"Whole Persons, Tattered Lives"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 27^th of January, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to consider the whole of our lives,
and the life of the whole community
in the light of compassion and truthfulness.
Here we are free to consider our limits
and to let the sublime go unfettered.
Here with song, silence, story and words
we teach ourselves how to bless the world

And at worship's end

may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

I saw the stars last night.
I saw them like Van Gogh saw them
in his famous painting,
swirling like pinwheels,
making a circus in the sky.

They still looked like small points of light
mind you, reflecting on the film of tears
on the surface of my eye,
but surely the human heart sees just as much truth
as the moist and efficient eye.

And I saw the universe as my home,
not my prison, or my way-station,
alive with possibility, not dead with dread.

And I saw the pulse of things blossoming
far more beautifully than my own caution or control.

And I remembered the words of Vincent Van Gogh
"What a mystery life is, and love is a mystery
within a mystery. I want to live, to give life,
to renew, to restore and preserve it, and to work
and to be useful and give spark for spark,
to give a glass of water to one who suffers,
or a slice of bread and butter to a child."

And in the midst of it all I want to be silent…."

silence

"But I love," wrote Van Gogh, "and how could
I love if I did not live or if others did not live?

And if we live, as we do, there is a mysteriousness in that too. Call it God or Human Nature, whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define very well, but which is very much alive," Love itself.

And thus, alive here in this place, we are free to remember the mystery of love in our own lives, the aliveness of all who loved us and whom we love, struggle thought it was at times. We honor them by naming them aloud, or bringing their memory into this hallowed place and time.

naming

Life is complex, but inside there is a simple song
that over and over again repeats its message…
love more today than yesterday, love deeper, better..

Like Van Gogh said, you can sing to God or sing to Human Nature,
sing to whomever you like, but may we never ever stop singing till our final hour…

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from two voices…which are each testimonies of people enduring serious mental health problems. The first comes from a novel written by Janet Frame, Faces in the Water (1961)

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.

And the second voice is graciously from this very congregation. During the early service on the Sunday after Christmas, Marian Bursten shared about recent difficulties from which these words are excerpted.

The last time I was really bad it was like being in an endless dark tunnel, no end in sight, although there might have been some light. So I had two directions to choose from, front and back.

This time it was totally different and much worse. Imagine an endless plain, hard and smooth. Now imagine another plain, about 20 inches above the first. It is high enough so that you can crawl, or lie down, but you cannot sit or kneel. There is very dim uniform illumination all around. No direction is any different from any other. There is no way to tell where you have been, where you are, or where you are going. Everything is featureless and endless.

It is hard to keep going through each day.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] Reading is found in the ancient Gospel of Mark, written sometime around or just after the year 71 by someone whom we do not know, and who only has the name Mark given to him or her by tradition The words attributed to Jesus here are considered by modern scholars in the Jesus Seminar to actually be an authentic echo of what the peasant philosopher said.

So he goes back to his own house, and once again a large number of people so crowds the place that Jesus cannot even grab a bite to eat. When his relatives hear about it, they come down to take him back home to their house…for you see, they are convinced he is completely out of his mind. Even the scholars who had come up from Jerusalem think this too: "He is totally under the control of the Lord of the Flies!" they say. "And the only way he can cast out demons from folks is because he has got a big old demon inside of him himself."

So he called them over to his table and said: "So tell me, great scholars, how can a devil drive out a devil? After all, does a government that is deeply divided like that long endure? And how about a family…if they are throwing each other out of the house, they won't survive long either, right? So since you think what you think of me, I guess you must be telling me that the devil's house is about to fall?"

Sermon: Whole Persons, Tattered Lives [Next][back to top]
(with Wendy Fish)

Mark: People often think of me as a busy guy now, but during my college years, I was twice as busy. Beside taking a full course load, I worked 20 hours a week doing a work-study job washing dishes. I also volunteered ten hours a week at my church, serving as a sort of receptionist and greeter when the priest was taking his weekly day off, or was away attending a clergy retreat.

One day when I was holding the fort alone, a member of the congregation came to talk to me. George was at least a decade or two older than me, but he was a student, and seemed like a nice enough guy. But recently I had noticed that when he showed up at church he seemed a lot more "intense" … or something. He smiled all the time, as if he was savoring some great wonderful but unfathomable secret. And when he came to talk with me, he had that great smile on his face.

He started to talk to me about his reading of Jean Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," and how the concept of "nothingness" meant a great deal to him.

"What is the symbol of nothingness, Mark?" he asked me. I didn't know what he was talking about, so without waiting, he clued me in. "Zero, Mark, zero is the symbol of nothingness. Zero." And he smiled that intense smile. "It looks just like the letter O, doesn't it?"

