"Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself." – Paul Tillich
On March 28, 1941, the brilliant writer Virginia Woolf (left), afraid of another painful bout of agonizing depression, put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in England. "Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title," Woolf wrote, a warning to all of us not to judge those who turn suicidal.
On July 28, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh, an artist virtually unknown in his time, raised a gun to his chest and shot himself. He died the next morning.
"My work is done, why wait?" film inventor George Eastman wrote in his suicide note on March 14, 1932. Eastman was the founder and head of the Eastman Kodak company.
Why do we need courage to be? Perhaps, it is because so many of us struggle with doubt and anxiety every day. In some cases, this causes us to reach for religion as a life raft amid the storm-tossed sea rather than as a belief we inhabit because we truly believe.
"The anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is potentially as great as the anxiety of fate and death," Tillich warned.
Dr. Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, wrote that emaciated inmates typically died within twenty-four hours of uttering three words: "I give up." Those who had a "why" were the ones who survived.
It takes courage to walk this earth when we've lost meaning. Especially when we have tied our "why" to a role.
What happens when a veteran caregiver loses her job? How do high-level executives hang onto their sense of self-worth after they retire?
I found myself staring at the same question a few years back. Let go by the new owners of an organization I had run, and after decades of being "the person in charge," I suddenly found myself wondering what worth I had.
At fifty-five, my role as the family provider was over. My children were grown. No one seemed to need me.
I believed that my life had meaning only so long as what I did had meaning. Why "be" if you can't "do" something that matters, I wondered.
Repeat the words "my life has no meaning" several hundred times a day and your brain chemistry will change, psychologists tell us. The right "self-talk" is crucial to mental health.
You, as a caregiver, know that it is painfully ineffective to tell those who have lost hope that their depression is irrational. Hallmark-card cheerfulness deepens the agony of the troubled soul.
Just as we admire those who find the courage to be, "we need to kneel before the kind of suffering felt by those who take their lives," a friend who is a psychotherapist told me. Those who judge the suicidal cannot understand such despair.
Depression blocks God's message of Love. It takes more than a psychiatrist's prescription to open our hearts once again. It means finding, somewhere, the kind of courage that holds on even when holding on makes no sense.
Reverend Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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