depression

A Reflection on Beauty in Time

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Ever since I retired, I’ve had more time to reflect upon my years as a teacher, and my years of friendship with some of my colleagues, and my good friends. Sometimes I have to drive to a nearby town for an eye appointment, and I’ll have to drive right past the school at which I taught for the past 20 years, and when I do so, I experience a certain euphoria, all as a result of an influx of various memories. 

So much has been forgotten, so many students that have passed through my classroom, the details of so many days, etc., and although I do remember many things, I do think I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But there is a joy there that I experience when I am brought back to that place, among other places.

My good friend is a retired priest, but I often think of my last 30 years with him, visiting him when he was stationed at this or that parish, and then after I was ordained in 2008 I could give him a break from preaching. A teaching colleague started to join me on these weekend visits; he’d cook, I’d preach, and our friend would smoke cigarettes and relax. Those were great memories. And they’re gone.  

I am acutely aware that there was something beautiful in those moments, something I miss, and something I long to recover, to experience again. And I believe this is the root of tradition, which is an attempt to make the past present once again. We believe that doing something the same way, repeating an action, making it ritual, like singing happy birthday and blowing out candles, or opening presents on Christmas morning and having turkey in the evening, allows us to experience once again what we experienced in the past, which now, in the present, we long for. We long to connect to that past, to the people who perhaps are no longer with us. 

But it begins with seeing something in the past that we didn’t quite see back then, or were not explicitly aware of at the time. It seems that time strips away some of the dross of our experiences and leaves us with a memory that is purified, and something now radiates. 

I became more and more aware of this the older I got. I began to realize that this beauty that I saw when looking back, was there at the time, when it was not past, but present, but something prevented me from seeing it at the time, or appreciating it. It was buried underneath a host of baggage–perhaps stress, anxiety, preoccupation with what needs to be done at the moment, marking tests or creating exams, etc. What this means is that today, in the present moment, that element, that nugget of beauty that I will appreciate and see clearly 10 or so years from now (looking back and recalling this present moment), is here now, at this moment. 

So, the question is: Is there a way for me to become aware of it now, so that I can delight in it now, rather than 20 years from now? And so a few years ago I began to really look for it in the present, to look for this element, this beauty, that I know I will see in retrospect.

So I know that one day I’m going to look back and remember teaching Confirmation to these kids, in the church basement either at St Lawrence the Martyr, or Blessed Trinity, or Sacred Heart in Uxbridge, taking their questions, questioning them, and I’m going to miss those moments, so, now, when I am teaching these classes, I am becoming more aware of that hidden element in the here and now. Same with preaching. One day I won’t be preaching anymore, but I’ll recall those times when I was preaching at this Church or that Church, and I’ll see something, something very memorable. I visit the hospitals often, at least once a week. Someday I might be a patient at Southlake hospital, and I’ll recall the years when I’d walk the halls and visit the patients, and I know I will long for those moments again, and I am aware of that now when I am in the hospital visiting patients, walking the halls and stairwells, making my way to their rooms. It’s hard to be attuned to this when we are young, because the young mind is just not focused on the present moment, but on the future. 

And yet, the moments keep on drifting into the past. I am aware that when I discern that element in the present moment, I will often try to grasp on to it and keep it, but I can’t do it. It still drifts into the past. And it is always sad to see it drift away like that. 

And yet, for God, nothing is past. God is the eternal present. So, does that mean when we die and enter into his rest, that all those moments will be recovered in some way? That we will experience the accumulated joy of each one of those moments, in the eternal present? 

I think so. I am quite convinced that this is part of the joy of heaven. We are not to experience the fullness of that joy here, it will always escape our attempts to capture it, but it will be returned to us one hundredfold later on, in eternity. 

Existence in time is a constant dying, drifting into the non-existent past. But Christ conquered death; he rose from the dead, so existence in time is a constant dying, each moment of which will rise again, in glory. Tradition seeks to recover the past, to make it present again, like the Mass, which actually does make present the sacrifice of Calvary. But in heaven, what tradition aims to achieve will be achieved. The joy of heaven will include the joys of each present moment of our existence, and so the deaths of each moment are not permanent; we can look at each moment and instead of saying “good-bye”, we can say: “see you again soon”. 

Now, the gospel reading for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, was the Transfiguration. You know it well, so I’m not going to read it, but I have always been struck by what Peter says there: 

Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

And every time I read that, I think of Father Frank Kelly, a homily that he gave way back in the early 90s, and I think it was when we came home from a retreat in New Jersey, we took a bunch of students, and we had Mass on our return. And the translation at that time was: “It is wonderful for us to be here”. That’s a better translation than what we have now.

The Greek word here is not “good” as in “It is good to be here”. The Greek word is kalon. It is kalon for us to be here. 

