Exorcism

Gospel reading: Luke 15.1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The need for everyday, ordinary exorcism is not much acknowledged." (from Amazing Grace)

Sentences like this one have a lot to do with why I find Kathleen Norris's book engaging. My hunch is you've never heard that sentiment expressed. And if you have it wasn't in such a nonchalant, understated way. Exorcism and demonic possession are the domain of raving street corner preachers or the inhabitants of mental institutions. One can define what constitutes 'polite' company very, very broadly and still manage to exclude exorcists.

But the reason for our discomfort may in fact point us to a distortion in the way these words have been appropriated. And correcting that distortion might just show us why talking of demons and exorcisms might still be useful.

My discomfort, and yours too perhaps, stems from the notion that a demon is a being out there. Even if I come to believe that I am 'possessed' by one, it is still something or someone alien to myself. But scholar Peter Brown wrote that for the early monastics the demonic was "an extension of the self." It may well be helpful to describe a part of ourself even as a dragon, but there's a sense in which if I never acknowledge how much of my own history, my own predispositions, my own wounds make up my demons exorcism may not quite be possible.

Discussion of demons opens up a related discussion about language and its impoverishment in a scientific age. In reality, language has expanded in mind boggling ways as scientific knowledge has. But somewhere along the way as we kept naming our world from the tiniest scraps of matter to expanses that must be described in terms of the speed of light, somewhere along the way we forgot that language doesn't just name things. It evokes things too.

If a demon is one more 'thing' alongside frogs and fluoride and flap jackets an exorcism is a kind of surgical procedure that has little to do with me. Believing in such demons may not sound terribly scientific, but it's our instinctive preference for assigning things to clear categories that pushes us into a false choice. Do you believe in demons or not? was a less interesting and less helpful question to those ancient monks than What are your demons? The first question presses us to choose between competing facts. The second opens our imagination and our language enough to start probing the mystery of our selves.

Kathleen Norris attempted to exorcise a demon from her adolescence. She was half apologetic about the relative insignificance of common middle school cruelty compared with some of the world's suffering. But what she realized was that a bitterness took up residence within her as an 11-year-old, and it stayed for years. Had she pretended not to need exorcism simply because the demons of other people seemed greater than hers, she would still be possessed, so to speak.

Lewis Hyde once wrote that we forgive when we lose attachment to our wounds. And something in Norris's story struck me as a struggle to detach from a wound. Exorcism must bear some relationship to forgiveness if only that they are both ways of gaining just enough freedom from our past to move forward.

The gospel we read yesterday suggested that there is joy in heaven when such shifts occur in our lives. When we repent, when we turn around, there is joy. And when I think of exorcism as a movement in the direction of God's joy or a participation in God's joy it becomes an enticing possibility. Rightly imagined, everyday, ordinary exorcism might just be a life-giving practice as we slowly come to take more interest in God's joy than our tired old wounds.