Finding Jesus in the Storm. John Swinton

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СКАЧАТЬ and spiritual experiences. Similarly, understanding the biological dimensions of mental health experiences may turn out to be helpful, but it is unlikely to solve problems that emerge from poverty, loneliness, war trauma, and abuse. It is also unlikely to tell us much about what it means to live with and to experience these things scientists describe as “symptoms.” If you don’t know what these symptoms actually mean for an individual, it is difficult to know what you are trying to control and what a “good outcome” might look like. If you have only fifteen minutes with a patient, you don’t need rich, thick experiential descriptions. Thin ones will do just fine. Time is an issue, but the problem of time reflects deeper issues.

THICK DESCRIPTIONS

      The purpose of this book is to provide readers with rich, deep, and thick descriptions of the spiritual experiences of Christians living with mental health challenges. It assumes that in order to understand people’s mental health experiences, we need to find time to listen carefully and cannot be bound by assumptions, even those of powerful explanatory frameworks like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This book is about how Christians living with severe mental health challenges—depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder— experience their faith lives and strive to live life in all its fullness in the presence of sometimes deeply troubling experiences. The book is not about “severe mental illness” understood as a clinical category. Rather, it is about the experiences of unique and valuable disciples of Jesus who seek to live well with unconventional mental health experiences—experiences that some choose to describe as “severe mental illness” but that can also be described in other important ways.

       Life in All Its Fullness

In John 10:10, Jesus makes an intensely powerful statement: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Life in all its fullness is certainly not life without suffering, pain, or disappointment. That much is clear as we reflect on Jesus’s own life. Nor is it a life without joy, hope, and resurrection life in the Spirit. The quest for life in all its fullness is not the basis for a theology of glory—one that minimizes pain and looks past suffering.2 Rather, it is the foundation for a practical theology of the cross that takes seriously the freedom and release that we have gained through the death and resurrection of Jesus at the same time that it recognizes that cadences of the cross still guide the rhythm and the tempo of the day-to-day life of the world. Life in all its fullness is life with God—a God who accompanies us on a complex journey within which we live in the startling light of the resurrection but remain intensely aware that Jesus’s cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” still resonates throughout creation. Life in all its fullness is not life without tears but life with the one who dries our tears and moves us onward to fresh pastures.3 Such fullness of life is what I mean when I suggest that this book is about the ways in which Christians with severe mental health challenges can live well and live faithfully even in the most disconcerting storms. Mental health challenges are difficult experiences, but they needn’t prevent us from living well, living faithfully, and loving Jesus.

       Understanding Explanation, Cure, and Healing

      This book does not attempt to explain mental health challenges. It does not address causes directly, although I do clarify the problem of naming causation from both a scientific and a theological point of view. Instead, it intends to help all of us understand the experience of severe mental health challenges in general, and the role of Christian spirituality in particular, in ways that can bring about insight, compassion, empathy, and enduring faithful relationships. Its focus is on listening carefully to the ways people describe their spiritual experiences and trying to make theological and practical sense of lives that have been touched by difficult, troubling, but sometimes also profoundly revelatory challenges. The book is therefore not about curing mental health challenges. It is about healing, understood as the facilitation of understandings and circumstances in which people can live well with Jesus even when the prospect of cure is beyond our current horizons.

“MENTAL ILLNESS” AS A JOURNEY

      At heart, the book urges us to change our language about and modify our descriptions of mental health challenges in ways that can help all of us live peaceably and faithfully without misrepresentation and stigma. For the ways in which we describe the world determine what we think we see. What we think we see determines how we respond to what we think we see. How we respond to what we think we see is a measure of our faithfulness. Language and description matter.

Richard Arrandale, in his paper “Madness, Language and Theology,” urges us to reconsider the ways in which we talk about the experiences some describe as “mental illness.” He urges us to move beyond the language of illness, the limits of suffering, and the kinds of military metaphors that turn mental health experiences into battles that need to be fought and won. If “mental illness” is a war, then “those who professionally care for us are the allied forces deployed to win this war, and who often seem to do so with no consideration for the casualties. It is often the case that much of the treatment which is given has worse (and sometimes very long lasting) side-effects than the original problem itself.”4

      Military metaphors—battling with schizophrenia, wrestling with bipolar disorder, fighting depression—narrow the person’s choice of description and “treatment” and easily preclude the development of “nonviolent” understandings and approaches. Instead, Arrandale urges the adoption of a kinder, gentler, and more generous hermeneutic that allows for forms of language that open up new worlds and new possibilities:

If we dwell in the language of the negative and the military there is a serious danger that this will set the agenda for the people the language is used for/against. If we can learn to dwell in a language which is positive and liberating this may help in shaping that movement beyond enslavement and existential death. Language used in this way can be part of an exorcism of the linguistic demons which “possess” those with mental health problems—language (and thus a world-view) which, in its negative usage, is content to leave people to live in “the tombs” (Mark 5.2) of labelled madness. A more positive and theological language might enable people to break free from the chains and fetters with which they have been bound. Such a language exorcized of negativity and value judgements may allow people with mental health problems to be brought back into the kingdom from which they can feel alienated.5

      If the church is possessed by linguistic demons that prevent it from talking faithfully about mental health issues, then exorcism is vital in order to ensure its present and future faithfulness. A primary intention of this book is to facilitate faithful speech that moves us to faithful action. By developing a phenomenological approach that takes seriously the lived experience of unconventional mental health experiences, the book offers different ways of articulating the issues; different ways of understanding those who bear the weight of diagnoses; and different forms of description that I have seen bring about liberation and healing.

      Arrandale asks us to consider framing mental health in terms of a journey. A journey is something we embark upon, willingly or otherwise, as we travel from one place to another. Sometimes we choose our journeys; at other times we are forced to go to places we do not want to. Along the way, we meet people and encounter situations—some helpful, some not—each of which changes the direction of our journey. Some change the meaning of the entire journey. Some journeys are easy and the burden light, like a summer hike; others feel like the winter journey of a refugee. Along the way, we may encounter enemies and become lost and confused. СКАЧАТЬ