Aristotle used that word kalon in his Nicomachean Ethics. The word kalon is derived from kaleo, which means attractive, and it is a word used in the context of aesthetics, the study of art and the beautiful. The kalon in Aristotle is best translated as the morally beautiful. 

The gospel really should read: “It is beautiful for us to be here”, or “morally beautiful to be here”. The beauty is the moral atmosphere. This is an experience of beauty, the divine beauty. And it is an aesthetic experience that Peter, James, and John want to perpetuate. They want to keep it from drifting into the past.

Moses and Elijah, they are from the past, but they are present, in the present moment of the Transfiguration, contributing to its beauty; they represent salvation history before Christ. What is past is made present, in the here and now, through Christ. 

God the Son joined a human nature to himself. The eternal, who is Beauty Itself, has entered into time and joined himself to the matter of the universe. Now, Pope John Paul II said often, in joining a human nature, God the Son joined himself as it were to every human being. He is present to every human person. Those who have the theological virtue of faith, those who have allowed Christ the king to reign in their lives, are given the light of grace, the light of faith. They have become aware of that deep and hidden presence, the presence of God the Son within the interior of the soul. That’s the kalon that exists at every moment, within every moment, in the lives of the faithful. That element of beauty that we see when looking back at things that have past is the kalon of the divine presence, stripped of the dross that acted as a distraction at the time. Our life is transfigured in Christ, right now, but there is so much that eclipses the radiance that the present moment contains. Later on, our memories of these events unveil the kalon so that we have a minor transfiguration experience.

To find that experience in the present, underneath the current dross that clouds it, we need to learn to be present. To be present is to be in the present. And to be present is a skill. It is interesting how the two words are akin: present and presence. To be present to another is to be in the presence of another, to be aware of their presence–not just their position in space. To be in the here and now, focused on the person before us. It is easy to be focused on a great person, but being present to the lowest of the low, that’s a skill. It requires an ability to see something in that person that is well disguised. Mother Teresa always spoke of the poor as Jesus’ disguise. 

Now, the Greeks distinguish two kinds of time: chronos time and kairos time. Kairos is used over 80 times in the New Testament, and it refers to a season, such as harvest time. Chronos time is measured time, quantified into an hour, or a minute. Chronos time moves outside of us. The clock is ticking. The present moment, the now, is here instantaneously and then quickly drifts into the past, always escaping us. 

However, we can be “within time”, that is, in time. We can move in it. If we move in it, then it is always now. As an analogy: think of a spacecraft. If we are outside the spacecraft, it zooms by us. If we are inside the spacecraft, we move along with it. Kairos time is time that we are in, and so it is always present. 

But, chronos time is real, and it makes demands on us. We have an appointment and so we have to move on. Peter, James, and John got a taste of the kairos time that is in heaven, but chronos time made demands on them. The experience of the transfiguration came to an end and they had to come down from the mountain. 

Chronos time and kairos time are simultaneous. Chronos time says I have an appointment at 10 o’clock, so I have to take leave of my friends and make my way there. But when I get to the doctor’s office, I have to be present to the doctor, pay attention to him, be a presence to him and allow him to be a presence to me. But, even the trip to the doctors, the drive, or the bus ride, is not meant to be pure chronos. I must be present to the beauty of the present moment. The view outside the window, or to the people on the subway, the walk to the doctor’s office, or whatever. 

God is outside of time, not subject to the passing of time, but time exists, and God is intimately present within all that exists, as the First Cause of all that exists. God, who is Beauty Itself, is present in each moment of time.

And my students feel it. The first assignment that I give to my Niagara University students in January is to have them write out a short essay on how it is they got to where they are now, that is, how they got to teachers college. Reading their personal stories of how they got to this point is really an exhilarating experience. Their stories are so unique and so rich in content, and there is often some hero in their lives, either their parents, who came to Canada under adverse circumstances but struggled and overcame these obstacles through faith, trust in God, and hard work, or a great and unknown teacher in their lives who had a profound influence on the student as a result of the way that teacher related to her students, with great patience and perseverance, or some priest in their lives. etc. Many of them have very positive memories of their school years. Each story from each student is so different, but each one is usually so uplifting and exhilarating. And it is so easy to see the hand of divine providence in their lives, leading them to where they are now. 

Now, it is amazing how many of these prospective teachers drifted from the faith, but returned, and it was the result of memories that were gradually uncovered, a feeling like something was lost, a world, and they rediscovered it. 

The transfiguration was really a gift given to Peter, James, and John, to strengthen them for the impending trauma of Christ’s passion, and the memories we create for our students, for young people in the parish, are ordered to the same end, to strengthen them for the impending sufferings and difficulties and traumas that await them.  

It is a ministry ordered to the creation of memories. I was going over these ideas with a patient of mine at the hospital, a young lady who suffers from clinical depression. I’ve been visiting her for many years now. Certain months of the year are very difficult for her. But I was telling her about the themes of this retreat.

