A Hell of Mercy by Tim Farrington

Author:Tim Farrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Job’s comforters are reasonable, upright, pious men, and there is much of truth and wisdom in what they offer their suffering friend. Where they fall short is in their need to believe in the comprehensibility of Job’s suffering, in the smugness of their conceit that they can explain the ways of God to him and to themselves, and in their complacent sense that human efforts can suffice to end such suffering. In seeking comfort and security in a reasonable God and a tidy creation that can be comprehended, they must defend themselves against the glaring truth of Job’s condition. It is Job alone, in the depths of his utterly disproportionate misery, who sees God truly: God stripped of all that human sense can make of him.

We do no one any good by encouraging a schizophrenic, a serial killer, or someone with a brain tumor to see their affliction as a dark night of the soul. But most of us fall somewhere on the semifunctional side of the line that marks the purely medical condition or untreatable character disorder. Often, too, depression is symptomatic of a Gordian knot of social dysfunctionality, and the communal compulsion to treat the “identified patient” with drugs to “solve the problem” (and thus avoid examining the pathological elements of the social matrix itself) is strong. At various times through my own years of depression I was strongly urged to take antidepressants, but the social dynamic at those points was such that to do so would have felt like capitulation, surrender to a form of coercion. You may simply be the canary in the coal mine, the first to succumb to a bad atmosphere. I once saw a wonderful Gary Larsen cartoon in which a cow was lying on a therapy couch, with a cow therapist attentively taking notes in the background. “I don’t know, Doc,” the cow-patient was saying. “Sometimes I think it’s not me, it’s the herd.”

The point is, life is complex. Doubt as to whether you are in a dark night or “just depressed” is probably a very good sign; it means you’re alive and paying attention and that life has you baffled, which is the precondition for truth in my experience. It’s uncomfortable, but the more we learn to live with that discomfort—to just breathe and be amid the terror of uncertainty—the more reality can sing us its subtler songs. You may well be helped through your brutal moods or your bogged-down lows by prescription drugs; you probably need therapy (I attend my weekly sessions religiously); and your childhood was almost certainly a mess; but what Viktor Frankl says in his wonderful book The Doctor and the Soul is likely still true for you: “The ‘symptom’ of conscientious anxiety in the melancholiac is not the product of melancholia as a physical illness…[but] represents an ‘accomplishment’ of the human being as a spiritual person. It is understandable only as the anxiety of a human being as such: as existential anxiety.”

In general, it is fruitless to treat such existential anxiety as an obstacle.

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