Many English teachers, faced with the formidable task of getting their students to appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry, probably tell the story of John Stuart Mill.
One of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the 19th century, Mill’s intellectual abilities and future promise were obvious by the time he was 20 – but by then, he was experiencing a mental health crisis. In his autobiography, he credits William Wordsworth’s poetry in helping pull him out of his severe depression.
Two centuries later, Anna Gazmarian – diagnosed with bipolar disorder – neglected to promptly register for college courses one semester and ended up in a poetry class. To her surprise, it helped her deal with the crisis of faith that accompanied her mental health struggles.
Gazmarian’s new book, “Devotion: A Memoir of Doubt,” chronicles her interconnected medical and spiritual journeys. Raised in a nondenominational evangelical church, she found her beliefs challenged when her moods spiraled. Her feelings of guilt and unworthiness were compounded when friends and acquaintances, and the first therapist she saw, all seemed to feel that reciting Scripture verses should be enough to cheer her up.
But in her poetry class, Gazmarian began to write poems herself. “Poetry gave me the freedom to question, to doubt, to lament – to engage with God as the person I was, not the person I thought I had to be,” she writes. “It took me years to realize that writing was my preferred way of praying.”
Conflating prayer with self-written poetry can sound self-indulgent, even New Age-y, but it connects with Pope Francis’ emphasis on prayer as dialogue. “Prayer becomes word, invocation, hymn, poetry,” the pope said during his general audience on April 21, 2021. The pontiff did not use the word “poetry” in precisely the same way as Gazmarian, but he stressed that unexpressed pain can “poison the soul.” In prayer, he said, people should speak to God in words that embody their deepest thoughts, emotions and experiences.
Gazmarian has remained a nondenominational Christian, but her story reflects some Catholic influence. She benefits greatly from a therapist inspired by the Catholic thinkers Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Gazmarian’s book opens with an epigraph from the devout Catholic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor: “Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
John Stuart Mill, in describing his crisis, wrote that “the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.” Likewise, Gazmarian finds herself embarking on the process of “breaking down and rebuilding my concept of faith.” Like Job of the Old Testament, Gazmarian finds herself pitted against those who confront her with a theology she cannot reconcile with her misery.
The poet Mary Oliver, musing on the mystery of creation in her poem “The Summer Day,” states, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention. …” One of the most telling episodes in Gazmarian’s story comes when someone, sensing she is troubled, does not presume to know the perfect prayer she needs to hear but simply pays attention to her.
Feeling hopeful and sick of side effects, Gazmarian had discarded her medications. Her condition worsens until, desperate, she rushes out of a writing workshop without explanation and contacts her psychiatrist. He arranges for a local pharmacy to have her medications refilled by the next morning. As Gazmarian, plagued by thoughts of suicide, is wondering if she can survive till then, a colleague approaches and asks if she wants to take a walk. “It seems like you’ve had a long day,” he says. His company is no cure for her mental illness, but his non-judgmental company calms her enough to get her through the night.
Gazmarian reflects on her experiences with kind people, and she looks back at that particular encounter – to use a favorite word of Pope Francis – as a miracle. So it is appropriate to cite “Miracle,” a poem by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. The poem is built on Jesus’ healing of the paralytic, but it is fixed on the man’s friends – the men who circumvent the crowd around Jesus by using ropes to lower him on his mat through a hole in the roof.
With numb shoulders and aching backs, they get him in the Savior’s presence. As in Gazmarian’s narrative, those who are most sensitive to another person’s suffering are the ones who bring him closer to God.
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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