We go into Meeting.
There's the usual squirming about
and people going in and out.
Everyone has too much energy
to be here on such a nice day.
Finally the children leave,
the last batch of latecomers come in,
and Meeting settles into the business at hand:
centering down to wait upon the Lord.
My soul can't do it:
a quiet, determined, unrelenting
voice in my head is telling me
again and again, over and over
that there is no hope;
that there will not, cannot,
be any relief.
That there is only one solution: death.
That the solution must be acted on now.
"Get the gun ... and maybe you can have peace.''
Over and over; on and on.
How much longer can this go on
before I break?

I close my eyes and try to concentrate
on anything but the voice. No good.
But on a different level
I become aware of something else:
it is the collective presence of the Meeting.
United, we are empowering one another.
The room as quiet as it can be,
eyes still closed,
I sense something bigger than all of us,
benign, protective, powerful, ... good.

Then someone rises to speak.
A woman whose voice I do not recognize
(my eyes still closed).
Into my darkness,
blindness, desperation, despair,
she speaks a message about her life.
Remarkably
the message from her life fits mine
giving it new meaning.
She has reached the length of the room to touch me;
into my closed eyes she is shining Light.
Her words cut in, cut through the depression,
and, for a few minutes,
silence my inner voice of doom.
For a few minutes I am unchained,
can leave my tormented hell,
and join her in warm soft Light.
The experience comforts me,
and though it does not heal me
it restores my courage,
reinforces my will to live,
and allows me to move forward
for a few minutes without pain.

It will be three more endless months
before the depression is broken
and that seductive homicidal voice
is silenced.
There are many very hard days yet ahead.
But more than once in that bleak time
I am able to close my eyes
return to that cool, brilliant morning,
and hear that woman's quiet voice
(her identity unknown to me to this day)
guiding me to a place where,
for a little while,
I can rest, rebuild, be safe.

She touched me from across the room with her voice;
God touched me from within with His Grace.

A third important role of the Meeting is that it provides a forum for ministry by a sufferer of depression or bipolar disorder. It can be extremely valuable because, first, it provides the opportunity for self-affirmation by the victim and re-affirmation by the rest of the Meeting. It then becomes possible for members of the Meeting to express their concern and love for the victim in a myriad of ways. In addition the victim can use this opportunity to lighten his/her load. And finally it is an opportunity for the victim to contribute to the growth of others by sharing his/her problems and triumphs, by giving them insight into his/her darkened or chaotic world.

Fourth, Quakers are skilled at finding good solutions to tough practical problems. The Meeting is therefore a potentially excellent source of help for the life chores that can't be managed adequately by a depressed person. This can range from just helping the person get to a grocery store (or even doing his/her shopping from time to time), to help with filling out his/her income tax (something any depressed person dreads), to offering advice based on some special form of expertise (well-meant suggestions about how to deal with the depression are best left to the physician).

In academic year 1986/87 I called on my Meeting for a different kind of help. During that year my job was in Boulder and my wife's in Urbana. Even with a lot of commuting there were many days when I was in Boulder alone in our big, empty, house in the mountains. Although the medication had worked wonders for me, I knew that there would be rough places in the road ahead, and I could well imagine that some lonely winter evening I would experience an urgent need for companionship.

When down, I always felt better with company. So I went to the Ministry and Counsel Committee with a list of about a dozen families and couples I especially like, and asked them to see if any of those people would agree to allow me to call them, as needed, and invite myself to their house to spend the evening, perhaps have dinner, maybe even spend the night. Almost all of them agreed (some had conflicting demands on their time and couldn't be available).

During the year I actually used my little backup list only twice, each time coming home at the end of a pleasant evening feeling better. But there were many other nights when I felt marginal, and would go to the phone, looking at that list, almost calling, but deciding that I wouldn't because I could still endure it by myself, taking courage in knowing that those folks were there if I needed them. It's impossible to say how big a difference that support from the Meeting made.

next: The Role of Mystical Experience