I did ask her if she has any memories that bring her a sense of peace, and she said she had very few if any. And of course, she suffers from depression. When I spoke of this, she was reminded of Erik Erickson, the final stage of psychosocial development, the stage of integrity vs despair. Now, it is not quite the same in her case, because the stage of despair results from the fact that one sees the choices that one has made, and the despair is the result of those bad choices. Clinical depression is not something that results from bad moral choices. It is a brain disease. But I did give her something to think about. This is what I said:

We believe that God the Son joined a human nature and entered into human suffering. In joining himself to every man, he is especially present in the depths of our suffering and darkness. We don’t suffer alone, although it may often feel that we do. But we don’t. And this lady has a special cross to bear, as do all those who suffer from clinical depression. 

And they must feel like they’ve been ripped off terribly. Others have their health, both mental and physical, they are privileged, brought up in a family that is well off, they travel and they’ve gone to university, they’re working. Life is tremendous. And here she is, this girl, in and out of mental health wards all her life. Life seems very unfair. But of course, our God is a God of justice. He balances the scales, and the divine justice has been revealed as the divine mercy. I told her that when you stand before God at the end of your life, and you see and grasp the meaning of your entire life from God’s point of view, that is, when you see your life in the light of Christ and the paschal mystery, and you reflect on the prospect of doing it all again, you will not want to change anything. She reacted to that and said she just cannot imagine that and doubts very much that she would not want anything changed. Nevertheless, that is the case, because she will see that Christ was present all along in the depths of that suffering, that her depression was a special sharing in the mental anguish of Christ that he endured throughout his life, especially on Holy Thursday night. She will see how her suffering has imprinted on her the image of the suffering Christ, and friendships are based on common qualities, and she’ll see how much her life has in common with Christ’s life, unlike the life of prosperity and privilege. She can’t see that now, but she will in eternity. But, she can begin to look now, to reflect upon her life in that light and perhaps begin to see it, begin to discover the suffering Christ in the midst of that darkness.

But the suffering involved in clinical depression is deep, but the Lord is there nonetheless. The specific cross given to such a person may involve being unable to detect the peace of his presence at any level, but he is there nevertheless, and one day this person will see it and delight in it, and see what it has done for her, how that suffering has configured her to the beautiful image of Christ crucified. And so the scales will be balanced in her favor.

The Unique Charism of the Chaplain

(Talk given to High School Chaplains, St. Bonaventure Church, Toronto, November 13, 2025)
Deacon Doug McManaman

It’s a real honor to be given this opportunity to speak to all of you this afternoon. And it’s been delightful to have spent these past few weeks thinking back over my 32 and a half years as a high school religion teacher and reflecting on the high school chaplains that have been a real support in my life. There is no doubt in my mind that the special charism of the high school chaplain is the ability to listen to people. And there is so much more to this charism than we tend to think. Most people think of listening as sitting back and not doing anything per se, something purely passive, but listening is really activity of the highest order, but most importantly, it is an activity that requires a host of conditions that only certain kinds of experience can put in place. Since we are given the charisms we need to live out the vocation that is ours, it is obvious to me that the Lord did not call me to chaplaincy in my years as a teacher, especially my early years; I didn’t have the gifts and the specific charism that are so essential for a chaplain. That charism developed slowly and came later as I was called to the diaconate, and this process of acquiring the necessary conditions in order to hear is still ongoing in my life, and will be until the very end.  

My first teaching assignment was in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto, Regina Pacis Secondary School, which was founded by Father Gerald Fitzgerald CSSp. He envisioned a school in Jane and Finch that would serve those students who could not get accepted at the nearest Catholic high school, and I came on board in 1987. Father Fitz retired shortly thereafter, which was when they hired a Salesian priest as our school chaplain, Father Dave Sajdak SDB, and so it was at this time that I was introduced to the spirituality of St. John Bosco. When students would ask Father Dave what he actually does at the school, his answer was always: “I just hang out. That’s it. I walk around, and I talk to students, teachers, and administrators”. And of course he was a very significant presence in the school, and he was a very good listener, much better than I was at the time. When he left, Patty Ann Dennis, was hired to take his place, and she too was a great presence in the school, a very humble woman who easily recognized the students’ gifts and tapped into them, bringing out the best in them. 

