before the Georgian flu strikes. (No spoiler alert required: said cardiac event begins on the very first page.) Leander enables Mandel to move the narrative back and forward in time, and to introduce the titular "Station Eleven:" a self-published comic book by Leander's first wife which is itself set on a sort of ruined world. The Leander storyline is much more than a narrative device, however: it's a means by which Mandel can illustrate that human culture persists wherever humanity persists.

Life without running water, electricity, or any other features of post-18th century technology would be hard and uncomfortable. It would not, however, be a life without culture. That, at least in part, is the glory of humanity, which reflects the glory of the culture of the Trinity.

;

I've been listening to The Hilarious World of Depression podcast since its inception, and for a long time it was my sole source of therapy. (All by itself, that one sentence tells you I've got a whole raft-load of issues.) Now, however, I'm talking to actual therapists and seem to have a handle on my symptoms, and host John Moe's frequent admonitions talk about depression in order to normalize  it have finally sunk in.

There are a lot of reasons for an OPC minister of Word and sacrament to not want to talk about his depression, not least of which is the fact that my depression comes with a chaser of paranoia. Pastors are under constant scrutiny by their congregations, and most of the members under their care have unresolved father issues which make them extremely reluctant to embrace the painfully obvious fact their preacher has problems of his own. In my case, I also have a presbytery which is not known as a safe place to express weakness, and I believe I have good reason to think that my acknowledgment of mental health issues could be used by some as a pretext to lower the boom on me. Now that I'm not as fervidly paranoid, though, I realize that even my enemies may have some sense of human decency; and if not, we have colleagues to thwart their more vindictive efforts.

So here goes.

I've had a few episodes of situational depression in response to traumatic events (such as Church conflict and when we lost our daughter). The "clinical depression" (if that's the correct term) began about six years ago when a problem with recurring sinusitis became a sinus infection that simply would not go away. I've been in physical pain for much of my adult life, but this pain was of an entirely different species: it wasn't the intensity, but the quality. I was perfectly capable of living my life, but I was so miserable that I simply did not want to. Although the sinusitis was finally resolved through surgery, it turned out to be masking Meniere's disease (fluid in the inner ear) complicated by a form of migraine. Since then, it's been a long journey of figuring out a regimen of vitamins, supplements, medication and sleep to deliver me from a constant sense of disorientation and unease. I think things are under control now, but I also know that I'm one sleepless night away from being plunged back into despair.

There's a clarity to depression. Most people seem reluctant to admit that, but it's true. Depression strips away the comforting reassurances we tell ourselves and allows you to see things as they are. Life is hard and full of suffering, and no one ever survives it. There's a hollowness to most relationships, and God, without a physical presence, seems absent.

On the other hand, one should acknowledge that depression makes it more difficult to recognize that God's lack of physical presence is not the same thing as absence.

People talk about suicidal ideation as though it were a shocking, well-nigh unthinkable thing, but for me it's a simple reality. I am a very slow thinker, but once I solve a problem it tends to stay solved. Now that I have a plan, I can't get rid of it: it's in my head and can't be dislodged. Obviously, I haven't done it, but there are times when I have to come up with reasons not to. Mostly, it's because I know how much it would mess up my kids.

I remember one of my ministerial colleagues being surprised that I wasn't afraid of God's wrath for violating the Sixth Commandment, but I'm not. That's one of the side-effects of believing the Gospel. While taking one's own life is a more heinous sin than others, the Shorter Catechism reminds us that [e]very sin deserveth God's wrath and curse, both in this life, and that which is to come." (Westminster Shorter Catechism #83-84) If the Cross has delivered me from God's wrath and curse, due to me for all my sins, then even a violation of the Sixth Commandment cannot separate me from the love of Christ (Romans 8:33-39).

Depression is bad enough. I'm grateful it couldn't rob me of my assurance of salvation.

"Snowflakes" or a sibling society?

In "Notes from a Sibling Society" over at the First Things website, John Waters helpfully notes that problems arise not when young people act like young people, but when older people act as though they were not older people. I love this paragraph:

The sibling society stands in contrast to what preceded it: the father-organized society in which authority was unafraid to speak or to be despised by the young for so doing. A working definition of authority might be: the capacity to endure unpopularity in the interests of the good. A defining quality of fatherhood through the ages has been a preparedness to be resented. The father was the guarantor and custodian of civilization, and even malcontented youth looked to him for guidance, free to remonstrate in the knowledge that affection would not be withdrawn. The Sixties tore up that Oedipal contract, and now the young look only sideways, and warily: The father is absent or suspect, the state has become a multi-breasted mother, and the hole in the human psyche where the father once manifested is invaded by demons.

Regarding "Still"

Winner, Lauren. Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. New York: HarperOne, 2012. Clothbound; 244 pages.

  I liked the insight and frankness Lauren Winner brought to her earlier book Real Sex (on the subject of chastity), and so was interested in what she would have to say about her own crisis of faith, precipitated by life crises such as the death of her mother and a divorce. I've not had any such crisis of faith, but I thought I might find in her some sympathy for my own struggles with depression.

  Still is written elliptically, its "chapters" really more meditative fragments pushing toward something like prosody. I don't read it as a narrative of a loss of faith so much as a loss of awareness of God's presence. Around the middle of the book (p. 102), Winner shares a friend's observation which she finds comforting; namely, that God gifts some with a natural feeling of God's nearness and gifts some others with a no natural feeling of his nearness so that these latter might undergo the discipline to know it. I've often put myself in that latter camp, and wonder whether Winner's mid-faith crisis may have resulted from having to move from the realm of feeling to knowing. I know God's presence, though I have rarely felt it, and that is the foundation which keeps my faith from shaking.

  Across several chapters she returns to the relationship between busyness, boredom, laziness and depression, but without drawing any definite conclusion. Here, I think, she puts her finger on the dissatisfaction with the present moment which depression breeds. Any distraction is welcome if it promises escape.

  What Winner found, if I may be so bold as to speculate, is that one moves on and that the future, though different from the past, still remains. This moment, no matter its power or gravity, cannot remain and must give way to the next. And God will be there still.