Mental health and our spiritual tradition

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1 Mental health and our spiritual tradition October is Mental Health Month. Mental health, as we know, can be complex. However, putting aside those expressions of mental health issues which require counselling or other forms of treatment, in the normal day to day of our lives, we all need to be aware of what we can do to ensure we develop and maintain a healthy way of being and living. This includes our thoughts, feelings, outlook and attitudes as well as our choices and actions. So what might our Christian tradition have to tell us about these aspects of our well-being? What is its contribution to our mental health? There are several instances in the Gospels where Jesus exhorts us not to be anxious or troubled, not to be afraid. In other words, he is identifying that one of our distinctively human tendencies is to be just that - to worry, to brood, to be anxious. And he offers us a way out of that into a more healthy way of being which is then expressed in the way we live and interact with others.

2 Jesus regularly invites us into peace. There are many ways of understanding peace. Peace may be seen as the absence of war or any form of conflict. Peace may be understood as tranquility and serenity, watching the waves break gently on the shore, or immersed in a sunset. Peace may be experienced in the quietening of the inner voices pulling us this way and that. Peace may be found in the resolution of a crisis. The list goes on. But often the attainment of peace or the lack of it is seen as dependent on changing the realities around us. And so we can tend to blame others, the world at large, our past, our parents, our workload, the era in which we live, the things that happen to us, for that lack of peace, and we continue desperately searching for it somewhere out there. However, Jesus speaks of a peace which is not dependent on our environment: he says it is not a peace that the world gives. What is this peace of Jesus? One insight we have into this peace is that Jesus speaks about it to his followers, to us, in the context of inviting us to let go of fear. Easier said than done much of the time! It is a deeply human response to be afraid - of situations we are in, of what the future may hold, of the unknown, of what is perceived as threatening us in any way. Yet we are called to let go of fear: Do not let your hearts be troubled (John 14:1) and do not let them be afraid, he says. So how do we let go of fear? Much of our fear arises out of our tendency to want to control things, day to day, and in the long term. It arises from our attachment to being in control. When we feel ourselves to be out of control, anxiety can set in. And yet, our Christian spiritual path, and indeed our spiritual growth, are dependent on how fully we are able to let go of control. Now that certainly doesn t mean being passive or weak or lacking direction. It does not mean being without goals or aspirations. But what it does mean is seeing ourselves and our lives in light of a greater context to which we surrender and which informs and directs all our undertakings and our attitudes, sets our agenda and gives us direction, inspires our aspirations, enables us to respond to what life presents. It is in that surrender that we make choices and exercise strength and courage. We speak of it as dying - dying many times, sometimes many times in a day. Ancient wisdom from the desert fathers and mothers of the first few centuries of Christianity, reminds us of this. This is what that dying is: Abba Nilus said: Do not want things to turn out as they seem best to you, but as God pleases. Then you will be free of confusion and thankful in your prayer. It is this freedom from confusion that Jesus himself models and invites us into. When faced with choices, he did not sway this way and that, but went into that place of certainty : when tempted with riches and power he was able to reject that pull and choose the way of God; when he was attacked and criticized, he remained steadfast in the truth he held dear; when he struggled with fear, facing suffering and death, he surrendered to what he had always known and chosen, trust in God. Jesus could do this because of what is known as his Abba

3 relationship - his relationship with God that he nurtured and grew in throughout his life. So what we see at work in his life is the dynamic of letting go of and surrendering to. We need both those movements. So how might that work in our own lives? It requires that we listen - listen and ponder. We are invited to listen to the truths and wisdom that are offered to us in our Christian tradition. To ponder them means to hold them in our heart, to stay with them, to let them settle into us. But that settling in might not happen easily! As we listen and ponder we will often find ourselves struggling too. We ll resist and object and do our best to justify other paths, paths that are more well-known to us or that keep us in our comfort zone, not challenging us too much, or paths that reflect popular opinion and trends, accepted paths of success. Yet as we listen and ponder we ll get to know much about ourselves. Sometimes what we find surfacing will not be what we want to see, but as we face ourselves, our darkness, our confusion, our restlessness, we will be invited to trust that this honest self-awareness will clear the way and pave a path. I am reminded of the words of a very dear friend who said to me many years ago that the spiritual journey is like taking a piece of glass and holding it up to the light: when it is hidden you don t see the smudges and marks, but as you hold it up to the light, all is made visible. And so it is with us. There, in the light, we face our imperfections, and as we do so, as we stop hiding and running, we come to a place of great honesty. And this honesty is the first step to opening our hearts and minds to the ever-present self-giving of God. To genuine life. It is this genuine life, settling ever more deeply into us, that will lead us to peace. Our thoughts give rise to feelings. When we worry and brood and fill our minds with troubling thoughts and predictions, we feel anxious. As we get caught up in those troubling thoughts we are drawn into sadness, pain, negativity. Jesus identified the futility of worrying: How can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? (Matthew 6:27). But how do we stop those negative thoughts? To let go of them we need to replace them with something other. And this is where once again our spiritual tradition comes into play. There are ways of thinking, attitudes and values that our tradition holds out to us, and we are invited to take them on: for example honesty, forgiveness, love, generosity, mercy, kindness, patience. We need to constantly align our thinking with these virtues. When we think bitter thoughts, replace them with forgiving thoughts. When we hide behind popular opinion or get caught up in power struggles, remember honesty and humility. It is about training our mind. The study of the brain today is increasingly revealing to us the capacity of the brain to be shaped and re-shaped. Constant practice in ways of thinking will form us in those ways. Spiritual traditions have always proclaimed that, but now we have a physiological underpinning of these ancient practices. As we practise, so our spiritual health will grow. This is what is meant by conversion. A new way of thinking and looking at life. That s hard work. It s hard work and confronting because it means accepting and embracing loss. We remember Jesus constantly

