"...depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes--and when we pretend they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work."
[. . .]
"One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless, which is exactly how a depressed person feels--and our unconscious need as Job's comforters is to reassure ourselves that we are not like the sad soul before us."
- Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
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