But there was one year early on after she left for another school board when I was asked to take on one period of chaplaincy. And so I did. During that year, with a period of chaplaincy, I recall spending a lot of time with a Vice Principal whose father had just died, and who was also having a very difficult time with a small group of staff who became rather bitter and cynical–because it was a very difficult school to teach in. In the heart of Jane and Finch, one needed a great deal more patience than one would need in almost any other school, and after a while, some teachers just got burned out and wanted to change that school into a school for the advanced level–but that’s not what the original mission of the school was, and so they became very cynical, cantankerous, and bitter. This Vice Principal, however, was a very good man, but with the death of his father and having to deal with a small group of cynics, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned, frustrated, and perhaps cynical himself, which is why I did spend a great deal of time in his office that year, just listening to him. But one day I said to him: “I’ve been coming down here all week, and I’ve seen this student sitting there for a couple of days now, and that student the other day. These are good kids. What’s going on?” I cannot recall the details, but let’s just say he made it clear to me that a good number of students were being sent down for the silliest reasons. And so I decided to challenge this Vice Principal, who I really liked. I said to him: “Why do you put up with this nonsense? Why don’t you challenge us at staff meetings? Why don’t you say something? You guys say nothing, you go on as if everything is okay, and you keep all this crap to yourselves”, or words to that effect. As a young and inexperienced teacher, I always wanted to challenge my administrators, and here I had the chance, because he was a friend of mine, and I could talk to him in a way that I wouldn’t talk to any other administrator–I knew there would be no repercussions. And, he could talk to me in a way that he would not speak to any other teacher, that is, he didn’t have to fear a grievance letter, of which he had plenty. 

He told me in no uncertain terms that my neat and tidy solutions were the product of inexperience, they were not solutions at all, but imprudence rooted in a lack of data that would only result in a heap of difficulties. He helped me to see that there are many more levels for an administrator to consider, far more than a teacher has to consider: i.e., senior administration at the board level, the union, parents, police, the law, teachers, etc. When one becomes an administrator, one acquires a purview that is very different, far more complex and much larger than that of a teacher. I realized that the four walls of my classroom shielded me from appreciating the complexity of this work. I became a more grateful teacher, but it was an eye opener for me, and I became a better listener to those in administration than I had been previously and was able to offer much greater support to all my administrators in the following years. 

I had an interesting dream that year as well. Over the years, I had dreams that were in many ways visions, as it were. Sometimes we are too busy to hear what the Lord is saying to us, but when we sleep, we just can’t interfere, so we are more disposed to listen to what God is trying to tell us. And I know when a dream is more than a dream, because I remember the details, I usually wake up in a spirit of joy, and it feels as if I just had a holiday and I have renewed strength to continue. But this was a very simple dream. I was in a huge barn, and I went to the barn door, the upper part of which was open, and I looked out onto this huge pasture, covered in manure, everywhere. I look to my left and see this beautiful stallion, and there’s a woman grabbing the hoof of this beautiful horse, like a farrier would, and cleaning the shit off of it, and she looks over at me and yells out my name and tells me to get out there and help her. So I did. 

Now, I knew immediately upon waking that the stallion symbolizes my Vice Principal friend, and the woman, I knew, was Mary, the blessed mother. It’s a great image of Mary. She spoke to me with such familiarity, like an older sister, and she was shoveling shit with her hands. Very important. That’s how I knew my time with this Vice Principal was important. Just listen, help clean off the crap that is thrown at him every day, help him not to get discouraged.

The following year I was back in the classroom, which is where I wanted to be, but the experience of teacher cynicism, which was a very difficult ordeal for me, took me a bit further in terms of my ability to listen to a certain sector of the school, namely administration. And that’s why I never became an administrator. Many of my friends became administrators and so I knew what they had to go through, because they would tell me. I also knew I didn’t have those gifts, and administration is a charism that St. Paul lists among the various charisms he speaks about in 1 Corinthians and Romans. 

Another painful but significant experience I had that helped me in terms of my ability to listen to and genuinely hear a certain group of people took place in 2011. I was ordained a deacon three years by then, and as a deacon my ministry was to those who suffer from mental illness. Every week I would visit CAMH, the old Queen Street Mental Health Center downtown. I was still a teacher, however, and we had been preparing to introduce the IB program in our school and I was set to teach the Theory of Knowledge course. Well, one day while visiting the philosophy classes at St. Theresa of Lisieux Secondary School in Richmond Hill, Friday, Dec 23rd, the last day before the Christmas holidays, I began to sweat, and I was getting the shivers. I stuck it out and left immediately at the end of the day, and just got into bed. The next day it was worse. I had terrible pain in my head and neck and shoulders, and the chills were bad, so I told my wife and daughter to go on ahead to Kitchener, Ontario, and I would drive up on Christmas day. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. The pain got worse, it moved from my head to my legs and arms, and I was taking Motrin, but you can only do that for so long before it burns a hole in your stomach. On Christmas day, all I had was a can of tuna. On Boxing Day, I went to the Emergency, and the doctor thought I might have Polymyalgia Rheumatica, for which there is no known cure. I was put on prednisone and given some oxycodone for the pain. The oxycodone was too powerful for me; it felt great, but it was playing tricks with my mind so I stopped it. But I was in a deep state of despair. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night. I didn’t think I’d be able to return to the classroom ever again. I thought it was over. I could not imagine returning; for I was experiencing a general, all around flu like condition x 10 with lots of pain in my arms and legs, like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. But the worst part was the despair.  

