This morning we welcomed to our pulpit David Fitzpatrick.
David is a writer and author of the memoir “Sharp”, and is the brother
of Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager.
He and his wife, Amy Holmes, live Rockfalls, Connecticut.
They are advocates in the mental health community.
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Texts: Isaiah 9:2; John 1: 1-5
Hope, Faith, and the Power of the Broken:
Reflections on Mental Health and Healing
Steve Jungkeit – Introduction
Before David gets up to speak, I’d like to say a word about how this morning fits in with a wider trajectory about the subject of healing that we’ve been tracing for a number of weeks. We’ve talked about several dimensions of healing, all of them present in the stories of healing that we encounter throughout the Bible: sometimes it has to do with physical ailments. Sometimes it has to do with emotional or relational struggles. At times, stories can be a dimension of healing, as when I encountered Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise. There are dimensions of healing that have to do with food, and with matters of ecology. But there are also aspects that have to do with mental health, which is a topic that is spoken about too little, and understood still less.
Except here’s the thing: many among us struggle with mental health in one way or another, whether it’s depression or anxiety, whether it’s a bipolar diagnosis or something more debilitating. Even if some among us are relatively blessed, in that we don’t face those struggles, in many of our families, mental health can be a skeleton that exerts a kind of hidden force, something about which there can be shame, fear, and misunderstanding. What I hope you hear this morning is that those are parts of our lives toward which grace and compassion can be extended. Those are parts of our lives where a kind of healing can and sometimes does occur, even if healing isn’t always the same as being cured.
In March, David did an adult forum here that I was privileged to hear, along with some of you who made your way into the Sheffield Auditorium that day. I found David’s openness about his own struggles with mental health to be profoundly moving. There was a tenderness and vulnerability about what he offered that had me wishing that all of you could hear his story, because there’s an uncommon beauty and grace to what he has to say. And so David, I’d like to thank you for your willingness to be with us today, but really for your willingness to open yourself in the ways that you do. I hope you know what a profound ministry it is that you bring to those who have the opportunity to hear you speak.
Hope, Faith, and the Power of the Broken – By David Fitzpatrick
I’m not a wizened professor, or a scientist with pie charts here today, only a peer offering a dose of hope. I’m also not an expert on belief or faith, just an extremely lapsed Catholic trying to find his way. I lean a lot more towards inclusion than the church does, though, but that’s another argument for a different day.
However, I do recall attending Mass each week growing up in Guilford, Ct. Our service featured a minister with swirling arms flying through the air like spastic windmills.
I was eleven, and heard him preach on faith, which is, in one sense, hope magnified a thousand-fold. It was a flimsy word to me then—not that I’m any closer to figuring it out now—but I do recall his moving sermon that morning involved a dying soldier on a battlefield. His best friend finds him, consoles him in the midst of the hell, picks him up and carries him back to the base.
The dying soldier’s final words to his buddy are delivered in a whisper: “I knew you’d come.” That gave me such a lump in my throat; still does when I think about the sentence today. I knew you’d come. It still has power, still has the oomph.
Now let’s jump 30-years years beyond the boy listening to a preacher, and find me in early 2006 – a morbidly obese 41-year old mental patient slowly working his way back to life after decades of illness. I sat at Clark’s Diner in New Haven, and by that point I was well into my decade at the group home on Broadway, right near Yale. I had enough ECT to start a few dead engines; enough Thorazine to last eons.
The experience left me broken and terrified of the real world. I went to lunch with my mom, and at that time I was in the thaw of my recovery. (I remember my therapist telling me so clearly: “Uncomfortable emotions will be bubbling, pouring, and spilling out of you for a while, but don’t panic, don’t worry. Sometimes being uncomfortable can be a good thing, a healing thing.”)
So I started the thawing in the diner, apologizing to my mother, saying, how could I have been such a sick soul, and she waved off my mea culpa and said only, “David, don’t you get it, before everything I just knew – I knew you’d return.”
That sentence became the working title of my memoir, later changed to Sharp by Harper Collins. Mom’s comment took my breath away—spoke of such support, devotion, and hope.
I Knew You’d Return.
As I got better, and started to escape the myopic mindset that depression can sometimes leave you with, I discovered mental illness leaves scars on everyone in a family. Everybody hurts, as the band, REM, put so succinctly in the early nineties.
I can’t speak for my older brother, but everyone else in my clan started therapy to deal with their once hopeful David morphing into a bloated, and fractured soul. Some in the family felt overlooked, my developmentally disabled younger brother, Dennis, went away to school in Cape Cod after witnessing my breakdown, and returned at Thanksgiving, 40-pounds lighter, gaunt. Even my folks started counseling. Illness touches all. Everybody Hurts.
Broken is a word that connected me with many along the recovery route: patients who were self-injurious, depressed, psychotic, or those with an eating disorder, that tugged out their hair, picked at their face. The list goes on and on. Everyone lent a hand. With the fragmented people reaching out, family members, patients and caregivers, I fought back and, eventually, recaptured my mind.
Proper meds and therapy were crucial, as well. My therapist dug into me, through the angst, inertia, fat, rage, and frustration, and found a tiny flame, built it back up to a roar, taught me how to come back from the near dead, the uncomfortably numb. Taught me to get hungry for life again, to seize it.
