The Rev. Dr. Paul Burgess, University Baptist Church - “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God.”

 “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God.”

That’s the ritualistic mantra I made myself recite somewhere around age 10 every time I felt I sinned. It had to be said out loud, but in the rules I constructed, I left myself a loophole that allowed me to say it softly, under my breath, so I didn’t seem completely nuts to any friends who might have born witness to my sinning, which—to be safe—covered a wide range of behaviors, from taking three ketchup packets in the lunch line instead of the permitted two, to demonstrating a cavalier disregard for my mother’s back by stepping on sidewalk cracks.

 

For a period of my childhood, I was a slave to compulsions like that.

 

Thanks be to God, over time, I was able to reason myself out of them. It can be terrifying when you fall asleep during your bedtime prayers because your ritual for completing them has grown impossibly long and complex. When you realize in the aftermath, however, that none of the worst-case-scenarios the ritual was meant to prevent came true, you begin to wonder if it really is necessary to ask God, five times with perfect articulation every night, to protect your parents from car crashes, cancer, robbers, and tornadoes.

 

But thinking myself out of the compulsions didn’t mean the germ that caused them went away. It simply bore different fruit, stronger and much more resistant to the weapon of reason.

 

And thus, through middle and high school, I devoted myself to the art of obsession. I had realized that I couldn’t control my anxieties through external rituals, but I was now convinced that if I attacked them with internal rumination, if I examined them from every possible angle and imagined a response for every possible scenario, I could solve them. Even though I never saw evidence that it worked, this idea was much harder to kill.

 

I knew God could defeat it, of course. I certainly prayed for that to happen. I prayed for release. I prayed for the fullness of life. But it never came.

 

The problem must have been me. I thought, “I must not have enough faith. I’m not good enough. My sin is too deep. I just don’t trust God—that’s why I lack the joy of the Lord.”

 

For years, my mom had recommended I talk to a therapist.

 

She meant well, but I knew that was dangerous. It was too secular. Everything I needed was in the Bible. It was in my campus ministry group. It was in the men “discipling” me.

 

But like that blessed woman demanding justice in Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow, my mama kept knocking. Until, finally, my junior year in college, I was too weakened by the war to maintain resistance. For the first time, I entered therapy. And there I found my Rosetta Stone.

 

“You know you have OCD, right? And chronic anxiety. And based on your family history, a predisposition to depression.”

 

That’s why the psychologist told me. And those words did more for me than anything I’d ever heard from any preacher or pastor. They opened my eyes to the previously unconsidered possibility that life isn’t meant to be lived as I was living it. The psychologist (whose dad was a Methodist minister, by the way) assured me that my faith and mental health needn’t be at odds. I could have both.

 

Since then, I’ve been on an 18 year journey of healing. There have been ups (many very bright) and downs (a few quite dark). But even in the toughest times, I’ve known that what I suffer is not a deficiency of faith; it’s not a weakness. It’s an illness, like any other that can trouble our bodies.

 

Now, I’m a pastor. In fact, I’m a pastor at a church right across the street from the college campus where my journey to mental wellness started.

 

And from my office, all day long, I see young people pass by and I wonder, “How many of them are struggling?” I see headlines about students, at our school and others nearby, who are dying by their own hand in alarming numbers, and I wonder, “How many of them believed they were broken? And would it have made a difference if a faith leader had told them that they weren’t?”

 

It’s for that reason that I aim to share my story as often as I can. The stigma around mental illness in our society has existed for far too long, and the faith community bears a great responsibility for its strength. We need leaders who are willing to demonstrate vulnerability and be authentic in front of those they serve, because when we show vulnerability and authenticity, we give others the permission to show it, too.

 

Whether it’s on college campuses, in the places we work, in our houses of worship, or within our very homes, people around us are silently aching to know they’re ok. We who know their pain mustn’t be afraid to share our own struggles—too much is at stake. Because no one who suffers needs to feel their pain is their fault. When you have an illness, you don’t say, “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry.” You seek help. And then, once you’ve found the help, you share that good news, so others who are ill can be empowered to get well, too.

              ---The Rev. Dr. Paul Burgess, University Baptist Church, Chapel Hill

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The Clergy and Mental Health Blog is a forum for faith leaders to share insights and observations, sometimes speaking from personal experience, about faith and mental health.  We welcome diversity of thought and perspective.  The view of authors are their own and do not represent the views of the blog as a whole.

 

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