Jessica Coblentz’s book sparked a question in my mind: How do the phenomenological worlds of persons living with depression relate to those of persons who do not live with this condition, at least not firsthand (by which I mean, they are not themselves depressed or prone to depression)? “World,” in the roughly Heideggerian or Merleau-Pontian sense I presuppose here, is not the name of a mind-independent objectivity but rather the name of the horizon of human existence as it appears to those who live it. Behind my question is a hope, or a hunch, that important connections are possible between the different phenomenological worlds that shape people’s lives. More specifically, I suspect that the difference between a depressive perception of reality and other modes of perception—though very real—may not be absolute or strictly binary. 

This line of reflection seems promising to me, insofar as it encourages practices of togetherness and mutual understanding, while mitigating feelings of isolation and incommunicability that contribute to suffering. Even though our phenomenological worlds may differ because of depression and many other factors, if we can share them with one another and find connections between them, this may be beneficial to everyone and reveal important features of our common humanity. 

Coblentz draws on phenomenological studies by thinkers such as Matthew Ratcliffe, Jennifer Raden, Fredrik Svenaeus, and James Alfred Aho and Kevin Aho to argue that the experiential horizon of depression is highly distinctive. Synthesizing these perspectives, she contends that depression involves an overwhelming sense of “unhomelikeness” (Unheimlichkeit) that presents the world as a place lacking in belonging, possibility, and meaning. Depression is not a momentary feeling of sadness but an abiding sense of life as such that makes it feel unlivable. It is not a finite emotional state that one may experience in the world but the world itself given as dark, heavy, confining, and desolate (35–48).

Although I do not suffer from depression, I can to some degree relate to such a depressive outlook on the world. In my research and teaching, I draw on Black, liberationist, feminist, and womanist theological traditions to reflect on interlocking structures of colonial, racial, and gender-based violence. I ask how prayer and even a mystical sense of God’s nearness can be possible and life-giving even in worldly contexts that seem like hell—places such as the hold of the slave ship. I consider what value spiritual practices may have for persons who do not only experience the world as prison-like but who are literally incarcerated, persons whose outward bodily darkness has been read as a sign of inner evil, persons whose ancestors were displaced from West African homelands and who today find themselves displaced again by predatory lending and socioeconomic exclusion. Like Coblentz, I agree with Delores Williams that persons living at the intersection of multiple oppressions may experience God, not only as a liberator bringing final deliverance from injustice, but as a loving presence in the midst of daily struggles to survive and flourish (183–189).

These considerations lead me to reflect on the relationship between depression and oppression. On the one hand, depression is a way of perceiving the world as unhomelike that is not only experienced by (at least some of) those who are oppressed but also by other persons whose outward circumstances are relatively comfortable. Therefore, it would be a mistake to posit a simplistic causal relationship, wherein the experience of depression would be perfectly explained by and correlated with the bitter realities of oppression. 

On the other hand, there appears to be some relationship between these two deadly weights (or “pressions”) that burden many human beings. It is not difficult to understand why oppression could make one depressed. Indeed, it is somewhat remarkable whenever this is not the case—that is, every time a powerful sense of joy, agency, and connection breaks through the crushing realities of social injustice. Furthermore, persons who are not themselves oppressed but are sensitive to the horrifying injustices that structure so much of history and society may similarly be moved to a depressive state of mind by this awareness. In such a case, their perception of the world as lacking in belonging, possibility, or meaning could be closer to the truth of social reality than the supposedly more ordinary or “normal” way of perceiving things as basically fine. Depression could be an affective symptom of a political order that is badly disordered—an unmasking of ideology.   

Beyond ties to oppression, the unhomelike world of the depressed may relate to a larger shared world of human experience in other ways. Existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions of philosophy argue that, regardless of social location, one is “thrown” into a world as a vulnerable, bodily, mortal being that did not choose this life and that depends on the affirmation of others simply to survive. If this relational affirmation is in short supply, this may fundamentally alter one’s perception of the world. But even if one receives plenty of love, the very contingency and precarity of life may generate feelings of existential disconnection or dread. 

In addition to psychic wounds caused by naked finitude and early childhood development, there are particular mental illnesses that affect certain bodies. Some central nervous systems process experiences in ways that make the inner wilderness of depression unavoidable, regardless of other factors. Although not everyone has this sort of illness, everyone’s mind depends on the functioning of the body in ways that are complex and susceptible to disruption and breakdown. Not only the oppressed but seemingly all human beings have vulnerabilities that could enable them to understand some measure of the unhomelike world that is disclosed through depression, even if this is not their prevailing viewpoint. 

Coblentz’s phenomenological account of depression brackets questions about whether it is caused by social forces, psychodynamics, or biochemical differences. This bracketing of causality (which resembles a Husserlian suspension of the “natural attitude”) is a helpful, methodological tool. It allows one to focus on describing the way the world is given to persons living with depression without trying to resolve longstanding etiological disputes. Yet the line between description and explanation is somewhat blurry. Oppression, thrownness, and illness are phenomena within the everyday world that I inhabit without feeling depressed, and they are features of this world that help me understand why one would, could, or perhaps even should feel depressed. How depression feels and why it feels this way are at least somewhat phenomenologically intertwined. 