I see reeling family members when Amy and me give these readings. They ask hard questions like, “What do we do with a teen that self-harms, and doesn’t want anything to do with his parents?”
Or it’s a daughter asking about her disappearing Dad, and his silences that have grown since losing his job ten months ago. I’ve learned with mental illness it’s never more than one degree of separation. It’s never oh, I’ve got a friend of a friend of a friend—no, it’s my depressed brother, my aunt who killed herself, my self-harming teen, my sister who doesn’t eat, or my psychotic mother who refuses outside assistance—they ask us, please, what on earth do we do? Share with us…
At my first reading in 2012 in Fairfield, Ct., a woman asked me a question about her self-harming daughter, and I wasn’t sure what to say. How to help, or give her solace. I talked to my Dad later, and he told me he’d spoken with the troubled mom afterwards. I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall for that interaction, because to me, it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about: the broken helping the broken. Hope, faith, and love in action.
Everybody hurts. I knew you’d come. I knew you’d return.
When I was first at the Institute of Living in the early nineties, they held a parent’s support group each week. My folks told me a Doctor came in on the first night, and said a sentence my Dad considers the wisest comment he’s ever heard.
“The definition of love is staying in the circle, nothing I ever say will be as important as that.”
To me, the doctor meant get furious at the disease, at the toll it takes, at the heinous inertia of depression, or the drudgery and side affects of the medications your loved one experiences. Scream at the sky, punch your couch pillow, kick your personal trainer’s butt, but try hard not to isolate the depressed soul in the family who feels so alone.
Without the numerous damaged souls lending a hand in my story, I’m sure I’d be dead by now. I think of the popular African saying: “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Well, it took a whole world to redeem me, to bring me back to the living, to have me finally enjoy the scarlet, cobalt and yellow tulips outside myself one New Haven spring.
At times, I think back to each of the faces in the institutions I met, ones that took their lives, ones still stuck so deep in the mire, but also ones that gave me slices of pizza on lonely nights, who schooled me on life when I could only spit in the mirror, or who let me borrow music on a bad day, or laughed and cried with me in group therapy. A large percentage of those souls have made it through hell themselves, and today are reaching out to affirm, to ease the burdens of others.
To use their broken wisdom to glue others back together. It’s what makes the world go around, it seems to me. Gives life its humanity, its poignancy. You pass it on, you pay it forward—I think Sharp is part of our way to aid.
Today our nation is full of people wanting to assist. With tragedies and trauma happening around us almost every day, gun violence, school shootings, anguish, and political savagery, there’s an unusual amount of empathic faces that want to help the broken. What a friend of mine described as the capacity for compassion spilling over. I hope, I pray, inside the huge wealth of love, mourning and kindness, some constructive goodness, a real batch of caring can be targeted towards easing the plight of people with mental illness.
Like funding them much more substantially, helping those who are so lost. Not just the acute, out of control souls either, for that’s essential and important, but so is helping out a young mom whose bipolar child is sick for the first time; or a suicidal young vet just back from Afghanistan; a pregnant teen struggling with a crippling eating disorder; the uninsured senior citizen crumpling under the stress of his malaise.
They deserve—we deserve—not to be stigmatized, forgotten, lumped and thrown away into the cellar like some toxin. For those who are alone tonight, so alone they don’t have anyone waiting in the wings, waiting to say, “I knew you’d return,” I want to say a few words that aren’t ever easy to undertake.
I guess I’d say keep fighting the fight. Try and keep turning your inner ache into something tangible; keep painting and drawing your anguish on paper; keep scribbling your rage in notebooks; keep twirling and dancing to escape the shadows inside your head; and sculpting the voices that batter and harass you, and please understand that there are people who can and will help you in this world, and some are in this room today.
I think about how important it was for the dying soldier in our story to know he had such a good friend, how that faith that someone cared enough about him, gave him hope and comfort—and really—a type of power. Hopelessness is when we get outside or beyond the belief that we are loved and wanted, and, ultimately, needed in this world.
So hang on—try to surround yourself with the best psychiatrist and therapist you can find. For those who self-injure, all I can say is that doing that doesn’t get you closer to anyone. It only increases your loneliness. Stop. Ask for help. Seek out counseling. Death is never an answer. Try to believe in something: a God, a song, a book, the ocean. Please don’t ever give up hope.
Because people do get better.
And then, maybe, we can all return.
Steve Jungkeit – conclusion
I like to believe that there’s a beating and broken heart at the center of the universe, and that it calls to us, summons us, toward lives of mercy, of tenderness, of grace, of empathy. I like to believe that beating broken heart is inviting us not into lives of perfection, but lives of wisdom and compassion, where we have the courage to visit what darkness exists in our hearts, trusting that a light can shine even there, especially there. As John’s Gospel reminds us, a light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. I sense that light, and that beating broken heart in David’s words. And I sense those qualities in the testimony he so beautifully offers. Thank you, David, for the gift that you have given.
Should any of you wish to hear more about David’s story, we do have copies of his book available on the lawn outside, a book entitled Sharp. As we just heard, it’s a story about the sharp edges in our lives, literal and figurative, that can do us harm. But it’s also about the grace that can occur in the midst of those jagged edges.
Amazing Grace is the hymn that David asked that we sing at the close of this service. And I invite all of you to join in singing those words now, in hopes that grace reaches into your broken places, in hopes that grace will lead us all home.
