mental health and christianity

I don’t know. I don’t know a lot about a lot. I’ve been thinking about how we think we know a lot about a lot. But I think even the wisest people… still don’t know. The rich, deep mystery into which we were born—a fallen cosmos—well… there are a lot of things we just don’t know. We can explain some mechanical functions of the universe—social laws, natural laws… but we can’t fully understand the implications, the why, the how, of original sin and redemption and the working out of our salvation. It is sometimes more “great, availing mystery” than we’d like it to be.

C.S. Lewis had some thoughts on this. In The Great Divorce, he writes:

“Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity… That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for this,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backward and turn even that agony into a glory... The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven… And that is why the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.’”

One thing I long to ask God about is the sometimes inexplicable madness of our minds. Mental health. I think you could read every secular source on the topic, sit under the most spiritually adept theologian, and still not come close to comprehending the complexities of sin and nature and truth and forgiveness. 42¹ just doesn’t cut it. And that’s okay. This is meant to be no polemic against the noble pursuit of understanding, healing, loving… The compelling to attain to the full stature of Christ Jesus must go on! We must forge ahead into the deepest, darkest questions of the universe in Spirit and in truth. But this is to you who feel like you are going insane. Do not lose the hope and joy of your salvation because you do not fit into the scholar’s boxes or the theologian’s parapets. And if you have not accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, your Love, do not let this keep you from him.

Mental health, the physical and the soulish, we will never fully understand while we labor in the pangs of childbirth. That’s okay. Pray. Seek medical attention. Lean not on your own understanding. It’s okay if you still don’t understand. I don’t. But I still believe in the goodness, the goodness, of the Lord. And one day, in the near and coming future, we will see his face and have the answer to all we never knew.

¹ In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything