A Pelican of the Wilderness

Depression, Psalms, Ministry, and Movies

Robert W. Griggs

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781620325599
  9781498215978
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630871581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

After serving for more than thirty years as a parish minister, the author was hospitalized with major depression. This is the story of his depression and recovery--a recovery of health, vocation, and faith. First, Griggs regained the experience of small pleasures. Eventually, he recovered the ability to choose, to set limits, and to accept reality. He then turned to the biblical Psalms--indeed his own writing echoes their candor. But he also found hope in films, including Breakfast at Tiffany's and Blazing Saddles. To the mental health issues facing clergy and others in the helping professions Griggs brings to bear insights from research and from his own experience as a pastor and a person recovering from depression. He tells his story with spirit and humor.

Chapter 1

From Pulpit to Psych Unit

On my second night on a locked psych unit, some of us patients got comfortable on the old sofas in front of the big TV and watched the movie Tootsie. We peacefully munched our popcorn from Styrofoam bowls and sipped our lemonade until some character in the movie said to Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman), “I beg you to go see a therapist.”5 Then things erupted. My fellow patients warned Tootsie not to listen to that advice. Several expressed their opinions of psychiatrists by throwing popcorn at the screen.

One big guy in his hospital-issued pajamas, robe, and tan socks with the treads on the bottom yelled, “Yeah, go see my psychiatrist. He’ll send you right to the damn loony bin. He’s the bastard who put me here.”

A handsome middle-aged man, well-dressed except for his shoes that lacked laces, agreed, “You got that right. My therapist is crazier than I am, and that’s saying a lot.”

A young, thin black woman behind me chimed in, “You know what? I dare him to go see my psychiatrist. He can’t say one straight sentence. I don’t know where he’s coming from, and I don’t think he knows either. Besides, he’s so damn ugly and weird. Sometimes I wonder if he’s a Martian. He looks kind of green to me.”

“I don’t know if mine is a Martian or just a regular asshole, but he can go straight to hell.”

“My psychiatrist is a Russian. He can’t even speak English. How can he help me when he can’t even speak our language?”

There’s not a lot of sympathy for psychiatrists on a psych unit. That’s not surprising, because a pysch unit is a cemetery for psychiatrists’ failures. The day before, I had been admitted because a doctor in the ER had determined I was a danger to myself. All at once, I had been sucked out of my normal life and had been dropped down into a place stranger than Oz. Yet it’s where I belonged. I met all the requirements, both great and small: a life crisis with which I had failed to cope, a diagnosis of a mental illness (major depression and anxiety disorder), a plastic hospital wristband, hospital socks with treads, and a nondescript hospital room with no key.

Since I am a pastor, I could easily use the words from Genesis, “In the beginning . . . ,” to start the story of how I ended up watching Tootsie on a psych unit. From there I could pad my story with an account of Adam and Eve, two people like me who made bad choices that played havoc with their lives. Maybe I could compare their expulsion from paradise to my own expulsion from the land of the mentally healthy. I could even identify one of my former parishioners as the snake.

From the narrative of this unfortunate couple and my parishioner (who could be much kinder now), I could add other applied Bible stories: For example, I could describe my depression as Goliath, myself as David, and my therapeutic insights as the five smooth stones David picks up for his slingshot. Were I to use another David story, my depression could this time be David, a king with some real boundary issues, and I could be the unfortunate Bathsheba, whom David is eager to pounce on. Reluctantly I will forego this analogy, leaving unexplored the intriguing gender question of why I choose to identify with Bathsheba.

Instead, I will take the Freudian route and begin with my parents. Like everybody else, I first learned how to deal with the world from my parents, who themselves were doing their best to deal with their own lives and realities. For my mom, this meant her own struggle to cope with anxiety. I remember her pacing around the living room and constantly looking out the window, unable to relax until my dad finally got home. Without words she emphatically conveyed one message to me: “Don’t worry me like your dad worries me.” I learned my lesson well. No matter how much I was hurting, I learned not to tell her or anybody else.

So I became an adult who played life close to the vest. I learned to deflect people with a joke or some sleight of hand so that they could never get inside. My wife, Susan, is a registered nurse whose compassion has made her the go-to person on her unit whenever a patient or family needs extra care. She would have done anything to help me. But I had learned so well how to hide my feelings that even she could not tell how much I was hurting.

As my depression deepened, I would wake in the early hours of the morning and spend the rest of the night drenched in sweat and tears, cataloging all my failures in Technicolor. Yet this was better than getting up and facing the day. When I could no longer avoid getting up, I’d tell Susan that I’d had a great night’s sleep. If she said that I didn’t look like I’d slept well, I’d just say I was stressed about something at work that I had to keep confidential and that next week would be easier. I could trump a lot of her concerns with an appeal to confidentiality.

From my dad I had learned other ways of coping. A self-made real-estate man, my dad drove himself hard. He was fiercely proud of all that he had accomplished. Like a character in a John Ford western movie, he lived by his own code of honor. I don’t know how hard all this was for him, but I do know that one of his four siblings committed suicide and another spent her adult life in mental institutions.

Growing up, I learned to cope with my dad’s pride by feeding that pride. I achieved and then achieved some more. Through my successes, I brought honor to our family name. Although he seldom said anything about my good grades or awards, I knew that my dad was proud of me. I hadn’t given him any choice.

I brought these ways of coping to my work as an ordained minister. After I had served a church in New Hampshire for six years, Sue, our two little boys, and I moved to Minneapolis, where I began my ministry with a United Church of Christ congregation, not far from one of the city’s famous lakes. When my meltdown happened, I was in my twenty-sixth year of service to this congregation of about three hundred members.

By the usual standards of my denomination, my pastorate was a success: budgets balanced, worship attendance up and then up some more, building projects completed, and progressive social-justice positions taken. It’s fair to say that most of my colleagues respected me, and for many parishioners I had become the beloved pastor who was always there for them.

So what went wrong? To put it one way, I couldn’t keep my inner dad happy. I just couldn’t keep the successes coming. My church had grown, a measurable success like straight A’s, but the church had begun to plateau. Moreover, the growth we had obtained meant that I had more to do. With more parishioners, I just couldn’t get to the hospitals every day, the nursing homes every week; I couldn’t go to every school play that a child of the church was in, to every family gathering that I was invited to, to all the community events where I might meet a potential new member, and to all the rest of it. I cursed myself for slacking off and kept pushing myself to do more.

Making things still worse, I felt that I had used up all my best, even my second-best, ideas for sermons, programs, and mission events. I just wasn’t doing a good job anymore. Sooner or later, probably sooner, somebody would catch on that I had become a time server, hanging around for the paychecks. I’d be weighed in the balance and found wanting. My pride couldn’t stand for this to happen. I lived in fear of exposure.

In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon, himself a depression survivor, writes that loss of an idea about oneself, a loss involving humiliation and a sense of being trapped, is responsible for triggering initial depression.6 He goes on to say that this fear of humiliation creates terrible stress. This is what happened to me. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would be found out as a phony and be ridiculed in front of my congregation. In reality this would never have happened, but I had crossed over into my own world of self-condemnation.

I tried all kinds of ways to keep the successes coming. I developed plans to add to the church staff and to enhance our youth ministry. I tried to do whatever long-term church pastors are supposed to do to keep their churches moving ahead. I looked into restructuring, reimagining, reenvisioning, reassessing, and redecorating. These are all standard ways of dealing with the realities of long tenure and a plateaued church, but I was too tired to really commit to any of them. I threw out plans like somebody tossing popcorn at a TV screen. I was just playing for time, hoping I’d feel better the next day.

Over the years I had blurred and finally erased the boundary between my church and myself. I had started to treat my church as some kind of extension of my own psyche, where I acted out my own needs and fears. I could no longer step back and take a clear look at what would actually be best for the congregation that I had been called to serve. I was unable to ask for help, unable to separate my needs from the needs of the church, unable to let go of anything: I had totally lost my way.

I remember a children’s sermon where I got the youth of the church talking about what a minster does. One girl kept asking me what my real job was. She couldn’t believe that going to church was all that I did. I don’t know whatever became of her; maybe she’s a therapist. Several kids said I ran the church. Did their parents nod a little too emphatically? One perceptive little boy said, “I know who you are. You are the conductor of the zoo.” He nailed the way that I felt. I kept trying to control people and events like I was some kind of zookeeper or ringmaster, and it exhausted me.

I should have left. It’s so clear now that my ministry in that place had run its course. All I needed to do was to declare success and seek a new call. Why didn’t I do that? After all, moving on to the next call, usually one that is larger and pays better, is the standard career path for clergy.

I can live with some of the reasons I stayed and stayed: I didn’t want to separate from people I had come to care deeply about, I didn’t want to give up the history and trust I had built with some of these folks over more than a generation, and I didn’t want to entrust their care to a stranger. Moreover, in spite of my downward spiral, there were still times I knew that by dint of my relationship with a person, I could help someone in a way no one else could. And there were some Sunday mornings when I still got it right, when my sermon helped someone experience what he or she was seeking.

There are other reasons, which aren’t so noble, why I didn’t want to leave. I had gotten used to a pretty good salary and long vacations. Because of his financial struggles as a young man, my dad had taught me that poverty was always a danger. We used to drive by the poorhouse in my hometown, Richmond, Virginia, and he’d say, “That’s where we’ll end up if your mother doesn’t stop spending so much of my money.” His words, his tone, still mark my attitude toward money.

Money wasn’t the only fear that kept me from moving: Could I succeed in a new place? Could I find the energy to get to know and to care about an entirely new group of people? Could I actually build up another church? Would I even get another call to another pulpit? So many fears—they weighted on me like chains so that I couldn’t move from that place.

In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris cites a story that shows how people like me can avoid making necessary changes. Norris writes:

One of my favorite stories . . . concerns two fourth-century monks who “spent fifty years mocking their temptations by saying, ‘After this winter, we will leave here.’ When the summer came, they said, ‘After this summer, we will go away from here.’ They passed all their lives in this way.”7

In fact I liked this story so much that whenever a friend would ask how I’d survived for so many years in the same church, I’d tell the story to them. They’d usually laugh, but I didn’t. I like dark humor, but this was too close to home. As things closed in, I felt that I had no escapes, no choices, and no options. I could...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: From Pulpit to Psych Unit
• Chapter 2: Holy Pleasure
• Chapter 3: Laments
• Chapter 4: Getting Help with Reality
• Chapter 5: Recovering Self-Respect
• Chapter 6: Recovering Choices
• Chapter 7: Sushi Night on the Psych Unit
• Chapter 8: Home
• Chapter 9: Too Much Too Soon
• Chapter 10: Losses and Gains
• Chapter 11: Recovery
• Chapter 12: From Psych Unit to Pulpit
• Chapter 13: A Pelican of the Wilderness
• Resources