#2 Christ's Mental Health and Ours

Part #2 In Gethsemane With Jesus

In part #1, the introduction to this short series, I shared some of my struggles with mental health, stemming from a traumatic childhood, parental suicides, and the challenges of supporting a child with special needs. I also shared how mental health recovery is not solely about necessary clinical interventions of therapy and medication but also embracing suffering as a path to transformation.

In particular, for Christians in situating mental suffering within the Christian narrative of the 'Christ Event' - our participation in the retelling and reliving of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. And we can do this with confidence, knowing that Jesus fully assumed human nature, including the capacity for and experience of mental suffering.

I undertook to explore and map this participation process and experience for mental health, centred on the core of the Christian event - Easter Weekend, comprising Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. I begin in this post with Good Friday.

The Dangerous Denial of Suffering

Christians often lack a spirituality of suffering, particularly in the area of mental health, due to a unique intersection of theological misunderstanding, stigma, and cultural denial of interior pain.

Consumer and therapeutic mindsets see suffering as a problem to solve and not a process to be embraced. This aligns with a theological disposition on material well-being and the avoidance of a cruciform life, where the cross is something we do not need to participate in because has ‘done it all’ for us.

Suffering and pain are not only shorn of any transcendence and meaning but they are seen as symptoms of a lack of 'faith'. To be spiritually mature is to hold more accurate beliefs and achieve success, freedom, and well-being. The health and wealth gospel is unapologetically overt about this. For many regular non health and wealth Christians, it is also intrinsic to their understanding of faith. If I do the right things and believe the right things, pain and suffering should pass me by.

As a result, we are prone to want to avoid suffering and pain and lean into spiritualities of faith that promote escape from distress, anguish, and affliction. All this is then coupled with an overly cognitive-based faith that has mistaken mental illness for lack of proper belief and false remedies of believing harder and more correctly.

The result is that to suffer mental illness is often seen as a sign of a lack of faith. Conditions like depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, or bipolar disorder are perceived as spiritual failures rather than as complex human realities that are a regular part of human life and that Christ longs to meet us in. We no longer know how to sit with, endure, and embrace suffering as part of not only the human condition but also as the threshold of encountering God.

We are prone to develop a coping mechanism for our cognitive dissonance about suffering, that God will protect me but I am in pain and believe I should not be. If we have faith, bad things should not happen to us. We keep the realities of pain at a distance with our Christian coping mechanisms until they are overwhelmed. As they almost always eventually are.

As a pastor for over twenty-five years, I noticed that faith was often predicated on an inverse proximity to pain, in the lives of others and my own. The further away suffering was, the stronger faith could be. Confident faith could be declared whilst knowing that the most awful things were happening to others on the other side of the world. But when something horrendous draws closer and happens to our friends and family, we suddenly struggle and ask, 'Why, Lord?' The cognitive dissonance starts to become too much for us as suffering edges closer. It is not until something truly awful befalls us directly that our spiritual buffer against suffering collapses, and we ask, 'Where are you, Lord? Why is this happening to me?'

Why does it take something painful to happen directly to us for our faith in God to be challenged? There is nothing new to this. Martin Luther, during the Reformation, noted how Christians sought the benefits of Easter Sunday and the resurrection without passing through Good Friday. We have always been pain-avoidant and prone to miss entirely the nature of life in Christ is not one without pain, and Christ explicitly provides a route for us to process our pain with him.

Jesus made some promises for us, and one was about a guarantee of suffering; it is not optional for Christians:

I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world - John 16:33 NIV

Suffering is part of life for all Christians. The choice is not whether we can avoid it but how, in Christ, we can go through it with Him to experience His resurrection. And Good Friday is the day of Christ's suffering, the doorway of his participation in ours and the invitation of ours with His.

So our first step for mental well being in Christ is to be able to admit and accept our mental suffering. To pray, Lord I do not like this but show me how you are in this with me - do not stop what you are doing until you have done all you want to do. Don’t let me run away from this, but help me go through this with you.

Christ's Mental Anguish

All the synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke, tell the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane immediately after the Last Supper and before his betrayal by Judas and arrest in the very early hours of Good Friday morning.

The three accounts are slightly different, as the Synoptics often are, focusing on similar and also different aspects of this moment. From all three accounts, we see how Jesus is in such anguish that an angel appears to strengthen him. He sweats blood, so great is his distress. He asks his closest disciples to stay awake, watch and pray for him in support. But they all fall asleep.

But their sleep is not due to tiredness. If someone I love deeply was in such a level of torment, I would be far from sleepy and resting. I would be overcome with their grief, wanting to comfort them. It is in Luke that we are given the reason as to why they have fallen asleep:

And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow. Luke 22:45 NIV

Their sorrow (Greek: lypēs) suggests a grief that is heavy and paralysing. In the face of intense anxiety and grief, the human mind and body shuts down to protect against emotional trauma. Here is Jesus, as they have never seen him before. Up until Gethsemane, their Jesus has seemed unbothered by hostile Pharisees and crowds seeking his death, able to command storms to be still. But now they see Jesus in severe mental anguish, crying out to God, sweating blood and falling to the ground, overcome in agony.

