I think that when it comes to depression, there's no such thing as it being simply a matter of choice...if we don't learn anything else from this discussion, please learn this...that it's IMPOSSIBLE for a person mired in the despair and muck of depression and despair to simply CHOOSE to either stay there or get out. Yes, there are choices involved in how we handle it, what treatments to seek, what direction to take to get ourselves the best help and to find our best way out. And there is the ultimate choice to live or die, to continue fighting or allow the depression to swallow us whole.

But people who have never been depressed cannot possibly understand how complicated and complex EVERYTHING is to the person entangled in those depths of despair and mangled thinking. We might know intellectually that we have choices, but the reality is that no matter how hard we try to make those choices, the depression and despair DON'T GO AWAY! Despite every best effort and sincerest most heartfelt prayer, depression just won't go away. The darkness continues to keep us imprisoned in that quicksand. Which is why I emphasize here over and over again, depression is an illness. You can no more simply snap your fingers and choose to be depression-free than you can snap your fingers and choose to be cancer-free without outside intervention and treatment. It just doesn't work that way...if it did, trust me, most of us would NEVER choose to be depressed. It's hell, a miserable horrible place to be stuck in, and not one of us here would deliberately choose to live this way.

That being said and understood, I do agree with Bluebird's differentiation between happiness and joy. Perhaps it's semantics, but there seems to be a difference between "feelings of happiness" and that more profound spiritual joy that defies all feeling (or absence of feeling) and understanding. It's possible, even in the depths of despair and stuck in the hell of depression's quicksand, to experience, somewhere in the depths of one's being, a joy that doesn't make sense. It doesn't heal or take away the depression, and it doesn't even always make a significant dent in the sadness and darkness of depression, but it does provide comfort and hope - and strength to fight ourselves forward - if we're able to detect its presence.

Unfortunately the mangled thinking of depression often deafens and blinds us to even that sweet shred of hope, which is why we need caring trusted others to keep reminding us of the truth that we are loved unconditionally. But if we are able to dig deep enough, and dare to trust that God has not abandoned us but sits with us, companioning us in that hell and muck, then we might be able to glimpse it.

IMO, that would be the main difference between happiness as a feeling and joy as a felt presence. We don't always have a choice over how we feel, only how we express or deny those feelings...but spiritual joy is a mysterious paradoxical presence that creeps in undetected, unexpectedly anywhere, anytime, even when we're feeling profound grief and sadness. That experience of joy and mercy is why I believe that there's no such thing as being beyond redemption. There is no place too mucky or unreachable for God...He creeps in to our dark caves and sits in that muck with us. It's that Presence that I believe is the paradoxical joy we're talking about here.

[ September 28, 2005, 04:09 PM: Message edited by: Eagle Heart ]