The Powderhouse

Faith and the city by Molly Baskette

Darkness

 

   

This is the time of year when many people dear to me are bottoming out in their annual struggle with depression. It strikes early—as early as late November—and may be momentarily disrupted (or exacerbated) by the light and color and levity of the holidays. At least, there are usually other people around to distract us from the voices in our head telling us how bad things have gotten, cycling through the viciousness of isolation, depression, isolation, depression, with a little shame thrown in for good measure.  But then the trudge through January, February, March…and April is the cruelest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot.

      

The good news for those with bad blues is that the stigma surrounding mental illness, and depression in particular, is not what it once was. We make cracks about going into therapy to undo what our parents wrought, and compare notes on our prescription medications.

 

Problem is, we can talk about depression from a safe distance, we just can’t actually be depressed in front of one another. As one of my peeps recently said to me: “it’s funny how legitimate mental illness is these days. We all have our diagnosis:  seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder, panic attacks. We all talk about it over coffee or beer. But it’s still not acceptable to actually exhibit our mental illness in front of people.”

   

And yet we become more and more aware of the multitudes among us living with depression, anxiety, or worse. Is the problem growing? Or is it merely that we live in this densest of cities, and therefore live with very little privacy, and have ever-larger social circles? So inevitably we notice when our roommate sleeps till 3 in the afternoon, or our coworker has shallow scratches on her arms from cutting, or our blind date is panting and looking pale. It’s enough to make one, well, depressed and anxious.

    

There have been very few tests to my religious faith. I suppose I’ve been through as much as your average 30-something straight white American woman, and been able to reconcile all my trials with the idea of a God who is good and wills the best in all situations. But when I see people I love struggle day after day, do the right things, eat the right things, visit the right therapists and take the right meds, and still feel hopeless and helpless, or want to end their lives, it makes me want to turn my back on God.

Just what place do depression and other challenges to mental health have in what Jesus has called the Kingdom of Heaven—if God is in charge, what business does He or She have letting these gatecrashers in? 

    

Is God responsible for smiting certain people with suicidal depression, or crippling social phobias, or schizophrenia? Or are the individuals themselves responsible for not being able to get out of bed, or hold a job, or talk with strangers? If they tried harder, could they not be well?

   

To blame it on God is to yank out the thread holding the fabric of our faith together, a belief in a God who loves us and wants us to be whole.  But to blame the individual is to further disable someone already crippled by self-doubt.  This dilemma puts us, to paraphrase Cab Calloway, between the devil and the deep blue funk.   

      

There are various accounts of mental illness in the New Testament Gospels. Although they happened to be called exorcisms. Jesus encounters a man with “an unclean demon” in the synagogue at Capernaum, as he is teaching. Later, a wild man meets the disciples at a cave in the Gerasene countryside; he is the neighborhood crazy and the people are terrified of him. Still later in the gospels, a father brings his son, who has violent fits, to Jesus, seeking relief.

      

Demons were a relatively new concept in first century Israel; belief in them had crept in from neighboring cultures. Not everybody believed in them, but they did serve to explain why some people’s behavior was so unpredictable, and dangerous to themselves or others—the kind of behavior we moderns now know as severe mental illness.

      

Faith in the city by Molly Baskette

Skin

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was having trouble sleeping. Night after night she would demand that one of her parents hold her for hours until she fell asleep.

They realized they couldn’t go on like this forever. One night, they sat her down and tried to convince her that she was not really alone in her bedroom.

“God is with you, beside you, watching out for your every minute, Sweetheart,” they said. “You’re never alone.”

Rev. Molly Baskette

She listened thoughtfully, nodding the whole time. But at the end of their passionate plea she said patiently, “Could you still stay with me? I know God is here, but right now I really need someone with a little more skin.”

A newcomer to my church, a young woman who had not been raised in any religious tradition, was baptized this year.

