7. The Weight: Faith, Depression, Anxiety, and the God of the Depths

What happens when the person singing three rows back on a Sunday is using everything he has just to put his feet on the floor each morning? A man rings his pastor on a Tuesday and says he needs to tell him something, and asks him not to be shocked. He describes two years of mornings that felt like someone had packed his chest with wet sand. He'd been smiling at the church door through all of it, week after week, and nobody had any idea.

In this episode, Graham explores faith, anxiety, and depression through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He shows how honestly the Bible carries mental suffering, from the psalmist asking why his nephesh is cast down, to the deep calling to deep in Psalm 42 where the word is tehom, the chaos waters of Genesis, to Psalm 88 ending in the dark with no resolution and God letting it stand, to Elijah under the broom tree being given sleep and food before anything else, to Jesus in Gethsemane perilypos, his soul surrounded on every side by sorrow. He opens up the Greek merimnaō behind "do not be anxious," and the ancient diagnosis of acedia that Evagrius and John Cassian mapped in the desert centuries before we had our language for it. He tells the story of Charles Spurgeon, the most famous preacher of his age, who knew despair from the inside, and engages with voices like Martin Luther, William Cowper, Julian of Norwich, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Kelly Kapic, and Walter Brueggemann, alongside the research and reflection of Viktor Frankl, Curt Thompson, Jonathan Haidt, and Andrew Solomon. He's fair to the believers who worry that treatment and medication let us off the hook spiritually, and fair to the young woman with a diagnosis, a prescription, and an app that reminds her to breathe, who told him she'd never felt so managed and so alone at the same time. And he asks what it would take for the church to become a place where people can say the true thing out loud, and be held.

Book recommendations: "Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness" by Kathryn Greene-McCreight, "Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering" by Kelly M. Kapic, and "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression" by Andrew Solomon.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636, both available twenty-four hours a day. Wherever you are, please talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

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See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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