fixes, it is not always easy to find a professional who fulfills
the original meaning of the word-a person grounded in a
profession of faith, faith in the nature of ultimate reality, in
the matrix of mercy in which our lives are embedded.
I had abortive meetings with two psychiatrists whose
reliance on drugs and whose dismissive attitude toward the
inner life would have made me angry enough to get well
simply to spite them had I not been terminally depressed!
But finally, blessedly, I found a counselor who understood
what was happening to me as I needed to understand it-as a
spiritual journey.
Of course, it was not the sort of spiritual journey I had
hoped some day to take, not an upward climb into rarefied
realms of light, not a mountaintop experience of God's
presence. In fact, mine was a journey in the opposite
direction: to an inner circle of hell and a face-to-face
encounter with the monsters who live there.
After hours of careful listening, my therapist offered an
image that helped me eventually reclaim my life. "You seem
to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to
crush you," he said. "Do you think you could see it instead
as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on
which it is safe to stand?"
Amid the assaults I was suffering, the suggestion that
depression was my friend seemed impossibly romantic,
even insulting. But something in me knew that down, down
to the ground, was the direction of wholeness, thus allowing