In Luke 22:44, the Greek word for Christ's anguish is agōnia, with the inherent meaning of severe mental struggles and emotions. The disciples fall asleep, shutting down because they cannot bear the intensity and distress of what they are witnessing in Jesus. But something else is also at work. Christ's distress and anguish are not just about the impending torture and suffering of scourging and crucifixion. It is because of the suffering of all humankind - sin, brokenness, abuse, torture, loss, and also mental distress - are finding their way to him. This is the cup he is to drink. It is the weight of all suffering that causes his anguish and ultimately puts him to death on the cross.

I believe that these disciples, who loved Jesus so intensely, wanted to take upon themselves their master's suffering. Just as we often wish when those we love are suffering, that we could take some of their pain onto ourselves. In their love and confusion, the disciples would have begun to pray and opened themselves up to the sufferings of Christ. And it caused them to shut down. And soon after to either run away or, like Peter, follow Jesus at a distance - seeking space from what they could not bear. It would not be until Christ had risen from the dead and was living in them by the Spirit that they could drink the cup he had.

This time, in this moment in Gethsemane, we see proximity to Christ and the act of participation with him. Jesus is not far away from any mental illness or suffering that we endure. All that life does to us, he has assumed and experienced and our anguish becomes his.

Anguish: Don’t fall asleep

During the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, I came to the readings set for me of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. I have written about this before and beg pardon for repeating it here. It remains one of the most important times in my life for understanding participation with Christ and mental health.

At the time of making this meditation, I was suffering greatly from anxiety. Amid all things COVID and some awful church conflicts, my anxiety had flared. I have known anxiety since I was a young boy. It was a coping mechanism to keep me alert to the danger of abuse. However, it took root as a coping mechanism that often anticipates more danger than actually exists. It is hard to describe anxiety to someone who does not suffer from it. For me, a deep dread overcomes my whole being, accompanied by a sense of impending doom. The hardest thing about anxiety for me is that my sense of God's presence recedes and, at times, disappears completely.

As I read the passages about Jesus in Gethsemane, I imagined myself there, watching the disciples. Jesus was in anguish, and for the disciples, this was too much for them to bear. Until this moment, Jesus had been the calm in the storm of everything. Yet here he was, sweating blood and asking God if he could avoid what was happening. I saw the disciples shut down. Their sleep was not due to tiredness but sheer overwhelm. Luke 22 tells us it was 'sorrow' that caused them to fall asleep. Overcome with anxiety and grief, they froze and switched off.

I noticed Jesus turn to look at me. In my prayer imaginings, I hear the Him say to me, 'Don't fall asleep. I need you to stay awake this time.' His voice was kind, an invitation and not a rebuke. He continued. "You fell asleep twice before. I need you to stay awake this time and share this with me."

A question formed in my mind, 'How and when did I fall asleep, Lord?" Then he showed me.

The first time was when I was thirty. I had a significant breakdown. Being bi-vocational with three kids, I had dealt with my anxiety by being a workaholic. I woke up one morning to have what I did not realise was a major panic attack. Those next few months, all I could do was hold a bible to my chest as I went to bed each night, my wife having to sit next to me, holding my hand with the light on until I went to sleep. The Lord graciously brought me through that time with much healing and understanding of my mental health and my faith.

Then, when I was forty, both my parents took their own lives, six months apart from each other. Estranged from each other for many years, the abuse and all that troubled them manifested in their suicides. Their last communications to me were letters saying what an awful son I was and blaming me for their condition in life. Even though in therapy, I had foreseen how their lives might end, the impact of this plunged me into the darkest of depression. In many ways, I fell asleep to myself at that moment and stumbled through life's motions until the Lord woke me up.

So, in this moment of prayer and colloquy with Jesus in the Garden, I walked up to Him, knelt with Him, and held His hand. I felt him shaking in anguish, knowing that he felt the anxiety that was shaking me. And during the next few weeks, I went back there to kneel with him again and again. My anxiety lessened as I stayed awake with him, and the Lord did a beautiful work in me. Anxiety is still something I am prone to and might be this side of eternity. But now I have a mental health prayer practice, where I can go to the Garden and sit next to Jesus and share my anguish with His.

Conclusion

There is so much more in Good Friday, to sit with, and bring our mental health sufferings to God. To walk into the courtyard and bear witness to his scourging. To carry his cross like Simon of Cyrene, and be next to him as he stumbles, in agony to Golgotha. To bear witness to Him being nailed to the cross and hoisted up high. To stand at the foot of the cross with Mary, holding her hand at her anguish, bearing witness to Christ’s suffering. To listen and watch until he breathes his last and dies. All of this is His participation in our suffering, taken upon Him. All that overwhelms and seperates us from God, is taken into Him as he cries ‘Father why have you forsaken me’.

Our ‘inverse proximity to suffering problem’ is transformed. The closer we get to Him, the more he bears our suffering and the more we can endure ours in Him. We realise that the Cross is big enough for anything we face. Our pain begins to be metabolised. The poison of all that assualts us, is drawn from us and infused into Him. He is laid into the tomb and descends to the dead where all our suffering and anguish seeks to take us.

Ressurection is coming, but first we wait into Holy Saturday.