At Sanctuary, we deeply value lived experience stories. We are grateful to Karl Persson for sharing his reflections on walking through the Lenten season while living with a mental illness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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As someone with depression and anxiety, it\u2019s always with mixed emotions that I approach Lent\u2014and this because the experience of darkness and desert and mourning are in some ways close to me all year round.<\/p>\n
Yes, in one sense, Lent can be a blessing, since it is when Christ and the whole Church suddenly join me amidst the darkness in solidarity. But in other ways, I can become a little annoyed and envious. In my more sour moods, it can seem like Lent is the time of year when all the privileged people get to do a little penitential cosplay\u2014give up a few minor things and come out reborn and happy on the other side. Happiness for such people is often easily paused at the beginning of Lent and easily resumed afterward. It feels a bit unfair to us sufferers that the terrifying landscape we inhabit\u2014the one we can\u2019t remember the beginning of and can\u2019t see the end of\u2014suddenly becomes a playground for ever so many acts of spiritual romanticism. The desert gets crowded, and those of us who have been here a while watch the antics and quietly wait for the crowds to go away. We know the desert. Or perhaps to put it better, we know we don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
What I mean by this, at least in reference to myself, is that it\u2019s not as if I\u2019m good at the desert. It\u2019s not as if I\u2019ve discovered \u201cthe trick\u201d to living here or achieved incredible sagacity. If you try to master the desert, it will master you, and if you try to master it in any case, you\u2019ve missed the point. The point of the desert experience is not to master it, but to survive intact, as a whole person, without giving in to temptation. It\u2019s a deadly, dog-eat-dog place. Can you survive it without it turning you into something bitter, dry, and twisted too? Perhaps only by a miracle.<\/p>\n
I realize that some will say I\u2019m missing the point. Shouldn\u2019t Lenten spirituality be something more healthy, perhaps directed toward prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? Well, yes. And I don\u2019t deny the importance of these practices, but there\u2019s still an ambiguous shadow side to Lent as well, a side that is dark and dangerous and sometimes fatal.<\/p>\n
Christ met Satan in the desert. Many of the Israelites died in the wilderness. And to those who say the darkness of depression and anxiety are not the same darkness as that which we enter in Lent, well, darkness doesn\u2019t come with a label. Sure, in retrospect it is easy to categorize and label, tracing with so many names what kind of darkness we have come through, after the fact. But part of the terror of darkness in the moment is that it is dark. If it gave us certainty about what it is, it wouldn\u2019t, properly speaking, be darkness. Can depression and anxiety\u2014provided we aren\u2019t merely refusing health care and self-care as a twisted form of spiritual masochism\u2014be part of our proper desert experience during Lent? I don\u2019t see why not.<\/p>\n
All this being said, I want to conclude this reflection with hope rather than despair.<\/p>\n
First, Christ is with us regardless of the feeling of his nearness or absence. As a desert dweller, I take much comfort in that.<\/p>\n
Second, I wonder if part of the point of Lent is that those surviving in the desert and those who are merely Lenten visitors should talk and swap stories. Maybe there is something a casual pilgrim in the land of suffering can learn from a desert dweller\u2014though come to think of it, everybody suffers, and maybe there are no \u201ccasual\u201d participants after all. Conversely, maybe long-time desert dwellers can learn something of hope from those who have touched it more recently or more thoroughly than they.<\/p>\n
And so this Lent, I\u2019m listening.<\/p>\n
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Note: This blog post was originally published in Patheos<\/a>. It is shared here with permission.<\/p>\n Cover photo by Eleonora Patricola<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n Karl Persson is Assistant Professor and Chair of Literature at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College, where he enjoys helping his students grow in their faith and their appreciation of good literature. His interest in the intersection of mental health and his Catholic faith emerges from his own experiences of OCD, depression, and generalized anxiety, which he has written about in a number of blog posts (see other examples of his work at The Inner Room<\/a>). Karl lives in Barry\u2019s Bay, Ontario with his wife, Meg, and their son, Andrew.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nKarl Persson<\/h2>\n
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