The Deep Places is a beautiful, profound book on suffering and belief

I always knew Ross Douthat to be a good writer, able to advocate dispassionately and provide tight, persuasive arguments for his almost always sensible positions. The longtime New York Times columnist, who has somehow found a way to smuggle orthodox Catholicism onto the Gray Lady’s pages, has always seemed at equal turns irenic and winsome. It was in reading Douthat’s The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery that I learned of the incredible beauty and, at times, poetic nature of Douthat’s writing. Frequently, The Deep Places, Douthat’s story of his harrowing half-decade-plus fight with Lyme disease, is achingly beautiful. In it Douthat is able to reveal a side that often does not come out in his in his political and social commentary.

The story begins, as it does for many transplants to Washington D.C., with a yearning to return home. Douthat had a “romantic idea” of an alternative to the life he and his family were living, now with two young children in the D.C. area with its “punishingly competitive” “school environment” that seemed to be “an enemy of childhood” and the hustle and bustle of DC life only made worse by the fact that it is taking place in a swamp.

The freedom Douthat and his wife, Abigail Tucker, have as writers finally allowed them to begin making concrete their dreams of moving home. In Douthat’s and his wife’s case this is Connecticut. Their ability to cash in on the craziness of the D.C. housing market also allowed Douthat’s dreams to grow bigger and in 2015 he and his family were able to buy a 1790s-era colonial farmhouse in the Connecticut countryside. It was a financial reach but in Douthat’s telling, he “didn’t really think of it as a reach at all, because at that moment in [his] life [he] only really believed in upside.” Douthat candidly admits that despite his own realism and experience, he had imbibed a certain combination of the prosperity-Gospel story combined with the secular meritocracy myth. He writes:

I wrote my share of words on the problem of evil—the why-does-God-let-bad-things-happen-to-good-people question—usually making the case that much of American Christianity offers people the wrong answers encouraging them to believe that actually bad things shouldn’t happen if you’re good, that the American Dream should be yours if you just stay in God’s good graces and follow the paths that He’s marked out, as straight as I-95 running north.

I had a similar critique of the secular meritocracy in which I had been educated: that because it asked its climbers to work so hard and jump so high, it encouraged an idea that we had somehow earned all our privileges, that our SAT scores and extracurricular accomplishments meant that we genuinely deserved to rule.

But the words had not totally taken hold: “[D]espite these critiques, there was still a sense in which I believed exactly these ideas myself—or at least for myself.” Douthat had put in his dues; he was now entitled his reward. Or, differently, Douthat was a person who set a goal and gotten things done. “I was the guy who did things.” The serendipity of selling the D.C. house for more than they could expect and purchasing the idyllic Connecticut farmhouse “felt like confirmation that we were on the right path, that I had planned and worked and won the things I wanted and that I deserved them—that my ambitions and God’s purposes could stroll along nicely.” But Douthat would have to learn through hard-borne experience that his critiques had been right: none of us is protected from suffering, no matter our faithfulness, no matter how fantastic our intellectual pedigree.

The irony, as the reader soon learns, is that the Connecticut farmhouse is likely the site where Douthat contracts Lyme Disease from a tick off one of the many deer roaming the countryside. The farmhouse is the ground zero of what will become a more than half-decade struggle that will bring Douthat face-to-face with his own mortality, the limits of institutional medicine, and force Douthat to live out some of the harder lessons of his faith that had previously been more abstractions than concrete habits and practices.

After securing the house, Douthat and his family return to D.C. to make the final arrangements before they move back home. Abby learns she is pregnant with their third child and Douthat finds a swollen lymph noted on his neck. A doctor tells him it is a boil and gives him a prescription for antibiotics. The doctor assures him that he will be back to normal in no time.

But normalcy does not come. Douthat’s “neck began to feel intermittently stiff and painful and [he] developed what felt like a . . . vibration in [his] head.” The welt shrank, but the weird feelings remained. Douthat wrote them off as stress from the move. It was a psychosomatic explanation that soon his doctors would be employing when he returned again and again and again with symptoms that would make anyone feel as if he were living out the horrors of a Stephen King novel, in large part, because they were explained away as being solely in his head.

