Saturday was the Feast of the Theophany. During the liturgy we heard St. Paul say, Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging symbol.
Saturday was also the fifty-day anniversary of my sobriety. Like all Millennials, I struggle with anxiety. Whenever the bad thoughts came, I would use alcohol to drown them out.
The trouble with anxiety is that, more often than not, we’re afraid of something scary. An agoraphobe could easily justify her fear of public spaces. She could quote you crime statistics and car-crash mortality rates. But, of course, the arguments are not the cause. Fear came first, and then sought out evidence to justify itself.
That’s why, if we describe our anxities to other people, they so often struggle to sympathize. It’s not that they don’t want to. There’s simply no objective reality behind our fears. I have a friend who’s terrified of clowns—something I learned only after passing a whole pack of them in Boston Common one day. Me? I love clowns. Which means I can’t enter into my friend’s fear. There’s nothing to bridge the gab between his subjective emotional experience and mine. He may have his reasons. Maybe he saw It at a tender age. Maybe he was mugged by a clown in the Common before. To him, that fear speaks with the tongues of angels and men. To me, though, it’s sounding brass.
Shylock says, “The Devil can quote scripture for his purpose.” Our enemy wants us to be afraid. He wants to make us doubt, to make us despair. And he’ll give us all the statitics—all the arguments and “reasons”—we could ever ask for. He can literally speak with the tongues of men and angels. And yet it’s all just clanging cymbals.
Freud saw the psychiatrist as a kind of father-confessor for the new scientific age. As usual, Jung agreed with him about the nature of the disease, but not of the cure. He said that a man with a good priest doesn’t need a therapist. Freud believed that psychoanalysis would make religion obsolete; for Jung, it proved that Christianity is more relevant than ever. Because some wounds can’t be understood in purely material or even individual terms. The disease is in our souls, and it plagues us through time and space. He by no means clears the guily, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the fourth and fifth generation...
My strong suspicion is that the West’s “mental health crisis” is really a spiritual health crisis. Our prevailing secular, materialist ideology denies our true identity as God’s children, made in His own image and likeness. We see ourselves as trousered apes and meat computers. Our media and technology cause us to disscociate from our environment: the people, plants, animals, and objects all around us. We’re cut off from our fellow creatures—from Creation. We dissociate ourselves from Reality and collapse into subjectity, becoming easy prey to those fears which the Evil One plants within us.
This is why St. John Chrysostom tells us: “Pray ceaselessly without anger and wandering thoughts; for every thought separating the mind from God, even if it apepears to be a good thought, is entirely devilish—that I may not say that it is in fact from the devil himself. For solely to cause the mind to wander away from God, the devil will dictate within the heart of man commandments and other good works, as well as certain rational and irrational fantasies, which we must never pay any attention to as worthy of our consideration.”
What John is talking about here is known, in modern parlance, as mindfulness. And so he warns us: “Whenever the mind becomes distracted, it must never linger in such thoughts, lest our assent to them be accounted as an actual deed before the Lord on the Day of Judgment.” True mindfulness is an act of the will. We can’t argue against the temptation to doubt or despair any more than we can argue against the temptation to lust or envy or gluttony or wrath or pride. We can only say no to the fear. We can refuse to indulge it. We can’t stop the Devil from tempting us, but we can refuse to be tempted.
Of course, we can’t resist by our own powers. That is why St. John urges us to pray the Jesus Prayer whenever the Enemy starts banging his cymbals.
“I beseech you to keep and never give up the rule of this prayer,” St. John writes, “for he is obliged, even when eating and drinking, or traveling or working, to cry out ceaselessly: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us,’ so that the very memory of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will stir us up to wage war against the enemy.
“A forceful soul will come to discover all things through the memory of the Lord, both evil and good; first it will see evil things in the heart and then good things. For the memory can both provoke the dragon and the memory can also subdue him. The memory can both detect sin dwelling within us and the memory can also destroy it. The memory can move all the power of the devil in the heart, and the memory can partly uproot it, so that the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, descending into the depths of the heart, can subdue the dragon who formerly had been ruling over the heart’s pastures, and save the soul and give it life. Thus, the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will remain and be the heart’s unceasing cry, so that the heart swallows the Lord and the Lord swallows the heart, causing the two to become one.”
A dragon ruling over the heart’s pastures. That image will resonate with anyone who has struggled with depression and anxiety. What can drive out the worm? What can silence the sounding brass? What can bring us back to Reality? St. John says we must go back to the memory of the Lord.
When we remember something, we draw it out of our own heart. It doesn’t come from “out there”: it comes from within. But this isn’t another retreat into subjectivity. When we pray the Jesus Prayer—when we remember the Lord in our heart—we re-join our most fundamental selves to the rest of Creation, and to our Creator.
My friend congratulations on the 53 days may the Lord God who is good and loves mankind continue to strengthen you and bless your work. If I may theologize with you for a moment one of the realities of the incarnation that people forget, especially in our generation which has totally forgotten Christ, is that he perfectly understands us. The Gospels tell us that he was so anxious and fearful in his sacred humanity when confronted with the cross that in the garden he sweat blood. He understands and will be there to drive out the fear or to at least gift you the strength to pass through that fear for his glory.
Interesting and thoughtful piece. As psychotherapist I too challenge the belief that there is a mental health crisis. When in fact it is emotional stress that is referred to in most cases. Stress is a normal EMOTIONAL reaction to the pressures of everyday life. Worry, fear, anger, sadness and other emotions are also all normal emotional responses. They are all part of life. However, if the stress that underlies these emotions interferes with our ability to do the things you want or need to do, this stress has become unhealthy. People, often celebrities believe they have mental health issues. They don’t. I agree there is a spiritual and emotional health issue rather than a mental health crisis. Man’s search for meaning…