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Mental Health
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Lamenting the losses in life

There are paths through the thicket of loss that mental illness causes. Rachael Newham explores lament.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist. 

 

 

A Victorian fisherwoman sits on a beached boat, shoulder slumped.
But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley. The title is taken from the Tennyson poem 'Break Break Break'.
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

I am lost. I feel utterly bewildered by my surroundings and my head is beginning to spin under the strip lighting. There are people all around me, but I can’t find my bearings. This place should be familiar, it’s somewhere I’ve been a hundred times before, but I feel the panic rise as I try to find my way.  

 Before I had known exactly where things were, how to navigate the aisles and reach the things I needed with ease, but in the months I’ve been away, things have changed and I cannot face the thought of finding my way around the new arrangement, so I turn on my heel and leave empty-handed.  

I haven’t been away on holiday or gone on a work trip, I’ve been locked inside my own head doing battle with my own mind in the shadowlands of mental illness. Stable now, with the crisis averted, I am trying to rebuild and yet the Co-op rearranging my local store has served as a stark reminder that things have changed in me and around me. 

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it. 

This is the where the conversation about mental health awareness falls silent; the reality of the losses mental illness stacks up like Jenga blocks while you aren’t looking. Serious mental illness doesn’t just take your mind; it takes your ability to enjoy the people you love, the work you find fulfilling, the gloriously mundane school run and the life you once almost took for granted.  

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it, no five-step process to ‘get over it’. There is simply the loss and the life you’re trying to rebuild.  

This loss must be grieved. I would argue that all losses must be grieved if we are to learn to live with them. It is as Michael Rosen’s childhood classic “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” reminds us as the family go on their adventure and encounter the winds and sticky mud: “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, oh no! You’ve got to go through it”.  

We simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. 

It’s perhaps something the ancient faiths and traditions understood better than we do where there are rituals for grief; whether it be Jewish communities sitting Shi’vah or the Irish keening their songs of mourning, they acknowledge the enormity of grief and the need for communities to come together to process it.  

Where the loss is more personal, we can seem to lose access to the healing found in community traditions. When the loss is because of illnesses still so misunderstood and stigmatised, these processes and traditions can feel even further away, still.  

And yet.  

There are paths through the thicket of loss. William Worden, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association speaks of four tasks of mourning which include accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to the world afresh and finally finding enduring connection. These tasks were designed with bereavement in mind, but they seem to me to speak to losses in the broadest sense and I have found them to be true in mental illness. 

In the Bible we find this prophet Nehemiah, who is tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Israelites exile in Babylon. They’ve returned home, but home doesn’t look like they imagined to, the place they longed for no longer exists, and they have to accept before they can begin to grieve what has passed. Author Marya Hornbacher writes that  

“managing mental illness is mostly about acceptance- of the things you can’t do, and the things you must”  

and I see it every day - perhaps you do too - as I take the medication and get the sleep that’s required for some kind of equilibrium to be maintained 

Nehemiah grieves and weeps over the city for an estimated four months; but there is no set timescale for such things, we simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. In the Christian tradition this is called lament; it’s grief directed at God, bringing the pain before him in a way that acknowledges the twin realities of God’s goodness and our grief’s greatness. It is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is the gift of honesty. We do not need to put on our Sunday best for God, but can come in our brokenness and mess knowing that we will not be abandoned to it.  

And then we begin to adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in. We test the boundaries of what we can do as anyone in recovery does. There is a slow almost imperceptible move towards more of life; a trip to the local shop much like I did during that disorientating visit to the co-op, a visit from a friend or a phone call answered, long avoided. Nehemiah returns to his work for the King - but even then the King asks him why he’s looking so sad. We need not rush in with fake smiles before grief has finished with us, but be honest with those around us  - and with God.  

We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church.

The fourth task is that of finding connection. For some it will be found in their friendships, others in their faith communities or peer-led community groups. Whichever way it happens it’s how life grows again around and alongside the loss. Worden I think meant it as a way to continue the connection with a lost loved one, but in the story of Nehemiah we see it as the Israelites first come together to rebuild the wall and then to celebrate it. We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church, we have to find spaces where we can share ourselves, our stories and know we are not alone. It is perhaps one of our most fundamental needs - it is certainly been mine - to know that I am not alone in my loss and I’m not alone as I survey the wreckage and tentatively begin to rebuild. 

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Atheism
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Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 2: The making of rage against religion

In the second of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper explores the roots of science and religion, and a manufactured rage.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

Part two of Stefani Ruper

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.  

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.  

Here at Seen and Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.  Read part 1 here. 

____

“Idiots,” I mumbled under my breath. 

I was fourteen. I was in the local library, spending the day with a stack of books about evolution. I walked past a conference room where a small group church meeting was taking place.  

“Idiots,” I grumbled again, a little louder this time. 