However, at one point in our conversation I said to him: “I think I understand now what my patients have to go through every day, the ones who battle depression.” I was genuinely frightened, because I didn’t know how I’d be able to manage this for the rest of my life–there is no known cure. I realized I had to stop thinking long term and think “one moment at a time”, not one week at a time nor even one day at a time. But I clearly remember saying to Father Kelly: “I think I have a glimpse, a much better appreciation, of what my patients have to go through every day”. And then Father Kelly said to me: “Just keep saying the following prayer: ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit’.

Now, I knew that prayer, because it is part of the Night Prayer in the Breviary that we promised to pray on our day of ordination. The problem is when you say a prayer for years on end, it can become just words after a while. So I decided I would pray this prayer and mean it: “Into your hands, Lord I commend my spirit. If you do not want me to go back to teaching, your will be done”. 

That night I had the best sleep. It felt as if a cool breeze had passed through my body. In the morning, the pain was still there, but the darkness was not. And eventually after a few days, the pain was beginning to subside, and I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and soon I was slowly weaned off the prednisone. But I had a much deeper appreciation for my patients who suffer from clinical depression. What I was experiencing was not clinical depression, they have it much worse, to be sure, but it was enough to give me a glimpse into what they have to battle every day for years on end. I was a much better chaplain to the mentally ill after that experience. “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, the kingdom of heaven is theirs”, and it is mental sufferers who in my experience are the truly poor in spirit, who recognize their utter need for God. 

But the Lord was not through with me yet. I’m reminded of Father Don MacLean saying to me in the sacristy one day when I was studying to be a Deacon; he said: “You never arrive. Remember that. You never arrive. Don’t ever think you’ve arrived”. As a Deacon for 17 years, I’ve seen things that I would probably not have seen without ordination, and not all of it was pretty; some of it was very ugly. I’ve known and worked with a number of very good priests over the years. When I first came back to the Church in my late teens, the priests who were the greatest influence were of course great priests, the most significant of which was Monsignor Tom Wells of the Archdiocese of Washington DC, who stopped the car and picked me up when I was hitchhiking to Nashville, TN, back in 1979. However, I have had my share of misogynistic priests, overly controlling micromanagers, insecure, arrogant, condescending, and envious priests; gossipy, petty, vindictive, male chauvinists who think women are good for little more than emptying the dishwasher, setting up tables and making coffee, setting down cookies and snacks, and other menial tasks, but not for giving talks for a parish mission or giving spiritual direction, much less preaching. Consistent with this clerical elitism–in some cases, a deep seated narcissism–, such priests, who are almost entirely indifferent to social outreach, will have a great love of liturgy and sanctuary decor, vestments, etc. These are the genuine poster boys for the clericalism that Pope Francis spoke out against so often during his papacy. I’ve had to taste that, experience that, and still do, it hasn’t disappeared, and that has been very difficult.

But I will say this: it has also been a great blessing in many ways; a painful blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. I say this because I didn’t always understand those who had been hurt by the Church. My mother was hurt by the Church; many of the patients I visit in hospital who haven’t seen the inside of a Church in decades have been hurt by the Church. I wasn’t able to identify with them completely; I didn’t really know what they were talking about. But now I do. I know exactly where they are coming from. And I am able to hear them in a way that was not possible earlier on. And so I am in some ways thankful for these condescending exemplars of clerical elitism who really believe the Church is about them and that the focal point of the life of the parish and the liturgy is them. 

If we read the Document for the Continental Stage of the Synod on Synodality that Pope Francis initiated, we will see that this kind of clericalism is not a local problem, but a worldwide problem. Francis is one Pope that understood the importance of listening, but it is remarkable how few clergy see its importance and still regard the parish as their own little fiefdom, to change and mold as they please. At one time in our history, not too long ago, a large percentage of priests were like that. Hence, the number of people who will simply not set foot inside a Catholic Church, except for the occasional wedding or baptism. 

In the gospel of Luke, Simeon is described as righteous and devout, awaiting the Messiah. It was revealed to him that he would not see death before laying eyes on the Messiah. He recognized, through the Holy Spirit, that the child Mary was holding was that Messiah and that he would be a sign of contradiction. He turns to Mary and tells her that a sword will pierce your soul also. Mary and Joseph both marvelled at what was being said by Simeon. Furthermore, Simeon blesses both Mary and Joseph. And so Mary, the greatest saint, full of grace, and Joseph, the greatest saint next to her, are amazed, impressed, they marvel at what was said about the child, and both are willing to receive Simeon’s blessing. Also, Anna, a prophetess, married and widowed, a woman of prayer and fasting, came forward too and spoke about the child. And one other irony: Mary and Joseph, the richest creatures ever created by God, are poor; for they offer the offering of the poor, two turtle doves instead of a lamb, and yet they hold in their arms the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And Luke, throughout his gospel, depicts Mary as one who “ponders these things in her heart”. She listens. In other words, it’s not as if she knows everything. She learns, and marvels at what she learns through others like Simeon and Anna, the prophetess, and ponders what she hears. Mary and Joseph seem to have no idea of their status before God. Both of them allow themselves to be taught, and to be amazed; although the old law is fulfilled in her womb, Mary does not see herself as superior to the old law, nor as superior to Simeon or Anna, even though she is higher than the angels.

