Soul-Dye and Salt: Integrating Spiritual

and Medical Understandings of Depression*

Mary Louise B n n g l e , Ph D
Jefferson Pilot Professor of Religious Studies
St Andrews Presbyterian College
1700 Dogioood Mile
Launnburg, NC 28352
Speculates on the many strands of depression, drawing particularly on
insights gained from Hebraic literature Suggests ways in which spiritual and
medical notions of depression can be integrated and made manifest and
helpful in the work of pastoral caregi\ers

eville Aysgarth is the Archdeacon of Starbndge in the novel Ultimate

Prizes by Susan Howatch ' He is a powerful man, accustomed to
authonty, unaccustomed to anything that remotely hints at weakness
When he is confronted with a difficult administrative decision, he summons
the necessary information and then moves ahead swiftly (some might even say
"ruthlessly," but that is a side of his character which we do not need to consider) When confronted with a difficult personal decision, he applies the same
skills
Roughly a year into a troubling marriagea marriage he deeply regrets
his wife goes into labor with their first child Twelve hours later, the hospital
informs Archdeacon Aysgarth that the child will have to be sacrificed if the
mother's life is to be saved Unforeseen problems have arisen severe hemorrhaging, a twisted umbilical cord, a lack of oxygen, potential brain damage
Aysgarth swings into action, makes the necessary decision, and then moves
immediately to "ring down the curtain'' on any unseemly ambivalence he may
be feeling about his child's deathor his wife's continued living
He attends to the needed details at the hospital, signing forms, offering a
semblance of comfort to his wife, making arrangements for a funeral He
attends the simple burial service alone, he carries the small coffin to the waiting grave, he tries to pray, but finds his mind wandering He heads to his car
Once there, he finds himself face-to-face with a man he has never gotten
along with very well, Jonathan Darrow, a priest and sometime spiritual director
for Aysgarthbut more often a thorn m the side Aysgarth knows he needs
Darrow's counsel to get through his grief, but he is too emotionally exhausted
to summon the humility to ask for help "Look, I'm sorry," he says, "but I can't
talk to you now I've got to go and see the Bishop "
"I didn't come here to talk," Darrow replies matter-of-factly "Nor have I

The Journal of Pastoral Care, Winter 1996, Vol. 50, No. 4

* This article was originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Conference on
"Depression and the Soul,' sponsored by Rush Presb) tenan St Lukes Medical Center,
Chicago, Illinois, on October 26, 1994
'Susan Howatch Ultimate Prizes (New York, NY Bailamme Books, 1990), pp 306-8

329

come to play the ecclesiastical nanny. My presence is more in the nature of a

symbolic act."
Aysgarth stares out at the tombstones surrounding him. He stares down
at his hands. At length, he stares at Darrow. Almost without knowing what he
is saying, he hears his voice form the words, 'You've come to stand at the foot
of the cross."
"That's it," Darrow responds simply. "Sometimes mere words are no
good. Sometimes in the presence of suffering, only symbols have meaning."
We have much to learn from this story, much to learn from this response.
Sometimes in the presence of suffering, only symbols have meaning. Whether
the symbol be standing at the foot of the cross, or sitting on the ash heap with
Job, or hanging up lyres on the willow trees of Babylon with one's sisters and
brothers in exile, our religious traditions uphold us with symboh of presence
which neither deny nor shy away from suffering, but which enfold it into a history, a communityand perhaps even into a slender promise of meaning.
Depression constitutes a particularly pervasive and an often untreated
form of suffering in our society. Going by varying names in varying contexts
depression, despair, the dark night of the soulit cries out for interpretation
from a number of different perspectives. Medical, psychosocial, and spiritual
vantage points all have something to contribute to our understanding.
Because the attempt to integrate these diverse dimensions represents a mammoth task, I open with a clear caveat about what I am and what I am not qualified to do.
I am not a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist, nor a psychologist, nor even
a pastoral counselor by training. I am a Christian theologianand I hope, at
least some of the time, a pastoral one. I am also a sometime sufferer of depression and despair (I confess to being less sure about the "dark night of the
soul"). I have been in therapy and out of therapy at various points, with a pastoral counselor and with a pharmacotherapist. I have "listened to Prozac" and
"talked back to Prozac." 2 1 continue listening for and talking back to the Spirit,
the Shekinah, the hidden and sometimes manifest presence of grace in my life
and in the world, as best I can discern it, which is often not very well. I have
written a book on despair and depression in relation to the cardinal sins tradition of Christianity. 3 1 continue to struggle with despair and depression and
to wonder what they mean in my living as a writer, a teacher, a student, a minister, a confidante, a friend, close relative of a sufferer of manic-depressive illnessand also as a child of God.
I have no quick answers about what depression is, or why it is. But as the
Jonathan Darrow character in Susan Howatch's novel helpfully reminds us,
"Sometimes mere words are no good. Sometimes in the presence of suffering,
only symbols have meaning." What I offer here may not even qualify as fullblown symbols. They are more sketches of imagesimages to dwell in, to
amplify and elaborate as we try to understand the many threads of this complicated life-weaving which we variously label depression or despair or the
dark night of the soul: the images of braided strands, colored dye and salt, and
the alchemists' and mystics' black sun.

-Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1993); Peter Breggin and
Ginger Ross Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
'Mary Louise Bringle, Despair: Sickness or Sin ? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990).

330

Braided Strands
One of the classes I regularly teach at my college is a general education course
for first-year students entitled, "The Individual and the Community" I frequently do an ice-breaker on the first day of that class in which I have the students mill about the room, introducing themselves to one another around a
broad range of topics which I have listed on the blackboard After a period of
conversation, I give all the students several long pieces of ribbon, instructing
them to hold on to one end of each strand while handing the other end to
someone in the room with whom they have discovered some kind of connection Chaos and hilarity follow as the ribbons cross and recross around the
room and people get entangled and attempt to extricate themselves from the
emerging pattern After all the ribbons have been connected, I ask the students to stand still while one person tugs on one strand and we see how many
other people feel the reverberations We do this a few times, and then use the
exercise as a vehicle for discussing the ties that connect us to one another m
occasionally unexpected ways
I think about this exercise from time to time, especially when confronting
the task of formulating a model of complex relationships In this particular
essay instead of observing fifteen college freshpersons milling around a classroom, I am contemplating the multiple forces which mingle within any given
individualbody chemistry, family upbringing, personal habits of thought and
feeling, social context, cultural milieu Any experience of significance involves
the interweaving and occasional tangling of all these strands If you tug on my
emotions, for example, my body chemistry will respond, and the students m
my afternoon class will feel some of the aftershocks, and further fallout may
show u p in my writing or my relationships If you alter my physical health, my
income, my social surroundings, or my framework of cultural meanings, a similarly broad wed of reverberations will follow Any h u m a n person is in part a
tapestry, m part a tangle of intricately woven threads
The tapestry/tangle image certainly holds true if we are talking about an
experience as significant and complex as that of depression None of us would
be simple-minded enough to suppose that any one strand of explanation
could account for all of what we feel in the most darkly painful moments of
our living Yet sometimes we are tempted to oversimplification, to reductionist s questions and answers The biological reductionist says, "Can't you just give
me a pill and make me welP" The spiritual reductionist says, "It must be God's
will that I'm suffering, so I've got to figure out why I'm being punished " The
sociopolitical reductionist concludes, "If only I weren't living in this oppressive
society, I wouldn't have so much to be depressed about," and the sociopsychological reductionist laments, "If only I weren't in this bad relationship playing
out all the destructive scripts from bad relationships in my past, I wouldn't be
so unhappy " When we pause to think, of course, we know that any one of these
explanations is too unidimensional to account for the full complexity of our
expenence But single strands are simpler to unravel than whole tapestries and
tangles In our weak moments, simplicity is seductively appealing
But there are no simple answers to the complex questions raised by our
depression, or by that of someone we care for The DSM TV (the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is clearly alert to the multiple dimensions

