A Whole & Holy Community
May 06, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 23; 1 Kings 19:1-15a
Rod Steiger, the famous actor who was nominated for an Oscar in On the Waterfront, and who received one for In the Heat of the Night, spoke out one night at the Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his own experience with depression.
“I have a clinical depression,” he said, “which is a chemical imbalance of the brain. It’s a disease, like diabetes. And if I don’t take my medicine in the morning, and I don’t take it at night, I’ll be great for about two weeks and then all of a sudden it’ll start. It’s very insidious….” He then read an excerpt from his journal, written from one of his depressive episodes: “I want to die, I don’t want to move. I have no feeling for movement. To be left alone. To disappear. Not to be bothered with washing, shaving, talking, walking, going to the bathroom. If only to get out of this tunnel and the heavy darkness, cold and oily, constantly pressing against my brain and being….” He continued, describing his fear of forgetting his lines, “I won’t be able to do it, I will not be able to remember. They’re going to discover I am inadequate. I am unable, I am weak. I must not scream, I must not scream in front of them. I must stay. I must not, must not listen to what’s left of my mind. I must not, I must not run off the set. I must not run. I must not run… They’re going to find out that I’m weak. They’ll find out I’m in pain. Oh God…What God? I’ll break down. I’ll look like a fool, an idiot, and they’ll find out….”
Unfortunately, that fear, the fear of people finding out, has kept all too many people isolated and untreated for mental illness. And probably the very term mental illness creates part of the problem. Many people, both those who experience mental illness and those who don’t, often have the misunderstanding that it is just in the mind, and perhaps can be overcome by willpower or a better attitude. It would be more accurate to describe these varied syndromes as being biologically-based conditions which affect the mind and/or emotions. Included under the umbrella term of mental illness can be conditions as varied as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic and anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. People with mental illness can be intellectually gifted and artistically creative, but their experiences with mental illness can range from frustration to tragedy. And the stigma of mental illness only compounds the difficulties.
Most people with mental illness suffer in secrecy – people are afraid of the repercussions if others find out. But you know, it wasn’t so long ago that people were equally afraid of the stigma of cancer, and didn’t want anyone to know if they had it. AIDS sufferers also suffered from this stigma. And so the loneliness adds to the other difficulties. And it isolates the loved ones as well – because mental illness impacts families and friends as well. But if your husband is suffering from major depression, if your wife has an anxiety disorder, if your son is bipolar, if your friend has OCD… and if they don’t want others to know, then you can’t get support or information either. And yet, if the statistic is right that 1 in 5 families is experiencing serious mental illness, then a far greater number are coping with some form of mental illness – so none of us is alone…and yet, we are walking alone.
I know that fear and loneliness. I have Attention Deficit Disorder. Until I was diagnosed, I thought I was just disorganized and procrastinating on the down side, and enthusiastic and energetic on the up side. Learning about ADHD continues to be a fascinating and challenging journey. I have been very fearful about sharing this with people, and have slowly experimented with telling people one at a time. I hear people describing people with ADHD as failures. I have two master’s degrees and have passed both the CPA exam and the Presbyterian ordination exams. I hear others described ADHD as a phony rationalization – yet I know from my reading as well as from my own experience that it is quite real. I worry that if people find out about it, they will look at me differently and judge me more harshly. And yet, I can’t talk about mental illness, and urge greater openness and honesty without being honest about my own challenges.
I spoke with a member on Friday about her daughter’s bipolar disorder – she said both she and her daughter try to be very open about it, because they know the danger of stigma. She remembers that when her mother had cancer, people would sometimes break the dishes she had used because they were afraid they would catch the cancer otherwise. We look back at Biblical times and the habit of isolating some people as ‘unclean’, and we believe that our culture has moved beyond that, but I’m not sure we’ve moved as far as we think.
A colleague of mine recently wrote very candidly in his church newsletter about his own experiences with Seasonal Affective Disorder, a condition in which people find the grey days of winter leading to depression, a depression that can be sometimes debilitating. My friend is working with his Personnel Committee to develop coping strategies.
