Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness by Kathryn Greene-Mccreight
Author:Kathryn Greene-Mccreight
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9781587433726
Published: 2015-07-13T23:00:00+00:00
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
Mark 5:1–10
We are legion. But we are usually invisible to the naked eye. We look as if we are human, even though the human is merely the host for our banquet, the silent devouring of flesh and guzzling of blood. Parasitic. We make our hosts walk among the living as though dead, and most of the time the living cannot recognize that we are survivors within the dying host.
Until we make our host so sick that she would choose tombs for a dwelling that she needs to be bound by chains. And especially when even the chains cannot bind our host, the living see just how much we have sucked the life out of her. But usually all they see is the host, and they blame the host, as if she had choice in the matter of having demons plague her. So the living are often just as happy to slough off the host and force her to dwell among the tombs.
At such a point, it is Jesus who has the power to bind our diseases, for he is the Strong Man. He knows that our disease, our demons, are separate from us. To the ill, the disease seems to take over, until one is entirely an illness. Jesus knows this is not true, and he can cast out the demons without destroying us. Only he can cast out of us our impurity, our uncleanness, our illnesses. Only he can cast the demons out from us into the pigs, then into the sea. Impurity dwelling among the impure is cast into the impure and then herded into the chaos.
The thing is that the man’s demons don’t want to go away, don’t want to be cast out. It is easier to dwell where you are than to allow Jesus to root you out, even if you are in the cemetery, living among the walking dead.
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