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ingredient in depressive experiences. 4 Instead of my textile image of interweaving ribbons, however, the DSM uses the more geometrical language of
axes and vectors. To account for what it calls the biopsycho-social reality of any
clinical disorder, the DSM counsels evaluating each patient along five axes:
Axis Ithe focal syndrome being presented;
Axis IIany personality traits or developmental problems which seem to
undergird it;
Axis IIIgeneral medical conditions, including any aggravating physical
problems;
Axis IVstresses in the patient's social environment; and
Axis Vthe person's degree of overall functioning or impairment
What we might note as significantly absent from this axial structure is the further dimension which I attempt to integrate into a model of depression, despair,
and the dark night of the soulan Axis VI for the dimension of spintuality.
I can understand a number of reasons why the DSM TV (like any DSM
before it) shies away from talking about this dimension. Among other things,
the spiritual dimension is a hard one to approach without wandering close to
what we tend to think of as the private borders of people's religious orientations (or lack thereof). But because I am in the business of theology rather
than medicine or psychiatry or psychology or social work, this is the very
dimension that I want to emphasize, not discounting the other dimensions,
but weaving them along with the dimension of the spirit into a more richly
comprehensive view of what it means to be human, and what it takes to be
healed.
What exactly do I mean when diagnosing a sixth strand or axis, a spiritual axis, to depression? The word spintual, as I intend it here, has a relatively
recent history.5 In sixteenth century English, "the spirituality" were the clergy.
Many of us who read journals of pastoral care rabbis, pastors, priestsare
members of "the spirituality" as distinct from "the temporality," the laity and
those positions of secular authority. By the eighteenth century, the term came
to mean "acts of soul" as differentiated from acts of the body, primarily mystical or contemplative practices. The twentieth century has seen a move away
from this kind of dualism and a stress instead on the totality of the human person, with the word spintual taken to encompass practices of the whole self,
embodied and inspirited, as it seeks to attune itself with a dimension of depth
or mystery or the sacred. As we use the term today, spirituality need not refer
to the symbols or rituals of any specific religious tradition. Rather, it broadly
includes the thoughts, feelings, and actions of any person who is stretching to
grow beyond the bounds of isolated ego in the direction of richer relatedness,
deeper maturity, and an enhanced sense of vitality and meaning.
By this definition, despair, depression, and the dark night of the soul
seem indisputably to involve a spiritual dimension. All three, in varying ways,
sap our vitality, stymie our relationships, and sink us into painfully deep questions of meaning. Of the three terms, I use the word depression most often,

'American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed.
(Washington, DC: APA, 1994). For another option for a "sixth axis" in the diagnosis and treatment of depression, see the epilogue to Arthur Klien man and Byron Good (Eds.), Culture and
Depression (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985),pp. 502-3.
5
C. P. M.Jones, "Note on Spirituality, "in Cheslyn Jones (Ed.), The Study of Spirituality (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. xxiv-xxvi.

332

because I take it to be the most generally inclusive. To be precise, by depression I mean a complex mental, emotional, and bodily condition characterized
by a general inability to find pleasure, even in customarily pleasurable pursuits;
a withdrawal from accustomed relationships and activities; a disturbance in
appetites for food and sleep and sex; a feeling of fatigue and tedium; a slowing of thought processes, often accompanied by an inability to make decisions;
an acute sense of rawness and weepiness, often for no apparent external reason. By despair, I mean the particularly cognitive component of this experiencethe assumption of hopelessness (literally: de+spes) which begins from an
experience of pain in the present and sees no way out of it in the future.
Despair consists of a shut-down of the imagination and a set of conclusions
that there is nothing I or anyone else can do to make matters better, so there
is no use even trying. The dark night of the souly finally, is the narrowest of the
three terms, coming out of a specific tradition of sixteenth century Christian
mysticism. Teresa of Avila and J o h n of the Cross coined this term to convey a
purgative stage in the contemplative journey during which worldly life loses all
its attractiveness and even the life of prayer dries u p so severely that the self
feels utterly cut off from God. From the most broadly to the most narrowly
defined, all these experiences, even the most spiritual, have both psychic and
somatic manifestations. (As Teresa of Avila said, "We aren't angels; we've got
bodies"). 6 All of them, even the most solitary, affect and are affected by networks of social relationships and cultural meanings. In short, all of them implicate the multiple braided strands which make up the rich tapestry and tangle
of the self.

