I wanted to follow up on last week's post about the co-incidence of doubt and depression.
One of the things I described in that post was how doubt can trigger a season of depression. Faith is a meaning-making structure, and when that meaning-making structure is deconstructed or lost life becomes evacuated of purpose and significance.
For example, as described by psychologists, meaning in life has three ingredients--coherence, purpose and significance. By coherence we mean that your life "makes sense," that you can meaningfully narrate your life story. By purpose we mean your life as a goal or direction, your life exists for a "reason." Lastly, your life matters and is imbued with value, worth and sacred significance.
For believers, faith carries coherence, purpose, and significance. Faith holds us in a story, gives our lives purpose, and grounds the value of our lives. Consequently, if you lose all this, mental health consequences often follow. Our lives start to feel meaningless, random, purposeless, pointless, drifting and devoid of significance. Once, everything mattered. Now, nothing matters.
To be sure, a new existential equilibrium can be achieved. New non-religious meaning-making structures can come to replace faith. But the initial season of doubt, along with the season of transition, from the old meaning-making structure to the new, can be difficult and emotionally treacherous. And some never really fully recover their emotional and existential footing. The fullness of meaning experienced within faith is never completely recaptured by the irreligious replacement. Meaning after faith can feel arbitrary, fragile, and thin. Faith cannot be sustained, but the loss of the fullness of meaning continues to haunt, the faint echo of God in the restless human heart, a residual sadness that never departs.
Yes, faith can provide these things.. but let's think about it. How easy is it to live in a society that tells you that you don't matter because you are not successful, don't work hard enough, don't look a certain way.. don't have enough material goods? How easy is it for those whose family is fragmented? Family, and parenthood seems to be one of those things that gives meaning, regardless of faith. How easy is it when so many jobs that served others are gone, replaced by automation? How easy is it to find a church with folks that really will be committed to the others in their congregation besides having a cup of coffee after the service? So many of the natural things that have given us meaning, even without faith, have been chipped away. It is difficult to tell someone without these things that they will be replaced by having faith as they live out their lonely, disconnected lives. It is complicated...
Richard, I wonder if you would distinguish between what you describe here and, say, the dark night of John of the Cross, or perhaps other markers of a drawing-deeper into the love of God that may come with a kind of meaning-collapse?
I recently read Brian McLaren's Faith After Doubt, and he offers a model of faith development that describes the process you're discussing here. However, my view is that it's a model that specifically applies to those from a kind of fundamentalist origin of faith - and therefore not faith as such, or faith as it necessarily needs to be experienced. (McLaren alludes to this by wondering if there's a way to simply start at the later stages, but comes up short.) I think the emotional distress caused in this kind of doubt is both different in kind and in severity because its origin is so totalizing. Thoughts?