Names That Free Us

Luke 8:26-39

June 23, 2013

As a parent, I have re-learned how important names are.  I see firsthand every day that there is something comforting or at least helpful in giving things names.  I see this because Lydia is always asking, “What’s your name?”  She asks it of stuff animals, toy dolls, me (apparently not satisfied with the names she already has for me).  And Lydia doesn’t stop with things that have eyes and ears; “What’s your name?” she says to cups, phones, pipe cleaners.  Each time I, the holder of the object, am to give it a name.  As you can imagine, over time my names have become less and less creative, degenerating to the point that the name of the cup is cuppity-cup.  Regardless, this naming seems important, and I imagine it’s because it allows us to know things better, feel more connected to them, and know how to relate to them. 

When Jesus first met the man with many demons, the author of Luke tells us that he commanded the spirits to come out of him.  Interestingly, they didn’t.  Not at first.  When Jesus commands the demons to come out of the man, they strike up a conversation, which I imagine Jesus met with either a sigh of exasperation or resignation.  “What have you to do with us?” they want to know.  “Don’t torment us,” they say.  They are not going to go easily into the night – or pigs as it were.  Their hold on this man was powerful…when commanded by Jesus the healer, the worker of miracles, they sit tight and strike up a conversation with him.

It’s at that point that Jesus asks the man his name:  “Legion,” he answers.  And the author explains to us what that name means:  many.  This man does not have just one demon, he has many.  And it wasn’t until the demons were given a name that they would leave the man. 

I would go out on a limb and say we all have demons of one sort or another; demons that occupy our lives, at times drive us crazy, make us do things we don’t want to, isolate us, imprison us in guilt and shame.  Hurtful things we have done that haunt us.  Truths about who we are that we would never share with another human being.  Illnesses that grip us and begin to become our entire identity.  Demons are everywhere – they are many.  Legion.

I wonder if giving voice to these things, if naming them out loud, might not reduce their power over us.  “Legion,” the man says.  Here they are – this is their name. Who knows what his demons were.  Maybe he was embarrassed about them, maybe they were secrets he kept from himself and others, maybe it was an outside force that had taken over his life.  They drove him from community and sent him to live among the dead.  But Jesus asked for the name, and when he gave it he was released from years of possession.

Some of the demons that occupy us are not under our control.  They are illnesses we can’t cure, grief we can’t excise, violence we can’t stop.  But some demons we have invited in, and they reside deep in our subconscious controlling us in ways we are hardly aware of.  If we do ever, in fleeting moments, become aware of them, we feel horrible about ourselves, become mired in guilt and shame, and without conscious thought we send them right back where they came from…hidden in our souls. 

I was talking to a friend this week who is working the Twelve Step program.  I never cease to be amazed at how much wisdom there is in those twelve steps.  She is working on steps 4 and 5, and as I talked to her I realized that steps 4 and 5 are about doing this very thing:  naming demons. 

Step four is to make a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”  And step five is “admit to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”  The 12 steps tell us that we are not free until we can give voice to these things.  We are not well.  Without steps 4 and 5, we end up back at step one:  Powerless with no ability to manage our lives.  We end up possessed by the same old demons. 

Searching and fearless moral inventory.  Admitting things to others.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds daunting and even pretty scary.  In step 4, as my friend described it to me, you make an actual written list…a list of “moral defects,” and a list of wrongs you have committed. Here’s how it reads in the book used in the 12 step program:  “a list of personality defects, violations of moral principles, defects of character, maladjustments and dysfunctional behavior.”  Sounds fun.

Now, let me say here that this language comes from 1940 when the founders of AA wrote down the basis of the wisdom that infuses the 12 steps.  In much the same way as we sometimes struggle with the out-dated language of the bible, some of this language is out-dated, but the wisdom behind it remains.  Defects, dysfunctional – words I wouldn’t use today.  I would use something more akin to brokenness.  But the idea is the same – these are the things about ourselves that fester in us – that, unacknowledged, control us and possess us.

