Tragedy strikes. Illness sets in. Something terrible happens, and we want to know why. Why me? Why her? Why anyone?

When I served as a hospital chaplain at Johns Hopkins four summers ago, it would send chills down my spine to hear a grieving mother say that her child had died from a gunshot wound because "God willed it." Many a time, I would hear hurting people try to comfort themselves and each other with the words "It must've been the Lord's will. We just don't understand it, but God must have had a purpose in allowing it to happen. After all, 'all things work together for good for those who love God.'"

But what sort of comfort is that? Cold comfort, I'd say. In those moments of cold comfort, I'd want to argue with these grieving, hurting people and say "God didn't do this to you!" But of course such moments are no time for arguing. Besides, I wasn't concerned so much that they had bad theology or had taken scripture out of context as I was with the unspoken messages I believe lay behind those pious sentiments. "It was God's will." Unspoken message: my desires and feelings don't matter to God, and they shouldn't matter to me or anyone else. "All things work together for good." Unspoken message: what I'm going through right now isn't meaningful. I don't count.

Such sentiments didn't explain their pain, they simply explained their pain away. But did their pain go away? No, it simply went underground. The very texts of true comfort and strength had somehow been warped, with the result that these people saw themselves and their loved ones as undeserving of God's mercy, rather than God's beloved children, "the firstborn within a large family."

It astounds me how often verses of scripture such as "all things work together for good" are used as justifications for a fatalistic worldview. Serving as a hospital chaplain forced me to re-evaluate my own understanding of where God was-and wasn't-in times of profound suffering, pain, and loss, and in doing so I found that simply theologizing about pain wasn't enough. In order to make sense of suffering, I had to re-visit those times in my own life when I suffered, and ask: where was God then?

Without a doubt, the most painful experience of my adult life happened to me about a year and a half before I did my summer chaplaincy internship at Johns Hopkins, and it prepared me for the suffering and pain I was to encounter in the hospital. In fact, without this painful experience, I probably would have been a less effective chaplain than I was, and it has influenced the entire shape of my life and ministry since. I have never shared any details of this time of my life in public before this morning, and wondered whether I should share it at all, for fear that in telling it, the focus would be more on me than on the lessons I learned. But I think it's worth the risk. This is the story of how my cat saved my life.

I was living and working in Annapolis and was in the ordination process, having graduated from divinity school two summers previous. By the late fall of that year, I had been delayed in the process twice on account of my youth. The folks in charge weren't convinced that somebody as young as I could possibly be an effective minister. Suddenly, I found the very basis of my life called into question, and I began to question whether it was God's will for me to serve as an ordained minister in the church. More than that, I wondered what power I had to serve as a minister at all, since I had understood that by virtue of our baptism, all Christians are called to be ministers in all aspects of our lives, whether ordained or not. But it seemed people had no confidence in me, and so I began to lose confidence in myself. I looked for encouragement and support, but those who supported me most also felt most powerless to help me.

As a result, I began to despair. I began to wonder whether the past several years of my life, including seminary at Yale, had been wasted. If I had gone to law school as I'd originally intended, I would have been in a much more lucrative job. But as it was, I was saddled with debt, gummed up in the ordination process, and in a job outside the church not earning enough both to pay my monthly debts and to feed myself. I worked a second job as a Latin tutor, but still could hardly afford to make ends meet. I would have been happy in my poverty had I felt I was actually headed somewhere or making a difference somehow, but I simply felt stuck, burnt out, and useless. I fell headlong into depression.

Before this experience, I had heard a lot about "depression," and had learned in pastoral counseling the symptoms that indicated clinical depression, but didn't really have a clear idea of what it felt like. I thought it meant a deep sadness that could not be shaken. But that hardly described the experience I had, for it was not so much that I felt sad as that I had lost the ability to feel pleasure. When one is sad, sweet things still taste sweet and a beautiful painting can still inspire awe. But when one is depressed, one knows that a sweet thing is tasting sweet, but one cannot derive any pleasure from its sweetness. One still may know intellectually that a painting is beautiful, but it does not inspire awe.

In my own case, it was late fall when I fell into my depression, and as I walked about the streets of lovely historic Annapolis, I saw the red and orange leaves on the trees and the way the bright autumnal sunlight played on the lush green lawns. Everything shimmered and sparkled, and I knew that what I was seeing was beautiful, but I could not feel its beauty. I also knew that once upon a time, I had felt pleasure from seeing the leaves of late November. The memory existed that I had had pleasure, but not the memory of the pleasure itself. This knowledge was tortuous-it was more unbearable to me than feeling sad. I thought that if I could only look upon the turning leaves and feel sadness, it would be better than to look at the turning leaves and know that I could not feel at all.

I began to understand why some people in the throes of depression hurt themselves. It is not uncommon, for instance, for some depressed people to cut themselves, not because they wish to kill themselves, but because physical pain is the only feeling they can access in the present moment. In their yearning to feel something, they prefer pain to the torture of not feeling anything at all.