There may be cases when understanding this “why,” or having an educated guess about it, helps one respond in practical ways, whether as a person living with depression or as someone accompanying such persons with tenderness and love. For example, if a particular form of oppression such as anti-Black racism is a major factor in a Black person’s experience of depression, then collective acts of resistance against such racism could be a way to help restore connections, build shared perceptions of a meaningful world, and provide some therapeutic relief. To be sure, it is necessary to resist all forms of oppression regardless of their emotional impacts, but it would be beneficial to make the psychological and phenomenological stakes of such political struggle explicit. Coblentz emphasizes that we need social action to increase access to mental health care and to overcome the stigmas associated with mental illness (208–17). What I am suggesting here, in addition, is that activism against racial and other kinds of injustice may also contribute to the mental wellbeing of the oppressed, even if it does not provide a “cure” or address the causes of depression for everyone.  

Theological speculations about a “why”—such as theodicies that suggest God causes depression and uses it for this or that purpose—are generally unpersuasive to me, as they are to Coblentz. One of the great contributions of her book is to carve out a space for affirming the presence of God in the inner wilderness of depression without giving it a redemptive function. Coblentz’s interpretation of the Hagar story is particularly helpful in this regard (141–71). However, some of the other, more humanistic etiological options, such as oppression, thrownness, and illness (as I am calling them here), may have value for understanding the relationship between depressed and non-depressed perceptions of the world. My suggestion is that we frame them, not as sufficient explanations for depression, but as bridges or conduits connecting depression with other experiential horizons of human life.

I hesitate on this point, however, because I am aware that my sense that such connections are possible is characteristic of a worldview that is precisely not depressed. I want to make a few points in light of this apparent hermeneutical impasse. Echoing Coblentz, I first want to emphasize that even if the inner wilderness of depression is completely unlike any other human perception of the world, this is no barrier to the God of love who is not constrained by any phenomenological limits (200–203). In other words, God does not need persons to feel happy or to experience life as rich in meaning and possibilities in order to love them, be with them, and in some cases help them see a way forward in their lives. However, it is also true that depression is sometimes so severe that persons suffering from it simply cannot conceive a viable path ahead. Such tragedy does not imply the absence of God’s love. Indeed, God is there with tender mercy even in cases where major depression leads one to end one’s life. Although they are not physically part of this earthly existence any longer, suicide decedents are not beyond the reach of eternal divine compassion. In sum, my point is that no difference of phenomenological world, however total or devastating, separates one from the love of God. 

My second point is that Coblentz’s decision to affirm God’s presence in depressive wilderness experiences creates a bond with other human experiences. Although it may not merge the worlds of the depressed and non-depressed, this theological argument posits a link between them. It describes both as places where the loving God can be found. In some of the less tragic cases, such divine presence is manifest through concrete experiences of belonging, possibility, and meaning that to some degree break the grip of depression. Although these experiences may not free depressed persons completely or permanently from an overarching sense of unhomelikeness, when they do occur they create openings in such a confining perception of the world that make living within it more feasible. When such openings happen, they prove that there is no absolute phenomenological differentiation between the worlds of depressed and non-depressed persons but at least some overlap between them.

Finally, I want to emphasize that Coblentz’s book has helped me appreciate that finding shareable worlds, and the presence of God within them, is not about asking depressed persons to leave their worlds behind and conform to a supposedly “normal” way of seeing things. Rather, it is about discovering and making connections between worlds, without a priori judgments upon them. In some cases, these shared liminal spaces can be entered from both directions—that is, through acts of self-care on the part of the depressed and acts of solidarity on the part of those who love and accompany them. In these interstitial zones of connection, human life is revealed through precarious tensions between isolation and belonging, stasis and possibility, absurdity and meaning. 

I am thinking of contexts of encounter in which persons suffering from depression, oppression, thrownness, illness, or any combination of the above may find comfort through supportive relationships with one another and, thereby, reflect something of the relational goodness of God. This is not only—or primarily—an eschatological vision of a glorious world in which all wrongs have been righted and all tears wiped away. For the most part, it is a quotidian vision of a shared life together even in the midst of ongoing struggle, suffering, and mystery. 

“Guilt filled every cavity of my body,” (3) writes Jessica Coblentz in her crucial book, Dust in the Blood: a Theology of Life with Depression. Here, she refers to how depression had emptied her of the ability to be present to life beyond her inner turmoil. Just as the phrase “dust in the blood” had stopped Coblentz in her tracks in its resonance with her depression (6), the image of guilt seeping into crevices, holes, and wounds of my body stopped me. It is the intangible space between who I was supposed to be, what I had envisioned I could be like, and my sense of self during times of depression that has weighed me down, pinning me to my bed. Coblentz serves us all by offering words that fill this intimate space.

