were "I have no idea." My response had given her an
alternative to the cruel "Christian explanations" common in
the church to which she belonged-that people who take their
lives lack faith or good works or some other redeeming
virtue that might move God to rescue them. My not
knowing had freed her to stop judging herself for being
depressed and to stop believing that God was judging her.
As a result, her depression had lifted a bit.
I take two lessons from that experience. First, it is
important to speak one's truth to a depressed person. Had I
offered wishful thinking, it would not have touched my
visitor. In depression, the built-in bunk detector that we all
possess is not only turned on but is set on high.
Second, depression demands that we reject simplistic
answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to
embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery
surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the
deeper we go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer
we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants
to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to
be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can
"straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet
mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes-and when we
pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but
also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.
Embracing the mystery of depression does not mean
passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of