Luckily for me, I knew several people, including family members, who had struggled with depression, and so I knew how self-destructive depression could become. I could see all the signs in my own life, and I was not about to wait around for them to get worse. I made an appointment to see a doctor as soon as I realized that what I was experiencing was more than a mere "funk" from which I would emerge after two or three good nights' sleep. Just as I knew I would want to see a doctor if my lungs or my liver were malfunctioning, I knew I needed to see a doctor when my brain was malfunctioning.

Once I made that appointment, however, the most terrible part was waiting for the appointed time to arrive. I would drag myself to my low-paying job, sit at my desk trying to concentrate on the most menial of tasks, and feel as if my life were already over. I found myself taking frequent breaks so that I could go downstairs to the basement bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. I stared dully into dull eyes, searching in vain for the person I knew used to exist behind those eyes. I found it vaguely reassuring to see my reflection in the mirror because it was tangible evidence that I existed outside myself, that there was more to me and to the world than my inability to feel its pleasures and pains. I told myself that I just needed to hang on, because beauty and pleasure still existed, even if I couldn't feel them.

During this period, I had two consolations: reading, and my cat Monica, who has since died. In books I could not feel feelings of my own, but I could almost feel what the characters in the books felt. For an hour or so I could forget that I existed, and could enter into other people's lives, suffer with them and hope for them. But when I emerged from my book, it was like waking up in a nightmare world.

And then there was Monica, the cat who saved my life. I am convinced she was the creature through which God's presence was made known to me, like a feline angel of life-not that she knew, necessarily, that she was God's messenger or anything like that-I was depressed, not psychotic, after all-but that through her I was reminded that God still existed even if I couldn't feel that God did, and that God still loved me even if I couldn't remember what it felt like to be loved.

I would come home after a day of menial tasks and mirror-staring and lie flat on my back on my sofa. I would not move, and I could not sleep. All I could do was listen to the incessant insistence of my breathing. Why did my lungs continue to take in air, my heart continue to pump blood, when my brain was dead, I wondered. But no sooner would I settle into my prone and lifeless position than my cat Monica would jump onto my chest. She would lie Sphynx-like, her blue Siamese eyes gazing into mine…and purr. Every day after work she lay there, day after day, hour after hour, and I would listen to her purr and listen to myself breathe, until I felt exhausted enough to drift into a restless sleep.

But before I drifted off each evening, I would say to myself: I will not die today, even though I want to, because if I die, who will take care of Monicat? I wonder if she has enough food and water. I should probably change her cat box. If I don't, who will? Yes, I will keep breathing. I will stay alive for my cat.

Monica's purring would remind me that there were people in the world, too, who loved me, and who I knew I also loved. Most of the time I was so trapped inside my own misery that I forgot this simple fact. I was disconnected from the world, and Monica brought me back in touch with it. I knew I loved and was loved, even though I couldn't remember what that felt like. But I knew it was true, and I would make mental lists of all the people I knew I loved, and whom I knew loved me, and this kept me breathing until I could see a doctor.

My cat saved my life, for through my cat I remembered how to pray. "The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." I had forgotten even how to groan, but through my cat's purr, the Spirit groaned for me.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose."

I would not return to that fall if you gave me a million dollars. And that's saying a lot, for usually I can be bought for a lot less than that, as Heyward and the Vestry well know. I would rather that fall never existed. I resent the fact that I was depressed for even the two or three months it took for me to receive effective treatment. But I am not angry at God for making me depressed, or even for "allowing" me to become depressed, because I don't think God had anything to do with causing it. You see, I don't believe God is a control freak. I don't think God was trying to "teach me a lesson." But I did learn a lesson-I learned a lot of lessons through that experience, some of which I still rather wish I hadn't had to learn, about life, and love, and prayer, and humility, and patience, and listening. I learned these lessons not because God willed me to suffer, but because God was present in my sufferings.

That's the thing, you see. God never promises us a pain-free life. But God does promise to be with us, whatever life throws our way. This is why God's Son came to be with us, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to the God and Father of us all. God doesn't control our lives so that we can avoid the cross and tomb, nor does God control our lives so that we are crucified and entombed. We crucify and entomb each other so much that God needs no monopoly on that dirty business. God doesn't control our lives, but God does promise that the tombs of our lives will not contain us.

"What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us."

There might have been easier ways for me to learn the lessons I did without going through the dark night of the soul. I'll never know, though, because that's where life took me. I would like to think that I'm not so thick-headed that God would inflict such suffering just to prove a point. I may in fact be thick-headed, but I don't believe God would ever be that vindictive. I believe rather in a God who is there with us even when we can't feel it, a God in whom we live and move and have our being, whether in joy, in sadness, or in depression. I believe in a God who causes all things to work together for good not because God wants us to suffer but because God delights in thumbing God's nose at sin and death, in turning defeat into victory, sorrow into joy, death into life. I believe in the God of Jesus Christ, the God of the cross and empty tomb because that God is true to life. That God doesn't invalidate our suffering, but redeems it, thereby showing how much God truly loves us no matter what we do, where we go, or what happens to us. That God suffers with us, intercedes for us, redeems us. That God saves. That's my God. Is that your God, too?