Oh Thanks God for Making me Better Then Them!

Luke 18:9-14

⁹ Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust: ¹⁰ “Two people went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹  The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹²  I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ ¹³  But the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’ ¹⁴  I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”

I’m almost into my third month of my new job where I work as a peer in mental health.  I am the youngest of all the team between two houses, one of the most educated, and the resident spirituality export (or as a professor said “theologian in residence”.  I like to think of myself as a low judgmental person, but I can tell you that I am quick to judge. I feel very much like the Pharisee who gives thanks for what is not happening to him. I have my anxiety managed, I have health insurance, I have a job where I don’t need to hide my illness, I can afford and have easy access to my prescriptions, I go to therapy every week, I have people or supporters as my job training would call it! I am called to this when I see my co-worker peers telling there stories or having a day where they symptoms of there diagnoses comes nocking at the door. I say to myself and unintentionally to God “thank you that I don’t have paralyzing anxiety like she does” or “wow I’m glad that I was never interested in dope like he was, what a mess of things he made”.  I am thankful that my symptoms are not as bad as someone else’s. Not thinking of how to support the person into having symptom reduction or even reduction.

            It is an interesting parallel, because we celebrate recovery and the resurrection of the person and not the patient (going from patient-hood to personhood). Yet our struggles also keep us down, and have caused me to think about myself and my place in this group of people a lot.  I am still cocky and feeling like I’m hot stuff and excited that I’m the first of my seminary friends graduating this year to have a ‘grown up job’.  We celebrate success and moving forward however it comes as an agency value. And yet I find myself still living in the judgment of ‘I’m doing awesome, whoot!’

            Yes I do a lot of the things that my faith demands of me, in the ways that suit my life, myself and beliefs and I sometimes brag about them. Yes I brag and it can be bad sometimes, very bad. But I know I brag because more often I feel like the tax collector, “God I’m sorry that I have to ask this person to explain why they came to a food pantry”, “Can’t you just create a compound, element, something to take this persons pain away? ‘Why do you let me suffer?’ Learning to question God both in angry ways demanding to know why God has done or not done this or that is something that has become a new practice for me. But the questions of why that come with my repentance of what feels like diminishing someone’s imago-dei are the ones that most make me feel like I’m separate from God a sinner who has missed the mark completely.

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Astronomy_Amateur_3_V2.jpg

Yet at the same time, I know that relationships are part of the process to restoration of the spirit. Maybe “hearing the person in to being”* even in the shame, stigma, and doubt is siting in the mud with the person, helping them to rise to there own feet and to tell them they are the beloved. To invite them instead of looking down in life, when everyone is already looking at you as ‘another welfare case’ at the social security line, or the disability, line or at the local homeless or outreach center. I can point to the way that will lead them to look up to see there imago-dei there lives filled with Grace so big they don’t yet know it.  I know that I am not the one who will fix the world, that’s God’s job. Nor am I the last person who will point to look up and out but I aspire to be one who helps to prepare and prime the soul for the journey ahead

*Inspired by a favorite theologian of my seminary Nell Morton (she is amazing BTW, I wish I had known her outside of her writing)

CUT IT OFF!

      In a Mass during CPE the Gospel Lesson was Mathew 18:6-9. It’s a harsh parable to be sure. Doing CPE in a psych hospital changes a lot of what might otherwise be ok in terms of chaplaincy. The Priest did state quite clearly about not cutting off your foot literally, because in this environment the power of suggestion can be very powerful. But what I was lead to think of in this environment when your brain causes you to sin what do you do? If you cut it out you will die, it is like telling someone to cut out there soul in my view.

          

  As a person with a mood disorder in the six ring circus of the state Psych hospital I was lead to think about the ‘sins’ I know I did in my deep dark hole of depression. Such as cursing out God, not loving my neighbors, not telling or showing the good news to anyone, missing the mark and one might even say my thoughts of suicide where sinful. At the time I felt them to be that way.

 But to me this entire passage is interpreted in light of how you view sin. I see sin as “missing the mark” and breaking a relationship. But can sin truly and willfully be committed when someone’s biological chemistry is causing him or her to do so? When in there true heart they want to do every thing else but sin and hurt the people around them.  So the solution for some might be to cut off the offending part. But this countered with Paul saying each part of the body is important. I am siting with Paul here and not Jesus. 

Well the brain may be messed up and it might sound like the easy route to just cut off the offending part. This is where lobotomy’s had there base. Looking to ancient Greek medicine it was viewed as people’s humors or the four body fluids where off.  The term melancholia is derived from the greek words for ‘bile’ and ‘black’. It was and sadly is still not uncommon for people to view depression as demonic possession and the ‘anger of the gods’. Certainly the person is sinning to have   I think at this moment in time, that some sins in breaking relationships are truly from the person themselves. But more often I am sure that it comes from illness. 

gotten a demonic possession. But again I ask are they liable for the sins they inflict if they are not themselves? If they are possessed or if God is punishing them. I am mixed on this question even as I ask it. It for me goes to the idem ‘love the sinner hate the sin’.

I think of one patient who is a fanatic fundamentalist Christian that is convinced Harry Potter ruined her childhood (she is in her 60’s BTW). She has a nasty temperament and has burned through many chaplains. Part of her burning relationships I know comes from her chemistry, but what I think most of it comes from is that she is lonely and hurting. She does not know how to forgive herself she just wants to cut the offending part, or parts off in her veiws. 

What happens if the offending part just needs stitches, wound care, or antibiotics to cure the oozing, festering, infected wound?  Paul’s route is much harder, learning to love each part, to accept it, to not declare one better then the other. All parts are not always even or 100% but together we are all 100% and with the Grace of God we are 110%