The Third Sunday of Lent: Our right mind

After reading the Morning Prayer lesson from Mark 5:1-20 about Jesus and the “demoniac” and the swine and the village, I came on this poem.  It opened my view.  I have always thought of the demoniac as an angry schizophrenic.  Now I wonder.  Did he have reason to be angry?  Did his division and anger grow by being ostracized, by being so heavily chained?  Has not mine at times, when my story, my inner becoming was simply not to be in view?  What happens when no one wants to hear our story, our insights, our becoming?  Even if this deafness is momentary, does it not bind us and ask us to lose ourselves…for whom?

The poet here was involved in the Polish Resistance under the Nazis and then was disillusioned by communism before immigrating to the USA where he eventually became a professor at Berkeley.  He was raised Catholic and it shows through.

Czeslaw Milosz, “Readings”

            From The Collected poems 1931-1987  (pg 234)

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.
Compelled to be attentive we shall think of that epoch
No more distant than yesterday, though the heads of caesars
On coins are different today. Yet it is still the same eon.
Fear and desire are the same, oil and wine
And bread mean the same. So does the fickleness of the throng
Avid for miracles as in the past. Even mores,
Wedding festivities, drugs, laments for the dead
Only seem to differ. Then, too, for example,
There were plenty of persons whom the text calls
Daimonizomenoi, that is, the demonized
Or if you prefer, the bedeviled (as for “the possessed”
It’s no more than the whim of a dictionary).
Convulsions, foam at the mouth, the gnashing of teeth
Were not considered signs of talent.
The demonized had no access to print and screens,
Rarely engaging in arts and literature.
But the Gospel parable remains in force:
That the spirit mastering them may enter swine,
Which, exasperated by such a sudden clash
Between two natures, theirs and the Luciferic,
Jump into water and drown (which occurs repeatedly).
And thus on every page a persistent reader
Sees twenty centuries as twenty days
In a world which one day will come to its end.

 

He makes me wonder.  Are all the demonized truly possessed or do we make them so?  I think of William who for a decade came to daily mass where I was a priest in Newark, NJ.  He was quite lost to us if one asked the pedestrian question: “Tell me about you?”  He got lost and babbled then.  But if you simply waited time he would emerge.  He had served in Vietnam.  Some trauma had overtaken him.  He prayed deeply as was clear from the small items he brought to the altar rail.  He remembered me with little prayer cards, or a mass being said elsewhere for me. He had  a heart for Jesus and me…just it was wounded long ago.

And so I have to wonder; where do demons come from, not only when they go but when they enter?  Do we “bind people with chains” for the “common good,” such as sending them to war or asking them to seal up their story when they come home?  Is it done when we do not want to listen, to hear what might disturb our easiness?  Is it achieved when we see someone who differs by skin or accent or tattoo or political view or the beloved they hold and we cease to listen, to care?

Perhaps like Jesus I need only whisper: “Come out; speak your name and story. I will listen.”  And in our speaking silently, our listening, our allowing the other to penetrate our protected lives, that which seemed demon goes over the cliff and we are left with a story and a right mind.

“And Jesus said to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”…and all marveled.”