Depression, Not As Sorrow Or Sadness, But As Despair

There seem to be many grades of what people like to call depression. Some people think it's just "the blues," a kind of down feeling, maybe makes you drink a bit too much or have trouble sleeping. Then there's the gloom of deep sorrow and sadness. Staring out windows. No energy. Physical pain. No joy in things that once used to be perceived as delightful. But there is a deeper level. There is a level of depression that confines you to your own personal Hell. It is the depression of absolute, monstrous despair.

Some theologians call despair the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. As if it were a choice. Despair is not a choice, it is a disease of the soul that no amount of prayer or kind words can heal. Some would say that despair is the opposite of hope. That is like saying a lion is the opposite of a zebra. Despair does not show up at the far pole of hope. Despair consumes hope. Rends it, tears it, rips bloody chunks from it. If one has not experienced despair, one cannot fathom despair. Despair even sometimes permits you some glimmer of hope just for the sake of snuffing it out. Despair is a disease with a thought process, a plan. Despair works tirelessly to wear you down and swallow the occasional flickers of hope that may alight. Hope is despair's food. When you have the disease, it is like a cancer and hope is like the healthy cells that get taken over. Despair's plan is one of ultimate self-destruction, for despair intends to destroy the being that carries it, thus wiping itself out.

To all the people who think despair is a sin, a failing, try to imagine how it feels like to be told you are loved and for the words to be swallowed up by an internal darkness that is beyond your control. Try to imagine what it is like to never know if you will be able to make it through the next day, hour, minute. Try to imagine that if you believe in any kind of Hell, that you think it would be preferable to the existence you have now. Try to imagine. But you've never experienced it. So you can't imagine it. You can only judge. Judging from beyond the reach of despair. This is where depression finds its purest expression. In the sin of cutting oneself from all imaginary help from beings divine and mortal; cutting oneself off against one's will, simply because one has had all that is good inside them served up as a feast for the beast despair.

If you either think you understand or think you are in a place to judge, think again. You do not understand, you are not in a place to judge. When all hope is gone and a person is simply waiting to die, beyond even praying for death, beyond even being able to bring about their own death, that is the Hell you seek in your lakes of fire and canonical texts. Despair is nearly the ultimate self-destruction. The only thing that subverts its plan is when the slightest hope that one would be better off dead arises and there is a suicide and the person and their disease both perish. Judge that only when you can say you have stared it in the face.