Soul-Dye and Salt

The ancient Hebrews had a word for this many-stranded self which neither
Greek nor Latin did a particularly good j o b of translating. The word nephesh
(rendered psyche in the Septuagint, anima in the Vulgate) conveys the totality
of the human person, molded from the earth and animated by the living
breath/spirit of the divine. 7 "And so," as the Yahwist creation narrative puts it,
"the Lord God formed an 'adamfrom ha '"dama, a human from the humus, and
breathed into its nostrils the breadth of life; and the human became a living
nepheshua living being (as the RSV would have it), not a duality of soma and
psyche, body and spirit, but an integrity of embodied vitality and inspirited
flesh.8 If we will let Hebraic holism rather than Greek dualism guide us, we may
even return to King James's choice for translating nephesh as "soul." It is in this
sense that Thomas Moor uses the term in his best-selling volume Care of the
Soul: soul as "the font of who we are," the "infinite depth of a person," the
source of his or her individuality, the mediation of mind and body into a richly elaborated and profoundly connected whole. 9
If we use this definition of the word soul, then it becomes quite clear that
depression and despair (not to mention the dark night) are forms of soul-sickTeresa of Avila, Life, quoted by E.W. Trueman Dicken, "Teresa of Jesus and John of the
Cross," in The Study of Spirituality, p. 366.
Tor an excellent study of the term nephesh, see Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture
(London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 99-181.
8
For the translation of Adam as "human from humus," see Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric
of Sexuality (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1978), p. 77.
9
Thomas Moore, Care oftlie Soul (New York, NY: Harper, 1992), pp. xiii, 267, and xiv.

333

ness, and that any thorough approach to healing must address their soulful
dimensions. At this juncture, we as priests, pastors, and rabbis, practical theologians, and pastoral counselors, find ourselves particularly well-equipped.
We may, however, be so entranced by the potential for our contributions that
we find ourselves tempted toward a reductionism in the opposite direction
from the DSM-TV. Instead of omitting a sixth axis of diagnosis and treatment,
we may want to dwell so much on the sixth axis that we neglect the other five,
and this, too, would be in error.
So, just as I used the image of braided strands as a reminder earlier of the
irreducible complexity of human experience, here I have another complex of
images, captured in a pair of sentences, to guide our reflections. The first sentence is the famous from Marcus Aurelius, "The soul is dyed with the color of
its thoughts." The second sentence is my own addendum, "But a pinch of salt
makes the dye take better."
Anyone who has ever followed the instructions on a box of fabric dye will
know what I mean by my addendum. A pinch of salt prepares the environment
of the dye-bath in such a way that the fabric becomes receptive to permeation
by more color, and a richer hue results. Suppose, now, we extend this image to
the processes which take place in the human person, the living nephesh, when
she and her rabbi or priest or pastoral counselor are seeking to brighten the
color of her mood by "dying her soul" with more positive thoughts. "We aren't
angels," as Teresa of Avila reminded us, "we've got bodies." So it makes sense
for us to attend to the complex biochemical balances of those bodies in whatever ways necessary to make their environment receptive to maximal benefits
from therapy.
Certainly, we know that in the case of manic-depressive, or bipolar, illness,
dramatic results in calming the frantic and exhausting extremes of mania
result from the medicinal use of lithiumwhich is, quite literally, a pinch of
salt. Similarly in the case of simple unipolar depression, which, as we know, is
five or six strands wide of being truly simple. Mounting research informs us
about the role of neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and serotonin in
depressive mood, about the involvement of corticotropin releasing hormone
(CRH) in the biochemistry of stress, and about abnormalities in blood flow,
detected by positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, in the prefrontal
cortex of the brain during depressive episodes and in the amygdala or innerbrain between such episodes in people susceptible to recurrent depressions.
Since I am not a medical doctor, it is not my place to posit explanations for
these phenomena. But, as in the case of salt and fabric dye, I know from personal experience that antidepressant medications can make a person more
responsive to the remaining work of healing. And I know as a theologian
respectful of the Hebraic roots of the Christian tradition that we ignore the
bodily dimension of our nepheshrhealth or nephesh-sickness to our peril.
Now, as a Christian theologian, I am also a dyed-in-the-tartan
Presbyterian, so I am as well acquainted as anyone with the potential reactions
of "pharmacological Calvinists" to this line of argument. Pharmacological
Calvinists, in a phrase coined by Gerald Klerman and popularized in Peter
Kramer's best-selling Listening to Prozac, are those among us who distrust the
use of drugs for the treatment of mental or emotional disorders. 10 The phar,0

