How many times has someone approached your depression as if it were a spiritual defect?
Or, in the same vein, suggested that you pray a little more, or just “encourage yourself with Scripture” to get over a depressive spell (as if you’ve never thought of that)?
You and I know the science — and we know that our depression is rarely related, if at all, to a lack of spiritualism.
And yet, we still wonder.
If I did get up a 4 AM every morning, if I were continually in the presence of God, would it change my genetics, my gut bacteria, or even low levels of acetyl-L-carnitine?
Enter Diana Gruver.
She’s a writer with a new book coming out this winter, Companions in The Darkness: Seven Saints who Struggled with Depression and Doubt.
In our interview, she talks about famous Christians who battled depression despite intense spiritual walks (think Charles Spurgeon and David Brainerd, among others).
I hope it helps in your struggle.
HEINZE: Can you tell me a little bit about the book and why you wrote it?
GRUVER: I’ve struggled personally with depression and, like so many, when I was in those seasons of depression, I felt this sense of guilt that I wasn’t a good enough Christian or that I was doing something wrong – that this was somehow a poor reflection on my spiritual life.
I never had anyone explicitly tell me that, but it was just this implicit understanding that I was doing something wrong.
I was in a program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that was heavily weighted in church history, and one of my professors had these random asides about some of the people I write about that made me think they might have been depressed.
So it just sparked my interest, and I started looking into them more.
And I kept thinking, “Why have I never heard these stories? And what does it communicate that I’ve never heard these stories? And how would my own experience with depression have been different if I had heard these stories?”
Reading about these people breaks down some of the stigma around mental illness because no one’s ever going to say Charles Spurgeon didn’t read his Bible enough.
The other thing I found is that when you go through something hard, it’s really encouraging to find someone who’s gone through that same hard thing, to be able to ask them how they survived. What kind of wisdom can they offer?
That was my approach in my research.
All of these people lived before what we now call the mental health care system. They didn’t have access to antidepressants. They didn’t have evidence-based therapies, so I don’t want anyone to be able to use their stories as an excuse not to pursue those treatments. They’re really important.
But I think they have things to offer us on a friend-to-friend level, or mentor-to-mentor, about how they survived. I hope that comes across in the books.
HEINZE: Historically, how have Christians approached depression? When did we start to see this concept emerge in church history?
GRUVER: The earliest figure I cover is Martin Luther and then I work my way up to Martin Luther King, Jr.
We talk about the Seven Deadly Sins but, originally, there were Eight Deadly Sins and one of them was called “tristitia” or sadness — a spirit of pervading sadness.
There was another called “acedia”, which Kathleen Norris has written about. It’s now what we call sloth — this sense of apathy and lack of motivation and energy. At some point, those two thoughts were combined.
So you had this sense of pervading sadness, and this sense of apathy and lack of motivation and they became combined into one sin – which stuck with the name of “acedia.”
I can’t fully make the argument that it was definitely depression because it’s a term being used to describe the experiences of the early monks and desert fathers.
So you can’t take it too far, but as I was researching, it really struck me that it sounds an awful lot like depression.
And you have to wonder whether that was the seed for the idea that this was a sin.
HEINZE: Historically, did Christians view depression as a sign they weren’t spiritually active enough?
GRUVER: To some extent, yes and no.
Since the days of the Greek philosophers, people had this model of the body surrounding the Four Humors. For centuries, both secular and religious people point to depression or “melancholy,” as they called it, as, to a large extent, a problem of misbalance of your humors. They’d say you have too much black bile in your system.
In 1621, the Christian English scholar Robert Burton published a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy, and he systematically went through and tried to analyze this thing called melancholy. But yes, there is, from a very early point, the idea that there’s a spiritual component to depression, but there’s also this view that it’s a biological issue.
So even during the time when the experience of depression was couched in very strong religious language, there was still this sense that there was also a physical component.
There was a woman who lived in England in the 17th Century named Hannah Allen, who wrote a spiritual autobiography called Satan, his methods and malice baffled: a narrative of God’s gracious dealings with Mrs. Hannah Allen (afterwards married to Mr. Hatt) reciting the great advantages the devil made of her deep melancholy, and the triumphant victories, rich and sovereign graces God gave her over all his stratagems and devices.
She was clearly depressed and made several attempts on her life. She even had what some would call an early example of anorexia. She tried to starve herself. And her battles were always couched in religious language. She feels that she’s committed the unpardonable sin and that her soul has been given over to the devil, but what was fascinating is that even though it’s all religious language, the people who were treating her didn’t treat it like it was a spiritual issue.
They obviously prayed with her and tried to encourage her from Scripture, but they also tried to change up her environment, to give her the best medical care that they knew of at that time — as far as “misbalance of the humors.”
They took her on trips, they put her on suicide watch, all these things. Even in the 1600s, people understood that, yes, you treat the person’s soul, but you need to treat their body because they’re so deeply intertwined. In that sense, we have a lot to learn from them.
HEINZE: Was it more common for the people you write about to blame their spirituality for their depression, or did a lot of them say, “No, God is just hiding his face from me right now because God sometimes does that?”