Soon Douthat canceled a planned trip to Rome because he ended up in the emergency room after a night during which he “had pain all over [his] chest and a gagging feeling in [his] throat” and that old “vibratory sensation . . . everywhere.” His blood tests come back normal, but he feels anything but normal. The symptoms Douthat describes are harrowing:

The pain that had started in my neck was jumping around, ubiquitous but unpredictable now stabbing sensations in my spine, now muscle twitches on my chest, now prickling and tingling in my extremities. And beneath it was a feeling that was hard to describe except as a sense of invasion, of something under my skin and inside my veins and muscles that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Douthat’s symptoms prevent sleep and eating. Thus, ensue a battery of tests and a litany of exams with “an internist, a neurologist, a rheumatologist.” Everyone attributes Douthat’s symptoms to stress. “Stress, they said. It was always stress. Too much going on in your life.” And while Douthat felt stressed, “the illness felt like the reason rather than the symptom.”

And yet the doctors’ persistent refrain that this is all in his head leads Douthat to change his tack with medical professionals. He writes that early he “figured out that when you’re claiming symptoms that don’t show up on blood tests, it’s a good idea to exaggerate your own good sense and self-awareness, to keep a smooth veneer over the bubbling help me, please hysteria beneath.”

But despite doctors’ attempts to pin this on his mind, Douthat noted that his mind was the one part of his person that seemed to work. “[D]espite the doctors implying that this was somehow in my head, my mind seemed like the only part of me that worked. I could still write columns, well enough and normally enough that I didn’t have to tell my editors how awful I was feeling.”

On a trip to Pittsburgh, Douthat lands in the Emergency Room again because of crushing chest pain. Yet, the tests show nothing. Douthat thought: “Surely this was the low point.” Not even close. The next night he was back in the ER again with the same indefinite diagnosis. By the time, later that summer of 2015, Douthat and his family finally moved to Connecticut, he had “lost forty pounds in just ten weeks.” Douthat writes, “In one of the few pictures taken in our last days in D.C., I look skeletal and permeable, like a haunted-house ghost accidentally captured by a tourist’s camera.”

Douthat hopes that the move to Connecticut will alleviate his symptoms. If they are indeed the result of stress, moving back home to an idyllic farmhouse would seem to be an anxiety-balm. It is not and a Connecticut doctor suggests that Douthat does have a tick-borne disease—one of which the doctors in the D.C. area might not have much familiarity.

But that insight is hardly the end. It is only the beginning of the beginning of a struggle that can only be called purgatorial. Douthat will only begin to feel like his old self a half decade later. Interwoven with Douthat’s own personal history with Lyme Disease is a fascinating sketch of Lyme Disease’s history and the science that has accompanied it. This provides a helpful context for the mainstream and non-mainstream ways people have approached treating the disease and insights into the Covid-wars that should make no one feel comfortable. Douthat is sympathetic with those who distrust the Establishment. But his research and understanding also made him someone who, early in the pandemic, took it seriously.

While much could be said about The Deep Places, I’d highlight four themes and urge readers to pick up The Deep Places for themselves.

First, the experience of the body. Douthat’s account is a powerful riposte to the Gnostic dualism that seems to penetrate deeper into our society by the day. For Douthat, Lyme Disease was experienced not as an abstraction but in and fighting against the body, his body. While doctors blamed his mind, Douthat suffered this in his limbs, his chest, his abdomen, his back, and his legs. There is no escaping the reality of the body and its finiteness. But the power here is more than the intellectual framework into which Douthat places his experience. It is his experience. His description of the sufferings he endured makes palpable the pain and agony that he felt in his body. Douthat makes this come alive—almost too alive at times. That someone of his stature is writing this candidly about the experiences of the body is a great gift and one that can help push back on the fashionable dualism of the day.