Gerald Klerman, "Psychotropic Hedonism vs. Pharmacological Calvinism," The Hastings

Center Report, 1972, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 1-3; Kramer, op. cit., pp. 274-5.

334

macological Calvinist sees drug use as a facile way out of the hard work of
insight-oriented therapy, a cheap evasion of the character-building properties
of sufferingand, at worst, a flight into chemically induced euphoria and irresponsibility. Peter Breggin, author of Talking Back to Prozac, is one of the most
vocal of such critics of pharmacological therapy.11 He maintains, indeed, that
the use of antidepressant medications sends patients a dangerous message that
they do not have the "psychological or spiritual resources to triumph over
[their] depression." "If you turn to drugs," he says, "you turn away from life,"
insofar as "life" entails a capacity for deep suffering as well as exciting creativity, and a natural rhythm of emotional cycling. Breggin quotes decisively and
approvingly a line from a fellow panelist at the August 1993 convention of the
American Psychological Association: "One cannot heal the soul with a medication."
Of course, Breggin and his colleagues are right. We should not expect
Prozac or any other drug in the pharmacopoeia to perform miraculous soulcure. If that is the expectation, whether trumpeted by a pharmaceutical company in search of easy profits, a psychiatrist in search of a doubled patient load,
or a depressive person in search of a "silver bullet" fix, then I share the reservations. The pharmacological Calvinists' fear, I think, is that a medical model
of depression will reduce the complexity of the human personincluding the
depth of her soulto nothing more than chemical processes, with the result
that we become a people of pill-poppers, preferring plasticity to profundity
and complacency to questing. This would, indeed, be impoverishing. Breggin
and his colleagues are right to caution us against any responsibility-evading
reduction of the soul to its chemical components alone.
But if we should not reduce the soul to chemistry, neither should we utterly divorce the one from the other. A physically healthy nephesh, one that is eating and sleeping and exercising well, attending to all the braids and balances
of its multi-stranded selfhood, stands rather to undertake the difficult
demands of soul-making. Far from offering an escape from these demands,
medication can facilitate a fuller engagement with them. As the pharmacological Calvinists insist, people who suffer depressive disorders do need to come to
grips with the patterns of perception and interpretation involved in their
depressions. The soul, after all, is dyed with the color of its thoughts. But in
order to shift the coloring from somber to iridescent, a pinch of saltor even
of fluoxetine hydrochloridecan help the dye "take" better.
One of the tasks of the pastor, priest, or rabbi in counseling with a
depressed person is to assist her in finding the appropriate salt. If her depression has persisted for several weeks and is painful to the point of interfering
with normal functioning, an appropriate ministerial response is to urge consultation with a physician and a mental health professional. As Andrew Weaver
advises in a helpful article, "an effective referral is a valuable act of pastoral
care."12
But referral for medical assessment and treatment is a beginning, not an
end, of pastoral involvement. Especially for people with religious commitments, people of the very sort are likely to seek out a pastor, priest, or rabbi
with their depression, continuing engagement with the spiritual dimensions of
"Breggin, op. cit., pp. 200, 215, 208, and 206.
12
Andrew Weaver, "Depression: What the Clergy Need to Know!" Currents in Theology and
Mission, 1993, Vol. 20, p. 15.

