We tell people who they are, and the forces of the world work very powerfully to shape us in its image. This is true in how the world tries to make us acceptable, in how we are taught to throw aside so many parts of ourselves to perform good citizenship and quiet productivity. This is true, too, in how the world makes it easy to judge us, to reject us, and to throw us away.
***
In his book “Mother Night”, the American writer Kurt Vonnegut explores the life and fate of an Allied spy who works perhaps too effectively in his role as a propagandist within Nazi Germany. I often return to its closing moral, which is something like: be careful who you pretend to be, because in the end, you are who you pretend to be.
If we go through the world playing at cruelty, but knowing in our hearts that it is just a façade, at some point the world is rather justified in seeing us as cruel, and condemning us accordingly. If we play the game of wealth and privilege, our Sunday morning commitment to proclaiming the dignity of the poor does not go very far. We give our lives, and indeed ourselves, over to the people we pretend to be.
So it is also in reverse, that the world must be careful how it treats people, because they will become what they are treated as. A peaceful protest which is met as though it were a violent mob is very likely to end up becoming a violent mob. A nation of ordinary people trying simply to exist and to survive who are condemned as terrorists will probably at some point decide to try terror rather than placidity in pursuit of freedom from aggression.
This is true of populations, and it is true of individual people. We are not powerless before the judgements and perceptions of the world, but neither are we unaffected.
I think of the number of times I’ve seen children dismissed or chided with words like these: you’ll just end up a loser like your father; you’ll just end up an addict like your mum. If we’re very generous, such messages are attempts to raise consciousness and to stir some resistance to a path that seems all too inevitable. In practice, they preemptively offer rejection for mistakes not yet made and suffering still unknown, and offer the kid a smaller set of choices about who they might be able to become.
We do this with adults, too. We tell them they’re not worth the effort because they’ll just falter as they’ve always done before. We tell the repentant that we still only see their failings.
***
I rather fear that as soon as Jesus left the place, the Gerasene demoniac would have once again been bound in chains.
You watch so anxiously, maybe even eagerly, for signs of slippage. Perhaps the most central rule of human development is: once bitten, twice shy. Individually and collectively, we vigilantly observe the known threats and risks within our midst. At the first unkind word, any sound of frustration, any ordinary, human aggression, all the good people of the community would have felt entirely justified in taking the reasonable precaution of chaining the demoniac once again.
We actually look for excuses to give up on people, perhaps quite sensibly, because you get sick of repeated pain and disappointment. It’s hard to watch the demons take charge once again and to know it’s all about to go to hell. So you anticipate, you prepare, you preëmpt. The first sign of trouble, you do whatever it takes to keep yourself, and indeed the whole community, safe.
***
If you lock someone up, if you strip them of their agency and autonomy, it might very well change them, and such change is unlikely to be for the better. When I was a kid, I watched troubled child after troubled child be sent to inpatient treatment programs, and return from them with more inventive ways to self-harm, and more identification with their own outsider status. You quickly become the very thing your parents and your teachers fear.
Neglect inflicts a demon that originates in the neglector. So, too, rejection, and alienation. Every judgement is both a projection and an attempted possession, to make the person judged into an avatar of our fears, so as to justify our continuing to be afraid. It is the nightmares of those who chain the demoniac which will ultimately possess him, and our collective fears that take from us the universal human dignity that is our birthright. Sometimes it’s bombs, others it’s restraints.
***
So it is that Paul tells us that we are clothed in Christ and we are neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female. All our categories and projections have failed us, and like any good demon, they simply cease to be if we stop believing in them. We divide one another up, but our divisions only serve to sustain our possession and our suffering, and we really can just let them all go.
We might manage a few moments, a few minutes, maybe hours, but probably not days, before the possession returns, the old homeostasis reasserts itself, and we fall back into the shape of thinking that the whole rest of the world believes. We have things like countries, and potent symbols like flags, to convince us that unseen lines in the sea and over the Earth are more significant than we human beings who live there.
This reversion to the mean, this familiar return to our familiar chains keeps us broken and lonely and isolated. We put up walls just so we can be afraid of the people on the other side.
***
We are made with brilliant and beautiful diversity, and our distinctiveness and our differences are gifts from God, and signs of the creative potential of the human person, and all Creation. God cannot be reduced to any one thing, simplified to some easy and straightforward idea, and neither can anything God has made, least of all those of us made in God’s image.
Difference, though, does not require division, and it certainly does not require hierarchy. Difference does not demand imprisonment, and it does not deal in death and destruction.
***
May you be set free from the divisions that have so possessed you, and tear down the walls which you have placed between you and your neighbour, and the walls between you and God. May you know that you are cherished and loved and whole, and that the whole garments of Christ are your flesh, your soul, your life. May you dance lovingly with those whose existence shapes your own, and reflect the full glory of God to every person you meet. May you revel in God, and delight in Creation, and always know the joy of your being for which you were made.