GRUVER: Yes to both.
I write about David Brainerd who was a missionary to Native Americans in the 18th century, and he was an interesting guy. I struggled with him a lot. It’s funny how you read about these people and there are some you connect with and there are some that really annoy you, and to be honest, he was one that I struggled with.
HEINZE: I read a book that was a collection of his diaries, and it was so depressing.
GRUVER: Yes, the guy was seriously depressed.
The journals we’ve inherited were edited by Jonathan Edwards and he says in his introduction that David Brainerd suffered very deeply from melancholy and claims it was probably a bit of a blight on his character, but that Brainerd still has all these other things to contribute.
The original journals were destroyed, so you can’t help but think how much more explicit David was about his struggles because if Jonathan Edwards – who was very liberal in his editing — saw it as a weakness, how much more might he have cut out?
We have no way of knowing. But even with that in mind, it comes through very clearly. And Brainerd definitely sees it as a flaw in himself.
He sees the need for more and more Bible study, and less and less sleep, and more and more prayer and more and more fasting.
He’s always referring to himself as a “wretch,” and there’s this great line where he talks about how he’s going to go preach to a group of people and says, “I pity this congregation that they have to hear this dead dog like me preach.”
It’s definitely, in part, a reflection of his depression, but it also has to be a two-way street in the sense that his theology certainly didn’t counteract those feelings.
He put himself through all kinds of religious rigor to try to purify this part of himself in ways that are kind of sad. I wish we could tell him, “Hey David, God’s with you. You’re not just a wretch. You’re God’s beloved, you’re his child, you’re loved by him.”
Now, as far as a feeling that God was absent, there are a lot of examples of that. For me, one of the effects of depression on my spiritual life is a sense of God’s absence, and I think it’s powerful in the sense of solidarity to read how some of these people felt God’s absence.
The one that comes to mind most clearly is Mother Teresa.
We don’t have enough information to know if she was clinically depressed, but no one knew about her deep emotional and spiritual struggles until long after her death.
There’s a book called Come Be My Light, which is a collection of private letters and correspondence with her spiritual director that she had wanted to be destroyed. It tells the story of how she received the call to go start her now-famous mission in Calcutta, but when she left to start, it was like all the lights went off.
She felt as if she were going in obedience to God’s call and when she stepped out in that risky step of obedience, it seemed as though he had abandoned her. And she spent almost the rest of her ministry in India, feeling as if she had been abandoned by him.
She refers to him as “the absent one” in some of her prayers. And obviously, she was part of a monastic order and they take spiritual disciplines really seriously.
The thing that struck me about her experience was that she didn’t feel as if she had to increasingly bend over backwards to try to get him to appear to her. Yes, she longed for his presence and some sense that he was still with her and pleased with her, but she just kept going in obedience.
It’s a powerful encouragement to me. You don’t have to see God clearly or have this deep sense of his presence. You just keep following Jesus. You’re following him, not your emotions. And sometimes that’s not glamorous and sometimes we don’t even know where he is, but we just keep going.
God created us with feelings, and he’s gracious enough in different seasons and people to give us those feelings, but he doesn’t always do that.
It’s a mystery and something I wrestle with. There’s another person in my book named William Cowper who was a writer and poet in the 18th century.
For the last 25 years of his life, he lived with the sense he wasn’t saved. He loved God and The Gospel and he’d tell anyone else that, of course, “God’s grace is for you!”
But in one of his psychotic, depressed episodes, he had this dream where he was told that he was outside of God’s grace and would never be saved.
And as I read what he wrote, it made my heart weep. I remember thinking, “God, why didn’t you show up for him? Why didn’t you break through and give him those emotions just a little bit so he’d know you were with him?”
But God was with him. And I had this realization during prayer — the way God showed up was through Cowper’s friends. He was with people who bent over backwards to take care of him, encourage him, and keep him alive.
And he could just see this steady parade of people that I really believe was God’s answer to that prayer. It just wasn’t something he fully got to see in this section of eternity.
HEINZE: Finally, we’ve talked about Cowper, Spurgeon, Hannah Allen – do you have any other names people could look up to read about their struggles?
GRUVER: Sure. The seven I write about are Martin Luther, Hannah Allen, David Brainerd, William Cowper, Charles Spurgeon, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. I chose these seven because it does become, historically, a little dangerous to try to point the finger at someone who lived 200 years ago and say, “You were clinically depressed as defined by the DSM-V.”
I want to be careful with the labels I put on people. So I chose these seven because we have enough first-hand accounts of their struggles that look so clearly like what we call depression.
HEINZE: I can’t wait to read your book. Thanks again so much!
About Diana: Diana Gruver (MA, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) writes about discipleship and spiritual formation in the every day. Her first book, Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints who Struggled with Depression and Doubt is forthcoming with InterVarsity Press in winter 2020.
Diana lives in south-central Pennsylvania, where she can often be found singing in the kitchen with her husband and ever-curious daughter. You can find her online at her website, www.dianagruver.com, or on Facebook or Twitter.
