Out of the Realm of Ceaseless Cognition
I would come up with a beautiful, stunning thought. And that great thought, that beautiful, correct insight into my own life, would pull me out of the deep waters and set my feet on beautiful country. There I would be, landing wide-eyed, coughing up water, stunned with what the tight thought had announced to me. Which, as I understood is, would always, always, always be reality.
When I finally figured things out in my head, a way forward would present itself in the world.
I see now what I did not see then. There in a gown, walking gently on shoeless feet, and mumbling under the fluorescent lights of the local psych ward, was the life I had made out of thinking more, and thinking better. This was my life in the Realm of Ceaseless Cognition. This is what you become when you only live there.
I would have to face it, sooner or later. My best thinking was how I got here.
I got here by consoling myself. I got here by trying to be okay.
Later, my therapist helped me see it clearly: I had used thoughts as a drug. Like a food addict, or a drug addict, life did not feel right, life was simply not okay, life simply could not be tolerated unless I was thinking. Every problem in my life, everything I met, was an occasion for and was to be managed by Ceaseless Cognition. Every bad and confusing thing was a reason to think more.
And in that psych ward, I had come to that crucial palace where such a thing as beautiful, primal, and necessary as thinking had begun to do me serious harm. In the way that such things as beautiful, primal, and necessary as food and medicine and sex can begin to do us serious harm.
And it turns out the only thing that now counts as hope, when you cannot think and you cannot do, the only thing that counts as power is what you can hear. When things get that bad. Life is won, this world is overcome, by being spoken to.
What I heard first, very faint, unbelievably small, was a tiny little bit of quiet that opened up in my heart. It was the kind of quiet you find yourself in when things have really and truly ended, when there’s no argument left for or against something because it’s already been decided. The quiet after you lose the big game. The quiet at the end of a movie. The quiet after you lower the casket into the ground. The kind of thing we mean by “When all is said and done.”
There in that hallway it was not like someone had changed the channel in my head but that someone had turned the TV off. The Realm of Ceaseless Cognition was not dimmed or quieted but suddenly canceled, rendered inoperable. And I was not in the far country called the Realm of Ceaseless Cognition. And there were no rats. And it was just me walking down the hallway with no shoes on.
I would begin to understand that quiet as the death of the Son of God. Or, rather, I began to understand that His death was my ability to be quiet, my ability to simply wait. A death that was more than my best or worst day. A death that was more than my heart.
It was just me and the hallway and this quiet.
It was the quiet where I could depend on Christ, the silence after Mercy had been spoken. Because we are not, thank God, what we can think, or what we will do. We are not our thoughts and not even our wills. We are what the Word of God will make of us.
I had just found the Christ I could depend on. I had just picked up the Thread of an ordinary life with Christ.
And suddenly there was something else. And it was not a word, and it was not a voice. It was an understanding in my heart that I should go to bed. And could go to bed. That I could depend on Christ by going to bed. And I did.
I walked to the med station. A kind old nurse gave me the pill that shut off the part of my brain that made me roam the hallways crying. Within twenty minutes I felt better. And I thanked God and I went to bed.
Excerpt from A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ by John Andrew Bryant. Published 2023 by Lexham Press. Used with permission.
John Andrew Bryant is a caregiver, writer, and part-time street pastor in a small steel town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife, Becca.