Christmas Depression: The Flood and the Mercy



"Being a writer is a bit like being in a war sometimes. Careers are strange, with unexpected gains and losses. People are on your side until they're not. The blank page can feel like a battlefield. It's good to have an ally to talk it through with, and Ned Vizzini was the best kind of ally to have in that particular war. You wanted him in your literary trench." 

Writer Cecil Castellucci in a tribute in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Ned Vizzini

Ned Vizzini has committed suicide. He had written poignantly about his Depression. I think we do a disservice in some ways to call Depression a mental illness. For Depression is a reasonable response to an unreasonable world. Watch out who we call mad. We all are madder than we think. Perhaps the mentally disturbed only are affected more profoundly by a broken world. The banality of evil. The normalcy of the abnormal.

We have to legitimize Depression in order to face it squarely. Usually, people have good reasons to be depressed. That must be acknowledged and heard. Then, bind oneself up and move forward. The Christocentric response to Depression is to look upon the "Man of Sorrows." Is not the Cross and Resurrection both the picture of what is and what will be? Tragedy and Triumph. Grace through nails.  

All healing comes through a prescription of Truth and Love, not just pills. I don't speak theoretically about the consequences of Depression. That dark cloud hung over me so much and for so long that I just took the rain as normal. It was the way it was. Blessed are those mourn. Depression brought me to Jesus, like a wave washing me to a far shore.

Artists seem more dogged by Depression than other temperaments. The highs of artistic expression countered by the depths of emotional downward anchors. A culture can be assessed for truth, beauty, wholeness, and love, by how artists are experiencing life. They are the canaries in the coal mine of culture. The flood will come. In Christ, so does the mercy. Really like this song from Ed K, All That I Wanted from his album The Flood and The Mercy...     

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