It's Time to Consider Our Symbols

And then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."

-Mark 5:9

As a modern person, I find Jesus interaction with demons a little unnerving.  Maybe it's because I have been trained by my secular education to disregard the possibility of supernatural evil, after all don't we have enough natural evil to go around?  But when it comes to things like the shootings in Connecticut, demons all of the sudden begin to seem awfully real.  The man that Jesus confronts in the region of Gerasa, across the sea of Galilee from his usual stomping grounds, is described as living among the tombs.  People had tried restraining him with chains, but he broke them, in other words the standard practice of treatment had not worked.  Living among the tombs is a powerful image for people in pre-industrial societies. These tombs were not the sanitary, well manicured graveyards that we all automatically picture.  These were caves and cairns where bodies lay decomposing and vermin of all sorts scurried about feasting on human remains.  And the Legion drove a man to live there.

Rather than being disgusted and angry with the man who was afflicted by these demons, Jesus has compassion for him.  In many situations, like the one I experienced here in June and the one that Newtown CT is living through right now, that is difficult, if not nigh impossible, for human being who is not the embodiment of a merciful and loving God.  And the Legion would be just fine with that.  Legion was not afraid of anyone, not the people who could chain them up, not the anger of the townsfolk or the power of the secular government, but they were afraid of Jesus, because he could cast them out.

Another facet of the biblical accounts of demon possession that troubles my soul is the rather confusing dynamic that is created when we begin to consider mental illness.  There is no doubt in my mind that much of the pathology that was once labeled demon possession was in fact mental illness.  The frightening corollary of that belief is that at least some of what we now classify as mental illness may be demon possession.  

Camouflage is perhaps the devil's most cunning skill.  As Goethe's Mephistopheles said in the play Faust, "Not if the devil had them by the neck..." would most people even be aware of the grip that sin and evil has on their lives, and of course that is the great dilemma we face.  It is not a problem of classifying mental illness over and against demonic possession, it is rather a need to recognize that both are tools by which human lives are broken apart and evil lashes out at the world.

When people are trying to deal with that lashing out, we often come to an impass.  Yesterday, in the unofficial religion of most of America, the NFL, players had moments of silence, they hugged children, they put decals on their helmets, they wrote words of sympathy and remembrance for the victims on their gloves and shoes.  In short, they revealed a rather poignant example of what sets human beings apart from most other animals: the use of symbols.  Words are a rather specific kind of symbol, but as a species, we can attach symbols to just about anything.

If you have read the blogs from the last few days, you know I am rather obsessed with wrapping my mind around the large cultural forces that create an environment, where someone, even a mentally ill or demon possessed person, would direct their violence deliberately at children.  Violence of this particular sort seems new to us.  Children are far too often the victims of physical or sexual abuse.  Children are far too often the collateral damage of large scale catastrophes and violence, but this seemed to be different, because there was no motive other than simply to kill children, on a rather massive scale.  Something that holds our humanity together was seriously broken in Adam Lanza.

What circumstances produced this unholy anomaly?  "My name is Legion, for we are many."  Broken home, mental illness (and maybe demon possession), a culture of violence, access to weapons, disconnection from a stable community and God only knows what else.  The end result was catastrophic, and we want to blame someone or something.  The problem is that the devil is good at camouflage, he attacks from many angles and leaves little forensic evidence in the midst of all that carnage.

In the absence of a clear answer, perhaps it would be good to analyze our most powerful symbols as a culture, not to assign blame, but to try and understand how we got out here among the tombs of all these dead children.  The first symbol that I can't seem to get away from in all this is the gun.  A gun is a symbol of power, you could say our country would not even exist if it weren't for the invention of the firearm.  The American Revolution would not have been numerically or strategically possible without the ability for the colonials to attack the British troops from a distance.  Without guns we would still be subjects of the Crown, without guns it is very possible that democracy would not be possible.  It is quite possible that the gun is wired into our cultural DNA.  Guns give us the ability to kill from a distance.  If you are going to kill someone with a knife or a sword, it's an up close and personal kind of thing.  Guns are not dependent on physical strength and with a minimum of training they can make a five foot woman every bit as formidable as a six foot man.  After all, killing from a distance was how David slew Goliath.

This is not good or bad in any a priori sense, it just is.  Guns have real power and symbolic power.  They symbolize freedom to a people who have made freedom one of their highest virtues.  When symbolic and actual power align, things are truly dangerous, not just physically but spiritually.  Our obsession with guns is closely tied to an underlying symbol that is perhaps the most definitive symbol of American culture: the individual.

How can an individual be a symbol you ask?  Easy, you just divorce the idea of an individual from any actual living individual and invest your thinking in a concept of individuality, without ever asking the hard question (that many of our founding fathers actually spent a great deal of time thinking about), what is the responsibility of the individual to the community.  There is no doubt that if the gun is part of our DNA than individuality is practically our entire genome.  We idolize the mythology of the mountain men and the cowboy, we hold on to the image of our founding fathers as the rugged individuals that tamed a new continent, we easily forget that their greatest challenge and accomplishment was actually forming a community, a great union upon this continent or something like that.

The biggest challenge for Americans has never been how we take care of number one, but how we stay together as a society.  We easily forget that in the idolatry of personal (individual) rights.  We have to get better at the community thing if we as individuals are going to be truly free to flourish.  If our children are going to be safe in their schools and community.  It was an individual that fired those guns, but the factors and forces that put the gun in his hand and gave him the sickness to use it on children were indeed Legion.