This sermon was for my preaching class. The text I was given was 1 Samuel 3:1-20 - the story of Samuel being woken up in the Temple by the voice of God. I came across the story of Will Hall in an issue of Newsweek in May 2009, and it stuck with me. I couldn't help but think about the difference implied in a small parenthetical in the article: that ancient native communities would have put mentally ill folks at the center of their society. This is a stark difference with the extreme marginalization of the mentally ill in our own society. Here's what I came up with...
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Will Hall
went through a bad few years a while back.
In the midst of a rather devastating episode of bipolar disorder, he was
prescribed the wrong medication and ended up spending months alternately
walking the streets or locked up in a mental hospital. For Will, those years were an unusual turning
point and the beginning of a strange kind of redemption – and he is still proud
of the fact that occasionally, trees try to talk to him…
What happens
when we hear the voice of God, but have no way of knowing who is doing the
talking? What if we took Samuel’s story
from our Old Testament reading today and set it in a different place? Maybe
instead of sleeping in the sanctuary and hearing voices from the ark, Samuel is
taking a nap on a bus station bench late one evening and the ATM next to the
locked up juice bar starts calling his name.
It seems a little absurd, doesn’t it?
The history
of our faith is chock full of people who talk to shrubs and have arguments with
farm animals. They hear voices in the
night and wander off unprepared into the wilderness. They recklessly attack rocks with sticks and
sing hymns among the catacombs in the night.
Why exactly is it that we hold up the book these people left us and
venerate it every time we come together? Why do I spend hours poring over their words every week trying to figure out what it was they were trying to
say? They sound a little off, don’t
they?
Will Hall
takes comfort in the history of his Native American heritage. He knows that – generations ago – he might
well have been the center of his community: a medicine man, or perhaps a
shaman; his whole village might have come to him to seek wisdom from the forest
that surrounded them. Joseph Campbell
once said in an interview with Bill Moyers that the difference between priests
and shamans is that while priests are functionaries in a larger religious
system, shamans actually embody the deity.
For somebody like Will, who must take good care to maintain his daily
routines and self-care to keep the angry voices at bay, Campbell’s statement
must seem a little chilling. But Will IS an elder of a kind – and he is
helping to create what might be the most effective key for managing the
“dangerous gift” (as he calls it) or “mental disability” (as some would have
it) he possesses.
After her
own near-fatal mishap with disease, Juliana had what she called a series of fifteen
“visions from God.” These were not your
run-of-the-mill religions visions, mind you: God and Jesus didn’t really look
and act for Juliana like they did for anyone else. She did her best to write
them down, and she went off and joined a convent. She spent years in her community doing her
best to discern whether her visions constituted a psychotic episode or a gift
from God. Eventually she wrote them down
again, this time in obsessive detail, and they were filed away on a shelf
somewhere and forgotten. Nobody’s even
sure anymore whatever happened to Juliana…
Thank God
for Eli. Eli, the old night watchman, at
least had the good sense to get over the irritation of being woken up a few
times by that bum over at the juice bar and realize that, when God’s not
talking in the ways we’re used to listening, we ought to at least give the ATM
a fair hearing. It can’t hurt, right?
The Icarus
Project’s office in Manhattan is the place where Will Hall’s quest for vision
has finally come to rest. He is the
leader of a nationwide group of dangerous people – fellow mentally ill folks
who encourage others to get together and get to know each other. They influence others to take a more critical
look at the treatments urged upon them and to take a generous and open look at
the so-called “abnormalities” in their character caused by their conditions. Ultimately they want their fellow patients to
find new hope in embracing themselves as they are and discovering the gifts
they’ve been given.
This is
indeed dangerously beyond the norms of our culture and medical establishment,
and not to be taken lightly – especially not alone. But many who have walked this hard road have
found new life in a world that they say simply wants to label and tranquilize
them. They have taken their suffering
and made something unique and beautiful: community.
Jean Vanier,
who founded the l’Arche communities for the mentally disabled, has written much
about this kind of gifting. In his book,
Becoming Human, he says that we must do more than simply create excellent soup
kitchens and special schools: “we should not be kind to such people because
they are human beings. Nor is it a question of ‘normalizing’ them in order that
they can be ‘like us,’ participate in church services, and go to the movies and
the local swimming pool. When I speak of the inclusion of those who are
marginalized I am affirming that they have a gift to give to all, to each of us
as individuals, to the larger forms of human organization, and to society, in
general… It is not just a question of
performing good deeds for those who are excluded but of being open and
vulnerable to them in order to receive the life that they can offer; it is to
become their friends.” Vanier calls this path: “the way of the heart.”
Unfortunately
Eli had it coming. That incident with
the bum and the ATM eventually put him out of a job. He didn’t seem to mind too much, though –
when God isn’t talking very often, you have to take what you can get. He knows that when God gets involved, you
can’t always predict the outcome.
What Eli did
for Samuel, and what Jean Vanier and Will Hall have done for thousands of people,
is no easy task. What is clear in each
case, though, is that they had no choice.
Discerning the voice of God is a calling which ultimately cannot be
thwarted. That being said, such
discernment can certainly be hamstrung by good and well meaning folks. When that happens, the voices from the
margins will start to become louder and more insistent; shrill. Jesus said that even the rocks would cry out… I think that part of being church is to be
ever on the lookout for people like Samuel, people like Will. We need to find them in the middle of the
night, in the hour of their confusion, and help them to go back with open
hearts to their resting place in the House of God. And we have to be waiting on the steps with
anxious ears when they open those doors in the morning…
Juliana’s
books sat on the shelf for nearly 600 years.
Kingdoms rose and fell. The world
changed. And when the voices from the
edges once more became harsh and hoarse – she showed us all God’s gift. Because her community struggled with her and
preserved her work, now with Julian of Norwich we can proclaim the deep truth
that underlies this sometimes thankless work we do: All shall be well, and all
shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
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