A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ

by John Andrew Bryant

His hanging there on the cross is, somehow, a Word to us. He has given us His Word. And by that Word, He has given Himself to us. It is the final Word, but it’s a Word I’ve never gotten over. It has confused me, destroyed me. Exposed and nurtured me. Cut and mended me. It is a Word that I’ve heard but am not done hearing. A Word of what has been done that is not done with me.

In order to do that, this Word must be nearer to us than the shame, fear, and dread of this Affliction. Christ must be nearer than what I can be made to see and feel. The Word must be as near the thing awakened by the shame, fear, dread of this Affliction: the hardness of heart that is our dependence on ourselves.

It is important to make this point. There are things so secret and painful and awful that only Christ can make them holy. He is the only one who can, and He will only do it in His time and with His own gentleness and severity.

Because the forgiveness of sin is the only thing that can possibly untangle our own pain from the hidden and idolatrous ways we’ve managed it. Our soul’s anguish from our heart’s pride: a distinction that simply isn’t available to us. Because it is only the forgiveness of sin that can stand against the Hardness of the Heart and stand with us in our distress, that can heal wounds and bury our hardness of heart, that knows what needs to be mended and what needs to be driven out and overturned. The forgiveness of sin is the only way it can be done without cruelty.

In God’s economy, sinners are honored guests, faithful servants of the Mercy offered in the gospel.

What Happened is the pit from which Christ rescues the one it happened to.

The soul is, again, not something floaty and ethereal. The soul is what we’re talking about when we turn our faces to each other and call each other by name.

There is found, at the foot of that cross, a solemnity and tenderness found nowhere else. A Word that stands over all time and space, over every History and institution and heartbreak. It is more than what can be done or taken. And yet it is an embrace; it has drawn us close. It is nearer than what can be seen or felt.

And we, the fragile and unseen and insane, cannot create the future by effort or sorrow but only as we behold His Mercy with fear and trembling. And become those to whom Mercy has been offered. Servants and guests of the Mercy that has been offered.

If we are going to live, if we are going to have any way through, any way forward, we are going to need something that is not effort or sorrow but the beholding and the following and the serving of Another. The One who is Mercy and whose Mercy rescues, whose Mercy leads, and whose Mercy fulfills.

It can be hard to say what a Rhythm means, how a regular mealtime, a regular time of prayer, any still point outside of how we think and feel, is a kind of friend, a kind of company. And that we need those more than thoughts or feelings. Because to only have what we think and what we feel is to be really and truly alone.

No one really wants to admit how small a life in Christ is. How it makes your life smaller so that it is bearable, how you’re given something so precious—His Word, His Spirit, and with it something so small and ordinary—hearing and prayer, with tattered Bibles and the half-hearted movements of our mouths at coffee shops and care home steps. That that quiet Rhythm is precisely how Christ wants to make a life with us. That isn’t just a dry routine. It is a rescue, a leading, a fulfillment of something. Of the trust we have in Christ. Trusting in Christ by hearing, trusting Christ with things through prayer. Learning to become quiet. Learning to become simple.