In writing of the Azusa movement in her wonderful new book, Azusa Reimagined: a Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging, Keri Day describes the worship at Azusa as encompassing revolutionary intimacy.1 Such tactile intimacy as a form of glorifying God, she argues, is a counter to the capitalist and supremacist theologies of white Christianity, which found or find such intimacy a perversion. Coblentz refuses to let theology go without the intimacy of her feelings and bodily experiences. Her book implicitly helps more of us to come out of our mental health closets and to be intimate in print and at podiums. Our work is better for it, as this book so beautifully proves. 

There is much to praise in Dust in the Blood: its authenticity, its careful attention to the multivocality of depression sufferers, its refusal to decide for each of us which theology is good or bad or repressive or liberative, and its ability to offer a bounty of theological options. It does all of this while also leaning us into theologies that dissipate the guilt or guiltiness of the depressed.

Indeed, Coblentz will not and wills to not let theology go. Instead, she mines theology for what it has to offer to those too often left out of the conversation. To do so she engages various approaches to the wilderness within the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Most crucially, she turns to Delores Williams’s readings of Hagar. I am grateful for how Coblentz honors Williams and the Womanist way of making a way out of no way. However, her discussion of the wilderness and homeyness need expansion, nuance, and thickening. I hope to suggest ways to do so without offering a problematic theodical justification for depression. There is nothing redeemable about depression, and yet to talk theology and depression is to talk about meaning within such irredeemable suffering.

In Dust in the Blood, Coblentz marks the state of depression as one of unhomelikeness (10). I am convinced by Coblentz that for many, depression is a kind of wilderness experience, where one is exposed to harsh conditions for life and disconnection from those people and experiences “that ground their identity” (128). To be sure, the guilt associated with one’s depression is entangled with a loss of some crucial personas. And yet, my depression is also like a big old familiar and warm, if itchy, sweater. I find myself wrapped in it in painful, but comforting ways. If anything my depression has come to feel more homey than the times in my life where I am out in the world being something more than it has taught or forced me to be. There is something comforting in the collapse into bed and the refusal of a striving that is impossible to achieve. 

For some, perhaps, the wilderness is harsh precisely because it is not the space of our depression. To move with and beyond one’s depression can mean entering a wild world in which one is not quite sure how to survive. Wildness might be the feeling of getting through the energy, the movement, the unmooredness it takes to believe your identity could be more than that of your depression. 

In chapter eight, this complication comes in well when Coblentz discusses people with depression who have come to understand that it will never be cured. The voice of Daphne Merkin resonates: “If I can’t quite declare victory over my depression, I am giving it a run for its money, navigating around it, reminding myself that the opposite of depression is not a state of unimaginable happiness but a state of approximate contentment, of relative all-right-ness” (188). I call this kind of feeling “supreme okayness,” an emotion characterized by some peace with the messy flux of time and space that those of us with depression are riding. Such a sentiment is resonant with Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression when she describes Eileen Myle’s commitment to brushing her teeth as a testament to, “the ordinary power of living,” and so a utopian demand that depression is not all there is.2 The question I offer is where could theologies of depression go if brushing one’s teeth was the wilderness experience as much as depression’s inability to shower? What do we do theologically, when depression is what feels like home to us, or what comes from the very harshness of the homes in which we were raised? And if one affirms this complication, how might theologians deconstruct the binary of home and wilderness that is set up in this book?

This might also be key to the important Womanist reading Williams does of Hagar, connecting her to the ways in which Black women have always made a way out of no way. This represents some of the most fruitful theological constructions Coblentz makes around the wilderness not as a lack of God’s presence, but as a space in which God is with those who unjustifiably have to find that way, and yet do so anyway. Yet, such a racial and gendered reading of the wilderness should also call theologians to critically engage “homelikeness.” I think of the kind of resentment I have felt from white men I know who never got a tenure track job. It is profoundly different from the sadness I feel from women, gender minorities, and Black, indigenous, and friends of color who are still looking for that stability. It is not that disappointment is absent or undeserved, but rather that some of us were taught to expect that kind of success and others were not. Would the wilderness have been different or less complicated if it was Sarah or Abraham or Isaac, rather than Hagar and Ishmael who were sent out? Would depression feel so unhomelike if one’s home had not been one of comfort and love? Simply put, how can we theologically challenge home or even landedness as an uncomplicated good in terms of depression?

In his posthumously constructed and published collection The Sense of Brown, José Muñoz writes, “This move to practice our commons otherwise, to know the brownness of the world despite the impediments that manifest themselves as enclosure, is a necessary project of dis-enclosure…an attunement to the brownness of the world promises an unboundedness that is not knowable in advance. Instead, it functions, stridently and beautifully, as the queer dis-enclosure of a brown commons.”3 Muñoz prompts the question of whether it is a lack of homelikeness that characterizes depression as much as an enclosure away from the possibilities of a connected commons? 

This is certainly something Coblentz acknowledges in her insistence that the wilderness is multivocal and filled with complex and unbounded theological meaning. But she could push even further into the ways in which the problems of depression might not be so much that they leave us ungrounded or without land, but rather that they keep us at home, doors locked, covers over our head, unable to see the expansive commons of which we are a part. 

