“Compassionate Conflict”
Mark 5:1-20
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/5/15
All I know
about multiple-personality disorder I infer from the name of the condition
itself. And if I spell schizophrenia correctly, credit my computer’s
autocorrect. Only two things can teach much about complex mental illnesses, and
they are extensive training in psychology, or walking faithfully with a loved
one who suffers from such a condition. Because of that, when wading into the
biblical story of the Gerasene demoniac,
we have to lay aside any curiosities regarding the man’s diagnosis. Those are rabbit
trails.
We also have to resist the urge to focus
on the man’s instant healing. Even well-intentioned proclamations that such
recoveries can happen, because ‘with God, all things are possible,’ usually
become excuses, ways to distance ourselves from suffering. Excuses cause us to
deny, or even to lose our purely Christ-imaged capacity for compassion – which
means, of course, to suffer with. And
even if our compassion does not actually heal
the mental illness, or the leprosy, or the paralysis, or the cancer, it
does offer a renewing wholeness. To enter the suffering of another says to
them, I still see the indescribable
beauty of your full humanity. I will not leave you alone.
Entering
another person’s suffering is difficult because it almost always leads us
deeper into our own suffering. It may also reveal how we have caused suffering in others. So for us, the
man living among the tombs represents that all-too-real place of chaotic un-reality
which lies between the conflicting pulls of conscious and unconscious powers.
Inside him, lives a legion of deliberate disorder crying, “We are reality! Do
this!” And outside him, other legions, the Gerasene community and everyone else,
shout, “No! We are reality. Do that!” Unable to manage these irreconcilable mandates,
the man often finds himself shackled and chained.
Terror can be
a source of superhuman strength. It can be a powerful anesthetic, too. So when
bound, the man goes berserk. When the psychotic mist thins just enough, he
discovers that his chains have been broken, but his battered body aches. His
throat hurts. Perhaps he experiences a brief calm. Soon enough, though, it
starts all over: Do this! No! Do that!
Our world is
full of folks like this man. Who lives among the tombs. On the other side of
the lake. We may often find ourselves helplessly bound to one legion or
another. When caught in this unsustainable dualism, we demand that life be all this or all that, all right or all wrong, all us or all them. To bind
ourselves to a single legion, whether interior or exterior, is to become terrified,
terrifying, howling, destructive creatures. We lose, at least temporarily, our
sanctifying capacity for compassion. We become, at least temporarily, incapable
of grace and peace.
In his book Owning
Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson uses the word “fanaticism” to refer to this
common form of possession. “Fanaticism,” writes Johnson, “is always a sign that
one has adopted one pair of opposites at the expense of the other. The high
energy of fanaticism is a frantic effort to keep one half of the truth at bay
while the other half takes control. This always yields a brittle and
unrelatable personality.”1
While
fanaticism can be as devastating as mental illness, the two are not the same. Fanaticism,
says Johnson, “depends on ‘being right.’ We may want to hear what the other is
saying, but [we become] afraid when the balance of power starts to shift. The
old equation is collapsing and [we] are sure that [we] will lose [ourselves] if
[we] ‘give in.’ And how the ego works to keep the status quo!”2
Of course,
fanatics can be agents of change as well as champions of convention. Johnson
acknowledges this with a wonderfully descriptive image. “When the unstoppable
bullet hits the impenetrable wall,” he says, “we find the religious
experience.”3
Remember, our word “religion”
derives from the Latin word ligare,
which means “to connect.” We get our word “ligament” from the same source. The
fundamental nature and purpose of re-ligare,
of the “religious experience is,” says Johnson, ‘to bond, repair, draw
together, to make whole, to find out that which is anterior to the split
condition. Our future lies in this religious vision.”4
True religion
recognizes that “the split condition,” what we are used to calling sin, is not our fundamental reality. To
think that our true nature is sin, and that we are all going to hell unless we
say the right things with the right words, is to be as detached from
reality as the Gerasene demoniac. True religion seeks to reunite us with the
wholeness, the Holy Love, which still lies at the deepest heart of our being.
This is the healing our story illustrates. This is our religious vision – not to “accept Christ into our hearts” as if he
were not there until we gave him permission. That would be a pretty impotent
savior. We accept that he is, has always been and will always be our original
and eternal reality.
While Christ may be our primordial
and perfected reality, unstoppable bullets are slamming into impenetrable walls
all around us, aren’t they? When they hit, both bullet and wall are destroyed.
And this devastating “religious experience” always leads to something new.
That is where we come in.
As the Church,
we cannot provide a foothold for fanaticism. We are called to be a place where legions,
where unstoppable bullets and impenetrable walls may safely collide. We are
called to be an impact zone for religious experiences through which human
beings re-connect to the health and wholeness that lies before our “split
condition.”
That means, of course, we must enter
the deep human suffering on both sides of clashes over care of creation, healthcare,
human sexuality, and how to appropriate the various symbols of our varied
histories. Even if hogs drown the process (Even if it costs us idols as beloved
as bacon!), the church must be a place where substantive conflict is welcomed, but where God’s Spirit of Love
and grace shapes that conflict. There will be no peace for any of us if we
ignore the “split condition” around us and within us. There will be only more howling,
chain-rattling, bone-crushing agony.
Good Friday is our most memorable
and transforming metaphor for the unstoppable bullet meeting the impenetrable
wall. And the result of the devastation is always healing experience of Easter.
Easter’s table is set before us. It
is set with a foretaste of the kingdom, a glimpse our already-happening future.
Our future is our re-connection – our re-ligare
– to the Loving, gracious, and compassionate wholeness from which we have come.
At this table, may you see anew the
Christ within you.
May you see Christ anew in others.
And may we all discover, once again,
that the compassion and Love between us, is, in truth, Christ’s eternal,
Eastering presence in, with, and for, all creation.
Charge to
Congregation:
When the man,
restored to his God-imaged wholeness,
asks to follow Jesus,
Jesus refuses.
Stay here, he says.
Tell your story here,
among your family and
friends.
Having been fed at
the table of holy impact,
we, too, are being
restored
to our original wholeness.
We, too, are called
to witness right here,
among family and friends,
to the healing
compassion of God’s eternal Christ.
1Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow:
Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche. Harper One, New York, NY, 1991, p.
90.
2Ibid., p. 90.
3Ibid., p. 92.
4Ibid., p. 90.
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