This says a great deal about what true holiness is. Holiness is listening, and listening is an activity, not a passivity, and it is rooted in charity. The truly holy allow themselves to learn from everyone, and they are able to be impressed with others. The proud and envious, on the contrary, are rarely impressed with anyone or anything, unless it is related to them and glorifies them in some way. 

Pope Francis, early in his papacy, derided the notion of a self-referential Church, focused on itself. Many in the Church were distressed by the suggestion, but his successor, Pope Leo XIV, continues to call the Church to turn outward, towards the world, to become a more listening Church. In fact, two or three weeks ago, he said: 

We must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone. Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world.

Listening is utterly central to the nature of the Church, which is a living organism that, in order to grow, must appropriate so much that is good from the environment that is outside the organism and integrate it. That is why synodal listening is so important, listening not just to clergy, but to the lay faithful, recognizing their gifts, talents, and expertise. However, not every diocese has been on board with this. There has been a great deal of indifference, in large part because very few clergy have been taught to listen and see themselves instead as the “anointed” with all the answers to life’s difficulties and peoples’ questions. But the world is vast and inconceivably complex, with a myriad of pockets of knowledge, each one a universe unto itself. The conceptual framework of one individual person and even a small bureaucracy made up of relatively like minded clerics unconvinced of the power of openness and listening to the lay faithful–not to mention those who have been hurt by the Church in many and varied ways–is far too limited to exercise any kind of effective and credible leadership today. 

Francis thus envisions a more Marian Church, a Church that, like Mary, listens and marvels at the extraordinary gifts, talents, insights and abilities of unknown men and women who are unique and genuinely under the influence of the Holy Spirit, like Simeon and Anna in Luke. 

Recently I asked Sue LaRosa, who was the longest serving director of the YCDSB, to do a video for my students at Niagara University. We are looking at magisterial pronouncements on the right to association, so I asked her to speak about her vision of the relationship between senior administration and the union. She says [emphasis mine]: 

When I became Director of Education , I inherited a teacher’s strike followed by a provincial strike. Trust between the board and the union was shattered. I indicated to the Board of Trustees that “this is no way to live”. I committed to rebuilding trust and changing the culture. They didn’t discourage me, but they didn’t believe it could be done. I wasn’t totally convinced I could develop the trust level that would allow for a path  to stop the “blame game”. So, I reflected on my beliefs. I believe we are all born with unique talents and a desire to contribute to the common good. No one thrives in conflict mode. The first step was one of reassurance and deep listening –not defensiveness if this broken relationship was going to be mended. The turning point was the introduction of interest-based bargaining. Many of you may never be involved in  bargaining , but the concept of interest-based bargaining was the catalyst that restored trust. The name alone gives hope: interest based. The method is built on collaboration and mutual understanding . The board team and the teacher team trained  together. The key word here is “together”. We moved cautiously , learning together . It wasn’t a rapid shift. In this approach, everyone had equal status—whether you were the Director or a teacher. That leveled the playing field.  We were disciplined in following  the proven strategies. It wasn’t always easy . Actually, there were moments I questioned the path.  The result was  evident; we successfully negotiated five collective agreements without ever hearing the word strike again. We went from forty annual  grievances to three.

That was, of course, a small portion of her talk, but what struck me about this is that she understood the fundamental principles of synodality and ecumenical dialogue more than 13 years before the Papacy of Pope Francis. 

There have been three priests in my life who I can characterize as having been widely beloved. A few years ago I began to reflect specifically upon why they are so loved by so many people. As I pondered this, I came to the conclusion that the reason they are so loved is that they are genuinely interested in ordinary people. They pay attention to people. They approach you and want to know your name, what you do, where you are from, what you love, the names of your children, etc. I was talking to one of these three priests the other day. He was out of town at a funeral reception a couple of weeks ago and he went around to everyone and shook their hands, asked about them, their names, the names of their children, what they do, and so on. But when he got up to leave, a number of them asked where he was stationed, that is, where he says Mass. He’s retired, so he is not stationed anywhere. But he was struck by their desire to maintain contact with him.

Now, I wasn’t surprised. That’s why he’s so widely loved. He’s genuinely interested in people, which is why he’s still very busy as a retired priest. My wife was reading Chesterton the other day and came across some lines that reminded her of my retired priest friend. He writes: 

How much larger your life would be if yourself could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference, you would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played and you would find yourself under a free sky in a street full of splendid strangers.