Most mental illness can be very successfully managed with a combination of strategies – and like many other physical conditions, it sometimes takes some experimentation to learn how to combine medication, exercise, schedule, support and other tools to thrive and work most effectively. But fear, stigma, and ignorance can keep people from seeking and finding the medical help and community support they need.
The story of Elijah is an example of how body, mind, circumstances and isolation can work together in an experience of mental illness. The episode we read this morning comes right after a huge event in the life and ministry of Elijah. He has been serving God in Israel, during the ninth century B.C., when Ahab was king. Ahab is not remembered as one of the good kings, and his sins included marrying Jezebel, who was a follower of the Phoenician god Baal. She supported hundreds of prophets of Baal and tried to suppress worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Elijah, the prophet, speaking for Yahweh often found himself speaking against the royal family. Finally, Elijah had won a spectacular showdown against the prophets of Baal, and so Jezebel wanted him dead. Elijah’s triumph over the priests of Baal was a significant victory, but as he runs into the desert fleeing for his life, his spirits plummet and he appears to be quite thoroughly depressed. He sits down in the wilderness and in his prayer, asks to die. As he sleeps, an angel comes and feeds him, gives him water, lets him get his rest, and then sends him on a long walk – the angel apparently knows the importance of nutrition, rest and exercise! When God asks Elijah what he is doing, Elijah replies with that he is the only one left serving the Lord, and that he also is in danger. He then looks for God in the wind but God is not in the wind, and in the earthquake but God is not in the earthquake, and in the fire but God is not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence in which he hears God. God instructs him to return, anoint a new king, name his own successor, and God tells him that there are still 7,000 who are faithful. Elijah was not alone in his faithfulness as he had thought, but in his depression, exhaustion and solitude his perceptions were not accurate.
This passage shows us that depression can strike when we least expect it – Elijah has just experienced an incredible triumph, and yet he was vulnerable. We don’t know whether avoiding exhaustion and maintaining contact with the others who were faithful would have prevented his depression. But we do know that God feeds him, grants him rest, and then sends him back to name and train his successor – God gives Elijah a purpose and a colleague. We all need that sense of purpose, whether it comes in our employment, our hobbies, or our family life. And we need to take care of our bodies, to get enough sleep and proper nourishment. And we need other people. Our culture is particularly vulnerable to the stresses that come from lack of community connections.
The word religion comes from the Latin religare and ligare means to connect or bind. It is also the source of the word “ligament”. The standard explanation for the etymology of religion is that it connects us to God. But we are called to communities of faith, where we become connected to one another as well. Both connections – to God and to other people – are important for our well-being.
How can the church be helpful? The church is often the first place that people turn when they are experiencing mental illness, so it is important for us to learn all we can about mental illness. We need to understand that mental illness is not a spiritual failure – people experiencing depression or anxiety aren’t cured by getting closer to God any more than people who are nearsighted or have arthritis. We need to understand that mental illness, like many other conditions, can be demoralizing and frustrating – just like asthma, cancer, or a bad back. We need to find ways to support family members, just as we should when families experience Alzheimer’s Disease, or a family death.
We need to understand that mental illness can run the spectrum from devastating to annoying, and that while some people are disabled by it, many very successful and famous people have experienced mental illness:
• depression: President Abraham Lincoln, Playwright Eugene O’Neill and newscaster Mike Wallace;
• bipolar disorder: Winston Churchill, Patty Duke and Robert Schumann;
• schizophrenia: Lionel Aldridge who played for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960’s and the dancer Vaslov Nijinksy;
• actor Dan Ackroyd has discussed his Tourette’s Syndrome;
• OCD: Howard Hughes, and also Howie Mandel, and soccer star David Beckham;
• anxiety or panic disorder: Willard Scott, Sigmund Freud and Donny Osmond –
mental illness does not portend failure, and yet, because mental illness does often interfere with effectiveness and our nation’s medical insurance has not kept pace with the medical understanding of mental illness, it is also true that many of our nation’s homeless are people who are mentally ill.