335

the problem is very important. Studies by Rebecca Propst and her colleagues
confirm that "religious individuals receiving a religious congnitive therapy
[report] more reduction in depression and greater improvement in social
adjustment" than control groups receiving less pastorally focused treatment. 13
Steven Hollon and colleagues conclude that "some modest advantage" may
exist in "adding cognitive therapy to clinical pharmacotherapy" and that
indeed, cognitive therapy may prevent depressive symptoms from returning. 14
Inasmuch as depression inevitably raises deep questions of meaningoutcries
of "Why me?" or "How long, O Lord?" or "For what may I truly hope?"its
spiritual axis remains clearly in evidence. Thus, we who are "the spirituality"
retain a significant role to play throughout its healing.
I see this role as consisting of four functions. The first of these, apt for the
clergyperson or counselor as a "physician of souls," is that of promoting health
care appropriate to the needs of the embodied nephesh. The second is the
more prophetic mission of rallying the community in support of those who suffer and in alleviation of the causes of suffering. Depression, after all, has clear
social and political dimensions: poverty, abuse of all kinds, a whole array of
environmental pressures. The synagogue and church are communities par
excellence to minister to situations which provoke despair, not only in their
own members, but throughout the human family. When it is the case that so
much depression derives from a sense of personal powerlessness, we are all
called to act as empowerers by helping the illiterate to read, helping the
unemployed to learn skills, helping the abused to discover inner resources of
resilience; rectifying whatever situations work to thwart people's legitimate
longingsor, as a final resort, providing ministries of presence when all we can
do for one another is to sit together by the waters of Babylon or huddle together at the foot of the cross.
The third function for members of the spirituality in addressing depression is a more specifically positive one, that of moving and empowering the
soul through liturgical and ritual enactment. In a secularized world, we tend
to overlook, to our impoverishment, the efficacy of the "word of power"the
salvation oracle proclaimed with the voice of authority:
Fear not, for I am with you,
be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)
Just as music stirs the heart, so the utterances and the gestures of ritual can stir
the spirit, offering confidence, reassurance, and comfort. Liturgy has the
power to seize and shape our imaginations, to touch us at a depth where both
pain and healing take root. As Rebecca Propst reminds us, in moments of
depression "intense and often emotion-laden images flood our conscious
mind....Indeed, sometimes the images are so intense that only other images
can have any impact on them." 15 Or, as the character of J o n Darrow said it for
13
L. Rebecca Propst, Psychotherapy in a Religious Frameivork Spirituality in the Emotional Healing
Process (NewYoik, NY: Human Sciences Press, 1988), p. 101.
]4
Steven Hollon, Richard Shelton, and Denise Davis, "Cognitive Therapy for Depression:
Conceptual Issues and Clinical Efficacy," fournal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1993, Vol
61, No. 2, p. 272.
l0
L. Rebecca Propst, "Comparative Efficacy of Religious and Nonreligious CognitiveBehavioral Theiapy for the Treatment of Clinical Depression in Religious Individuals,"
fournal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1992, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 121-2.

