I wanted to be sad. Now I’m sad.

Beth Warden, Indian Summer

[Dear Reader: This is the seventh in a series on the vices as the Desert Fathers understood them. If you haven’t already read them, please begin the series with parts one and two first.]

Normally I like to begin these reflections with some clever observation or anecdote to ease into the subject. But in this case it might be better to start with some brief explanation and by defining terms carefully. As someone who has had his struggles with depression, it is very easy for me to imagine how discussing the next two vices could invite some inevitable jumping to unhelpful conclusions. I know how I might have reacted to reading this stuff in the throes of my dark seasons. The last thing people want to hear when they are coping with depression is anything that sounds like, “well, just stop being depressed!” or an assignment of blame.

But that is not my intention here. Because when you wrestle with depression, you don’t just “stop.” You can, however, learn how to cope. Eventually you can learn how to identify unhealthy habits of the mind that amplify depression, and take steps to reform those habits. With work and self-discipline, the incidents and effects of depression can lessen. I believe all of this is made possible by the grace of God, who enables us by his Holy Spirit to look to Him for our rescue and take hold of his outstretched hand. I say this from experience, in the hopes it can shed light on a path to follow and encourage others to take it.

As always when I write this stuff I can only speak for myself, and your mileage may vary. So if anything I have to say is helpful or encouraging for you, I’m happy to share. But I do not intend this to be an exhaustive treatment of sadness and depression which covers all possibilities and applies in equal measure to everyone. What I do intend is to tap into the wealth of knowledge left by the Desert Fathers, the fifth-century Egyptian monks whose insights into human psychology and practical Christian spirituality were often far more penetrating than modern American evangelicals may be willing or able to recognize, for some insights I have personally found to be valuable and life-changing.

Sad, You See

The fifth and sixth vices, according to the Desert Fathers as recorded by the monk John Cassian, are “sadness” and “acedia.” The latter is hard enough to explain that we’ll just save it for next week, save that it overlaps with, is fueled by, and contributes to the kind of sadness Cassian describes. And both sadness and acedia overlap with depression and have the same kind of tidal tug-and-pull relationship with it. So they are worth considering, not as a means of heaping shame and self-loathing on myself when the Black Dog is barking, but to help me understand what is happening to me and pointing me towards help. Understanding this kind of sadness rightly directs me towards the virtues and towards the grace purchased by Christ’s blood which allows me to grow in them.

But yes, I can hear the scornful question inside my own head: “Oh, so you’re going to say sadness is a sin?” Well, no…not by definition. Among the things I’ve learned from the Desert Fathers is that very few things are inherently bad, but most things can be used to bad purpose. Sadness is just such a thing. There is a legitimate place for sadness is our lives, and a God-intended purpose for it, just as was the case for food, sexuality, and even anger. The problem is when we misuse these God-given gifts and faculties for unintended and self-destructive purposes.

My own experience is that I can be a little slow to recognize when I have passed from good use to unhelpful use. I don’t think I’m alone in this. But here’s one thing these trips to the desert have helped me understand: That sadness can become a habit, and that this kind of willful sadness which refuses any offered remedy is a sin—and it is crucially important to differentiate between this willful, habitual sadness that separates us from God and a healthy sadness that drives us into his open arms. What makes sin sinful is not a violation of some arbitrary rule written on some dusty piece of parchment or chipped into a rock somewhere. Sin is sinful because it steals my allegiance to God, leading to separation. It vandalizes a piece of his creation he cares very much about: Me. Weird as it may sound, these confrontational, controversial thoughts have been encouraging and life-changing to me. I pray I can explain why.

Eaten Away From The Inside

Cassian’s treatment of sadness, in the ninth book of his Institutes, is by far the shortest of the eight vices. It is hardly exhaustive, and seems to serve mostly as a lead-in to the next book on acedia. He spends more space describing what sadness causes a person to do than he does explaining what it is, which is actually useful. Looking at the effects of what he calls “consuming sadness” on a person might be the best way to demonstrate that it is both self-destructive and avoidable.

