Depression, Lent, and Easter

I am always relieved when the end of Lent arrives. Not because I found the giving things up part difficult. For the depressed person, giving things up is relatively easy. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, once defined depression as a disorder “whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.” This characteristic manifestation is called anhedonia, the inability to enjoy things people normally find enjoyable. When you don’t and/or can’t derive pleasure from something, giving it up isn’t that hard. When the “something” is basically everything, it’s even easier. No, the pain of Lent is something worse.

Lenten Depression

I am one of the estimated three million American adults who live with persistent depressive disorder, a.k.a., dysthymia. It’s characterized by “loss of interest in daily activities,” and — important for Lent — “hopelessness,” “low self-esteem, self-criticism or feeling incapable,” and “feelings of guilt and worries over the past,” among other things.

For the depressed person, giving things up is relatively easy. When you don’t and/or can’t derive pleasure from something, giving it up isn’t that hard. When the “something” is basically everything, it’s even easier. No, the pain of Lent is something worse.

The severity of these traits varies throughout the year. Sometimes, I can do a reasonable imitation of being happy, or at least not depressed. Other times, their effects are are more severe. Then, making sure that I am meeting my basic obligations -- working, taking care of my son, etc. -- is all I can do. Making things religiously interesting, by which I mean challenging, by which I really mean the stuff of dark nights of the soul, is that these severe periods tend to coincide with Advent and Lent. Before you ask, I don’t know why this is the case. I only know that mid-February through mid-April and early November through mid-December are the worst times of the year for my depression. I’m far from alone in this respect. Of the two, Advent is the easiest to navigate. There, the challenge is how to experience “devout and joyful expectation” while feeling depressed and hopeless. The season doesn’t reinforce the characteristics l listed above. Also, my mood seems to lift a week or so before Christmas Day.

The Tough Lent

Lent is much tougher. Not the works of charity and certainly not the giving things up part. The tough part is the self-examination. The problem isn’t self-examination per se. Repentance and ongoing conversion require self-examination and honesty about ourselves. That’s why I am drawn, however fitfully, to the Examen of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The problem is with the kind of thinking, common in online and what I call “entrepreneurial” Catholicism, that literally calls Lent a “Catholic colonoscopy.” The “probe” in this case is a series of questions about the way we live our lives, all of which provide fertile terrain for self-criticism and feelings of guilt.

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The self-criticism-and-feelings-of-guilt associated with persistent depression is different from the objective guilt that we confess during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The latter is guilt over something we have done: e.g. lust, lie, steal, hate. The former is guilt over what we are: unworthy of love, respect, and esteem.

Ruthless Self-Scrutiny

These kinds of practices turn Lent into a time of ruthless self-scrutiny. It becomes a six-week long rehearsal of the seemingly limitless ways I fail to love the Lord our God with all my heart, soul, and mind, and the seemingly limitless ways I fail to love my neighbor as my self. For depressed people, this adds fuel to an-already raging fire. Monica Coleman asks: “Do people who live with depression really need more introspection?  I mean, isn’t that part of our challenge? That we are too internal. That our thoughts turn in on themselves — sometimes betraying us, or making us think the worst things about ourselves.”

The self-criticism-and-feelings-of-guilt associated with persistent depression is different from the objective guilt that we confess during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The latter is guilt over something we have done: e.g. lust, lie, steal, hate. The former is guilt over what we are: unworthy of love, respect, and esteem.

It’s possible that I don’t understand what Lenten self-examination is for or how it’s supposed to work. If that’s the case, it’s because this is how I have been taught to observe Lent by people -— both clergy and laity -— who are convinced that the problem in the Church is that ordinary Catholics are insufficiently scrupulous and introspective. It’s possible that this diagnosis is true. What’s certain is that it’s not true of all Catholics, and, what’s more, there are some Catholics for whom an excess of scrupulosity and introspection is the stuff of which mental illness and suffering are made. This matters, because people are not interchangeable. The combination of our embodiedness and lived experiences makes us, if not unique, at least not “one size fits all.” We respond to what we are are told and how we are told it differently.

On to Holy Week

Thankfully, Lent gives way to Holy Week and, with this, my focus goes from my failures to what the late Father Francis Martin called “the act of love in which Jesus died.” We are invited to keep “our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith for the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame.” As a result, as St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “I live no longer, but the Anointed One lives within me; and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness that is of God’s Son, who loves me and delivered himself up on my behalf.” (Translation by David Bentley Hart.) Holy Week gives way to Easter and reading through the Book of Acts, where we hear what “living by the faithfulness that is of God’s Son” might look like. Men the first half Luke-Acts depicted as often clueless and deeply-flawed are turning the world upside-down through their witness to what God has done in Christ. All of this is a much-needed invitation to get outside of the most dangerous place in the world: my head. At the same time, the combination of more sunlight, brain chemistry, etc., come together and my mood begins to lift. The combination of what I’m reading, praying, and experiencing inside my brain/mind — I’ve stopped trying to distinguish between the physical thing we call our “brains” and our subjective experience of it we call “mind” —  is something that resembles hope. Shy of Jerusalem, that is the best this embodied being can hope for.   Roberto Rivera has written for First Things, Touchstone, and Sojourners. He worked with the late Charles Colson as a principal writer for two decades. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his son, David. His previous article was The Pro-Life Movement Goes Cheap.