Rev. Cameron Barr, United Church of Chapel Hill, "Come Healing of the Mind"
Come Healing of the Mind
----Rev. Cameron Barr
Mental health concerns are very common in the life of faith communities because - well, mental health concerns are very common in human life. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.3% of all adults in the United States have experienced depression in the past year. Almost 20% of US adults have experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. In 2022, it was reported that more than 23% of US adults experienced some sort of mental illness. Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that you ever come to a place of worship without shaking hands with someone whose life is touched by mental illness.
People are often under a great deal of stress in their ordinary lives. There is enough pressure from the regular commitments in one’s life such as childcare, marriage, work, or caregiving for aging parents to cause even the healthiest and most resilient people dark nights of the soul. Add onto those difficulties the kinds of acute challenges that all of us live through at one time or another - such as grief of a major loss, post traumatic stress from a difficult life event, or a major diagnosis - and it’s easy to see that we’re surrounded by mental health needs every time we come to church. Faith communities are uniquely safe and compassionate spaces for us to encounter mental illness. We all know people through our churches who just seem to struggle with daily living, even if we don’t precisely know the cause or diagnosis of their pain. All churches that I’ve been a part of try to make a small offering to folks who are homeless or in need of help with transportation, rent, or healthcare. Unmet mental health needs are almost always some part of those untold stories, and our faith communities are places where people trust they will at least find mercy when healing is out of reach.
Church is one of the rare places in our culture where we dare to be honest about those needs, if only barely. It’s quite rare for people to talk openly about mental health, but at my church they do every time we offer the Prayers of the People. Listen closely. In that space of prayer during worship, our community is strangely open and honest about the things that we struggle with. You hear people talk about mourning death. You hear people speak of worry for the state of the world. You hear people pray about their fear, for themselves or others. We pray for teenagers suffering from eating disorders, for parents estranged from their children, and for marriages cleaved by alcoholism. The details might not be spelled out in the prayer petitions, but if you listen to the subtext of our prayers we are often searching for God’s healing for our minds as well as our bodies. The prayers of the church, and the everyday kindnesses that we find in our prayer communities that give life in the midst of suffering that we so often carry unspoken within us, make me think of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Come Healing.”
Behold the gates of mercy
In arbitrary space
And none of us deserving
Of cruelty or the grace.
O, solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Coming healing of the body
Come healing of the mind.
Rev. Cameron Barr is Senior Pastor of United Church of 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.