He told me he had come to the church to set up some special audio speakers in the sanctuary for use in the next service, coming up in two hours.

Our priest, whom we always called by his first name, Jerry, was due home from his clergy retreat any minute to get ready for that service. But he had not clued me in on this special event, and Jerry was always quite thorough. "Does Jerry know you are going to do this?" I asked, with my anxiety mounting.

"No," said George, "but he will love it. The presence of nothingness is here."

"Huh?" I asked.

"You know that movie Space Odyssey?" George asked.

"Yes..." I said, totally confused.

"Well, I am going to play that great music..." he then sang it for me... dah, Dah, DAH!...", and then I'll stand on the altar table and proclaim the presence of nothingness!"

"What!?" I cried.

"Don't you get it? My first name begins with a G, right?"

"Yeah, it does, but so what?"

"And my last name begins with a D, right?"

"And when you put the presence of nothingness in-between my initials, what does it spell?"

"I don't understand," I said. I really didn't. I don't think I wanted to, actually. I was getting more and more scared by the moment.

"God! G-O-D," said George with his wide smile. "I will announce to all this evening that I am back, and going to make everything all right in the world. Isn't that wonderful?"

"George, I really think you should talk to Jerry before you do this." And for the next half hour, which felt like about ten, I tried to reason with a man who had come to believe he was God. I was almost whimpering when Jerry suddenly came in the door, his overnight bag over his shoulder.

"What's going on?" he said, eyeing George.

I told him as concretely as possible what George had in mind. He looked at George, smiled a little smile and said "George. George, its time for you to go to sleep now, not come to church. George, go home and go to bed."

Well, to my surprise, George got up, put on his coat and went out to his car and drove home. The next day I heard he had checked himself into a hospital. And, as I remember, he eventually recovered enough to return to school.

This was the first experience in my life I ever had with someone who clearly had mental problems, severe mental problems. And it scared me to death. It also taught me many things and opened up a whole new world …a vast universe…which I didn't know existed. And best of all, it helped me to grow up a few notches, too.

Later I worked at an institution called Hawthorne Center For Emotionally Impaired Children. It was a residential treatment center for kids aged 4 to 17. I worked there for three and a half years before I left to go to seminary in California. I loved my time there, almost every minute of it. I loved the children. And they too, with all of their problems, taught me and helped me to grow up.

I learned that the phrase "mental illness," commonly used in English, covers a lot of territory. I learned that many forms of mental illness are relatively mild in form, nothing so dramatic as George. These forms clearly seem to be rooted in reactions to difficult family situations, or other environmental factors, whereas other forms of mental illness are plainly biological, like the seven year old named Julie who was born without a quarter of her brain. Her behavior was so self-abusive and wild at times that we could well-nigh understand why people in ancient times thought that only the invasion of the body by some external demon or devil could account for such things. I have to admit that there were some very exhausting days when we wondered if demon-possession wasn't as good an explanation for her horrific behavior as anything else. We didn't know exactly why Julie hit her own face all the time; all we knew is that the missing section of the brain would surely have something to do with it.

I learned the mental health jargon while I worked at Hawthorn Center too. I learned about labels and diagnoses…I studied about neuroses and acting out; I learned about autism and schizophrenia of various kinds; I learned about sociopathy and character disorders and the wide variety of psychoses; and I learned about various kinds of bi-polar illness (which in those days was called manic-depressive illness). I learned about different kinds of debilitating depression. Those of us who worked with the kids day to day studied about all of these things as we could, one illness at a time; few of us had been psychology majors in school, and most of these terms were new to us. And we wanted to know, and to learn how best and most humanely to do our work with these children, whom we all clearly loved.

At the end of three years, I had learned this much.

What it means to be human in this world is not separated from what any of us think or feel about mental illness.

All people are human, no matter how different they are from one another in mood, action, speech or dreams.

All issues of mental illness interface with other subjects, such as authority, medicine, theology, and every single social reality… poverty, war, violence, street drugs, gender inequalities, sexual differences and ordinary alienation.

Wendy My first experience getting to know individuals with mental illness came at about the same time in my life as Mark described, when I was 21. Under some pressure, my mother, Selma, had just checked herself into a mental health lock-up unit of a Boston hospital. I was designated by my family to be the one to accompany her as she faced the reality of needing to be hospitalized, so I took vacation time and traveled 1,000 miles to be a presence during her first days in the hospital.

Selma fell into a routine with group sessions and individual therapy. I had quite a lot of time on my hands, time I wanted to spend in the hospital as close as I could be to my emotionally fragile, suicidal mother. I sat in the gathering room, played checkers with patients, exchanged small talk, and as time went by, got to know some of the patients on Selma's unit.

