Depression and hope through faith

I don't want to go on and on about depression. One reason is that I don't want to wallow in my affliction. Another reason is I don't desire to impose my suffering others, still less to garner pity. In all honesty, it isn't really that pleasant to deal with either internally or externally. Hence, the purpose of this brief post is to share how, in my experience, God finds a way through the fog of my self-absorption. One key to this, at least for me, is to send out a beacon through the fog, so to speak.

I send out this beacon by keeping up the spiritual discipline of prayer. On a daily basis, for me, this consists of fidelity to praying Morning & Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, doing some spiritual reading in conjunction with Morning Prayer, which Monday-Wednesday consists of practicing lectio divina with the readings for the upcoming Sunday and Thursday-Sunday reading from a carefully selected book, along with reciting the Rosary during my morning walk. Something I do with less regularity than I should is practice the Examen in conjunction with Evening Prayer. In certainly helps in these circumstances that I am attentive, desperately looking for something, anything, that might be a life-saver.

For those who are unaware, just as Fridays are days of penance for Roman Catholics, Saturdays are devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. As a result, the Intercessions for Morning Prayer on Saturdays typically seek her intercession. Being the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time, we are currently praying from Week III of the four-week cycle found in the Liturgy of the Hours. This petition today struck me as my prayer:

You strengthened Mary at the foot of the cross and filled her with joy at the resurrection of your Son,
   - through her intercession relieve our distress and strengthen our hope

For spiritual reading, have recently taken up a book by the late Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini: On the Body: A Contemporary Theology of Human Person. This book is ideal for spiritual reading because, as the author says in his Preface: "I chose to write this book as a series of notes, comments, and maxims. I thought this was a more appropriate genre than a research paper or exegesis." Because he wrote this book in this way, it is well-suited for spiritual reading.

Reading only one note this morning was all I needed to be helped. The note I read is about physical illness. However, it quickly dawned on me that it is easily transferable to depression. To suitably adapt it I substituted one phrase, which will appear in brackets, for the phrase "physical pain"-

Sometimes I am seized by a fear of the future in which I see only darkness; at other times, I feel I am not receiving proper care. Loneliness, [mental anguish], irritability, disappointment, the difficulty of human interaction- I am disturbed by all this, and these predicaments reveal a part of me I did not know existed.

The positive, spontaneous flow has been blocked, and my first impulse is to distrust everyone, myself included¹

One caveat: at my age, I know all too well this part of me exists. Probably time for confession: Jesus, I trust in You. 

Like Mary at the foot of the cross, always remember, hope lies beyond optimism.

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1 Carlo Maria Martini, On the Body: A Contemporary Theology of the Human Person, Crossroad: New York, 2001, 18^↩