That’s why these three priest friends of mine are so interested in other people, because they are so small in their own eyes, and so they always walk under a free sky in streets full of splendid strangers. 

I believe this is a small scale example of how ecumenical unity works. It’s not about having a great debate. These people were moved by the fact that this priest was interested in them as persons. They encountered Christ in him. ‘Someone loves me enough to pay attention to me’. In their minds, that has to be Christ. ‘Where do you live so we can make the effort to see you again’. That’s the key to ecumenical unity.

The more I was interested in my students’ religions, whether Islam or Sikhism, Hinduism, etc., the more they became interested in what I profess to believe. If they have Christ at some level, and if I love Christ, then I will have the eyes to discern Christ within their tradition, their literature, their great teachers. These students know from within that their religion is good, that God is among them (Emmanuel), and if they see that I am able to discern that, they know that I too must have something good that enables me to see this, and they want to know what that is, and they want to share in that. Ecumenical unity is not going to be the result of a series of Q & A sessions or a campaign of apologetics. It’s going to be a matter of mutual enrichment. ‘I see that you have something to offer me, that you can help me see the world in a way that I currently do not, that you can even help me to discover things about Christ that I would otherwise have overlooked, and vice versa.’  It’s not going to work if we insist that we have the “fullness of truth” while you others have only splinters and fragments here and there–so we don’t really need you, but you need us. No, at the heart of ecumenical dialogue is Christ. As St. Paul says: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and if he lives in me, then I have his eyes, and I will recognize him outside of my tribe. Hence, the importance of listening, hearing, seeing. Unfortunately, tribal Catholicism is on the rise, even among young Catholics who typically confuse evangelization with apologetics. Evangelization is the proclamation of the good news, and the good news is that Christ is risen, he has conquered death, that death no longer has the final word over my life and your life, and that in joining a human nature to himself, God the Son joined himself to every man, as it were. 

Chaplains are called to be the good news. That’s how we proclaim it: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. In our schools, there is great diversity. Almost 40% of my students in Markham were Muslim. We had Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and more. We are not called to proselytize, but to witness to the risen life of Christ, to the joy of Easter. If it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you, then it follows that those Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh students who love you and love what they see in you in fact love Christ without them necessarily knowing it. The good news of the risen Christ is proclaimed to them in you. That’s what is most important at this point, not that they leave their religion and join the local Catholic parish. 

Although none of you here are clergy, you are all priests, members of the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. Each one of us, when baptized, were anointed, with sacred chrism, priest, prophet and king, Christ’s threefold identity, and as a high school chaplain, you are rightfully exercising that priesthood. Catholics of the Latin rite are not used to hearing this, again, due in large part to the clericalism of the past centuries that sees the Church as primarily clerics: deacons, priests, bishops, cardinals and pope, with the laity at the base of the pyramid. And many have forgotten the efforts made at the Second Vatican Council to define the Church primarily as the laos, from which is derived the word laity: the people, which includes clergy. The Church is the fellowship of believers, the people of God. The hierarchy is only a small part of that larger Church, but the whole Church is a priestly people. The ministerial priesthood exists to serve the common priesthood of the faithful. It was Pius X’s mother who commented on his papal ring that people were kissing and she said to him: “You wouldn’t be wearing that ring if it wasn’t for this ring here”, pointing to her wedding ring. Marriage is a genuine priesthood. A priest is one who offers sacrifice, and the life of a married couple is a genuine self-offering. It is difficult, it is sacrificial, and life in our schools today, whether you are a chaplain, teacher or administrator, is holy work. It is difficult work, but it is holy, sacred. When we walk into a classroom, we are walking on holy ground. And chaplains are called to minister to the entire school, not just the students, but administrators and support staff.

Finally, let me end with this. I was talking to a consecrated virgin in our parish recently; she is a wonderful woman and gives talks to seminarians at St. Peter’s in London–but not here, for a prophet is not welcome in her own town, especially if she’s a woman–, and she is on fire about synodality, and rather frustrated with the lack of it at the parish level. But I asked her what she thinks I should say to you. She said a host of things to me at that moment, but I asked her to write it down. She writes: 

We don’t need to wait for some program about synodality to come into our parishes–like the Alpha program or a Bible study–for synodality to become a reality for us. We can start now in becoming synodal people, that is, people who intentionally encounter other parishioners, listen to them prayerfully in light of the Holy Spirit, come to appreciate their gifts, go out to the margins to encounter those who feel uncomfortable or excluded by church structures, etc. There is so much we can do now, as individuals or as informal groups of parishioners, to begin to live synodally, to be living signs of what synodality looks like. As Pope Francis said repeatedly, synodality is not just another program; it is a way of being church.

