On October 8, I'll be a guest speaker for the Sawitski Memorial Lecture webinar at Desert Garden United Church of Christ. I'll be offering reflections on the theme "Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll: Mental Health Challenges and Our Journeys of Faith." It's all remote, so you are welcome to join! You can register at this link.
Just a small bit of backstory: the title for my talk is a quotation from they hymn “It Is Well With My Soul,” a hymn by Horatio Spafford. I reference they hymn, in a somewhat negative light, in Christ on the Psych Ward. In describing a time of acute mental and emotional crisis, I wrote: “With all respect to Horatio Spafford, it was not ‘well with my soul.’”
When Desert Garden UCC invited me to give this lecture, they informed me that “It Is Well With My Soul” is something of a theme song for the lecture series, and kindly inquired whether that would be a problem for me, given this passage in my book. I told them no — to the contrary, what a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the tensions we hold in our faith life, between celebration and grief, presence and absence, assurance and lament.
So the choice of title for the lecture is an intentional reference to these tensions, and will provide something of a focal point and theme for the webinar.