I saw a beautiful article online this week from a website called “Momastery,” which I shared on my Facebook page, about the world’s need for ‘mentally different’ people. It’s an old blog post, from April, written by a woman who has anxiety, depression, and addiction, and it speaks to the usual, typical way people tend to interact with those who have mental illness. You know the way, with medications and doctors, with pity and institutions, with suspicion and typically low expectations. So much mental illness is invisible until someone has ‘an episode,’ a nervous breakdown or behavioral tics that stand out from the statistical normal behavior. And because it’s not as clear as a broken leg or even cancer, we tend to act as though a person with mental illness can just pray away their illness, or think happy thoughts, or easily change their attitude and not be sick any more. It’s not that simple, human brain chemistry, and getting along in the world as it is, well, that’s nearly enough to put anyone into an anxiety attack if we’re paying attention.
That’s just what Glennon, the blogger whose article I’m talking about, has to say about the ‘mentally different.’ Here are a few words from her article:
“Sometimes we understand that our inability to accept and live resignedly in the world we’ve been born into is chemical and personal and that we need help integrating… But other times — we turn on the news or watch closely how people treat each other and we silently raise our eyebrows and think: Actually, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you, world. Maybe my inability to adapt to the world is not because I’m crazy but because I’m paying attention. Maybe it’s not insane to reject the world as it is. Maybe the real insanity is surrendering to the world as it is now. Maybe pretending that things around here are just fine is no badge of honor I want to wear.”
I say this because we joke a lot, I know I do, about people being ‘crazy.’ I throw that word around anytime somebody decides to do something that seems outlandish. As in, last winter my best friend and I drove an hour each way to meet for dinner in a snowstorm just because we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, and we called it crazy. But we needed to connect. When people today are outrageously, painfully generous, we tend to think there’s something wrong with them. The church in her first generations sold everything and shared in common with the poor, and if we did that today we would certainly be called crazy for it. Taking care of widows and orphans without repayment? Crazy. Standing up for the outcast? Crazy. Love your enemy? Crazy! Pray for those who persecute you? Crazy! Father, forgive them while they nail my body to a cross? Crazy!
The letter we read today, that portion from Second Corinthians, has this line in it: “If we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right minds, it is for you.” In a world of buying and selling, competition and score-keeping, to be loved unconditionally and without reserve is so far from our experience it’s enough to overstimulate anyone to the point of breakdown. That’s kind of how we grow, though. Another image going around Facebook lately is simply a picture of a stalk of wheat with a phrase about the seed needing to come completely undone, to turn entirely inside-out, in order to grow into the plant it is designed to become. Usually one would look at a seed and notice, if anything, how small it is, maybe it’s general color and shape, and it might just as easily be brushed off the kitchen counter as planted in the soil with any intention.
But then all this stuff happens underground, in the dark, with time and warmth and water the seed splits and shoots sprout down for roots and up for more sunlight. If you’ve ever started a bean sprout wrapped in a wet paper towel in a ziplock baggie, you’ve seen some of what happens there, but it’s still a pretty miraculous process even when we think we know what’s going on. How does a seed know to do that? How do the cells know when to do that? How do the sugars and proteins and nutrients and everything work so well together that entire species can rely on the miracle of plant growth to sustain their own animal bodies?
This, Jesus tells us, is what the Kingdom of God is like. A farmer plants in the fields, and before she knows it there are roots and shoots, stems and leaves, flowers and fruits and veggies! I’d imagine that today Jesus might tell us the Kingdom of God is like those hostas growing out front. A few Wednesdays there were just hints of growth poking up out of the ground, and then three days later when we gathered for Sunday worship, wham! Suddenly there were more hostas than we knew what to do with! That is what God’s love in the world is like. It’s crazy! It’s amazing! It’s startling even when we think we know what to expect of it. And for all of our best intentions and for all of our worst ones, it will grow, we know not how, until it becomes a nuisance. Like dandelions all over the yard when we just spread fertilizer yesterday. Like wild mustard, and other invasive species that start out small and soon take over the garden and the lawn and come up between cracks in the sidewalk, and with their roots make even more cracks in the sidewalk.
The kingdom of God is like Mike, a guy I met yesterday in Albany who just got out of then years in prison for some dumb stunt he pulled as a kid, who claims that those ten years away were God’s gift to him, to help him slow down and calm down and learn a few things before getting his second chance. He was in town for some cancer treatment and spent a good long while telling me about God’s love and care for him, that the universe doesn’t owe him anything because everything he has is a gift, that he wishes people would understand the value of life more. Talk about a journey! He’s been through the ringer and grown up quite a bit in the meantime and is like a new person this side of prison. It’s a bit like the letter to the Corinthians reminds us: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away, see everything has become new.”
And that is the daily conversion we go through, little by little and sometimes in spurts and sometimes in dry spells. Growth slow and invisible underground, new life budding just below the surface, resurrection out of every little letting go. Jesus Christ has given us that planting, has planted us like seeds, has come like us, down to the cellular level, to resurrect our hearts. We do not regard anyone from a human point of view any more, even though we once saw Jesus that way, just like we’d gotten used to judging everyone at first sight. We put labels on him according to our reasons for wanting him dead, and he died and rose and shattered all of those assumptions about life and death and heaven and who we are. He brought us the kingdom of God, right in our midst!
That blog I first mentioned goes on:
“We addicts — we have rejected the world as it is. We left the big world and started hiding inside the small world of addiction for a reason. So inviting us back into the world as it is — it’s not effective. We are too smart to rejoin a party we couldn’t stomach… I needed to be invited not only out of addiction, but into a movement to change the world. I needed to join folks working to turn this planet into a gentler, saner, safer, more vivid place in which folks with wide-open eyes and tender hearts might survive and thrive.”
She’s using the language of addiction, but it’s the same message, because addiction language is sin language. We sinners - we have rejected the world as God made it, we left God’s world and created our own because we did not trust the word of life and of love. So digging ourselves in deeper is not effective. We are too proud to join a party where we are not the center of attention. We are not only invited, but carried out of sin and into a movement to change the world. We are connected through Baptism to people who are recognizing God in our midst and people who struggle with recognizing God, so that we can together bear God’s redeeming love to the world.
In September, we are going to host a community Heroin awareness event. We will reach out to help folks who are addicted to Heroin, to help those who love addicts, and we are inviting schools and community resources to come together, not only to offer help ‘out there’ but to receive help ourselves. We need to know our community better to serve and love our community better. We need to recognize ourselves as addicted people, too. Maybe not addicted to pain killers, maybe addicted to making people happy, or addicted to being in control of our own lives. So we invite the addicts among us to lend us their perspective, their uncertainty, their questions and struggle, their awareness of what is deeply wrong with the world, that we may learn how better to recognize Jesus alive and active in the world as it is, and to help create the world as it can be. Where folks with wide-open eyes alert for joy and for threat, and folks with hearts made tender out of love and out of pain, all together can not only survive, but thrive in love and hope, like a garden that blooms as though overnight, to wake us in the morning, fresh and alive.
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