Throughout Coblentz’s engagement with sufferers of depression she highlights a thread of disconnection, loneliness, and the untranslatability of the experiences of the depressed. In the introduction she writes, “communication is predicated on connection—on something shared, a common referent—and I could not relate to anyone” (4). And in her concluding call to a Christian discipleship that would attend to depression, Coblentz quotes another person with depression who recalled, “It never occurred to me to talk to anyone about it. . . . I had this idea that it just wouldn’t be acceptable. . .I think there’s something of a taboo against talking about bad things or bad feelings. . . . I had to maintain a façade so that people would treat me with respect” (147). What if this was not so much a feeling of unhomelikeness, but of enclosure, maybe perhaps the enclosure of what has come to feel like home? What theological sense could we make of the problem of enclosure or, to borrow from Muñoz again, the concrete utopian act of dis-enclosure?4 

Coblentz begins to call such a need to mind in chapter eight when she discusses Christian discipleship in the face of depression. Here the call for disciples to participate in the disclosure part of such dis-enclosure—to attend to and see as God is a God who sees Hagar—is a call to see beyond our enclosures and into the suffering of the depressed. In attending, such disciples would also take action in re-connection through word, deed, and liturgy with those suffering. They would advocate for mental health care and changes in policy and destigmatization. Yes! Yes to this description of discipleship. But might also those who are suffering be the disciples? If God is a God who feels, as Coblentz points to by drawing on the work of Monica Coleman and Jürgen Moltmann, then could God also be suffering with depression? Could God not merely be a God of the depressed, but also a depressed God? Could those who were depressed not be following God in being depressed but still following God’s lead by refusing to ignore what they feel, and in not letting those who have not seen and have not heard, remain in their own enclosures?  

Here’s where the theodicy problem comes in. I do not want to say that depression is necessary, or that we are prophets who therefore need to be depressed so that others might learn to feel a revolutionary intimacy that our depression forces upon the world. Depression is not redeemable even within my hope that we could imagine the wilderness as an unbounded space like that of the brown commons.

No matter what revolutions might come from such a dis-enclosure it is unjust that some and not all must be cast out, as Coblentz so rightly argues. Indeed, Coblentz lingers with both the unreasonableness of the wilderness and its importance as a space of meaning-making when she embraces a God of presence. She suggests that salvation in the wilderness can be rewritten as survival in community, even if that community is only the mother and child as with Hagar and Ishmael, or a nomadic community, or the sufferer and God (chapter seven). 

This book reminds us that God’s presence can be a form of community. Coblentz calls to mind how what we can call survivance (a survival that is also a resistance to that which is trying to kill us) is weighty with theological meaning. Perhaps then, what I want us to think more about is how survivance is discipleship as much if not more so than witness to the other’s struggle to survive. The imitation of God can be found in the embodied survivance of sufferers of depression. This is not to argue that depression itself is holy, but rather that to brush one’s teeth is an act of glorification, it is an act of faith that one might be more than the isolation. 

God’s presence with us might be God’s act of survivance. Wilderness and home, flight and retreat, could mingle such that we build a commons, one landed enough for us to find one another, but unbounded enough that we might also let one another go, and in the going to lead us to the next commons and the next. Would this be a discipleship of revolutionary intimacy? Could we find a homeyness without possession or isolation? Might we write theologies of wild commons that move in and out of our houses?

These are questions to play with, to stay in bed with, to brush our teeth with. But they need not be engaged by all who suffer from depression, for as Coblentz so rightfully points out, we cannot and should not speak for all sufferers, we can only offer an ever more expanding collection of theologies, of sweaters itchy and not, for each of us to try out and try on. 

For over a decade, Coblentz and I have collaborated on multiple projects, all of which have involved bringing questions of mental health to bear on theological issues, in theological settings. Because of this friendship, forged in the fires of professional endeavors, the image that struck me from Coblentz’s introduction to her debut text Dust in the Blood was one that had haunted her during a particularly terrifying bout of depression in her twenties: her recurrent dream of dozing in the backseat of a car surrounded by the wooded terrain of the Pacific Northwest, a dream that suggested at the time to her that she would die there (4).

As she narrates that part of her life, she explains that she was inexplicably overcome with an extended, severe episode of depression that debilitated her for a long time (3–6). This is a languid and isolated self-portrait that cuts against my perception of Coblentz as a preternaturally motivated, productive, and connected theologian. That is part of her point: that is what depression did to her. I am grateful that she has the courage to allow these more “private” experiences—experiences that we in the academy are “supposed” to hide—into her public image as a theologian. Fittingly, she declares at the outset, “A body that has known depression is the only body from which I can theologize” (10).

I am also a theologian, and I will try to match Coblentz’s transparency in identifying her body as that from which she theologizes: I have spent most of my life as a suicide loss survivor. When I was a child on the brink of adolescence, my teenage sister—diagnosed as depressed—died by suicide. So, I read Coblentz’s book from the perspective of somebody who experiences her own body and life as incomplete, who is missing a part of herself—a part of her “flesh”—because of the depression of her kin.