Indeed, Douthat’s discussion near the end of the book, relying on insights from Charles Taylor, concerning the body, is particularly powerful and insightful. He writes that “throughout” his “fight” with Lyme Disease he “gained a heightened awareness that the territory” of the body “really is an ecosystem, an actual terrain, with different viral and bacterial forces moving through the landscape temporarily, various influences being exerted from outside magnets, sound waves, maybe even the prayers of holy saints-and hidden places everywhere that are hospitable to many kinds of life.” As Douthat concludes, the “body isn’t a clean machine that sometimes breaks or leaks or rusts. It’s a landscape in which many things take root.”

The second theme to note is Douthat’s experience as a beggar before God. We are all beggars, but we so often forget this. Through his suffering, Douthat was reminded on a daily, even minute-by-minute, basis that his life was entrusted to someone greater than he. Douthat’s description of his prayers to Mary, to saints, to Jesus, and to relatives who might have passed beyond purgatory—and the effects he experienced from these prayers—is powerful. Douthat’s witness would be great if this were some random man off the street. That this is someone who writes for the Gray Lady only underscores the witness. Douthat may get a hearing that others cannot and he presents a powerful example of how belief in God and his Providence can coexist with powerful and sober reason.

The third theme is the gift—often unwanted—of suffering. Certainly, Douthat points to the redemptive power of suffering, but there is more. Suffering generates solidarity with the great mass of humanity who are bearing their daily crosses. It also can push a person towards belief—or deeper belief. Indeed, Douthat writes of belief’s necessity in these circumstances:

[C]hronic suffering can make belief in a providential God, if you have such a thing going in, feel essential to your survival, no matter how much you may doubt God’s goodness when the pain is at its worst. To believe that your suffering is for something, that you are being asked to bear up under it, that you are being in some sense supervised and tested and possibly chastised in a way that’s ultimately for your good, if you can only make it through the schooling all this is tremendously helpful to maintaining simple sanity and basic hope. If God brought you to it, He can bring you through it, read an aphorism in one of the doctors’ offices I frequented: a neat distillation of what I wanted and, more important, needed—to believe, in order to get up every morning and just try to hold my world together for another shattered-seeming day.

While Douthat writes that his “pre-illness self would have disputed” the idea that religion was a “crutch,” his “sickened self” would not. Rather, he would “give it a tweak.” “Absolutely religion is a crutch, and it’s not only useful for the weak of mind but for anyone dealing with severe weakness. You had better believe that I leaned on my belief in a silent, invisible God more in those miserable months . . . than on any hope or notion or idea in any prior portion of my life.” This sort of bracing honesty runs throughout the book.

A fourth theme, which is particularly powerful coming from someone as sober-minded as Douthat, is the need to strike a creative tension or balance between “trusting the science” and seeking out unconventional therapies and explanations. Douthat’s description of the history of Lyme Disease—about which we’ve gained insights gained from within and outside (and against) the Establishment—and his own journey with the disease, that required the use of conventional and not-so-conventional approaches to treat it, are a powerful rejoinder to sceptics on either side. While Douthat never entirely rejects the Establishment, he also is willing to go beyond its limits and question its assumptions and conclusions. Douthat is saying that we should place a skeptical trust in medicine and be willing to push back on medical professionals in large part because of their frequent tendency to disregard reality, the very things being reported to them by their patients. Douthat argues for greater epistemic openness on the part of science while avoiding a tinfoil hat approach to the world. It is a healthy skepticism. We could all benefit from such a balanced and healthy attitude.

The Deep Places is a beautiful and profound book. The prose sparkles and the story moves. Douthat’s willingness to share so openly about such a difficult experience and his incredible suffering is impressive. We are blessed to have someone of Douthat’s stature at The New York Times making the case for Christ. Douthat was already one of our most impressive Catholics in public life. This book only solidifies his place.

The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery
By Ross Douthat
Convergent Books, 2021
Hardcover, 224 pages