Imagine doing this:  Sitting down and writing out your flaws – your brokenness – and giving examples of them.  Then imagine sharing that list with someone.  It makes me a little queasy.  But my friend had made that list, and was sharing with me, another person, some of the things on that list that were most surprising to her, and caused her the most shame.  After we spoke, she told me, she was freer, lighter.  The demons didn’t feel so big once they were said out loud.  She knew more about them, she knew now how to relate to them.  And she knew she wasn’t judged.  I still loved her as much as I did before.  They had a name.  To name our demons and not be judged….to be understood…it is a freedom that’s hard to overrate. 

But we can do this, because we have a God that does not desire to judge us, but desires to love us, defects and all.  Jesus asks for the name – he invites the truth telling.  And his response is not judgment, it is to free the man from that which binds him. 

Without this inventory – this searching and fearless inventory, open and as honest as it can be – the things we don’t name will wreck havoc on our lives.  They will make us crazy as we try to deny them.  They will create distance between us and others as we try to hide them, putting up walls around us so people can’t see.  They will imprison us in guilt and shame as we let them lie unnamed in our deepest selves. 

I have actually watched a number of people struggle through these steps.  I have tried such things myself.  It is hard.  Either it’s just too painful – too much to admit to ourselves and certainly someone else – and so denial reigns supreme and we refuse to give our demons names, or we can’t do it without beating ourselves up and allowing guilt and shame to take us down.  This balance is SO hard to strike. 

But if we do, I think we will experience freedom.  The demons we have invited in no longer get to hide out in the shadows of our souls – they are exposed in the light for what they are – simple human brokenness.  And even the demons we can’t control, we can’t fix are important to name.  When we put them out there, share them with select others, they have less power over us.  I am addicted.  I have bi-polar.  I am mired in grief.  To say these to another lightens the load and demystifies their power.

Someone sent me a pod cast this week of the NPR show, “On Being.”  The guest was a poet named Marie Howe.  At the end of the show she shared a poem that I found powerful and very much related to naming our demons.  It’s called Mary Magdalene and the Seven Devils.    Mary Magdalene has gone down in history as a prostitute, but in Luke the only time she is mentioned is when he tells us she was one of the disciples following Jesus, and that she had been cured of seven demons.

What I like about this poem is that it poignantly names demons – some we will relate to, some we won’t, and some are just common to the universal human condition.  She names them so honestly and I think without judgment.  The demons are a mix of things she can control and things she can’t.  And in this naming there is a struggle about whether, if they are named, others will understand – a struggle with which I am familiar.  As an answer to this question, she chooses vulnerability.  She writes a poem for all to see.  She chooses to risk saying the hard things and in doing so, she invites us to do the same.

I want to read the poem.  There’s a copy on the table outside the sanctuary if you want a copy when you leave.

MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.

The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin
lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn’t stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word – cheesecloth –
to breathe through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it – distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?

Someone using you as a co-ordinate to situate himself on earth.

The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.

Historians would assume my sin was sexual.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.
The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn’t stop hearing it–years later –
grocery shopping, crossing the street –

No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger
finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you— if I told you – would understand any of this -

Naming truth – honestly without fear – is what frees us.  Some are truths not of our own making, yet possess us in ways that feel demonic.  Some are truths about things we have done, ways we live that cause us guilt and shame…certainly two of the worst demons there are. 

What this story in Luke tells us is that the God of grace asks for these names, and then rather than judge, removes their power.  God reduces the hold they have on our lives – the power they exert over what we do and who we are. 

The twelfth step is the step Jesus encourages the man to take in the end.  Step 12 says “having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry this message to [others], and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”  In the end, Jesus gives the man an instruction:  Go and tell everyone what God has done for you. 

Tell others that God meets us, sometimes in the guise of another, and loves us no matter what truths we hold.  Then God, through unconditional Grace, invites us to be free of the demons – from the guilt and shame – from fear of judgment.  Can we name our demons?  Can we be that vulnerable?  Can we offer a place where others can name theirs?  Can we provide a safe enough space for others to be that vulnerable?  Can we be the ones who do understand?  Try it.  It’s freeing.  It frees you, it frees others, and allows us all to continue to take steps on the journey of faith.  Amen.