As a Coptic Orthodox Christian, I still struggle daily to accept the very real problem that I live with generalized anxiety and major depression. No matter how educated I become about the illness (a label that I once couldn’t accept) and no matter how incredibly palpable my pain is because of it, there is still a lot of shame and stigma that I feel within myself about it.
Ironically, what feels even more shameful to me is the following confession: The fact that I can’t pray away this depression has made me feel a whole lot less Coptic. That’s a big problem for me because I grew up in a family that firmly believed in every story of every saint and the miracles of the Church’s sacraments. My entire life, I’d advocated for them furiously. I hung up my entire identity on them. “So isn’t prayer a better alternative to being medicated?” That’s the actual question I asked the psychiatrist who first diagnosed me. Naturally, he too happened to be Coptic.
NO!!! No, no, no! That’s me telling myself this now. His response was only one “no.” At the time, I secretly judged as heretical the explanation that he gave me, which now I pose to you here: God made us LIVING beings, with real physical issues that are to be dealt physically, not just spiritually. This isn’t foreign, even to the most Coptic of us. Think about it. When you have a headache, you take Tylenol. To avoid getting the flu each year, you get vaccinated right around October. You don’t pray those things away. You deal with them using resources that God in all His wisdom and mercy allowed people to have so that physical issues (like an imbalance in the composition of one’s brain) could be dealt with physically. This is a gift from Him, not something to be criticized or dismissed.
Here is the crux of why I’m sharing this: It wasn’t until recently that I realized—and by recently, I mean in the past month of the past three years since my diagnosis—and with the help of someone who is not a priest and whose spiritual advice I trust wholeheartedly…
MY PHYSICAL STRUGGLES SHOULDN’T BE CONFUSED FOR MY DISBELIEF IN GOD.
I didn’t misstate that and you didn’t misread it. There were many days when I questioned God’s existence because of my feelings of depression. I prayed and prayed and prayed for these feelings to go away, and the more I prayed, the more the pain (and then anger) persisted, overwhelmingly and most excruciatingly. I was taught from an early age that God is merciful and answered whenever one knocked. So where was His mercy now that I asked for it more vigilantly than ever before?
I struggled hard to see the answer, but I eventually did. It wasn’t right for me to confuse my physical struggles with my spiritual ones. Please don’t take this statement politically, because I know this issue can get real political, real quick. What I mean to say is that God wasn’t absent because He wasn’t healing my depression when I prayed about it. Prayer ALONE wasn’t going to FIX my depression the way prayer ALONE isn’t going to FIX this coronavirus epidemic. I can pray about both problems as much as I want, and maybe blame God for the persistence of either if prayer doesn’t work, but that’s my problem, not His. To think He might not exist, or worse, that He would want me to suffer from either, is just not reality. It is confusion on my part.
I can’t always figure out how to not be confused about all of this. I guess that’s going to be my lifelong struggle. But what I do see is a light at the end of the tunnel. God will allow someone brilliant to come up with a vaccination or a combination of medicines to end this horrible crisis. This physical problem will have a physical solution. Until then, to rely solely on any “spiritual solutions” to coronavirus (like allowing hundreds of people to partake in church activities that make them highly susceptible to possible infection, all in the name of prayer), is reckless at worst and uneducated at best.
Luckily, someone brilliant already came up with the type of medications to make me more mentally balanced so I can see all this more clearly. I’ll always have God to thank for that.
Veronia Mikhail is a native Californian and a proud member of St. Peter & St. Paul Coptic Orthodox Church in Santa Monica, CA. She currently lives in Houston, TX with her husband, Youssef, and two dogs: Ollie, the lab, and Lulu, the Boston Terrier. The happiest place on earth for Veronia is in fact Disneyland.