4 exhorting us not to be afraid. Not to be afraid of loss. All too often we mourn and grieve those losses. And we hold on to that. Remember, we want to be in control! But we all know that saying: you have to close one door in order to open another. How often might each of us have had the experience of saying, I am so glad I took a chance, tried something new! Last Sunday the Gospel text was the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers. In the first century world lepers not only suffered the ravages of that terrible disease but were also outcasts literally. They were condemned to live outside the towns and villages, away from their loved ones and their livelihoods. So when Jesus healed them they were also restored to community. That is why he told them to go and show themselves to the priests - they would give them the okay to return to their homes. But there is another key point in this story: nine of them ran off immediately, but one returned to thank Jesus. This man was also a Samaritan and therefore doubly an outsider - Jews and Samaritans were hostile to one another and the Samaritans were looked down upon. Now when this man returned, Jesus said to him, Your faith has saved you. He didn t just say, your faith has healed you, but your faith has saved you. So we learn that there was something more than physical healing and restoration to community happening here. The healing was more than skin-deep. His turning back symbolises a deeper recognition, a change of heart, a conversion. He turned to Jesus and saw in him something which he recognized as genuine life. Praising God, he threw himself at Jesus feet. This movement of turning away from and turning towards, needs to be practised and nurtured. In The Light of the Cross is a wonderful collection of reflections on the Australian journey of the World Youth Day Cross and Icon in In this little excerpt, the author, Christopher Ryan, reflects on his experience of kneeling before the cross in the church of the Benedictine Abbey at Jamberoo: After some time we came into the beautiful darkened abbey church, lit only with candles, their light flickering and briefly illuminating the wood of the cross. The Celts have a marvelous expression for places like Jamberoo. They call them the thin places of the world, where it seems that the veil between heaven and earth is all but transparent, diaphanous, where God seems very near, and finding God seems easy. If you ask the nuns they will no doubt tell you that God can hide his face there just as well as anywhere else, but there are some places in the world and, for me, Jamberoo is one of them where it seems possible to drink in God as you drink in the silence of the place. I am sure it has something to do with the way in which a place becomes consecrated, set apart for God, holy, as it soaks up the prayers of the people who come there. As I joined the sisters for a small part of their vigil with the cross, I was reminded of the ritual that Benedict required for all who wanted to enter a monastery. The postulant (literally, one who asks ) was to stand outside the monastery and knock on the door. The abbot or abbess was to ask the postulant, What do you seek? The only answer that Benedict would accept to this question was God. Kneeling in the darkness before the Cross, I was reminded once again that we are made for God, and that nothing less than God will do for

5 us. We are, as St Augustine famously pointed out, restless until our hearts rest in God. This was the fruit of Augustine s own experience. He knew first-hand that all our seeking, indeed all human searching, finds its fulfillment only in God. All human searching finds its fulfillment only in God. This is the ultimate stance we take when we profess to be a person of faith. To find this fulfillment, we need to constantly put ourselves in places where we see God those thin places Ryan speaks of: be with people who speak and live this way, take time for prayer, reflect on Scripture, not buy into anything which is not of God s ways even if it is currently on trend. And there is much in the secular vision of things that we can feel we need to embrace: standards of power and styles of leadership, measures of success, image We cannot enter the Christian spiritual dynamic of dying again and again to anything which is not of God, dying into God, when we cleave to those things. Lose your life for my sake, says Jesus, and you will find it. Don t be afraid, we are reminded. It is the way to genuine life and peace. Ms Kerry McCullough Dean of Mission

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