I believe that my sister often experienced her depression as meaningless, and I know that after she was gone, our family was dumbfounded and riven by the senselessness of her death. In the decades since, we have learned to live in that disquieting space of senselessness. There is deep joy, community, passion, and good humor, but our lives will always be worse without my sister. I have always felt since she died that part of my life was also over before it really began. There is no going back to meaning, normalcy, or shallow propriety.

I could write about the sensitivity and empathy that I gained through grieving this loss, but the truth is that I would return it all if I could just have my sister back. Perhaps some other suicide loss survivors might feel differently, but, either way, I do not need to be told to gain more perspective on these matters. I have been given the tragic misfortune of almost thirty years of perspective, accumulated through the harrowing idiosyncrasies of the grief process itself as well as the grace notes of therapy, excellent theological education, and loving relationships. I would even say I have healed in pieces. I have an unwanted authority that I despise.

However, in our society, with catchphrases such as “no regrets” and “live in the moment,” it feels like you are not supposed to offer this kind of outlook. You are supposed to take all the bad as a learning experience. After all, the silver lining justifies the black clouds, or, even more strongly, without any black clouds we would have no silver linings. Supposedly, every experience of suffering, if you let it teach you, is leading to your grand apotheosis as a radically becoming individual. Therefore, in light of this cultural pressure, what I like about Coblentz’s book is that she argues that this view of suffering, particularly when imposed in hegemonic fashion, is pablum.

As a suicide loss survivor who is grieving a death where depression certainly played a role, I offer here some reflections about Coblentz’s chapter on how (not) to talk about depression (Chapter 4). While I can speak only for myself as one suicide loss survivor, I imagine that my words might resonate with some others who have also weathered this tragic devastation. Briefly, the preceding chapters clarify that there are common views of depression that depict it as a self-imposed moral evil or as a divine instruction (55–71). These two depictions encode depression with a “higher” divine purpose that is supposed to reconcile us to belief in an all-powerful God who has suffering under control, who “makes it make sense.” These are theodicies. But Coblentz points out that these approaches are not really up to snuff when it comes to fulfilling three significant tasks: understanding the experiences of many depression-sufferers, promulgating a compelling view of God, and encouraging proper social action for depression-sufferers. These theodicies overlook that depression-sufferers are no more sinful or holy than the general population (74–79), they raise questions about what kind of God they presume and whether that God is worthy of worship (79–82), and they risk normalizing depressive suffering in a way that breeds apathy and stymies social justice for depression-sufferers (82–85).

In Chapter 4, there is a twist. Here, Coblentz deploys Karen Kilby’s work on suffering and the limits of theology to argue that if individual depression-sufferers find some meaning in viewing their depression as a self-imposed moral evil or divine instruction, then that is their absolute right. Coblentz approvingly uses Kilby’s grammatical distinction between first- and second-person language about suffering to suggest that it matters less what the content about suffering is and more what the position of the speaker is. So, if I am tempted to impose meaning on somebody else’s suffering, I should be quiet. We have had too much theological talk about other people’s suffering in a manner that grossly minimizes that suffering for the sake of preserving the pristine image of an all-powerful God (and the all-powerful theologian). I should not even think I know better than the sufferer. On this point, Coblentz includes Kilby’s statement at length:

It is important not to see this difference between a first person and second person relation to suffering as a mere matter of tact, of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent. The idea, in other words, is not that while I might see meaning in your suffering, I must be patient, keep my mouth closed and let you work it out for yourself, as I might for a student of mathematics who is a little slower than I am at doing a calculation. To ascribe meaning to your suffering, even silently, is something I have no right to do. (103)

But, as Kilby clarifies, if I am suffering, I deserve the space to make sense of that suffering however it strikes me. I think that what draws Coblentz to this distinction is its grounding in compassion for her fellow depression-sufferers. She would never position herself as reprimanding somebody who viewed their own depression as a divine test and was therefore able to relate more hopefully to their depression.

I pondered this part of Coblentz’s argument for a long time, but I ultimately came around. I felt compelled by this statement from Coblentz:

To presume that I, as a theologian, know better than another depression sufferer when it comes to her suffering is to disregard the real, persistent mystery of evil in the Christian worldview. Instead of “correcting” this sufferer with my “right” ideas about God and suffering, which would at least indirectly impose parameters of meaning (and nonmeaning) onto the suffering of another, it would be better for me as an outsider to witness the complexities and even impossibilities of my own God-talk in the face of suffering’s mystery. (100)

Here, Coblentz indicts my own fixation on being theologically right, a fixation that exists because my very career depends, in some fundamental way, on it. But not only should I avoid being obnoxious by remaining silent instead of “correcting” people’s theological utterances about the sharpest edges of their own lives. I should also check myself and acknowledge that I do not possess unmediated access to God and that I, like mostly everybody else, am doing my best while knowing nothing for sure about God or the existential implications of suffering. It is a call for radical epistemic humility, and if that means that we end up with a plurality of Christian viewpoints on suffering that may even conflict with each other, so be it. God is wild, and suffering is absurd and chaotic. I find in Coblentz’s reflections a gentle nudge to remember that it is not a virtue to want to control other people’s stories about their own sorrow. I am not God.

