Depression and spirituality

** As someone frequently overcome by depression, I found most interesting an article from the October 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (subscription required for online viewing). It’s about Abraham Lincoln’s little-noted - at least not since the 1940s - almost constant state of “profound melancholy.” Toward the end of the article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, are some insights into Lincoln’s spirituality, and its relation to his struggle:

Throughout history a glance to the divine has often been the first and last impulse of suffering people. "Man is born broken," the playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote. "He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!" Today the connection between spiritual and psychological well-being is often passed over by psychologists and psychiatrists, who consider their work a branch of secular medicine and science. But for most of Lincoln's lifetime scientists assumed there was some relationship between mental and spiritual life.

Lincoln, too, connected his mental well-being to divine forces. As a young man he saw how religion could ameliorate life's blows, even as he found the consolation of faith elusive. An infidel—a dissenter from orthodox Christianity—he resisted popular dogma. But many of history's greatest believers have also been its fiercest doubters. Lincoln charted his own theological course to a living vision of how frail, imperfect mortals could turn their suffering selves to the service of something greater and find solace—not in any personal satisfaction or glory but in dutiful mission.

An original theological thinker, Lincoln discounted the idea, common among evangelicals, that sin could be wiped out through confession or repentance. Rather, he believed, as William Herndon explained, "that God could not forgive; that punishment has to follow the sin." This view fitted with both the stern, unforgiving God of Calvinism, with which Lincoln had been raised, and the mechanistic notion of a universe governed by fixed laws. But unlike the Calvinists, who disclaimed any possibility of grace for human beings not chosen for that fate, Lincoln did see a chance of improvement. And unlike some fatalists, who renounced any claim to a moral order, Lincoln saw how man's reason could discern purpose even in the movement of a vast machine that grinds and cuts and mashes all who interfere with it. Just as a child learns to pull his hand from a fire, people can learn when they are doing something that is not in accord with the wider, unseen order. To Lincoln, Herndon explained, "suffering was medicinal & educational." In other words, it could be an agent of growth.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of "sick souls" who turn from a sense of wrongness to a power greater than they. Lincoln showed the simple wisdom of this, as the burden of his work as president brought home a visceral and fundamental connection with something greater than he. He repeatedly called himself an "instrument" of a larger power—which he sometimes identified as the people of the United States, and other times as God—and said that he had been charged with "so vast, and so sacred a trust" that "he felt that he had no moral right to shrink; nor even to count the chances of his own life, in what might follow." When friends said they feared his assassination, he said, "God's will be done. I am in His hands."

Some articles about depression and spirituality:

Out of the prison of depression

Depression's hold released by the Word of God

Stay right here -- God needs you