The church, in its prophetic role seeking justice for all God’s children, should be an advocate for better health care coverage, including coverage for mental illness care.
Part of what the church can do is to remember that when we think about people with mental illness, it’s not a matter of them and us, it’s us – not only do 1 in 5 families cope with serious mental illness, but many many more people have borderline or subclinical experiences with mental illness. Five years ago I was attending a conference of the Attention Deficit Disorder Association, and Dr. John Ratey, one of the foremost writers on ADHD, who himself is ADHD, was asked “What about when people don’t meet all of the criteria for a formal diagnosis, of say, depression? Is it possible for someone to be just a little sad? That is, to be almost depressed?” Ratey affirmed that this is true and discusses this in detail in his book Shadow Syndromes. As better understanding and care of serious mental illness becomes available, those among us with mild mental illness or shadow syndromes may have more effective resources with which to cope.
One of the main tasks of the personal spiritual journey is to learn to accept ourselves and others as each uniquely gifted and uniquely flawed. As we accept both our own blessedness and our own brokenness, we find ourselves more able to accept, care for and delight in others as well. We are called as the church to be a community of such deep acceptance and care.
In a few moments, we will share the communion meal. As Jesus began this meal, he took the bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples. Each of us is taken by God, claimed by God’s love. And we are each blessed – gifted in significant ways. So too are each of us broken – each of us has weaknesses and flaws, and for some of us that includes mental illness. So we come together in community, knowing that it is together that we find wholeness, together we approach holiness. And finally we are given – we are the body of Christ in ministry to all of God’s children throughout the world. We can only be what God calls us to be when we recognize both our blessedness and our brokenness. There is a habit among Navaho weavers of weaving a flaw into their work, for they say that it is through those flaws that the Spirit enters. As we care for ourselves and each other, accepting our flaws as part of the mix of who we are, we are bound to one another and to God…and we are a community of the Spirit. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 23; 1 Kings 19:1-15a
Rod Steiger, the famous actor who was nominated for an Oscar in On the Waterfront, and who received one for In the Heat of the Night, spoke out one night at the Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his own experience with depression.
“I have a clinical depression,” he said, “which is a chemical imbalance of the brain. It’s a disease, like diabetes. And if I don’t take my medicine in the morning, and I don’t take it at night, I’ll be great for about two weeks and then all of a sudden it’ll start. It’s very insidious….” He then read an excerpt from his journal, written from one of his depressive episodes: “I want to die, I don’t want to move. I have no feeling for movement. To be left alone. To disappear. Not to be bothered with washing, shaving, talking, walking, going to the bathroom. If only to get out of this tunnel and the heavy darkness, cold and oily, constantly pressing against my brain and being….” He continued, describing his fear of forgetting his lines, “I won’t be able to do it, I will not be able to remember. They’re going to discover I am inadequate. I am unable, I am weak. I must not scream, I must not scream in front of them. I must stay. I must not, must not listen to what’s left of my mind. I must not, I must not run off the set. I must not run. I must not run… They’re going to find out that I’m weak. They’ll find out I’m in pain. Oh God…What God? I’ll break down. I’ll look like a fool, an idiot, and they’ll find out….”
Unfortunately, that fear, the fear of people finding out, has kept all too many people isolated and untreated for mental illness. And probably the very term mental illness creates part of the problem. Many people, both those who experience mental illness and those who don’t, often have the misunderstanding that it is just in the mind, and perhaps can be overcome by willpower or a better attitude. It would be more accurate to describe these varied syndromes as being biologically-based conditions which affect the mind and/or emotions. Included under the umbrella term of mental illness can be conditions as varied as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic and anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. People with mental illness can be intellectually gifted and artistically creative, but their experiences with mental illness can range from frustration to tragedy. And the stigma of mental illness only compounds the difficulties.