The ultimate result of the kind of sadness Cassian describes is separation, from both God and from human fellowship. Monks mired in this sadness, he wrote, found their very thoughts under attack; such sadness “does not permit [the monk’s mind] to carry out its prayers with its customary eagerness of heart, nor does it allow it to dwell upon the remedies of sacred writings” (Institutes I.1). It is a sort of spiritual auto-immune disorder: Once the illness takes hold, it attacks the very mechanisms designed for healing. Notice this very important progression: What we feel pollutes what we think, which in turn pollutes what we want, which finally pollutes what we do…inevitably polluting what we think even further. Lather, rinse, repeat; dwelling on sadness becomes a death spiral.

Cassian compares a person consumed with sadness to a moth-eaten garment or worm-eaten wood, neither of which are able to carry out their purposes usefully. My temptation—due to the auto-immune disorder—when reading stuff like that is to view it as a condemnation, but I think it is far more helpful and healthy to view it as a warning and a reminder. When you’ve been sick enough or injured enough, you will do whatever you can to not go through that again if it is within your power. You learn to protect your body, through diet or exercise or avoiding certain high-risk activities, against repeated illness or injury. The mind and the spirit are not different. Health is found in relationship with God; Cassian’s “consuming sadness” tricks us into hiding from him even though being close to him is what we most need.

“For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”

1 Corinthians 7:10

This sadness similarly corrodes interpersonal relationships. Cassian describes the increasing irascibility and irrationality of monks in whose minds and hearts sadness had taken hold: “We are unable to welcome with our usual courtesy the arrival even of these who are dear to us and our kinfolk, and we consider whatever they say in innocuous conversation to be inappropriate and unnecessary and do not give them a gracious response, since the recesses of our heart are filled with the gall of bitterness” (IV). I recognize these symptoms in my own behavior; by his use of “we” and “our” in his description, Cassian indicates that he too is speaking from personal experience. So much of interpersonal communication depends on the hearer’s interpretation of things done and said, and so many conflicts can be traced right to the hearer interpreting things in the worst possible way.

Cassian goes on to note the temptation to withdraw from people in the mistaken belief that things will get better if only they weren’t around. But even if our sadness and irritation can be explained by the behavior of other people, enough self-absorption lurks in any human heart that withdrawal will not end our misery. (In fact, Cassian observes that sadness—and acedia—were acute problems for many of the anchorites, mature monks who lived as solitaries for long periods of time.) By ignoring that we “have stored up within ourselves the causes of our offenses and the seeds of our vices,” (V) we make ourselves more vulnerable to morosity’s influence by casting the blame to others and isolating ourselves.

Good Grief

It is important to remember that sadness can serve a useful and necessary purpose. Solomon wrote there is “a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4); Paul instructed us to “rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). When we need to mourn, we need to mourn. I don’t claim to be good at it, just to know that it is necessary. Life is pain, highness; anyone who tells you differently is selling something. While that overstates the case just a bit, let’s not pretend that life isn’t painful quite often. And when it is, there is a time to weep, a time to mourn…and a time to heal. When I don’t mourn as and when I should, I actually open the door to this deeper, unhealthy, disintegrating sadness later. Sometimes we need to sing some sad songs before we remember that joy comes with the mourning.

Cassian doesn’t really talk about this aspect of sadness, and I can only speculate why. When grief over tragedy comes up in his writings the subject usually turns to other concerns (e.g., theodicy) rather quickly. What he does emphasize is the ways in which sadness is mis-activated and mis-directed. In many cases, it is the overflow of the other vices: “Sometimes [sadness] follows upon the vice of anger, which precedes it, or arises out of the desire for some gain that has not been achieved, when a person sees that he has failed in his hope of acquiring the things that his mind was set on” (IV). When my anger or appetites go unrequited (or when they are met but fail to satisfy my expectations), disappointment follows. Like any form of pain, disappointment is God’s gift to alert me to an unhealthy condition that will result in serious—perhaps lasting—damage if not corrected quickly. But if dwelt upon and obsessed over, disappointment often paves the way for depression.

Sometimes, though, sadness just happens. And if not recognized and counteracted, it can cause all kinds of mayhem. “Occasionally we are even provoked to fall into this misfortune for no apparent reason, when we are suddenly weighed down with great sorrow at the instigation of a clever foe” (IV). Cassian argues that such sadness takes advantage of any dormant seeds of vice we may have hidden away in our hearts and we need to take responsibility for that element of our condition. But he acknowledges that sadness can and sometimes does result from an external attack—by which Cassian means demonic forces. That might sound scary to some, and nonsensical to others. I actually find it a bit comforting, because it could explain some of my struggles as not being entirely the result of my responding badly when life happens.