336

us simply in the opening story of this article, "Sometimes in the presence of

suffering, only symbols have meaning." T h e priestly function in responding to
depression is to mediate such symbols.
Fourth and finally, there is a crucial pastoral function in responding to
depression, the function of brightening the color of the thought patterns
which trigger or sustain depressive moods. 1 6 Such patterns include "catastrophizing" (magnifying the negative elements of a given situation to the exclu
sion of any positive considerations); reading rejection into situations of even
modest exclusion, criticism, or approval-deprivation; reacting with automatic
thoughts and self- reproaches to specific circumstantial provocations or to
overwhelming nonspecific stresses. Depressive thought patterns lead a person
to leap from insupportable assumptions to intolerable conclusions: "I have
made a mistake; it is terrible to make mistakes; therefore, I am a terrible per
son"; "I did not get the affirmation I wanted; it is 'a dire necessity...to be loved
and approved by virtually every significant other person' in my community;
therefore, I am unloved and unlovable." As Aaron Beck, the founder of cog
nitive psychotherapy, and others have noted, depression fundamentally
involves a disorder of perception and interpretation whereby people see their
environments as overwhelmingly hopeless and themselves as utterly helpless.
Such thoughts dye the soul in melancholy hues, indeed. Both spiritual direc
tion from a counselor and spiritual discipline from a counselee are necessary
to alter the coloration.
Of what should such direction and discipline consist? From personal
experience, I suspect that the single most important conviction for the con
quest of depression is that of simple caring. T h e healing words here are
straightforward. "I'm sorry you're in such pain"; "Let me hold your hand, just
so you'll know I'm here"; "Here's a tissue; it's OK to cry"; "Let's go for a walk
together"; "Call me back in two hours to let me know how you are"; "I'll call
you tomorrow to see how you're doing"; "I know you feel horribly lonely right
now, but I want you to know you are not alone." These are not simply inter
personal assurances; they are affirmations of profound theological meaning.
As the Yahwist creation narrative affirms, "It is not good that the h u m a n should
be alone." We are made for relationship with one another. Only in mutuality
can any of us be whole or be healed. A first task for spiritual direction in
depression is to communicate such caring mutually; a first ask for spiritual dis
cipline is to assimilate that it is real.
Three further tasks of direction and discipline remain for addressing the
particular spi)tu al axis of depression, three further important pigments for redyeing the color of the soul. I return to a statement I made at the beginning
of this essay in commenting on Neville Aysgarth's remark to J o n a t h a n Darrow
('You've come to stand at the foot of the cross"). I commented in response
that our religious traditions uphold us with symbols of presence which neither
deny nor shy away from suffering, but which enfold it into a history, a com
munityand perhaps even into a slender promise of meaning. Beyond the pri
mary task of communicating care, a second major task for the pastoral thera
pist in addressing depression is that of helping the sufferer to enfold such
experiences into a larger context. Contemporary secular culture offers us lit,e

These typical depressive thought patterns are described by Albert Ellis, quoted in Propst,
Psychotherapy, p. 114, and by Aaron Beck, The Diagnosis and Management of Depression
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973), p. 138.

337

tie help in this endeavor; it urges us to think that sadness is more to be excised
than interwoven. On the other hand, our Jewish and Christian religious traditions acknowledge suffering within the larger pattern of a redemptive plan.
We have seasons to mourn and seasons to celebrate; we have times to weep and
times to dance; we have eras in exile and episodes of liberation. Through it all,
we have a God who is with usEmmanuelworking for ultimate shalom.
One of the most potent affirmations of this faith-conviction is communicated in the single word, nevertheless. Though my tears have been my daily food
and my soul is disquieted within me, nevertheless I will hope (Ps. 42). Though
weeping may tarry for the night, nevertheless joy comes with the morning (Ps.
30). Neither Judaism nor Christianity denies the palpable reality of suffering.
But both Judaism and Christianity affirm that suffering does not have the final
say. The last word belongs to God, and the last word is, "Alleluia! Amen." This
is a word which the spiritual directors among us need to speak, and the spiritually afflicted among us need to reiterate, until we deeply believe that it is so.
Part of recognizing the larger context of seasons of sorrow and seasons of
celebration involves learning a new trust for the timeliness, the tempo o our living. This means, among other things, what Father William Lynch called learning to temper our "absolutizing instinct."17 The absolutizing instinct concludes
that the way things are right now is the way they are going to be forever and
ever. Such a conclusion does lead to despair, even as it betrays a curiously absolutistic arrogance. Soren Kierkegaard phrased the insight powerfully in ajournai entry:
Just because I do not see any way out, I must not for an instant be so presumptuous as to conclude that there could be no way out for God. For this is despair
and presumption, to confound one's bit of imagination with the possibility God
disposes of.'^
When we temper our absolutizing imagination, as both Kierkegaard and
Lynch would have us do, we remind ourselves that the presence of God, working in and through all situations, has possibilities undreamt of in our despairing philosophy. Pastoral care calls us to open ourselves to these possibilities.
Beyond the tasks of caring and of context-enlarging, its third discipline is to
school us in courageous waitingwaiting for a god who makes ways in the
wilderness and rivers in the desert (Is. 43:19); waiting for a grace-filled healing
which is at work beneath and beyond our limited abilities. "My soul waits, and
I hope," says the Psalmist (Ps. 130)and if these are not synonymous activities,
at least they are very close kin.