What I remember most vividly was the time Sally, a patient, asked me if I'd agree to take her out for a walk. She needed to have a designated companion, and since no one from her family came to visit any more, and the staff didn't often have time - would I take her out, she asked.

"Sure," I replied, trying to sound confident, but what I felt was anxious and afraid. It was one thing to be a companion in the safety of the hospital, but would I know what to do on the "outside?" Would Sally try to run off? That was the fear I had only days earlier when it was my job to get my mother to sign herself in.

I signed us out on an official looking form, and Sally and I ambled through a nearby park. We talked, we laughed and ate ice cream. My anxiety eased; I became able to just be with Sally, listen, be open to what was happening, not what I thought might happen. Sally talked about her own fears about her upcoming discharge, and what she would do outside the hospital. She spoke in a gentle way about past disappointments, but then with a burst of energy and anger shared some current frustrations. Some of her concerns were very similar to what Janet Frame, in our first reading, spoke of: "orders to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting, and faces are made to be fixed into smiles, and weeping is a crime." As she spoke, I could feel the power of Sally's angst.

By the time we returned to the hospital unit, just an hour after we had left, I recognized that our outing had perhaps been more therapeutic for me than for Sally. I was more comfortable in Sally's presence, and now as I look back, perhaps more comfortable with myself, as well. I wanted Sally to find a sense of belonging in the world. Would there be a welcome for her if I who had a mother who was mentally ill had had so much anxiety about being with her, so much discomfort about her unpredictable behavior?

Mark: The word "welcome" probably suggests images of open arms and smiles. But I would like to suggest that there are other forms of welcome too. For instance, if Father Jerry had said to George, "Sure, George, stand on top of the altar table and proclaim yourself God!" I am not so sure George would have been welcomed as much as mocked. If we had said to Julie, "Go ahead Julie, hit your face and eyes as hard as you can," she would have been blind by age ten. So sometimes, a welcome can look more like a boundary or seem like an expression of authority. "Go home and go to bed, George," doesn't sound welcoming on the surface, but I would like to suggest it is. Claiming authority does not automatically mean becoming self-servingly authoritarian, despite honest anxieties about anyone claiming authority.

The whole medication thing is tricky, I know. Prozac has helped some folk immensely, but I also know some folks whose personal chemistry didn't take to the drug very much, and it made them worse. For some on certain sorts of medication, the side affects are so great, they long to get off. Others enjoy "the high" experience of their manic stage so much they see the medication as something that distorts their own inherent joy. I understand their feelings I think. But I also have to say that I have known hundreds during my quarter century of ministry who have benefited greatly from the medications now available. And who, for the sake of living a somewhat less bumpy life, have gladly adjusted to the regularity, and some of the irregularities associated with medication.

Other forms of welcome are more expansive. When I knew my friend David was suffering from deep depression despite medication, I offered to call him every single day until he was past the crisis and he told me I did not need to call quite as often. A welcome sounds like an initial thing, but sometimes it has to be repeated over and over and over.

The words of the ancient Galilean peasant teacher Jesus strike me as very wise. There are many stories where he is depicted as healing a person with a demon, that is, someone suffering from what we now call mental illness, described in the gospels. How does he do it? By magic? No, he is always depicted as talking with the person deemed mad as a human being…simple questions, ordinary concerns. "Who are you? Tell me about yourself. How long has this been going on with you?" His is a very human approach. When his enemies condemn him by telling him that the only way he has the power to help mentally ill people has to be because he is mentally ill himself (or in their words, possessed by the great devil called Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies), Jesus is not threatened by the accusation. Rather, he pokes fun at their ideas by pointing out their inherent and sad contradictions. "I guess being possessed by a devil must be a good thing, eh? If I have the devil inside me, and am casting out devils, then the end of the devil's household is nigh."

The teacher is saying a great "So what?" it seems to me. He is saying we are all human, and that if you think you can divide the world neatly into the mentally healthy and the mentally ill, you have made a very great and potentially destructive error. After all, everyone has some place inside of them which has known depression, unrealistic fears, despair, or wild-ness, or sudden ecstasy perhaps. Maybe not to the extent of folks who are hospitalized. But life offers us a continuum, not two opposite and distinct categories.

Of course, I need to say that definitions of mental illness have fluctuated throughout history. Gay and lesbian folks were incarcerated or hospitalized as mad throughout most of the last century. Many of our greatest historical characters here in the west would today be diagnosed as having serious problems. Jehane Tarc of Domremy, whom we call today "Joan of Arc," heard as many voices as some of the kids at Hawthorn Center used to hear, yet she became a General in the French Army and a canonized Saint, whereas my kids were simply hospitalized. I think you may agree that Vincent Van Gogh is one of our most revered artists and writers here in the west. He had serious mental problems, I suppose, but that did not take away from his stunning greatness as a human being. And the gospel of Mark even suggests that Jesus' family members came to take him back to the old homestead and out of the public light. Why? Because they were convinced by his "contrary" behavior that he was, in Greek "existemi," or in English, "beside himself," a metaphor for mental illness we still use.

