Crossing Myself: A Story of Spiritual Rebirth

By Greg Garrett

This book captures the author’s efforts to find his way out of a spiral of depression – a tortuous path through mental anguish and suicide attempt(s) into the grace that brought him spiritual rebirth, sanity and a life of service to others.

Crossing Myself will speak to those who have come through depression and those who still struggle with it. It can be appreciated by men and women, adults or teens for its literary style and personal insights of redemptive faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780819233066

Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is the author of We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel according to U2; The Gospel according to Hollywood; Holy Superheroes! Revised and Expanded Edition: Exploring the Sacred in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film; and Stories from the Edge: A Theology of Grief. He is a novelist, a professor of English at Baylor University, the writer-inresidence at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, and a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church.

Book preview

Crossing Myself

A Story of Spiritual Rebirth

GREG GARRETT

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Copyright © 2016 by Greg Garrett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Morehouse Publishing, 19 East 34th Street, New York, NY 10016

Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated.

www.churchpublishing.org

Cover design by Laurie Klein Westhafer, Bounce Design

Typeset by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garrett, Greg, author.

Title: Crossing myself : a story of spiritual rebirth / Greg Garrett.

Description: New York : Morehouse Publishing, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016010463 (print) | LCCN 2016028313 (ebook) | ISBN

9780819233059 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780819233066 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Garrett, Greg. | Christian biography. | Spiritual healing. | Depression, Mental. | Depression, Mental—Religious aspects—Christianity.

| Episcopalians—Biography.

Classification: LCC BR1725.G375 A3 2016 (print) | LCC BR1725.G375 (ebook) |

DDC 283.092 [B] —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010463

Printed in the United States of America

This book is for the Right Rev. Greg Rickel, Bishop of Olympia, and the people of St. James’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas, who saved me, not just for the next life, but for this one.

Contents

Author’s Note: 2015

Prologue: August 2005

Unction

Last Rites

Prayers for the Departed

Confession

Family History

Direction

Solitude

Martin

Baptism

Writing

In the Valley

Simplicity

Charity

Confirmation

Sin

Neighbors

Soul

Credo

Obedience

Ordination

Orientation

Walking Around in the Light

Author’s Note: 2005

About the Author

Midway through this journey we call life,

I came to myself in a dark forest

Where I had stepped aside from the right path.

Oh, it hurts to say what this forest seemed,

So wild, rough, and difficult that

Thinking of it, I feel the fear all over again.

So bitter it was that death is hardly more frightening.

But to tell you of the good I found there,

I will tell you of all the things I experienced.

—Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Author’s Note: 2015

Sometimes people talk as if the days before 9/11 were some kind of golden age. When we say, as we sometimes do, Everything changed on 9/11, we’re describing that date as the dividing line between something that made sense to us, something good and beautiful, or at least good and less frightening, and something hard and painful and fear-inducing. In one sense, that could not be less true for me. The years on either side of 9/11 were a time of great fear and darkness for me. In 1999 and 2000 and 2001 and 2002, I was sick with chronic serious depression that was far more life-threatening than any terrorist. The suicide attempt in Santa Fe I relate in the book’s first chapter took place in the fall of 2000. The second attempt in Austin that I contemplated and write about in this book was, I think, in the fall of 2001, post 9/11, but certainly not prompted by it.

It was a time of terror, yes, but my terror was personal, spiritual, emotional, physical, existential.

I did not see how I could possibly survive.

And I could not see why I would possibly want to, as life seemed so much more frightening to me most days than the prospect of death.

It’s a terrible thing to see there, those words cold on the page. But that was my experience of depression—and the experience of many I know. Although I took some proactive steps—I was in therapy, ultimately I was on medication that stabilized me a little below .500—I did not think I would ever get better.

Depression ran in my family. Had for generations.

It would take a miracle for me to recover.

And I had given up believing in miracles a long time before.

For me, actually, everything did not change on 9/11, but a year or two later, the first time I walked into a service at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. As these pages relate, I walked in frightened and alone. I left feeling a little less so. And as you will read, over the course of months and years, that church loved me back to health, patched me up, and sent me off into the world to do the good work they believed that followers of Christ were called to do.

I was confirmed Episcopalian in the fall of 2003, shortly before I preached my first sermon at St. James. In the fall of 2004, I entered the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (now the Seminary of the Southwest), recommended by St. James for the Episcopal priesthood. And somewhere in there—dates again are arbitrary—I realized that I was well. Healthy.

Whole.

I was helped by therapy and stabilized by modern medicine. I know and would not dispute that.

But it was the loving and compassionate care of that church community and its priest, Greg Rickel, as well as the powerful sacraments and sense of the beautiful I found in the Episcopal tradition that pushed me out of the darkness and into the light.

I can’t explain it. A friend who is a therapist told me once that I had moved from seeing the world from a filter of despair to seeing it through a filter of hope, and that much is true.

