Saints and Madmen by Russell Shorto

Author:Russell Shorto [Shorto, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-6591-8
Publisher: Open Road Media

A woman named Andrea addressed a conference called Spirituality and Recovery from Mental Illness, at which Nancy Kehoe spoke. She was an African American in her forties, a large, cheerful, articulate woman, a graduate of Tufts University who works in a program helping people to recover from childhood trauma. She sat before fifty mental health professionals and told her story, her hands shaking uncontrollably but her voice clear and eerily serene: “Throughout my childhood I was constantly raped by my father and beaten by my mother. I became pregnant by my father, and had his child. I learned to live entirely in my head, where I was safe and omnipotent. There was only one huge glitch: I began cutting and burning myself. I have been in psychiatric institutions for thirty-two years.”

Andrea developed dissociative identity disorder as a way to deal with the prison of her childhood. “My only partner to help me survive that suffering was my concept of God,” she said later. “With God’s help, I created alternative selves to have other people in it with me. If I needed to be angry, my predominant self couldn’t show it, but I could turn into Sandra, who could be very angry and foulmouthed and vengeful. If sad and demure was called for, the Girl in the Old-fashioned Dress came out. When my father was attacking me, and I needed to lure him out of the violence, Sara would appear, and she was good at seductive behavior, she could lure him into lustful behavior as a way to protect me.”

Religion remained vital for Andrea as she worked through the disorder—as with Job, giving up religion just wasn’t an option for her. Also like Job, she did not simply repeat pieties but let her religion—her idea of God, her sense of fate, her understanding of the relationship between herself as an individual and the yawning chasm of the universe—rage and twist through her. She hasn’t stayed true to Baptist theology for reasons that seem awfully sound. “How can I believe in the Virgin birth after incest?” Instead, she has become a searcher, and she says her spiritual search has been a part of her recovery. “I’ve constantly worked through my religious beliefs. Right now I’m struggling with the idea of whether or not I believe in Christ. I can’t believe God would sacrifice a human being, especially his own son, for the good of anybody. I think this struggle has to do with my own history of child abuse. But I’ve learned that as adults we have to grow out of our childish ideas of religion. I’ve learned that you don’t need an abstract language to talk about spirituality. You don’t even need to say ‘God.’ You just recognize. Recognize your children, give them your time, tell them they are real and valuable. I was made to feel invisible as a girl, and that was devastating. Recognize others. That’s where spirituality is.”

Spirituality, as Job knew, and as the questers in Nancy Kehoe’s

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