Darkness and Walls

Just over a week ago I delivered my first sermon at Grace Hill, my home church, and I feel as though I brought out a lot of pain and emotion and struggling from the members of the congregation.  My goal was to make myself as vulnerable as possible in the hopes that they would follow my example and become more vulnerable to each other, not all at once, not from the pulpit, but one at a time, slowly, caringly, it a way that was meaningful to all those involved.
I was completely overwhelmed by the response I received after I was done.  I got hugs and an outpouring of affection from people that I never would have expected.  I saw people crying and comforting one another.  On that day I knew that I had achieved my primary purpose, but the question still in my mind is: did they remember it when they got home?  Did they remember it the next Sunday morning in church?  I don't know and I probably will never know, but one goal that I had failed.  I challenged everyone to come closer as a community and sit closer physically during church, but I know that one week later they had all forgotten and assumed their normal seats.
Despite this fail I am still feel as though my message was heard, even if only for a few hours.  Below is the text of my sermon.  The ** signify where I moved away from the pulpit and transitioned into my visual aid.  I will do my best to get the audio and put it up on here but for now, please read the text and let me know what you think.

Love and peace,
Daniel

Assembling Our Own Walls:  Why we build?

            This morning’s Gospel reading is already quite short, but for my purposes I need even less.  I’m going to be focusing on only two verses from chapter 6, 22 and 23, “The eye is the lamp of the body, So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full off darkness.  How great is the darkness!”  My translation of this text ends this last phrase with an exclamation mark, to place incredible emphasis on these words.  The darkness is GREAT!  How many among us can say that we truly know just how great the darkness is?

            Some of us understand this darkness better than others.  We understand just how engulfing it can be, just how black.  We think that we know black, but know nothing.  Our black is merely twilight, dusk, the warning that the ever-present dark of night is coming.  Obviously neither the author of Matthew nor I are talking about darkness in the literal sense and the author is not using “eye” in such a literal context either.  I am speaking of the darkness of mental illness and the stigma that to this day it still carries.  I am speaking of the darkness of depression, which will affect everyone, either personally or through someone else, in his or her lifetime.  The author uses eye to refer to the mind or the eye to the body, an eye to the soul of any particular individual.  We very rarely get that glimpse through the eye into the true emotions and the state of a person, even when think we do, how real can it truly be?

            If you would have seen me just over a month ago I would have seemed just as I am today, happy, cheerful, normal.  To all outward appearances I was just like everyone around me, but I was not.  I was depressed, and throughout my life I have become very good, too good in fact, at hiding myself, including my depression, from others.  I was completely, utterly consumed by loneliness, darkness.

            There are times in our lives when being alone is a good thing but that loneliness is a different kind of isolation.  You are still aware of the presence of others, of the presence of God.  The loneliness, darkness that I am speaking of is complete, utter, I would wish the true depths of this sea of black on no one.  I have been to the bottom and I know that there are some people who never return from that deep.  My mind was completely black, filling my entire body with terrible darkness and yet I took delight in that darkness.  The darkness was complete and even though I felt better when it was present I knew that this was not the way I should feel.  Even as the darkness helped me, comforted me, I could feel it settling in, taking me over, slowly strangling my will to live as a boa constrictor crushes its prey.  The prey senses that it is being slowly destroyed but there is nothing that it can do to save itself.  By this point it was too late for me to reach out.  I knew that I needed help to escape this terrible, never-ending, all consuming darkness but I could do nothing.  The mind was black and the body was blacker.  Even the most brilliant, blinding light could not reach me.  I was completely, utterly alone.  I reached a place so dark and so deep that death itself seemed to be the only escape.  As I sat there one night on a bridge, too terrified to take the plunge into nothingness and yet not able to step back, I believed that no one could possibly understand what I was going through.

            Finally someone came and pulled me back from the edge.  I was taken back and embraced by many, but I still felt cold.  I still felt alone in this experience.  Wide open to the judgment of everyone in whose eyes I had changed.  Less than 36 hours later the loneliness came back harder than ever when I was forced to a place that would “help” me to deal with these issues, a suicide ward where I would be around others with similar experiences.  I felt as though everyone that I cared for had betrayed me and left me in the hands of those at Prairie View who I viewed as my tormentors.  I wept and wept, consoled only slightly by the mournful music I played.  I could not possibly fathom why God had made me like this and why I was still alive when every second of my existence was spent in misery.

            There is one image that describes how I feel this darkness.  Imagine a vast hall with huge pillars thousands of feet high.  This hall extends for miles upon miles of nothingness, deep underground where there is no history of light, and I stand in the middle of it all, holding the smallest of small, a single spark.  Look down at the palm of your hand and find the smallest crack that you can still see.  This spark would fit in that crack and it would not produce enough light to escape that tiny crack.  You cannot see the spark, only feel its presence, as faint as the beat of a butterfly’s wings, if at all.  Others describe similar encounters in different ways, each unique to their own experiences.  To Heather it feels like she was alone in the Antarctic, walking aimlessly in a blinding snowstorm, hearing nothing but he howling wind, feeling nothing but the bitter cold.  She cried out as I did, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald said of his experiences, “In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” 

            While in this place, in the constant supervision of these mental health workers, I believed that there was nothing for me.  Every instant was a struggle to hold back the tears, a struggle that I mostly lost.  I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t cry in front of the staff and I did not, but I wish that I had because it was these people, the staff and other residents who showed me that I am NOT alone and that I had nothing of which to be ashamed.