But I also have a lingering question. Coblentz explains that we must allow people to interpret their own suffering in whatever theological ways make sense to them because such self-interpretation, regardless of the content, can be salutary for depression-sufferers as they attempt to reclaim their voice. She refers to the ability to interpret one’s depression-suffering as “life-sustaining” (99), good for “survival” (97), enkindling of “hope against hope” (97), and deeply “vital” (98). It made me wonder about Coblentz’s general standard of judgment here that enables her to accept these diverse viewpoints on people’s experiences of their own depressive suffering. Ultimately, it seems to me that, for Coblentz, it comes down to whatever works for people to be in their lives: if they think God is giving them depression to test them, and that makes them feel closer to God and more motivated to keep going, that is real and valid. Conversely, if they are like Coblentz in experiencing their depression as a meaningless void while knowing that this is not un-Christian, and this knowledge enables them to keep going, that is also real and valid.

But what about the depression-sufferers who are succumbing to the deceptive narratives of their depression, who come to believe that they are a burden on everybody, that everybody is just putting up with them but would be better off without them, that God hates them? My sister wrote frequently in her journal about being a useless human whose life was devoid of anything real, and she felt sure that God was angry with her for all her “failures.” These sentiments were part of her first-hand interpretation of her suffering, and given the nature of depression, I know she was not unique in this way. But they are not “vital,” and they do not facilitate “survival.” Therefore, although I am largely compelled by Kilby’s exhortations, I cannot help but feel, as a second-person bystander, that completely accepting these sentiments expressed by my sister and many like her is unacceptable. I object not because I judge my sister for her feelings; I never did. Rather, deeply suicidal people often go through periods of time where they are testing their connections and genuinely seeing if others care about them, specifically in a way that might subvert their own self-annihilating internal monologues.1 Crucially, this testing of the waters often does not take the form of the explicit questions “Would you care if I died? What do you think about my suicidal suffering?” People are typically less direct and interrogative than this. Further, if they do attempt suicide, many who survive are grateful that they did survive.2 The stakes are high here, so prioritizing the individualization of each person’s first-hand interpretation of their suffering above all else seems dangerously misguided to me.

Perhaps Kilby’s argument allows us to respond if suicidal depression-sufferers ask us what we think, but this language still loses the sense that sometimes these encounters can be honest “back-and-forths” or even confrontations rooted in love. This does not have to foreclose real listening. Kindly and with sensitivity to context, I need to be able to tell such a person that they are loved, by God, and by others. I may have to be forceful. It is complicated. Nevertheless, I would find any way within my power to help that person feel more loved in their life and to get them the support to feel like “staying” was a real option. For a variety of reasons, not everybody who struggles with depressive suicidality can come to feel this way. Nevertheless, it is imperative that the community signal to people that they matter and belong. It is also necessary to reject any kind of romanticizing logic about suicide as mysterious or interesting. This is especially key when we communicate with younger people, a demographic in which suicide clusters occur every year.3

Ultimately, I think these considerations show the limitations of Kilby’s grammatical rules about suffering, which I find to be too heuristically controlling in terms of who can and cannot talk when, and about what, and to whom. I know more about this topic than I wish to, and I will connect with people suffering with their depressive suicidality however I see fit. While I fully support the idea that we need to listen to those who are suffering, we may also, under certain circumstances, need to say things back, because the content does matter. The content itself can be vital. We should remember that so many people who have died by suicide were once depression-sufferers looking for a lifeline.

I offer this reflection with love for people like my sister and like Coblentz. Ultimately, even with the critique I have offered, I have come to believe that if my sister were alive today and somehow living with her depression, she could have experienced some healing reading Dust in the Blood, and maybe she would have felt less alone. For that image, Coblentz, I thank you.

With Dust in the Blood, Jessica Coblentz has given a precious gift to Christians who ask where God is amid their own or another’s depression, and to Christian communities desiring to be places of homelikeness both for those suffering from the loss of possibility depression affords, and those who accompany them through depression’s wilderness. Space will not permit me to reflect on all the good in this book that should be uplifted, shared, and taken to heart. I will focus my response, then, through my lens as a virtue ethicist, reflecting on the dispositions and practices Dust in the Blood suggests for theologizing depression and accompanying those who suffer it. 

With feminist rigor, Coblentz incorporates her own story with depression into the book’s introduction and conclusion, gently reminding the reader that the theologian is always a human being, a beloved and broken child of God, before, while, and after she becomes a scholar and begins to put words on a page. Her many virtues as a scholar are revealed through this act of vulnerability, as with generosity she offers the gift of her own journey through depression and her seeking for a meaning in its suffering. Compassion is evident in her attention to the accounts of other sufferers and the way their experiences resist univocity; what appeared as a source of light to one sufferer may forever remain forestalled to another. 

