presence in our lives but believing, on the contrary, that
nothing good is going to happen unless we make it happen.
Rilke describes a kind of love that neither avoids nor
invades the soul's suffering. It is a love in which we
represent God's love to a suffering person, a God who does
not "fix" us but gives us strength by suffering with us. By
standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of
another's solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a
person who needs something deeper than any human being
can give.
Amazingly, I was offered an unmediated sign of that love
when in the middle of one sleepless night during my first
depression, I heard a voice say, simply and clearly, "I love
you, Parker." The words did not come audibly from without
but silently from within, and they could not have come from
my ego, which was too consumed by self-hatred and despair
to utter them.
It was a moment of inexplicable grace-but so deep is the
devastation of depression that I dismissed it. And yet that
moment made its mark: I realized that my rejection of such a
remarkable gift was a measure of how badly I needed help.
FROM THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT
Acknowledging my need for professional help was not easy.
I had believed that going into therapy was a sign of
weakness and that weakness was bad. But once I got past
that barrier, I ran into another one: since professional has
come to mean a person with a bagful of techniques and