Yes, it will be great when initiatives taken by the Archdiocese begin to filter down to our parishes in structural reforms that will facilitate shared decision-making and accountability in our parish life. But we do not need to wait for those structural changes to come down from on high. We can begin now with grassroots, relational, attitudinal changes. What we can do now is about preparing the ground, so that when the structural changes do come, we will be ready to embrace them. Let us trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us in this, because it is so much a movement of the Spirit for our time – necessary and prophetic.

Of course, what she implies is that we should just start to do that in the school and not wait for the diocese, because you’ll probably be retired and in a long term care facility before we see anything like that. I was driving through Markham recently and saw, in big bold letters on the side of a barn, Be The Change. I laughed, because the line is such a cliche and very 70s, and yet it is true. Be that synodal Church. And that’s the unique gift brought by the chaplains that I’ve been blessed to have had in my life, the gift of synodal listening. 

The Evolution of the Temple

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome
Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the first reading, Ezekiel has a vision of the temple of Jerusalem, where water was flowing from below the threshold toward the east, from the right side. The water gives life to whatever it touches. But we know from the gospel reading that the temple of Jerusalem foreshadows the true temple, which is the temple of Jesus’ body, from whose right side water flowed as a result of the open wound caused by the centurion’s lance. And that water from his side symbolizes baptism, which brings to life all who are immersed therein.  

And so we’ve gone from the temple made of stone to the living temple of Christ’s body. But the second reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians takes this even further. He says: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (3, 16). You and I are temples of the Holy Spirit because we have put on Christ, as Paul says in Galatians: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (3, 27).  

And so we’ve gone from the temple of Jerusalem, made of stone, which will eventually be destroyed, to the temple of Christ’s body, which was destroyed but restored in his resurrection, to the faithful, each one of whom is the temple of the Holy Spirit. But, it does not stop there. Jesus not only houses himself in the baptized, he houses himself in all those who suffer, as we read in the Parable of the Last Judgment: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and in prison and you visited me. When did we see you this way? As long as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me (Mt 25, 31-46).

As Mother Teresa never tired of saying, Jesus disguises himself in the poor and suffering. They house Christ without their knowing it necessarily, and they are all around us. And not everyone who belongs to Christ is explicitly aware of the fact, and not everyone who explicitly belongs to the visible Church actually does so, for Christ said it himself: “Did we not prophecy in your name, cast out demons in your name? …go away from me, I never knew you; I do not know where you come from” (See Mt 7, 21-23; Lk 13, 27).

Desecration of the temple incensed Jesus because desecration was rooted in a failure to discern the sacred, and that spiritual blindness was caused by the greed of the money changers. And what angers Jesus today is the same failure to see and discern the sacred (himself) in the suffering, the struggling, ordinary human persons who have lost their social standing. We don’t have to take “poor”, “thirsty”, and “in prison” literally. These terms include the sick who are poor in health, and all those oppressed at work by an emotionally abusive boss or a toxic workplace environment, or those oppressed by a mental illness, or a lonely elderly person virtually abandoned by his or her family, or a teenager who feels alienated and estranged from parents going through a divorce, or alienated by an alcoholic father or mother, and so on. Christ is housed by the suffering of this world because he identifies with them, and that’s what love does. And if this is true, it follows that a hospital room, for example, is holy ground. I know of one priest who was so convinced of this that he would take off his shoes when visiting the sick in hospital. A classroom of young students is holy ground as well; a prison cell is holy ground, and so too a street shelter. Wherever we encounter suffering human beings, we have found Christ. A Carmelite biblical scholar recently mentioned to me that when he was in the city, he gave some money to a person living on the street, who responded by calling out to him: “God bless you”. This priest is emphatic that this man’s blessing has greater significance than if it were a blessing from the Pope himself. 

Speaking of which, Pope Leo XIV, in a recent homily, said that “we must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone. Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world” (30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 26 October, 2025). Amen.

Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength. 

One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day. 

I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me. 

Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes: 

All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.1

On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames. 

There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.2 What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

The Vocation of Mental Illness

On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes: 

Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.3

In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”. No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.4 Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

            “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

            “Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

            Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

            I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

            It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.5

A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”6 Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”7

If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.8  

Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.9 We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes: 

This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption. 

This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.10

Some Final Thoughts

Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness11—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us. 

To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.12

Notes

1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff. 

3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

6. Ibid., p. 178.

7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89. 

8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

9. “Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well.” Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959. 

12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96. 

Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength. 

One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day. 

I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me. 

Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes: 

All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.1

On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames. 

There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.2 What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

The Vocation of Mental Illness

On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes: 

Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.3

In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”. No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.4 Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

            “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

            “Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

            Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

            I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

            It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.5

A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”6 Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”7

If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.8  

Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.9 We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes: 

This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption. 

This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.10

Some Final Thoughts

Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness11—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us. 

To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.12

Notes

1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff. 

3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

6. Ibid., p. 178.

7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89. 

8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

9. “Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well.” Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959. 

12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96.