            One man in particular, Peter, was always happy.  It was unbelievable in this place but you could see the joy in his eyes, pure exhilaration that he was alive.  John made no excuses, kept no secrets and was very forward about why he was there.  Five days before I met him, John stood in his garage with a gun to his head, fully ready to end his own life because he could no longer stand the darkness.  Were it not for the context in which I met him I never would have guessed that he had been through such traumatic events, that he had suffered the same darkness as me.  It was John who opened my eyes to how much other could help me and how much others would help me because they had been through the same things.  They knew what I was talking about even though I unable to articulate my thoughts.

            Through the four days I spent at Prairie View I came to understand why I could not do this on my own.  I talked through my experiences over and over and I came to realize that I had nothing to hide.  Nothing of which to be ashamed.  I know now that I am not alone in this experience.  Ten percent of Americans will suffer from depression in any given year.  Fifteen percent of them will do what I could not and take their own lives and these numbers get larger every year.  **I realized that I had been building walls and that those walls were a place for me to hide.  Hide how I was truly feeling, what I was really going through, hide from my family, my friends, my faith, and most importantly, myself.

            Just as I put up walls to hide how I truly am, we all put up walls between ourselves and others, keeping them out and our emotions in; our loneliness, anger, fear, our hate, malice, our disappointment, letting the feelings fester within us.  This rotting, decaying of our emotions adds layers of brick and mortar to our walls, making them thicker and thicker.  We start off leaving plenty of room inside the walls to continue our daily lives.  We are able to think and move and act normal for everyone to see, but as we add layers our space diminishes and we lose what little breathing room we had.  Our emotions continue to fester, boxing us in, leaving room only for themselves, these negative emotions.  Try as hard as we may we cannot let go.  We cannot take down these layers one brick at a time, destroying our walls.  We cannot do this because we cannot express these emotions.  We cannot let others know that we feel lonely or depressed or angry or hateful.  It is just fine to share our happiness but other emotions are taboo.  We stand up in church to announce births, engagements, and weddings, a plethora of joys.  We announce deaths and illnesses and they are fine because they can be good in their own respect.  A death that ends suffering, an illness that brings people closer together, reuniting them, bringing a new sense of self-awareness, awareness or God, or a new perspective on the world.  And yet we cannot share when we are not okay because we are always supposed to be fine.  We say it, we look it, but we aren’t.  What will it take for you to share with your brothers and sisters?  Because every time you do, you take down a brick.  Will it take an experience like mine?  I pray not.  What will it take for you to be completely honest with God?  With yourself?  This is something that is easy to say but difficult to do and it cannot happen all at once, but God wants to hear all of your emotions not just the good.  Not just the joys.  EVERYTHING!  Prayer is not about getting the words right, it is about speaking out of the depths of our being and in those depths there is suffering, pain.

            A very close friend told me during this experience, “Sometimes you have to yell at God before you can pray to God.”  I fully believe this to be true.  I see prayer as a call to be fully honest with God, sometimes getting angry because God can take it!  It won’t hurt God’s feelings because you are being honest.  She won’t love you any less if you get angry when you pray, but she will be glad that you are giving all of yourself.

            We must all be cautions when listening to others and their expressions.  We must be careful not offer a word of explanation or encouragement because that can push people further away.  Who are we to say why they feel this way?  Who are we to say that it will get better?  Instead we should just listen and be present.  Give a hug, instead of saying that it will be okay, don’t say anything except to express your love.  But when we do share our emotions with each other, and I mean true emotions, all the bad stuff you don’t want anyone to know, slowly the walls with which we surround ourselves come down.  This cannot happen all at once.  We cannot expect to immediately share our deepest emotions with everyone, but slowly, we can become closer as a community.  I speak from my experience and what I outline next is what has worked for me and what has helped me tear down my walls.  When we admit to ourselves that we can’t do this on our own, another brick comes down.  When we are angry with God and we tell God that we are angry with her, the foundation cracks and more bricks topple.  When we realize that we have nothing to hide, the walls fall down.  To quote one of my favorite songs, “If there’s any hope for love at all, some walls must fall.”  Today I tell you, the walls are falling.

            So why did I tell you this story?  I probably could have made my point just as well without being so personal, so exposed, but that would have been hypocritical.  I stand before you today as I stood before my peers and I say to you what I said to God on that day, “Here I am, complete.  Take all of me, strength and weakness.”  Will you accept my challenge?  The church is the body and each one of use is the eye.  If you hide things from your brothers and sisters, if you hold in your anger and fear and sorrow and depression, you, as the eye, create darkness in the body.  And how great is the darkness!  Now, will you respond as God did?  Did I even have to ask?