But as I recently said at a conference on mental illness and faith, what St. James did for me was this: I had sung the song Jesus Loves Me from the time I was two years old. It was not until I walked in the door at St. James, felt their embrace and welcome, took communion with them, that I actually believed Jesus loved me, that my life mattered, that I was part of something larger than myself.

For that, and for so much more, I will always be grateful. This book is dedicated to Greg and the people of St. James, past and present. But it is written for everyone who has known suffering, everyone who has loved those who suffer, and everyone who serves them. It is, perhaps, the most important book I have ever written—and there are several now!—and that is why I am so delighted that this new revised edition is being brought out by my friends at Church Publishing, the publisher for The Episcopal Church.

This is a book that matters.

And it is a book about how The Episcopal Church saved my life.

U2 sings—and the Bible notes—how the Spirit moves in mysterious ways. Since Crossing Myself was first published in 2006, I have heard from people all over the world (from New Zealand to the UK and from all across these United States) who tell me that this book showed up in their lives at a moment when they were facing their darkest thoughts, and that it was a comfort to them in their darkest hours. They found it in libraries and secondhand bookstores, even after the book went out of print.

A friend handed it to them. I know a couple of Episcopal priests who have loaned out their copies until they are ragged.

What I hear is that this is a book that has made a difference in people’s lives, that the Spirit moved in a mysterious way, and that they are in some way different because they read it.

As I hope this book will teach you, no one contemplates suicide unless they are in agony from which they can’t imagine emerging. So this story of how church and community helped me out of those dark waters—as I mentioned, I seriously thought about suicide on several occasions, and was within a heartbeat of it in the incident I describe at the book’s opening—is both the record of my suffering and a reminder of Christian hope.

Sometimes things do get better.

Sometimes great hurts can be overcome.

Sometimes resurrection happens.

As a side note: That doesn’t mean, by the way, that the suffering always get better. Friends and acquaintances who were smarter than me, stronger than me, more faithful than me nonetheless continued and continue to struggle with depression. Some didn’t make it. I don’t know why I was healed and other people weren’t, and I don’t use the language of blessing (i.e., God blessed me) for fear of insinuating that God is cursing those who suffered or died. As the great Episcopal pastoral theologian, chaplain, and teacher Will Spong said, I don’t believe God is a tyrant.

Sometimes things just happen.

Sometimes bad chemicals in the brain cause people to do things that break the hearts of others.

It doesn’t mean those who didn’t make it were bad people, or lacking in faith, or unloved. Often the very opposite is true.

But if I was saved by something outside myself—and that’s certainly how it appears, whether I was saved by community or a divine miracle or something else—I believe I must have been saved for a reason. That there’s something I am supposed to be doing with these years I never expected to have.

As I describe in the book, my therapist told me after I survived my suicide attempt in Santa Fe that he thought I was still around so that I could help others in despair.

I didn’t believe him then.

I’ve staked my life on it now.

That’s why I wrote this book, and that’s why I continue to talk about depression in almost everything I write, almost every time I speak, and every semester that I teach. I believe my story can be of use to others because, in the past, it has been. I believe hearing my story can free others to be authentic about the suffering in their own lives and in the lives of those they love or serve.

As Rabbi Steven Folberg of Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel—himself a sufferer of depression who came out to his congregation—told me, Pretending takes so much energy!

Some readers have told me that they recognized themselves in my own story of depression, loss, hope, and faith, and that they gained enough strength from the recognition that they were able to go on a little longer. For that, thanks be to God, because this was, without a doubt, the hardest book I have ever written, and the one I most wish I hadn’t had to write. That response by readers helps make what I went through in living and writing these events meaningful, even though I wish I’d never lived them (and now and then, I wish I hadn’t put myself out there by writing about them!).

No one writes a book about such pain and despair out of simple narcissism; I do not appear at my best in these pages, and there are times when I am deeply embarrassed by the intimacy and truth splashed across these pages. A longtime colleague at Baylor University never treated me the same way after hearing me read from the book; she felt, I think, that what I had done was unseemly. Perhaps she thought that my frank talk about mental illness didn’t reflect well on the institution we both served. I hope not, although that is an attitude I still sometimes encounter over a decade after I was last in the throes of deep depression, and another reason I think it’s necessary to keep speaking out on behalf of those who suffer.

The response from readers, though—that this is a helpful book that many people need to read—was the chief reason I wanted to see a new edition of this book, which has been out of print for several years.