At the time of her baptism, she didn’t understand intellectually what baptism was all about, but just felt a strong spirit leading her to do it anyhow.

When we sat down to talk about it, she said: I feel like this is the right place to be, but I’m just not sure what I believe about Jesus.

I summed up for her what it means to me that Jesus is the incarnate—literally, en-fleshed—version of God. “This is what I believe:  God made us as part of the long, epic process of Creation; made us, in fact, because nothing else that God had made had satisfied the loneliness God felt.  So God made us, and loved us, but it wasn’t quite enough. God couldn’t get close enough, still. So God took on human skin to entirely share our experience, to learn total empathy by sharing every iota of what it means to be a human being fully alive, and to be as close to us as possible:  hugging, crying, eating. The incarnation is no more complicated than that.”

Maybe you don’t know quite how you feel about the adult Jesus.

Maybe you don’t know enough about him.

Faith in the city by Molly Baskette

Illumination

Somerville, you are showing amazing restraint this year. Most of you have not yet put up your obscene, spectacular Christmas bling: enough icicles to reverse the effects of global warming, dayglo Santas, emaciated reindeer fashioned entirely from twinkle lights, air-blown snowmen imprisoned in snow globes.

Is it that the leaves are still providing us with decoration, thanks to an unusually mild fall? I didn’t realize how much I missed all the gaud until it wasn’t there on Nov. 1.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to be a pillar of Advent Orthodoxy: Advent constitutes the four weeks leading up to the feast of Christmas.

It is a time of preparation, of restraint, of not-yets. We’re not yet telling the nativity story. We’re not yet singing Christmas carols.

Some churchy types throughout time have even called Advent “a Little Lent,” a time set aside for quiet meditation, fasting and prayer.

And so I would grinch to my music directors: no carols before Christmas! Let Advent be Advent! We sing Advent carols until Dec. 24!

Trouble is, there are only so many lovable Advent carols. Like, umm…I know there’s one around here somewhere...

The problem with Advent Orthodoxy is, we’ve been hearing “Joy to the World” in CVS since just after Halloween, and we’re all worn out with it when permission is finally granted to sing it in an actual church sanctuary on Christmas Eve.

When consumer culture co-opts Christmas so early in the season, there’s nowhere for actual religious observers to go by late December.

I used to get mad that secular culture has gutted Christmas of its real power, by domesticating it and turning it into a veneration of excess tied up in curly ribbon. As one holiday season rolled around a couple years ago, a close Jewish friend and I got sore about how the dominant culture wreaks havoc with our kids’ understanding of their religious heritage.

She was mad, she said, that Christianity had so stolen the show that her kids wanted to trade in Hanukkah for a Christmas tree and a visit from Santa.

I said, “That’s not Christianity. Christianity is the birth of a peasant child in a remote corner of the Middle East, a child who will become a beacon of hope for the oppressed and the depressed. It’s about paradox, reversal of fortune, and incarnation of the divine.

It’s about God getting as close as possible to us. Santa and Best Buy stole this holiday from my kid, too.”

We’ve been working hard in my family to get the focus off of stuff and onto the heart of the nativity story, with mixed results. My five-year-old son still spends much more time wondering about the physics of Santa’s trip around the world than the biology of God’s entering human history in the body of a infant.

So while my religious tradition generally eschews easy-answer theology, preferring the open-ended “let your conscience and experience be your guide.”

I’ve developed a catechism we practice daily. I want to make sure there are some basics he gets.
It goes something like this, on the drive home from school:

My son: Look, Mom, there’s another Santa! One with lights and sparkles on it!

Me: You mean Saint Nicholas.

My son: You can call him Saint Nicholas. I’m going to call him Santa.

Me: Fair enough. But just making sure you remember: who does Saint Nicholas work for?

My son: God.

Me: And what did Saint Nick do originally?

My son: He started out giving money to the poor. Then he found out how much kids wanted Power Rangers™, and he got into that line of work.