Another virtue readers will encounter in these pages is intellectual hospitality. Coblentz examines popular theologies of depression at length, and one important task is to show the ways in which these can harm sufferers, by portraying depression as “a self-imposed moral evil” (55) or God as a “theological sadist” (Dorothee Solle; 81) who sends depression in order to test sufferers. These careful indictments of popular theologies of depression achieve their intended purpose, urging Christians who wish to accompany depression sufferers to humility around imposing meaning on depressive experience. However, Coblentz does not engage popular theologies of depression to belittle them and their adherents. She is careful, throughout, to show the affordances of each popular theology. For example, “for some, attributing depression to sin affords a sense of empowerment by providing a clear path of escape from the condition” (62), an appeal this theological approach shares with medical models which focus on etiology rather than meaning. “Though depression displaces its sufferers into an unfamiliar, unhomelike world, these popular theologies suggest that it is not a world beyond the bounds of the Christian faith and its God,” Coblentz concludes (71). Equally, critics of these popular theologies come in for their share of gentle correction when they assume that getting the theology right is the solution: “Positionality, not right content, should be the primary factor for evaluating the legitimacy of Christian talk about suffering” (drawing on Karen Kilby, 87).  The overall effect of intellectual hospitality toward popular theologies of depression—and thus, inclusion of those sufferers for whom they have provided meaning and those loved ones of sufferers for whom they represented all there was to offer—shares powerful affinities with the insistence on popular religion as locus theologicus advanced by Orlando Espín and others. As Espín teaches, theological truth is not necessarily found in the particular practices or expressions of belief through which the sensus fidelium makes itself known, but in the actual intuition of community belief, guided by the Holy Spirit (The Faith of the People, chapter 3). Just so, the popular theological conviction to which Coblentz shows hospitality, that depression sufferers are not “beyond the bounds of Christian faith and its God,” is invigorated with scholarly engagement later in the book. Coblentz uses the biblical Hagar’s suffering in the wilderness to envision God as present to sufferers of depression, enabling possibilities for survival (184).  

White U.S. theologians have been slow to take up the call to theologize popular religion issued by Espín and others, including Delores Williams, M. Shawn Copeland and other womanists Coblentz draws on throughout Dust in the Blood. Coblentz does a great service to those white theologians who wish to begin this work by demonstrating the presence of popular theologies where other academics would not think to look for them, including in texts some might be tempted to derisively call self-help books. Quite in line with her liberationist predecessors, Coblentz’s intellectual hospitality toward popular theologies preserves the dignity of their framers and adherents. Popular theologies are not immune from critique, but they reveal the yearnings of people responding to “that which culture allows” them to believe about God (Espín 93) and provide an invitatory point for the theologian to respond to that hope. 

My own work as an ethicist has benefited greatly from Coblentz’s introduction of “small agency.” Many sufferers of depression experience it as a lack of possibilities for daily living, where even leaving the house or taking a shower feels out of reach for the sufferer. Sometimes, in a mysterious way, this sense of possibility for small actions eventually returns. Some sufferers forthrightly describe this return of possibility, which Coblentz names “small agency,” as demonstrating the presence of God’s action in their lives. So Coblentz concludes, here and elsewhere, that small agency can be theologized as a sign of God’s grace. Medication, certainly, can be a help to restoring that sense of emergent possibility and thus a gift from God as well, despite the sad reality that some sufferers’ depression will not respond to medication (210). 

Small agency as a sign of God’s grace resonates in generative ways with diverse contemporary efforts of theological ethicists to articulate the reality of moral action constrained by the vicissitudes of life. Tools including burdened virtue (developed by philosopher Lisa Tessman and appropriated by many theological ethicists); social structures (a tool from critical realist social theory, developed for theology by Daniel Finn and Dan Daly, among others); the womanist ethics of Katie G. Cannon, Rosita DeAnn Matthews, and Melanie Harris, among others; Kate Jackson-Meyer’s account of tragic dilemmas; and the Christian account of moral luck I develop in my own work are all attempts to describe for Christian audiences how moral agency really persists even though it is genuinely limited, challenged, and constrained by oppression or, in different ways, by privilege and domination. Coblentz’s small agency reminds us that behind the challenged, limited, constrained and vicious realities of human agency remains the loving Source of all human being and doing. At times, what had once seemed impossible now seems doable, and we don’t quite know why. Thanks be to God! 

Coblentz carefully cautions that the association of small agency with God’s grace should not be misused to force depression into a narrative of meaning not claimed by the sufferer (192). Still, Coblentz’s association of small agency with grace will certainly suggest its own theodical questions not explicitly answered in the book’s earlier sections on depression and theodicy. Why do some sufferers regain small agency while others never might? Coblentz is willing to conclude, with Parker Palmer, “I do not know why” (197). Her prescribed dispositions and practices for accompanying sufferers of depression do not answer the theodical question, but they do offer a pathway for accompanying those whose depression places them in a situation to ask it. 