Rage began to simmer in my blood. Religious people swore allegiance to an invisible entity for which there was absolutely zero evidence—actually, that demanded their fealty against evidence! It made me so mad. I was studying science because we needed to stick to the facts! If society was to move forward, we needed to leave our religious superstitions where they belong… in the past.   

Twenty years and a PhD in Religion & Science later, I cringe at what I used to think and feel. I’m not upset with my former self—it wasn’t my fault. But today, instead of fighting in the war between religion and science, I am fighting to end it.   

Here’s what I learned that changed my life. 

Science came from Christian Theology 

Many assume science and religion have always been at odds. But science grew out of the soil of Christian thought.   

To medieval Christian thinkers, nature was God’s Creation. They studied nature to glorify God and to nurture their own spiritual health. As William of Auvergne put it in the 13th century, studying the “book of Nature” led both to “the exaltation of the creator and the perfection of our souls.”   

They also saw God as an all-knowing, all-powerful source of Order. This predisposed them to look for overarching, universal patterns that would later become known as natural laws.  

Contrary to the common assumption that medieval thinkers were dogmatic, they were extremely humble about their truth claims, because they compared their ability to know to God’s and found themselves wanting. So when Aristotle’s systematic methods of observing nature were re-introduced to Europe in the 12th century, they seized the opportunity to enhance the rigour of their studies. As they began implementing Aristotle’s techniques, they realised they could combine them with the Platonic mathematics they had already been using for centuries. This was a powerful combination that resulted in uniquely accurate theories and predictions. It illuminated just how much Order there was to Nature—in fact, more than ever previously demonstrated. It also provided a way to formalise the study of Nature into the methods we today recognise as science. 

It is often said that over the next few hundred years scientists (then called “natural philosophers”) fought against the Church for the sake of science (“natural philosophy”), but this is an anachronism. Philosophers did begin to debate the best sources of knowledge. There were some major conflicts. But the vast majority of these people continued to study nature as a way to know and glorify God as its Creator. 

Huxley and others also re-wrote the history of science to make it seem like it had always existed and been conducted by freethinking naturalists challenging the religious status quo.

Shots fired!   

The supposed conflict between “Religion” and “Science” only really emerged about 150 years ago. In Victorian England it was becoming increasingly acceptable to criticise the church. Most wanted to reform it, but a few began to want to defeat it entirely. 

At the same time, various areas of natural philosophy were proliferating into specific disciplines becoming known as “sciences.” Some people, including influential scientist and public intellectual Thomas Huxley (who hosted an exclusive dinner club for advocates of naturalism called the X Club), saw this as an opportunity to discredit religion.   

One strategy was to unite the growing pool of various scientific disciplines under the umbrella of a singular “science” that could be defined as oppositional to religion. Science was rational, so religion became irrational. Science embraced facts, so religion entertained superstitions. Science honoured truth, so religion enabled wishful thinking. The success of theories such as evolution helped lend credence to such claims. These naturalists began to argue that science doesn’t just disprove specific notions (such as that the Earth is 6,000 years old) but all beliefs in the life beyond entirely.  

Huxley and others also re-wrote the history of science to make it seem like it had always existed and been conducted by freethinking naturalists challenging the religious status quo. In Evolution and Ethics Huxley declared, for example, that “’scientific naturalism took its rise among the Aryans of Ionia.” And he described naturalism as appearing wherever in history “traces of the scientific spirit” were visible. 

Finally, Huxley used his considerable influence both in the UK and the USA to push religion and religious people out of the sciences. As a member of the Devonshire Commission and having several other prestigious roles and memberships throughout his career, he strategically placed his naturalistic protégés in influential university positions, and he re-wrote science textbooks and exams to exclude religious ideas, motivations, and people. In a very short amount of time, Huxley and others succeeded at pushing religion to the margins of the sciences (not entirely of course, but enough to make a difference) and making it seem anti-science. 

Overcoming rage and hate with humility 

I used to think that religion was silly and weak. I thought this view was rational, and I was intellectually superior because of it. I now know I only had these perceptions because I was born into a specific worldview in part manufactured by Huxley and others. By the same token, many fundamentalist religious people—while influenced by many sociopolitical factors—are anti-science in part because their forebears were derided as irrational and intentionally alienated from the sciences. 

Both “sides” of this supposed war have inherited simplified views of one another and are taught to fear and to hate. Without learning this history, most never realise what has biased their enemies--or themselves. And virtually everyone in our society carries misperceptions about there being some kind of intrinsic conflict. When I tell people I have a PhD in the relationship between Religion and Science, most laugh and say: “but is there one?!” 

There is, and it was once beautiful and harmonious.  

The truth is that science is a way of investigating the order of nature, which can be done with or without belief in God. Today, many scientists eschew faith, but many others continue in the medieval tradition of studying Nature as God’s Creation with great integrity, rigour, and depth.  

We don’t all have to return to such beliefs. But one medieval practice we may all do well to reclaim is to approach the world, ourselves, and one another with deep humility concerning the limits of our knowing.  

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