The Gift of a Dark Sun

I reserve the final task for spiritual direction and discipline in dyeing the soul
for a few concluding images. The nigredo and the sol nigerboth come from the
alchemical tradition, though they correspond in significance ways to what
pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite termed the "superluminous darkness," or to
what J o h n of the Cross and Teresa of Avila called "the dark night of the soul."19
17

William Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 103.
18
Soren Kierkegaard, fournals, quoted by Walter Lowrie in Kierkegaard (London: Oxford
University Press, 1938), p. 404.
,q
Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, quoted by Roger Schmidt, Exploring Religion
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988), p. 165; John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul,
trans. E. A. Peers (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 12.

338

The common point of all four images is to affirm the illuminating potency of
what seems uiterly light-lm to our ordinary way of seeing. Listen to J o h n of the
Cross:
Divine light...acts upon the soul...in the same way as fire acts upon a log of wood
in order to transform it into itself, for material fire, acting upon wood, begins
to...make it black, dark, and unsightly...and drives away all...which is contrary to
the nature of fire. And, finally, it begins to kindle it externally and give it heat,
and at last transforms it into itself and makes it as beautiful as fire.
Like the fire's action on wood, God's action on the soul demands an initial
period of dryness and darkening. Such a period is painful, undeniably so. But
it is pain with creative power.
Just as the dark night is a crucial purgative phase in the soul's journey, so
the nigredo is a crucial preparatory stage in the alchemical process. The mystic
and the alchemist both know that a breakdown of old familiarities must take
place before any new creation can occur. "Things fall apart" before they come
back together. Some alchemical writers describe the nigredo as "the black earth
in which the gold...is sown like a grain of wheat," while others liken it to the
whirling chaos before the creation of the world.20 The black sun is a key symbol of this process. In the darkness of this sun, Thomas Moore writes, "there is
to be found a precious brilliance," which is "perhaps the greatest gift" of
depression. 21
As spiritual directors and as spiritual disciples, we need to be reminded of
this final pastoral teaching, that depression can be a gift. By the light of its
"superluminous" dark sun, we come to see things we have not seen so clearly
before: things in our lives that need changing, truths from which we have hiddenthe truths of our limits, our neediness, and our surprising strength. We
are pushed below the surface into the depths of our being. We are forced to
clean out the rubble of our false securities, our fickle attachments. We are
made vulnerable, emptied out in order that we may be filledfilled with sensitivity and compassion; filled with an ability to live by faith, not by sight; filled
with the courage to walk forward, even in darkness, and to reach out our arms,
trusting that we are not finally alone.
"Sometimes in the presence of suffering, only symbols have meaning."
The image of the dark sun, illuminating the dark night of the soul, can be one
such symbol, for it assures us that even our depression bears redemptive possibilities. (As pastors, priests, rabbis, and counselors of one sort or another, we
assuredly want to assist those we care for in alleviating the most debilitating
aspects of their pain.) But we also need to assist these same people in seeing
the full range of its occasional, paradoxical, creative potential. In ancient
Greece, as Socrates reminds us, "A therapist...is a sacnstan, one who does service to the gods by keeping watch over the sacred vessels and vestments." 22 As
Jewish and Christian therapists, our role is similarly a holy one, in service to the
one God who made us for shalom. O u r healing vocation is to tend the vessels
in which we drench our souls with vivid color, and the vestments which are the
tapestries of our lives, richly interwoven with both the intensity of depression
and the iridescence of hope."^
20

Walter Odajnyk, "The Meaning of Depression at Significant Stages of Life," in Louise Mahdi
(Ed.), Betwixt at, I letween (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987), p. 349.
Moore, op. cit.

21
2i

Ibid., p. xvii.

339

^ s
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