Most people with mental illness suffer in secrecy – people are afraid of the repercussions if others find out. But you know, it wasn’t so long ago that people were equally afraid of the stigma of cancer, and didn’t want anyone to know if they had it. AIDS sufferers also suffered from this stigma. And so the loneliness adds to the other difficulties. And it isolates the loved ones as well – because mental illness impacts families and friends as well. But if your husband is suffering from major depression, if your wife has an anxiety disorder, if your son is bipolar, if your friend has OCD… and if they don’t want others to know, then you can’t get support or information either. And yet, if the statistic is right that 1 in 5 families is experiencing serious mental illness, then a far greater number are coping with some form of mental illness – so none of us is alone…and yet, we are walking alone.
I know that fear and loneliness. I have Attention Deficit Disorder. Until I was diagnosed, I thought I was just disorganized and procrastinating on the down side, and enthusiastic and energetic on the up side. Learning about ADHD continues to be a fascinating and challenging journey. I have been very fearful about sharing this with people, and have slowly experimented with telling people one at a time. I hear people describing people with ADHD as failures. I have two master’s degrees and have passed both the CPA exam and the Presbyterian ordination exams. I hear others described ADHD as a phony rationalization – yet I know from my reading as well as from my own experience that it is quite real. I worry that if people find out about it, they will look at me differently and judge me more harshly. And yet, I can’t talk about mental illness, and urge greater openness and honesty without being honest about my own challenges.
I spoke with a member on Friday about her daughter’s bipolar disorder – she said both she and her daughter try to be very open about it, because they know the danger of stigma. She remembers that when her mother had cancer, people would sometimes break the dishes she had used because they were afraid they would catch the cancer otherwise. We look back at Biblical times and the habit of isolating some people as ‘unclean’, and we believe that our culture has moved beyond that, but I’m not sure we’ve moved as far as we think.
A colleague of mine recently wrote very candidly in his church newsletter about his own experiences with Seasonal Affective Disorder, a condition in which people find the grey days of winter leading to depression, a depression that can be sometimes debilitating. My friend is working with his Personnel Committee to develop coping strategies.
Most mental illness can be very successfully managed with a combination of strategies – and like many other physical conditions, it sometimes takes some experimentation to learn how to combine medication, exercise, schedule, support and other tools to thrive and work most effectively. But fear, stigma, and ignorance can keep people from seeking and finding the medical help and community support they need.
The story of Elijah is an example of how body, mind, circumstances and isolation can work together in an experience of mental illness. The episode we read this morning comes right after a huge event in the life and ministry of Elijah. He has been serving God in Israel, during the ninth century B.C., when Ahab was king. Ahab is not remembered as one of the good kings, and his sins included marrying Jezebel, who was a follower of the Phoenician god Baal. She supported hundreds of prophets of Baal and tried to suppress worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Elijah, the prophet, speaking for Yahweh often found himself speaking against the royal family. Finally, Elijah had won a spectacular showdown against the prophets of Baal, and so Jezebel wanted him dead. Elijah’s triumph over the priests of Baal was a significant victory, but as he runs into the desert fleeing for his life, his spirits plummet and he appears to be quite thoroughly depressed. He sits down in the wilderness and in his prayer, asks to die. As he sleeps, an angel comes and feeds him, gives him water, lets him get his rest, and then sends him on a long walk – the angel apparently knows the importance of nutrition, rest and exercise! When God asks Elijah what he is doing, Elijah replies with that he is the only one left serving the Lord, and that he also is in danger. He then looks for God in the wind but God is not in the wind, and in the earthquake but God is not in the earthquake, and in the fire but God is not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence in which he hears God. God instructs him to return, anoint a new king, name his own successor, and God tells him that there are still 7,000 who are faithful. Elijah was not alone in his faithfulness as he had thought, but in his depression, exhaustion and solitude his perceptions were not accurate.