Me: And what does Saint Nick have to do with Jesus?

My son: He’s handing out presents for Jesus’ birthday, because Jesus lives in each of us.

I realize how much I’ve had to compromise. The reason I let Santa stand is because kids need magic in their lives, especially with winter so cold and dreary. Those pagans knew what they were about with their festivals of light dotting the calendar from Solstice to Beltane. I want my children to experience the wonder and almost unbearable excitement that comes as Christmas approaches. Even if the story gets a little garbled. It’s not culture’s job to make sure Jesus stays at the center, it’s mine.

Faith in the city by Molly Baskette

Yoke

So, this evangelist walks into a movie theatre…

I don’t know how it ends, because it’s not a joke, and it actually hasn’t even happened yet. On Tuesday, Nov. 27, Rob Bell, the young pastor of a counterculture megachurch (is that a paradox?) and author of Velvet Elvis and Sex God, came to Davis Square’s Somerville Theatre to give a talk.

The stingy Web site promoting the event reads: “Part anthropology, part history, part deconstruction - this is new material that Rob hasn’t taught before, exploring how humans invented religion to make themselves feel better.”

Rev. Molly Baskette

This is typical cryptic PR from Bell. When he started his church, Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Mich., he killed the idea of advertising it before the first Sunday. “People have to want to find us,” he wrote in Velvet Elvis. “The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.”

A thousand people came that first Sunday. Two thousand the second Sunday. “If you want your friends to come next week,” he told the two thousand, “you’re going to have to buy them chairs.”

I read that chapter of his book and said to myself, “Maybe that’s the growth barrier at our church. We actually want to make it easy for people to find us and stay.”

My church is like the nice boyfriend you had sophomore year in high school who asked permission to hold your hand and bought you little presents. Bell’s church is like the smoking-hot, slightly dangerous-looking and aloof boyfriend you had two years later who, well, never mind. But you adored him. Of course, I’m just jealous. And mad that, given what most urban churches are up against, Bell didn’t TELL us how his church got so hugely popular. He just told us how he didn’t do it.

But where does that leave us CathoEpiscoBaptiLutherTarians, with all these pews and not enough bottoms in them?

Anyhow, true to form, Bell doesn’t seem to be talking up his speaking tour that much, and yet the venues are selling out all over the place. He’s playing the Dallas Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie, Atlanta, Orlando and….the Somerville Theatre?

It seems a strange place for a megachurch pastor to come, however alt, stripped-down and counterculture he may be. Then again, I read one of his books and was immediately won over. This is the guy who wrote: Sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up. Can I just say that? Can I get that off my chest?

Faith in the city by Molly Baskette

I’ve lived halfway between Davis and Powderhouse for a while now.

My husband and I wanted to raise our kids here, because we spent a few years in the burbs, and frankly, it was the worst of both worlds: no real privacy or exposure to nature (other than the occasional rabid skunk), and no real in-your-face community. So we threw in our lot with city, and Somerville has never disappointed. We love the crush of humanity, the drama that plays out on our front stoop nearly every day.

Rev. Molly Baskette

One regular feature is Mike, who is fond of hanging out on the bench in front of Powderhouse Park on College Avenue. I don’t know what his diagnosis is (Schizophrenia? Borderline personality disorder? Acid reflux?), but he is the least comprehensible and angriest guy around.

I’ve heard him shouting up and down this street for four years, at odd hours, and the only words I can make out are the expletives.

“Momma, what does %&$@! mean?” my five-year-old asks me after he passes by our front porch.

Baskette joins The Powderhouse

The senior minister at Davis Square's First Church Somerville UCC, Rev. Molly Baskette, will write a regular column for The Powderhouse newspaper beginning with the paper's first issue Wednesday.

Titled "Faith in the city," the column will address nexus of life in the city and religion.

Baskette eats prays and loves this city with her two young children and her husband Peter.

You can write her at fcs@firstchurchsomerville.org.