Mental Illness, Morality and Holiness

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One of the most important struggles of my spiritual journey has been the way that mental illness — my own and other peoples’ — has completely confounded my conception of morality. I often wonder if what allows some people to view the world with perfect moral clarity is that they have never faced the terrifying helplessness of not being able to trust their own minds. My understanding of the Christian gospel was shaped decisively by my experience of being built back from nothing by God after a season of severe depression in my early twenties. When Paul says that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, I say exactly. As a result of my journey, I see humility as a much more important Christian discipleship goal than blamelessness, which causes me to understand morality and holiness very differently than how many other Christians seem to do.

For example, my crippling encounter with depression took the word “laziness” out of my vocabulary. Because I remember a job I had where for several months, I went into the office to stare at a blank screen all day and then go home. I wasn’t kicking back and taking it easy. I was terrified. My mind was filled with judgmental thoughts telling me how worthless I was. I was sweating bullets. I remember trying to come up with routine tasks that I could do to feel productive. The work was supposed to be very creative and self-directed. I was the communications director for a labor union. I was supposed to be developing catchy slogans and campaign tactics that would generate buzz. I was supposed to crank out op eds and press releases.

Because of my memory of so many days when I accomplished absolutely nothing, I cannot think “lazy” when I see people being unproductive; I just think maybe they’re paralyzed by depression or something similar. When I see people in a poor part of town sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, I’m not able to muster up any scorn for them. Even when people I know are doing something like smoking a lot of pot that undermines their sense of willpower and initiative, I tend to view their predicament through a pathological lens rather than a moralistic one, all because of my experience with mental illness.

I’m pretty good at not judging people for whom I do not feel personally responsible. But one place where this falls apart is with my eldest son. He struggles to get his classwork and homework done largely because of the way his brain is wired. We don’t have an official diagnosis yet, but he struggles to concentrate and connect socially with his peers. Because his behavior reflects on me as a parent, it judges me and makes me resentful. I want to be able to say it’s his moral failing or his teacher’s when he comes home with a bunch of empty worksheets in his backpack because it seems like otherwise it has to be my fault.

I’ve been trying to hold my son accountable this school year. Every night we pull his binder out of his backpack and look at a tracker sheet where his teachers are supposed to mark whether he had all his materials out for class, did all his assignments, and wrote down his homework. I figured that knowing he would have to show me every night would incentivize doing his work because that’s the way I was taught to do accountability in conservative evangelicalism. You avoid temptation because you don’t want to face the humiliation of having to confess your sins to your accountability group.

But there was a moment about a month ago that broke my heart. I had raised my voice with my son while asking him what in the world happened on a day when he apparently daydreamed through all of his classwork. He hung his head in shame and said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” I knew then that I would never be able to shame him into doing his classwork. So God convicted me to change my approach. Every morning as we drive to school, we pray together for him to be able to concentrate in class and get his work done. When he gets home, if he has his homework written down in his planner and it looks like he tried on his worksheets, I do a melodramatic happy dance. I’m trying to focus on positive reinforcement rather than negative.

It’s hard to be a parent and a pastor in a world where clear moral expectations are nuanced and undermined by the emerging reality of mental illness. But I think the moral confusion in our world makes the Christian gospel all the more relevant. We just have to recognize what the true enemy is. The enemy is not the “secular psychology” that has “corrupted” our moral clarity by redefining what had always been a sinful “bad attitude” as a medical condition that needs to be treated. The solution isn’t to revert to a “golden age” Victorian moral approach where children are beaten into politeness.

The real enemy is blame. It always has been. The enemy is the ruthlessness with which we judge each other when we feel ashamed deep inside and the violence that ripples outward cyclically from that ruthlessness. I judge the most harshly when I feel the most culpable. Judging is always related to my need to justify myself. For example, I might be a mess, but at least I’m not like those other privileged white men whom I go off on.

United Methodists and many other Christians talk about their being two aspects to salvation: justification and sanctification. Justification is accepting God’s unconditional acceptance of me expressed through Jesus’ sacrifice for my sins. To be justified by Christ is to stop self-justifying. Sanctification is the virtuous reshaping of my character by the Holy Spirit as my self-justification is removed from being an obstacle. I think part of what many Christians get wrong is to assume that justification is a “decision” or a snap transformation that happens instantaneously.

We are in perpetual need of deepening our salvation from self-justification. I continue to deny my justification through Christ by judging others out of my own inner shame. I’m coming to believe that the more we are justified, the less we are able to view people around us moralistically, that is according to the blameworthiness of their deeds. The more secure we are in God’s love for us, the more we are able to show compassion toward people whose behavior is causing problems in our community. This doesn’t mean that we do not correct problematic behavior or impose restrictions or consequences as part of helping the other person to grow and change. But it does mean that we don’t humiliate or punish other people for purely moralistic meritocratic reasons.

The goal of Christian discipleship is holiness, a state of spiritual perfection in which all of our behavior is ruled by love. Many Christians misunderstand the perfection to which we aspire as a kind of flawlessness or blamelessness from which we gain the standing to pick apart the blameworthiness of other people’s behavior. But this completely misses the point of the gospel. Jesus sets us free from blame through his sacrifice on the cross so that we will stop justifying ourselves by blaming other people.

The holiest people I’ve known are those who refuse to blame. This doesn’t mean they don’t protest injustice or tell the truth about sin, but they are very reluctant to attack the dignity of another person. They are safe and approachable. They bring a non-anxious, non-judgmental presence into their communities which reduces the level of drama and accusation around them. Holy people don’t care if the agitated person yelling at them is a “spoiled brat” with a “bad attitude” or someone who’s lashing out because of severe social anxiety. They’re going to respond with healing, gracious, radical hospitality either way.

I hope to grow into a holy person. If I understand it right, then my struggle with mental illness has been one of the most helpful things that’s ever happened to me in that journey.

The Rev. Morgan Guyton serves as director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, which is the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice on Patheos.com, from which this post is reprinted with the author's permission.