Communion and Clomipramine

the body the blood and the pills

Content warning: this piece has a brief mention of suicide.

Communion of the Apostles, Luca Signorelli, 1512.

Clomipramine

I’ve been writing for a public audience for twelve years now, and the entire time I’ve been writing I’ve been taking an antidepressant.

Like the dinosaurs or Taylor Swift, I can split my adult life into distinct eras. First came the Prozac Era: eighteen to twenty-three. Then the Lexapro Era: twenty-three to thirty. And finally, the one with the longest name, the Clomipramine Era: thirty to today.

Communion

Predating the anti-depressants and stretching over and around and through them is one long era: communion. I’ve been taking it since I was six, after deciding to accept God into my heart at a gas station by the big McDonald’s on the Oklahoma border.

Whenever the time came to take communion, I didn’t pass the plate by but actually partook. I chewed that small wafer when the pastor told me to and tipped back that grape juice on his command too.

I didn’t cognitively understand the scope of what was happening, but I knew it had to do with Jesus’s body and blood and somehow salvation. It felt big. It was big.

Clomipramine

In high school one night, before I got my diagnosis, I was flipping channels and landed on The 700 Club. There was a woman with red hair on the TV, and she was praying for people she had never met before. I think I remember her praying for someone with back pain, healing him through the TV.

I watched, mesmerized. I was drowning in worry; I was worrying—deep, deep worry—that I might become suicidal someday, that somehow it might just sneak up on me and take over. My days were filled with that panic; I couldn’t run from it; I couldn’t escape it. It just hovered there over me.

So I stared at the TV and prayed to God that that woman with the red hair would pray for me next. That her words might heal me of my fear and my anxieties—these companions I had known for so long.

She didn’t. I thought that maybe she had more important people to pray for.

Communion

I’ve switched churches and states and traditions; I’ve had bits of tortilla and wafers and crackers and loaves of bread; I’ve had it impromptu and planned, blessed by a priest and handed to me by another college kid. It’s looked all kinds of different, but I’ve kept taking it. Monthly, weekly, occasionally, whathaveyou—I’ve always taken it.

I still do.

Clomipramine

I am not a rationalist. I believe in divine healing.

One time, a year and a half before I went to the doctor and got my first Prozac prescription, before the psychiatrists and the counselors, God healed me.

It was the summer before my junior year, and I can’t tell you why or how, but God told me he loved me and he held me. It wasn’t audible, but I felt the words in my brain. In the same cramped corners that panic so often occupied, God made me feel love in a way I had never felt it before; it was like he opened up the windows of my mind and let springtime air fill the space.

And for the next six months—I kid you not—I never worried. Not once. One morning as I walked towards my high school, I began to pray and felt like I was floating across the ground.

What I believe—what I know in my heart, as they say—is that God healed me.

Communion

That first pastor who served me communion told me it was symbolic. I nodded and agreed, content to eat the wafer and take the grape juice. I didn’t realize that centuries of the church’s history are etched with arguments about what actually happens in communion. Does it become the literal body and blood of Christ? Or does it become the spiritual body and blood? Or is it simply symbolic, like Pastor Bowden told me all those years ago?

I don’t know.

Clomipramine

Eventually I began to worry again, and eventually I went to a kind doctor and got a prescription of Prozac.

A year and a half into taking it, I met a guy who told me he used to take Prozac too. He said God healed him of his depression. He was so healed that he didn’t need to take his Prozac anymore.

I called my dad and told him the story. He told me to keep taking my Prozac.

But I believe in divine healing.

Communion

I’m flying home for Easter right now and don’t have the books in front of me to reference, but somewhere in the Eastern Orthodox books I read in college, a theologian said that the East just kind of sits amused watching the West debate about whether the bread and wine are actually the body and blood of Christ.

This theologian writes that the Orthodox simply trust that somehow these simple elements become Christ’s body and blood. They believe it is a miracle.

Clomipramine

A part of my job is working with pastors and learning about different churches around the US and the world. Today I looked up a church in Tennessee that had on their website a “Doctrine of Divine Healing.” It had a lot of words and scripture references, but it told me that divine healing had to be absent of medical apparatuses. If medicine cured it, it didn’t count.

I can’t help but wonder if that church would consider me a failed case. Would they tell me my pills aren’t a form of healing?

I don’t know.

Communion

One church I attended took communion every week. I’m pretty sure they believed it was symbolic because the pastor didn’t believe the Spirit spoke outside of the Bible. If someone said they felt God speak to them, he would be doubtful.

I can’t help but wonder what he would think about God healing me of anxiety back in high school. Would he say it didn’t actually happen?

Clomipramine

So why does this church online not believe that medicine counts as an act of the divine? Is it not miraculous that God has invented scientists who invent medicine? Is it not surprising—shocking, really—that anyone can understand anything about what happens underneath my skin, inside my skull? Of all the neurons firing and spinning and colliding around in my brain, is it not amazing that these little pills—these small mustard seeds—are able to move the mountain that is my mind—are able to make me feel like myself?

Is that not miraculous?

Communion

And is it too much of a stretch to believe that Christ’s body and Christ’s blood was broken and spilt two thousand years ago and forever after in every act of communion? Is it too crazy to propose that each week, when I go down front for the loaf of bread and the sip the grape juice, that somehow it, too, is healing me from the inside out? That walking down front and receiving my portion is an act of faith akin to the bleeding woman reaching out and touching the hem of Christ’s robe? That Christ’s presence is inside me, that the Holy Spirit is spinning in my gut, that I am being made new through this act of faith?

Is that not miraculous?

Communion and Clomipramine

Clomipramine and communion, both transfigured by the hand of God.

You are deeply loved by God. It’s okay to hurt. If you are, please reach out to someone; may they remind you of the unconditional love of God, and may you take communion in the knowledge that God is with you.