And yes, I know, there have been abuses in the mental health field. At Hawthorn Center we used to have to wean kids off Ritalin and other medications they had been given in too high a dosage just to keep them docile. Yes, some therapists have over-medicated, or under-medicated. It's important to say this is not usually out of any sort of malice or incompetence, but because getting medication right in the constantly shifting chemical realities of the human body is perilously difficult. Others, I think, have paid too little attention to the social conditions of poverty, rigid religion, ethnic conflict, sexism and homophobia which have contributed to various mental breakdowns in the world. But abuses in some instances do not invalidate the successes and triumphs of humanity in other areas.

I said earlier that only folks in ancient times believed that mental illness was caused by evil spirits, devils. Actually, quite a few modern folks are taught that still. Many people in Columbus are taught that in their churches. Pat Robertson teaches this every day on television. Watch him sometime if you don't believe me.

These distortions are terrible, but even many liberal people, who have given up Robertson's notions, still demonize those who suffer from any sort of mental illness. They do this in many ways, but most frequently by the careless use of certain words in common speech. The words deranged, demented, insane, and nuts are commonly used about lots of things that are not human beings. These words, associated with mental illness, are often used to demonize or denigrate ideas, concepts, or religious groups. I have used them that way myself many times. It seems to me we could take it as a spiritual discipline to think of and use more humane, and less insulting, words than those.

Wendy: As Mark implied, stigmatization can be in many ways more disabling than the illness. What can we do to ease the pain, or the shame some individuals with mental illness feel, or those who love and care for them?

I'll suggest three challenges that lie before us as people of faith:

First, I think we need to foster greater public awareness of these issues. Just a few months ago, the headlines in the Metro section of our local paper read, "Mental-health Cuts Feared." I found myself thinking as I read it, "Who will speak up as changes in health care and diminished funding for treatment cut services and programs? Who will help to ease the secrecy that surrounds mental illness, people's fear of discovery? Who among us will be agents for justice, equity and compassion in human relations as it relates to mental illness?"

Who will answer these calls?" I believe each of us can in our own way. I'd suggest the first step, though, is to break through our own fears and prejudices about emotional illness.

Second, my years in the ministry have taught me that often, what is most powerful is not action, but presence. We need to be there for those with mental health problems; we need to see the ones who are suffering, not look past, or through them. We need to see and listen to the ones who may feel invisible, or marginalized.

In the story Scott Lewis shared earlier, Chibi's teacher saw him as a boy with strengths, with gifts. May we have that kind of presence as we go through the world, so we can empower everyone we meet, no matter who they are.

And finally, may we value persons who are mentally ill as whole beings, rather than seeing them first as "people with mental health challenges." Our Unitarian Universalist tradition would have us recognize in one another, inherent worth and dignity. It helps if we pay attention to how quickly we find ourselves judging others or fearing them, screening them with our im-patience and suspicion. We must make a place for and believe in all our brothers and sisters, those temporarily able, and those who seek inclusion.

The difficulties and complexities of mental illness must not be minimized. Rather, by noticing others for who they are as opposed to how we wish they would be, by being present with others, by respecting one another, we participate in the healing of a troubled world.

Church member Marian Bursten tells us, "There is no way to tell where you have been, where you are, or where you are going. Everything is featureless and endless. It is hard to keep going through each day." That's why it is so important, so expressive of our Unitarian Universalist way, that each of us strive to be there with our open hands. And also with our capacity to really listen. We may also need to express our welcome with boundaries and limits too, and to sometimes claim our authority in difficult situations, such as in the story Mark told about George. But, since every person in this room is on the same continuum of health as everyone else, it is our lifelong work to come to this issue with ever more compassionate understanding in our hearts and mind.

Prayer [back to top] (based on some lines by Vivian Pomeroy)

I would rather not be more hard on myself
than I am on others.

Nor would I prefer to be harder on others
than I am on myself.

O Love, help me keep my balance.

I pray I do not repel people by the way I set a good example, and I pray I do not idolize others instead of living wisely.

Love, help me to keep my balance.
May my little ideas of goodness never serve as a spear to wound those who are different from me,
and may I never think I am superior to others when all I am is shielded.
Love, help me to keep living a life of balance.
And may I encourage the secret struggle of every person who comes across my path.

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