Depression Cure #7: Pray More, Sin Less

This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.

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The following fall, I entered high school. Surprisingly, the first few weeks weren’t too bad. The kids I’d joined for lunch during middle school had become, if not friends, buddies. I never felt fully accepted by them, but we passed the time together. When I think of those kids now, I wish I would have appreciated what I had: They were artistic, unconventional and hella smart. On one level, I knew this; on another, I could only see that they were sinners. Cognitive dissonance is such a bitch.

It wasn’t only confusion about others that bothered me; I couldn’t quite figure myself out, either. At church, I was radiantly confident and perfectly clear where the line lay between right and wrong. At school, I was devastatingly lonely and desperate to fit in, even if that meant swearing once in a while. I often wondered what each of my lives would think about my other life if ever they should meet. They rarely did.

Freshman year passed without major incident. I used plenty of unoriginal coping skills for my depression–boredom food, random crushes, beauty treatments. I also continued to developed a few healthy ones–books, baths and friends. There’s a picture of me holding a mug and resting my Converse All-Stars on Judith’s dining room table, smiling confidently. There were blond streaks in my pony-tailed hair. In the picture, I am pretty, and looking back I realize I was never ugly. It was the confidence, and the smile, that made the difference.

Then, of course, there was the ultimate coping skill: religion. My belief system gave me much-needed hope–but there were strings attached. Church gave me a place to practice being my best, most outgoing self, but it also gave me a … problematic … worldview. I feared the wrath of God if I listened to non-Christian music or had a crush on a boy. I was wracked with guilt over things I hadn’t even done, but just thought or felt. Everything, it seemed, was sinful. Could a more effective tool for exacerbating my puberty-fueled identity crisis be invented?

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One of the many clashes between my identities came during my Sophomore year when I attended a weekend camp with my youth group. During the lengthy Friday and Saturday night services, amid evocative music and other carefully crafted bonding experiences, the participants were asked to share their sins and repent. I’d always had a tender conscience, and a strong sense of personal responsibility, which is why at the time, repentance was an attractive option. It would cleanse me of my sins, but also demonstrate, publicly, my goodness and humility. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t view the group dynamics or my expected response this way. Instead, I saw my choice to take the microphone in the front of the room and confess to “swearing” as a deeply honest expression of my values. The retreat drew me closer to my church friends while challenging my interactions with the rest of the world: It’s us or them, my community seemed to be telling me. Not surprisingly, I chose my church friends, and by extension, God.

It seemed like the more prudent bet.

The interesting thing about this experience was that, briefly, it worked: For an entire week following the retreat, I felt a deep inner peace. I was blissed out in that way meditators describe sometimes. It felt like being in love, but without all the nerves.

It was the best feeling I’d ever had.

That Monday, I returned to school and life as usual. But something felt a bit off. I didn’t know how to interact with my friends anymore–what would Jesus do, and all that. Noticing my near-silence, one of my friends said, “What’s wrong with you? I haven’t heard you swear once all day.” I shrugged my shoulders and tried to play it off. She didn’t press the issue, and neither did my other friends at the table.

That day, I pondered an existential question: Was my deepened spiritual awareness compatible with my life at high school? I didn’t think so. I was faced with a decision: continue to try to fit in with my school friends, or ditch them for God? I chose the latter, and withdrew from the best school friendships I’d ever had in order to honor my newly minted inner stillness with outer calm.

Anything else would be hypocrisy.

Additional social isolation wouldn’t bother me too much, I figured, as long as I could maintain this spiritual high.

But there was a problem: As the days wore on, the feeling began to recede. I became concerned: How could I hold on to this blissful feeling? Clearly, I’d have to be careful. I would avoid all sin and read the Bible every day. I would repent regularly and maybe even witness about Jesus now and then. But would it be enough?

Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be. I was right.

It didn’t happen right away. But by the end of that year, I had stopped going to dances and spending time with them after school. We still ate lunch together but I sat on the end of the table so I wouldn’t be in the way and I didn’t talk much. 

I was a loner again. 

And I was sick of trying to pretend otherwise.  

***

Though this spiritual experience might have been my most profound to date, religiously inspired euphoria wasn’t new to me. On at least four other occasions, and on several occasions following that weekend retreat, I had briefer significant experiences with the Divine.

Several of these occurred at other Christian retreats. (Those camps. They know what to do.) Maybe it really was God that blessed me with the feelings of peace and love. Or maybe the situations were orchestrated in a way that encouraged belief that such feelings were possible.

Belief is a powerful thing, after all.

These spiritual experiences weren’t problematic in and of themselves–for the most part, they were lovely and life-affirming. It was the interpretations provided to me that increased my already significant feelings of guilt and alienation and decreased my chances of finding my way to mental health.

An example: One weekend, at a prayer retreat I attended with my mom, brother and sister, families were invited to wash each other’s feet, as Jesus had done for his disciples. As I kneeled before my mother, touching her beautifully creased and tanned skin, I burst into spontaneous tears of love. Afterwards, she told me that I now knew true repentance. I hadn’t known true repentance before? I wondered. There are tiers to this? My siblings hadn’t cried that day. Had I surpassed them spiritually?

At another retreat, as my sister and I doodled on sketch pads and otherwise tried to calmly endure the boredom of a long and featureless meeting, my mother turned in our direction, then knelt over her chair to pray. I glanced at her face, and as I did so, I was struck suddenly and hard. The look on her face was one of deep pain.

Immediately, I began to sob, then joined her on the floor. I told her over and over that I was sorry for ever hurting her, and that I loved her. Because I did. I really, really loved my mother, and the experience we shared could have remained pure. Instead, the following day, my mother said this: “Last night, you received the baptism of love.”

In her eyes, I had leveled up. Again.

And so, it will come as no surprise when I say that after the youth retreat that fall, my spiritual identity was further strengthened, and the rules that went along with it, more carefully adhered to. Pray more, sin less. That’s what Godly People Like Me did. It was my new plan for becoming the person I wanted to be, and for feeling better.

From that week on, and through the end of high school, I tried as hard as I could to be a good person. I went to church twice a week. I devoted myself and my future (Christian writer? missionary?) to the betterment of my soul. Nothing is ever simple, and some of the takeaways of my faith were positive; I generally treated others well and didn’t make any seriously detrimental life choices. I maintained a few school friendships, but my efforts towards them were minimal. Virtue would be its own reward.

Wouldn’t it?

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“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them.” Epictetus.

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