A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul

by Tim Farrington

book data

15 ratings, 2.80 average rating, 8 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		13%
4		20%
3		20%
2		26%
1		20%

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published

February 1st 2009 by HarperOne

details

Hardcover, 128 pages

isbn

0060825189 (isbn13: 9780060825188)

description

n this unflinching look at depression and the human struggle to find hope in its midst, acclaimed author Tim Farrington writes with heartrending hone

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Jan 06, 2009

Marilyn rated it:

Novelist Tim Farrington has written a candid memoir about his lifelong struggle with depression. He’s not a scholar, not a therapist, not a theologian; “I’m more like a veteran, I suppose: a guy whose ass has been on the line, [with:] some stories from the front.” Nor does he draw a simplistic equation between depression and the dark night of the soul. He acknowledges the imprecision; he’s not writing for those who want precision, but for those whose “maps have given out.”

...more Novelist Tim Farrington has written a candid memoir about his lifelong struggle with depression. He’s not a scholar, not a therapist, not a theologian; “I’m more like a veteran, I suppose: a guy whose ass has been on the line, [with:] some stories from the front.” Nor does he draw a simplistic equation between depression and the dark night of the soul. He acknowledges the imprecision; he’s not writing for those who want precision, but for those whose “maps have given out.”

Depression began to creep into his life with the classic late adolescence onset. He discovered Zen meditation at the same time, and spent his senior year of high school thinking his melancholy was simple realism – depression was the logical answer to the world. “I took long walks and thought about death and the suffering of innocents. I wrote bad poetry. I did not go to Stanford.”

As he wrote, and worked, he didn’t see any way out of depression, because it seemed like the price he had to pay for art, in the grand tradition of modern writers. He joined an ashram in Oakland, where he discovered the Christian mysticism classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. And by the end of his first year, “I’d had it with my damned kundalini. All I wanted was for my soul to simplify itself and for my mind to shut up.” John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul and the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM became his faithful companions, while he tried to figure out if he was “making [his:] blind way to God though the cloud of unknowing or was just clinically f***ed up.”

After years of depression, despair, and grief, he found himself capable at last of knowing and surrendering to God’s mercy. He’d been, over the decades, “shot full of Haldol to break a mania, swaddled in sedatives to blunt the breakage, and spoon-fed lithium to reconstruct a durable decorum.” He finally decided to try antidepressants, and one day soon after, he noticed how beautiful the trees looked in the February light; it seemed like forever since he had noticed trees. He asks, would his dark night have ended without drugs? Perhaps, but certainly not when it did. He concludes that the dark night is not about suffering to suffer per se, but is about a certain work of the soul being accomplished (which can include realizing that a pharmacy can be an outpost of heaven).

A Hell of a Mercy is a book to be read slowly, and more than once. Filled with the wisdom of one who is making a difficult journey - “The vast country of human suffering remains what it has always been, the wilderness in which the soul must travel.” – it is a meditation on finding meaning in dark times, in times of grief, and the gifts of grace and trust.

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Jun 11, 2009

Joseph Gowen rated it:

I'm sure this book might be more meaningful to anyone who has struggled with depression, but I mostly felt like an outsider eavesdropping on a clique speaking in code. Why I gave it three stars is he has some profound conclusions tying depression to spiritual growth. I liked his theme that depression isn't always a bad thing and is sometimes necessary to come closer to God; that we must accept our nothingness and turn over our spirits to Him.

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Jun 03, 2009

Traci rated it:

bookshelves: put-down---will-never-finish

Way too many Jesus/Christian references to make this relevant for me. Also, it seems that the author merely collected a bunch of quotes and other people's ideas and tried to formulate into a cohesive book. None of this worked for me.

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