Coblentz warns that theologians approaching the reality of depression must avoid two opposing pitfalls. They must refrain from imposing meaning from without on the suffering of those with depression, thereby overriding sufferers’ agency by imposing narratives that may not reflect their experience. Equally, they must resist the temptation to withdraw from theological thinking about the suffering of depression through a misguided fear of saying the wrong thing, thereby leaving sufferers to fend for themselves. What is crucial is for sufferers to speak about their own experiences of meaning or lack thereof within depressive experience. However: 

Theologians…should try to expand possible resources for first-person meaning making without requiring and imposing meaning…Theologians…could offer sufferers the resources of our own imaginations of what might be possible for them…This could include possibilities for meaning making yet unforeseen for sufferers themselves; it could also include possibilities for affirming the meaninglessnes of one’s own suffering within a Christian worldview. (108-9)

The theologian’s task is to “offer sufferers access to theological resources that expand possibilities for meaning making in the context of depression … while articulating a clear stance against the imposition of meaning.” (110) 

I find myself convinced by the necessity of the two tasks Coblentz sets out for theologians and yet still unclear about the distinction between them. What does it look like to offer resources that propose possibilities of meaning, without imposing that meaning on sufferers? Does the distinction simply describe a disposition of humility or a particularly gentle address on the part of the theologian who makes such offers? 

One possibility for offering without imposing is not explicit, but certainly implied in Coblentz’s concluding tasks for Christian communities accompanying sufferers of depression. Namely, the possibility of a world where any meaning of our suffering is not known to us must become part of the Christian imagination. Coblentz explores the possibility of Christian communities practicing immersion in tragic narratives, ones where suffering remains unresolved, through the work of Rowan Williams, Pope Francis and Karen Bray (203–6). While Coblentz envisions such practice as preparing communities to accompany sufferers with depression, becoming a people capable of acknowledging that suffering’s meaning may lay beyond our view will surely help community members who, one day, suffer depression themselves. 

When I read Coblentz’s prescription of accompanying depression sufferers without imposing meaning on their struggles, as God does for Hagar in the wilderness, I experienced my own expansion of possibility. In her wilderness, Hagar encountered and named God “present to this suffering amid its enduring incoherence and inexplicability … God Who Sees and Hears but does not explain” (202). In imitating this God who kenotically draws near without imposing meaning where the sufferer experiences none, here at last was a roadmap for loving those in depression or in other circumstances that render this world unhomelike. For Coblentz, Christians can love those suffering depression by drawing near to their suffering, offering the possibility of understanding this depressive wilderness as a “difficult place where God is” (135), without imposing the medical model’s expectation for immediate improvement, or popular theology’s pressure to affirm meaning that may not be present to the sufferer. 

At the risk of proceeding from the gracious, thoughtful, and rigorous to the goofy and oversimplified, I will close with a reflection on a popular Internet meme. I offer this in the spirit of Coblentz’s own hospitality to popular theologies of depression and their potential to offer sources of meaning despite their theological limitations. 

The meme circulates as a picture of Eeyore, the habitually depressive donkey character from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books and the Disney media based on them. A common version of the meme text reads: “One awesome thing about Eeyore is even though he’s basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and shenanigans with all his friends. And they never expect him to pretend to feel happy; they just love him anyway, and they never leave him behind or ask him to change.” 

This meme, which circulated as early as 2016, reveals many of the cultural concerns and lacunae that make Dust in the Blood so timely and necessary. Its creation and ongoing virality illustrate growing awareness of mental health challenges along with the understanding that stigma and social isolation can compound their suffering. Memes tend to be created by and for young people, and we might also notice that the text refers only to “friends” as agents of assistance. This suggests to me that it reflects the experience of young adults trying to accompany each other through severe mental health challenges without feeling able to rely on the support of adult family or the professional health system (whose failure to meet the needs of many suffering with depression Coblentz details in her book).

Not until I returned to the meme in preparing this essay did I realize how much each of Eeyore’s friends are dispositionally unsuited to the quiet work of accompanying suffering in the way Coblentz, and the meme’s creators, urge. Cheerful Winnie the Pooh, anxiety-ridden Rabbit and Piglet, assertively maternal Kanga and exuberant, over-the-top Tigger are, each in different ways, about the last people one would look to for quiet presence which does not impose meaning or offer a “fix” (202). That they manage to accompany Eeyore well, as the meme suggests, presents a popular expression of eschatological hope for the possibility of becoming a community capable of mediating divine presences for those with depression.

We who currently feel at home in the world can only encounter the unhomelikeness of depression as clueless spectators—even those of us who have lost our homes before.

Surely our awareness of our own unfitness for accompaniment is behind the ham-fisted imposition of meaning to suffering that Coblentz so carefully and thoroughly cautions against. As well, mainstream U.S. culture forcefully imposes dispositions that are antithetical to “drawing near” without imposing meaning: a desire for clear cause and effect narratives, for solutions findable through consumption or hard work, and, most perniciously, a conflating and overvaluing of happiness, innate worth, and moral goodness. (Though I don’t have time to explore it here, virtue ethicists share some complicity in the latter.) How desperately we need generous maps like Dust in the Blood to guide us out into the wilderness with those who suffer depression, trusting that where God’s beloved are suffering, God is there.