I am a Christian. I suffer from depression. The relationship between those two realities is hard to write about because I often feel they have no relationship at all. In fact, and I feel a mixture of guilt and queasiness about saying this, the two seem to stand in contradiction. Christianity speaks of the presence of a loving God: one who is close to us, cares for and consoles us even in our darkest hours. But during the most relentless episodes of depression, I don't "feel his presence" in a consolatory way. Instead, I identify with the question posed by the late-nineteenth-century priest, poet, and depressive, Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Comforter, where, where is your comforting?"

I feel both sheepish and disconcerted by this since I have sometimes expected to experience God in some clear and distinct way when in difficulties. But instead, only silence. I haven't had an encounter like Saint Paul's on the road to Damascus: "Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven ..." Or even one like Elijah's on Mount Horeb: "And after the fire a still small voice ..." Which leads me to wonder: Is there a fault with my faith? Is my faith too weak? Are my convictions half-hearted? Or is my sin too great? Does it block my access to God? Here, as elsewhere, depression provides no answers, only questions. [...]

Both Protestant and Catholic thinkers have reflected at length on that moment. "No abyss," writes John Calvin in the Institutes, "can be imagined more dreadful than to feel that you are abandoned and forsaken of God, and not heard when you invoke him, just as if he had conspired your destruction" (italics my own). But Calvin is clear: the silence of God is not a sign of the believer's faltering faith. Why? Because, Calvin continues, there is a precedent: "To such a degree was Christ dejected, that in the depth of his agony he was forced to exclaim, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" Similarly, Saint John of the Cross concludes that at the moment of his death "Christ was likewise annihilated in his soul, and was deprived of any relief and consolation, since his Father left him in the most intense aridity." While, finally, in The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton reflects - and it is worth quoting at length - upon the "stark and single-minded" words which Saint Mark and Saint Matthew, in their "naked narratives," attribute to Christ on the cross:

Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.

Paradoxically, I find that reading about the abandonment of Christ can be profoundly reassuring. Why? Because here, as Calvin highlights, is a precedent. Clearly, there is an utterly unique phenomenon at play in the Passion narrative: the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world, who carries the curse, and therefore upon whom the Father cannot look. Nevertheless, at the level of experience, it is profoundly comforting to learn that Christ has been to a place "pitched past pitch of grief." He too has suffered the darkest possible night.