My inborn reaction to much of this is to get defensive, and I have learned (well…I am learning, and prove many days that I need to learn it some more) to recognize this for what it is: The auto-immune disorder working to impede my well-being. I am learning to recognize the symptoms: Anger at myself for my shortcomings, distance from God due to irrational feelings of shame and unwelcomeness, irritability towards the people around me and a tendency to justify it. As I have learned with the other vices, getting wrapped up in the whole question of “oh, so you’re blaming me for my deficiencies, now?” is actually a very self-absorbed and unhelpful response. It breeds defensiveness, which mires me in the very self-absorption from which I need desperately to be freed.

And that may be the irony of sadness: According to Cassian, it is a capacity given to us by God to motivate us to humility and repentance. If my thoughts, motives, desires, or actions have brought me to a point of grief, sadness is designed to prompt me to seek correction and restoration. It should turn me towards grace, not guilt. As I have learned with the other vices, the best response to identifying a vice at work in my life is to turn to its opposing virtues and, by God’s grace, to pursue them. Sadness’s work is to sap my energy to pray to my Father and to meditate upon Scripture and to fellowship with believers who bring out the best in me, which is why I need to pray and read and fellowship all the more.

Sadness breeds defensiveness, which mires me in the very self-absorption from which I need to be freed. And that may be the irony of sadness: According to Cassian, it is a capacity given to us by God to motivate us to humility and repentance. It should turn me towards grace, not guilt.

In addressing the issue of this consuming sadness, Cassian puts a lot of emphasis on 2 Corinthians 7:10. Paul had upbraided the Corinthians for their many vices, but their response had been a “godly grief” and not defensiveness (at least not as much as one might expect). “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” Paul noted that the Corinthians felt indignation, but that indignation was, after some thrashing and flailing, ultimately well-directed. It led to self-reflection and correction, to their own benefit and to Paul’s comfort. Cassian contrasts this example with that of Cain, whose grief over murdering his brother was entirely self-serving and unrepentant, and that of Judas, whose grief over betraying Jesus was so consuming that, despite the certainty that forgiveness and restoration were his for the asking, his despair drove him to suicide.

Such is the fruit of this auto-immune disorder, which “is very harsh, impatient, rough, full of rancor and barren grief and punishing despair, crushing the one whom it has embraced and drawing him away from any effort and from salutary sorrow, since it is irrational” (XI). In contrast, the fruit of a godly sorrow is the fruit of the spirit: love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). These are the virtues to which we are called and for which we strive, and as they grow in us they blunt the corrosive effects of the sadness Cassian describes.

No Easy Task

I am not a counselor or a psychologist, and I do not pretend to be an expert on depression. Nor do I make any claims that my own struggles have been any worse or easier than anyone else’s. This is not intended to be a definitive tome on how to understand and deal with the topic. And I understand some of this is a hard sell to anyone who struggles with depression.

However, I have the benefit of looking back and seeing how learning some of what I have laid out here has helped me. I understand better what goes on inside my head and what I can do about it—and, for me at least, it is a tremendous comfort to know there are things I can do about it with God’s help. Understanding what the results of a misdirected sadness look like, and that they are not destiny but rather a choice I can choose to turn away from, has been empowering. While many of my low points have been due to circumstances entirely outside my control, I now realize that I have—by God’s grace—far more power over how I respond than I have often realized. I am learning to lay ahold of that power God has granted me and to not forfeit it.

None of that rules out or dismisses the need for or usefulness of counseling or treatment for some people amidst some circumstances; in fact, counseling may be a necessary part of helping to sort this stuff out and establish healthy priorities. I’m just firmly convinced from my own battles against very bad habits of the mind that there is a spiritual component to this. What we think, and what we want, matters a great deal.

Hopefully understanding how this kind of unhealthy, soul-corroding sadness damages our ability both to think about and to desire God will also help us to understand acedia, which we will turn to next blahg. Understanding them, I believe, places God-granted tools in our hands to push back against both.

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