Exercising the courage of the children of God
By Marcellus Allen Roberts*
Peter Martyr Enjoins Silence, by Fra Angelico, c.1441 (fresco inside a monk’s cell), Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy
A mysterious figure stands in the foreground of a fresco in the Museo di San Marco in Florence, Italy. Fra Angelico’s genius is on full display. His “St. Peter Martyr Enjoins Silence” adorns a lunette like a sacred guardian commanded to turn back every unnecessary movement of mental chatter. It admits only one meditation to perfume the Holy Place, a question to be contemplated silently within the heart. That question: What happened?
The artist depicts the Dominican saint as gesturing with a universal sign of stillness — one finger positioned before pursed lips. Or, is St. Peter Martyr directing our attention upward, toward the curdling blood that has transgressed the boundary of his tonsured head? Is that the hilt of a dagger with its blade buried in his back? How much blood is racing down his right shoulder? Wait! What’s going on here? What happened?
“Nothing is done, nothing happens, either in the material or in the moral world, which God has not foreseen from all eternity, and which he has not willed, or at least permitted.” (Preface to Abandonment to Divine Providence, preface by Rev. H. Ramiere S.J.)
So it was for Chuck and Esther. They met on September 8, 1984; Chuck was then an Air Force Academy graduate, reorienting his life away from his childhood dream of becoming a pilot. Instead, he was focusing on a career that would allow him the quality time he wanted to spend with the future family that was becoming his sincere desire. Esther was young and lovely. At 5’5” and 115 lbs., her slender frame radiated a wholesome femininity which brought out the mystery in her eyes, so dark they could appear to be black. Her presence was always punctuated by a loving attention to the needs of others, the kind of attention that collects in deep wells within a servant’s heart.
Chuck, the luckier one, got both her home and work numbers that day. He called Esther four days later, calming her unwarranted worries that she would never hear from him again. The two of them quickly discovered that they were a pair of matching ensembles cut from the same cloth. They both cared about doing what was right; they both cared about people. It was the springtime of their young love and they spent it talking on the phone for hours, sharing how their days had gone, venting their young adult frustrations and empathizing with one another. It wasn’t long before they were going to Mass together, and by December of 1985, they were married.
During the next thirty years of a fruitful marriage, Chuck and Esther worked hard to be a good mother and father. They raised four happy children together, and Esther turned out to be an excellent hostess of their home — by turns, a little bit of St. Martha and of St. Mary, she was always prepared for visitors and always eager to listen.
But, beneath it all, there was a real friendship, a virtuous friendship, such a one as Catholic philosophy professor John Cuddeback describes in his book, True Friendship, when two souls love one another “for the other’s sake and because of who the other is in himself.”
Chuck recounted to me, in tears, how Esther had loved holding his hand. Once, she exclaimed in that genuine and innocent way friends do when they want to emphasize that it’s the small things that matter most, “Holding hands! It’s so nice to have a friend like you, my love. Just to have this friendship.”
They learned Latin hymns together, sang in the choir together, and through the tough times, they supported one another in mutual sacrifice. So why is Chuck, a devoted husband and father, with no prior history of violence, serving a 20-year sentence for the murder of his wife, Esther? What’s going on here? What happened? To answer that question, we’ll have to turn back the clock to the year 1990.
“In early 1990, two Harvard Medical School psychiatrists, Martin Teicher and Johnathan Cole, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry that Prozac could induce intense, violent suicidal preoccupation…” (Prozac Backlash by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D.) When I first came across the book Prozac Backlash, I was unprepared for the descriptions of psychosis suffered by patients as a side effect of serotonin boosters like Prozac, Paxil, etc. I was even less prepared for the accounts of their deadly effects and the sheer number of documented cases from the 1990s alone.
These reports presented polar opposites of the smiling faces, serene settings, and choreographed social gatherings pantomimed to attract potential consumers on pharmaceutical commercials. Researches have found that prescribing these compounds is a dangerous gamble, says Dr. Glenmullen: “Teicher and Cole labeled the suicidal and violent impulses a ‘paradoxical’ reaction to Prozac, estimated it might happen in 3.5% of patients, and warned physicians to prescribe the drug with caution.” Maybe this statistic should be added to the laundry list of side effects listed in small print in the product literature.
The most chilling parameter of all is the speed at which these “suicidal and violent impulses” seize a patient as if they’d been overcome by sorcery. As described by Dr. Glenmullen, “The two psychopharmacologists at McLean Hospital described a number of patients who became severely anxious, agitated, and obsessed with violence within two to seven weeks of starting Prozac… the reactions were sudden and dramatic.” Phrases like, “Just weeks after starting Prozac…”, “Within days of starting the drug…”, “Ten days after starting Prozac…” preceded accounts of horribly violent acts committed under the influence of Prozac-induced psychosis.
So, what happened? Tragically, in December 2015, after being admitted to the hospital without health insurance and receiving a diagnosis of severe depression, anxiety and suicidality, Chuck was detained for two and a half days without therapy or counseling, then sent home with prescriptions for a cocktail of four psychotropic drugs, of which Prozac was one — and told there were no side effects. Less than three weeks later, Esther lost her life to Chuck’s “paradoxical” reaction to Prozac.
The book Prozac Backlash by Joseph Glenmullen
It’s difficult to digest this story. Like a wildfire ravaging a Northern California forest, or a hurricane indiscriminately distributing destruction along the Gulf Coast, the catastrophe concealed within the chemical compounds of those tiny capsules forever altered the landscape of Chuck and Esther’s life together. They were no more in control of the outcome than had it been a natural disaster.
For a while afterward, Chuck refused to communicate with God. He spent the next three years wading through, and at times, submerged beneath, a turbulent sea of depression, despair and self-hatred.
In April of 2018, he pled no contest and accepted a 20-year sentence.
“We make mental prayer in order to be converted from evil to good, from good to better, from better to perfection… mental prayer, by its very nature and its diverse acts, is pre-eminently the source of this transformation.” (The Ways of Mental Prayer by Rt. Rev. Dom Vitalis Lehodey)
By the time I met Chuck in late 2022, he was a devout, rosary-praying, Latin-hymn-singing, lay Dominican.
He credits submitting himself to God in the Prayer of Quiet Recollection as the genesis of his spiritual recovery — a mental health remedy that has been in the Church’s medicine cabinet for centuries.
As we turn our gaze back to Fra Angelico’s painting of St. Peter Martyr, a new question arises, the only logical question at this point: Lord, why? Why the wounds, the loss, the brokenness?
Rev. H. Ramiere, S.J., answered this question well when he said, “All these things are only sent to exercise the courage of the children of God, and when their virtue is proved and confirmed, He permits them to overcome these monsters, and continues to send new warriors into the field. So that this life is a continual warfare which exercises the courage of the saints on earth, and causes joy in heaven and confusion in hell.”
Let us offer a prayer for the repose of all those souls who lost their lives to the adverse effects of psychotropic prescription drugs: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.”
*Marcellus Allen Roberts is a 40-year-old Prison Oblate of St. Benedict’s Abbey, Atchison, Kansas. He is serving a 25-year penance in the state of Texas.
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