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Finding Jesus in the Storm. John Swinton
Читать онлайн.Название Finding Jesus in the Storm
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780334059769
Автор произведения John Swinton
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Understanding Explanation, Cure, and Healing
This book does not attempt to explain mental health challenges. It does not address causes directly, although I do clarify the problem of naming causation from both a scientific and a theological point of view. Instead, it intends to help all of us understand the experience of severe mental health challenges in general, and the role of Christian spirituality in particular, in ways that can bring about insight, compassion, empathy, and enduring faithful relationships. Its focus is on listening carefully to the ways people describe their spiritual experiences and trying to make theological and practical sense of lives that have been touched by difficult, troubling, but sometimes also profoundly revelatory challenges. The book is therefore not about curing mental health challenges. It is about healing, understood as the facilitation of understandings and circumstances in which people can live well with Jesus even when the prospect of cure is beyond our current horizons.
“MENTAL ILLNESS” AS A JOURNEY
At heart, the book urges us to change our language about and modify our descriptions of mental health challenges in ways that can help all of us live peaceably and faithfully without misrepresentation and stigma. For the ways in which we describe the world determine what we think we see. What we think we see determines how we respond to what we think we see. How we respond to what we think we see is a measure of our faithfulness. Language and description matter.
Richard Arrandale, in his paper “Madness, Language and Theology,” urges us to reconsider the ways in which we talk about the experiences some describe as “mental illness.” He urges us to move beyond the language of illness, the limits of suffering, and the kinds of military metaphors that turn mental health experiences into battles that need to be fought and won. If “mental illness” is a war, then “those who professionally care for us are the allied forces deployed to win this war, and who often seem to do so with no consideration for the casualties. It is often the case that much of the treatment which is given has worse (and sometimes very long lasting) side-effects than the original problem itself.”4
Military metaphors—battling with schizophrenia, wrestling with bipolar disorder, fighting depression—narrow the person’s choice of description and “treatment” and easily preclude the development of “nonviolent” understandings and approaches. Instead, Arrandale urges the adoption of a kinder, gentler, and more generous hermeneutic that allows for forms of language that open up new worlds and new possibilities:
If we dwell in the language of the negative and the military there is a serious danger that this will set the agenda for the people the language is used for/against. If we can learn to dwell in a language which is positive and liberating this may help in shaping that movement beyond enslavement and existential death. Language used in this way can be part of an exorcism of the linguistic demons which “possess” those with mental health problems—language (and thus a world-view) which, in its negative usage, is content to leave people to live in “the tombs” (Mark 5.2) of labelled madness. A more positive and theological language might enable people to break free from the chains and fetters with which they have been bound. Such a language exorcized of negativity and value judgements may allow people with mental health problems to be brought back into the kingdom from which they can feel alienated.5
If the church is possessed by linguistic demons that prevent it from talking faithfully about mental health issues, then exorcism is vital in order to ensure its present and future faithfulness. A primary intention of this book is to facilitate faithful speech that moves us to faithful action. By developing a phenomenological approach that takes seriously the lived experience of unconventional mental health experiences, the book offers different ways of articulating the issues; different ways of understanding those who bear the weight of diagnoses; and different forms of description that I have seen bring about liberation and healing.
Arrandale asks us to consider framing mental health in terms of a journey. A journey is something we embark upon, willingly or otherwise, as we travel from one place to another. Sometimes we choose our journeys; at other times we are forced to go to places we do not want to. Along the way, we meet people and encounter situations—some helpful, some not—each of which changes the direction of our journey. Some change the meaning of the entire journey. Some journeys are easy and the burden light, like a summer hike; others feel like the winter journey of a refugee. Along the way, we may encounter enemies and become lost and confused. Some of these enemies are in our own heads, while others emerge as our perceived strangeness unsettles people and causes them to react with physical or psychological violence. Above all, the journey is surprising for us and for others. We will need maps, guides, friends, communities, equipment, and, for Christians, ultimately the guidance of God’s Spirit if we are to negotiate our mental health journeys faithfully. But properly equipped, guided, supported, and faithfully accompanied, we can survive even the most powerful and disturbing storms.
The key thing about a journey is that we are always heading toward somewhere and something, not nowhere and nothing. Destination matters. The destination, like the winter road before us, can be cold and unclear. If it is uncertain or disappears from sight, we find ourselves in a very difficult, lonely, and deeply hopeless situation. But if we know our destination even in the midst of our sense of lostness, then we have hope. And if we can find hope (or if others can hold it for us), then the journey might actually be going somewhere rather than nowhere. Thinking of mental health challenges as a journey reminds us to hold on to the kind of destination we might want to reach. What that journey looks like in the context of severe mental health challenges is what this book is about.
ABOUT THE BOOK AND ITS LANGUAGE
The core of the book emerges from a series of qualitative research interviews that I carried out over a two-year period with Christians living with major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. I chose to focus on these diagnoses not because they are representative of all mental health challenges but because they are generally acknowledged as particularly problematic and also because they raise important theological and practical issues for individuals, church, and society.
Through these interviews, I intended the following:
1 to capture some of the complexities of how people actually experience their mental health instead of how they or others interpret it, given their assumptions of what their diagnosis represents. This is the phenomenological dimension.
2 to gain insight into the ways in which people’s unconventional mental health experiences affect their faith lives and relationships with God. This is the experience of lived theology.
3 to try to make sense of this in terms of the theology and practice of the church. This is theological reflection and revised practice.
Though these three foci formed the basis of our conversations, the richness of our conversations drew us to other interesting and surprising places. As people granted me entry into the intricacies of their mental health experiences, they helped me to recognize