This passage shows us that depression can strike when we least expect it – Elijah has just experienced an incredible triumph, and yet he was vulnerable. We don’t know whether avoiding exhaustion and maintaining contact with the others who were faithful would have prevented his depression. But we do know that God feeds him, grants him rest, and then sends him back to name and train his successor – God gives Elijah a purpose and a colleague. We all need that sense of purpose, whether it comes in our employment, our hobbies, or our family life. And we need to take care of our bodies, to get enough sleep and proper nourishment. And we need other people. Our culture is particularly vulnerable to the stresses that come from lack of community connections.
The word religion comes from the Latin religare and ligare means to connect or bind. It is also the source of the word “ligament”. The standard explanation for the etymology of religion is that it connects us to God. But we are called to communities of faith, where we become connected to one another as well. Both connections – to God and to other people – are important for our well-being.
How can the church be helpful? The church is often the first place that people turn when they are experiencing mental illness, so it is important for us to learn all we can about mental illness. We need to understand that mental illness is not a spiritual failure – people experiencing depression or anxiety aren’t cured by getting closer to God any more than people who are nearsighted or have arthritis. We need to understand that mental illness, like many other conditions, can be demoralizing and frustrating – just like asthma, cancer, or a bad back. We need to find ways to support family members, just as we should when families experience Alzheimer’s Disease, or a family death.
We need to understand that mental illness can run the spectrum from devastating to annoying, and that while some people are disabled by it, many very successful and famous people have experienced mental illness:
• depression: President Abraham Lincoln, Playwright Eugene O’Neill and newscaster Mike Wallace;
• bipolar disorder: Winston Churchill, Patty Duke and Robert Schumann;
• schizophrenia: Lionel Aldridge who played for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960’s and the dancer Vaslov Nijinksy;
• actor Dan Ackroyd has discussed his Tourette’s Syndrome;
• OCD: Howard Hughes, and also Howie Mandel, and soccer star David Beckham;
• anxiety or panic disorder: Willard Scott, Sigmund Freud and Donny Osmond –
mental illness does not portend failure, and yet, because mental illness does often interfere with effectiveness and our nation’s medical insurance has not kept pace with the medical understanding of mental illness, it is also true that many of our nation’s homeless are people who are mentally ill.
The church, in its prophetic role seeking justice for all God’s children, should be an advocate for better health care coverage, including coverage for mental illness care.
Part of what the church can do is to remember that when we think about people with mental illness, it’s not a matter of them and us, it’s us – not only do 1 in 5 families cope with serious mental illness, but many many more people have borderline or subclinical experiences with mental illness. Five years ago I was attending a conference of the Attention Deficit Disorder Association, and Dr. John Ratey, one of the foremost writers on ADHD, who himself is ADHD, was asked “What about when people don’t meet all of the criteria for a formal diagnosis, of say, depression? Is it possible for someone to be just a little sad? That is, to be almost depressed?” Ratey affirmed that this is true and discusses this in detail in his book Shadow Syndromes. As better understanding and care of serious mental illness becomes available, those among us with mild mental illness or shadow syndromes may have more effective resources with which to cope.
One of the main tasks of the personal spiritual journey is to learn to accept ourselves and others as each uniquely gifted and uniquely flawed. As we accept both our own blessedness and our own brokenness, we find ourselves more able to accept, care for and delight in others as well. We are called as the church to be a community of such deep acceptance and care.
In a few moments, we will share the communion meal. As Jesus began this meal, he took the bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples. Each of us is taken by God, claimed by God’s love. And we are each blessed – gifted in significant ways. So too are each of us broken – each of us has weaknesses and flaws, and for some of us that includes mental illness. So we come together in community, knowing that it is together that we find wholeness, together we approach holiness. And finally we are given – we are the body of Christ in ministry to all of God’s children throughout the world. We can only be what God calls us to be when we recognize both our blessedness and our brokenness. There is a habit among Navaho weavers of weaving a flaw into their work, for they say that it is through those flaws that the Spirit enters. As we care for ourselves and each other, accepting our flaws as part of the mix of who we are, we are bound to one another and to God…and we are a community of the Spirit. Amen.