It’s not, believe me, because I wanted to revisit these pages or these years of my life in editing the book for you. Things have changed radically for me since the events I wrote about in this book. They had to. Not only am I physically, emotionally, and spiritually well (or as well as a sensitive soul can ever be in a world full of heartache), but after fifteen years of living alone, I recently married again. In my new life with Jeanie, I am helping to raise not only my boys, but her two young girls, an experience I could not have anticipated in my darkest days. That brings me joy and challenges me to put family first, something I’ve never done well until now. And after some years of figuring out what I wanted to do with this life I never expected, I’ve settled happily and even somewhat successfully into a professional life of teaching, speaking, and writing about story, faith, culture, suffering, and politics. I went to seminary, as I noted, and am a licensed lay preacher in The Episcopal Church—which ought to make my Assembly of God grandmother happy, and yet, somehow, doesn’t quite.

It’s a good life. Much more than good.

I am filled with joy.

That’s why the Greg wrestling for his very life in these pages seems in most ways to be a different person from the Greg I look at in the mirror today, the Greg writing this introduction in 2015. But there’s no question that the events I talk about in this book remain the seminal experience in my life, my own personal 9/11 where everything changed. God’s intervention in my life through the people of St. James’ Episcopal Church prompted not only my return to faith, but an entirely new direction in my life: seminary, service, and my current life as a husband, father, writer, teacher, preacher, and public follower of Jesus.

I’ve spent a lot of time at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, have studied the desert tradition of Christianity, have even taught and led retreats on desert spirituality, and I know from experience that hard as it is, time in the desert tends to give you clarity. If you survive it, you emerge from the experience stronger, wiser, and maybe even willing to share some of your tips for navigating the desert to those who are still out there searching for an oasis.

This is my desert. These are my tips. Here is my oasis.

One important side note about writing memoir: I mentioned in the original author’s note that these recollections are how I remember the events, and that I have tried, in so far as I can, to take blame for all the decisions and actions that filled me with shame at that time. It is not my desire to make any of the other characters in this story look bad, or to reveal secrets that are not mine, and in this revision I’ve tried once again to center the story and the responsibility on myself. I do not believe a memoirist has the right to undress anyone but himself. If at any time it feels I have done otherwise, I am truly sorry.

And an important note about this new edition of Crossing Myself: as much as I enjoyed my experience with my original publisher, the simple fact that I was working with an evangelical Christian publisher dictated some changes in the original text, some of which I was less than happy about. My aesthetic as a writer is simple: honesty—emotional, factual, spiritual—is essential. Sometimes you have to say that something sucks when it sucks, regardless of how a Christian bookstore might feel about your employing such vulgarity. So this edition is, at once, closer to my original text, and subtly changed from it. I’ve rewritten the book for style and clarity. I am a better writer in 2015 than I was in 2005, and I just couldn’t let some sentences lie there as they were when I could make them into something truer and more beautiful.

That said, I haven’t made substantive changes; Crossing Myself, like every book, is a snapshot of a particular time, place, and state. I haven’t updated movies, celebrities, or current events to make them more timely. This is a book from a specific time, and I want to honor that, at the same time that I hope it’s filled with universal truths.

So, if you are coming to Crossing Myself for the first time, I trust that this book has shown up on your radar because something bigger than you and me has put it there. Whether you’re a Christian seeking a faithful way to understand depression, a counselor or chaplain hoping to gain some insight into suffering, or a person deep in the midst of your own suffering, you are most welcome here.

I’ve written books that were more successful, and I’ve certainly written books that were more fun to write. But telling the truth about what happened to me—as sad as it sometimes was and is—is an essential part of explaining the joy I have felt since.

I hope these truths—hard lived and hard recorded—will in some way help you in the days and years to come.

I did not expect to be alive today, and that leads me to think of every day, every new experience as a gift.

The Church saved me.

Love rescued me.

And, for as long I have this brand-new life, I will never stop telling this story.

I hope and pray that it might be a story that brings you life as well.

Grace and peace,

Greg Garrett

Austin, Texas

Advent 2015

Prologue: August 2005

Awoman asked me at lunch today—not in a confrontational way, but just in the I’m-confused way in which it often comes, And why are you going to seminary?

It’s a good question, and I get it a lot, and yet I never know exactly how to answer it, because there’s a polite answer and then there’s a real answer.

I’m beginning my second year at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in my hometown of Austin, Texas, and some people think my being in seminary is the greatest thing since sliced whatever, and some people wonder why anyone anywhere would ever want to become a duly licensed representative of any sort of organized religion, especially Christianity.

I looked at this woman. She seemed puzzled, but she had a kind face and she seemed serious and spiritual and thus unlikely to laugh at me.

I took a deep breath.

Five years ago, I said, I didn’t really expect to be alive today.

There’s always an uncomfortable pause here, and I made it a short one by quickly speaking into the silence. I really think of my life now as a gift. That it doesn’t belong to me anymore. And so I want to give it serving other people. And that’s what I’m learning to do in seminary.

She nodded, slowly, and told me some things about her own life, and the world started revolving again.

I don’t think of my story as my own anymore either, because I know that so many other people will recognize themselves or someone they love in it. So