Order of Service: 1 October 2006
Prelude: Goldberg Variations, J.S. Bach
Opening Words (#429):
Come into this place of peace
and let its silence heal your spirit;
come innto this place of memory
and let its history warm your soul;
Come into this place of prophecy and power
and let its vision change your heart.
-William F. Schulz
Opening Hymn (#211): "We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder"
Chalice Lighting and Unison Reading (#450)
Blessed is the match comsumed
in kindling Flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns
in the heart's secret places.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating
for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match
consumed in kindling flame.
Welcome and Announcements:
Since today's service involves a topic both challenging and contentious, I wanted to say in advance that I chose it not to be gratuitously provocative, but rather because in all seriousness I feel the subject to be of real importance. It is also of personal importance to me. I have wanted for some time to put my thoughts into words and to discuss them with others; and my original intent was to convey these thoughts in the context of personal experience. In the preparation, however, I became more and more uneasy with this approach, and I decided to recast the arguments in less directly personal terms. Overall, I think this enhanced both clarity and brevity, but I realized on review that it risked a misapprehension in tone. Stripped of the context, I worried that my words would seem unduly harsh, so I wanted to ask in advance for your forbearance. I do mean to be challenging -since I think this challenge is important, even if uncomfortable- but I ask that you bear with me while I try to make the case. I'd also be more than happy afterward to hear any thoughts or suggestions you might have. This is a touchy subject, I know, but worth it, I think. I hope I can convey with it the spirit of helping and sharing that motivated me to take it on in the first place.
First Reading:
You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity?
Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium dendriticum), that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into position to benefit its progeny, not the ant's.
It is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely -even suicidal- ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host.
Does anything like this ever happen with human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings setting aside their personal interests, their health, their chances to have children, and devoting their lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains. [...]
Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare [...] is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely defend a food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant attempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to protect food stores or their own children and homes. [...]
The comparison of the Word of God to a lancet fluke is unsettling, but the idea of comparing an idea to a living thing is not. [In] the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13): [...] The Word of God is a seed, and the sower of the seed is Christ. These seeds take root in individual human beings, it seems, and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide [...].
How are [such] ideas created by minds? [...] Where did they originate and why? And once our ancestors took on the goal of spreading, not just harboring them but cherishing them, how did this belief in belief transform the ideas being spread?
-from Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett
Music for Mediation (#279): "By the Waters of Babylon"
Meditation and Silence
Second Reading:
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.
But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. [...]
Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined. [...]
[Rather] immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
Offertory: Goldberg Variations, J.S. Bach
Offertory Dedication #507, "Mendon" in the Red Hymnal
Sermon: "Faith and Madness"
Closing Hymn: #205 "Amazing Grace"
Closing Words (#701):
We Receive Fragments of Holiness,
glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight,
let us gather them up for the precious gifts they are
and renewed by their grace, mover boldly into the unknown.
-Sarah Moores Campbell
************
Lay Sermon, 1 October 2006: Faith and Madness
Is Sanity simply a matter of opinion? Even posing this question tends to touch some pretty raw nerves, so one does not raise the issue lightly. On the one hand, labeling certain beliefs and behaviors as "insane" has historically been used to justify terribly inhumane "treatments" imposed upon people against their will; from lobotomy used to correct "incorrigible" behavior , to forcing psychiatric medication upon political dissidents. Looking across cultures and historical eras, it is not hard to find examples of ideas considered normal in one context, but crazy in another. Taking this to its logical extreme, it has been argued that all psychiatric diagnoses are no more than arbitrary cultural conventions in an enforced societal definition of normalcy.
On the other hand, for many who have personal experience with these conventionally-defined mental "illnesses", questioning whether the causes of their suffering are real can seem hurtful or even offensive. Families struggling to help a family member with schizophrenia, for example, generally do not find the often devastating effects it has on their lives and relationships to be merely a result of an alternative point of view. Serious psychiatric symptoms are common enough that even in a small congregation like ours, it is likely that a more than a few people here have faced them, either in themselves or in close friends and family. In this setting, insanity seems all too real.
I had not thought much about these questions until my psychiatry rotation in medical school. I had to the best of my knowledge never known anyone personally with serious psychiatric problems, or -more accurately- at least had not recognized them as such. I remember being surprised learning in psychiatry class about the high prevalence of various mental disorders and thinking, if this is so common, why don't I see more of it around?
It was only when I came back to clinical rotations after several years doing research that I got to see serious psychiatric illness first-hand. My first rotation back on the wards was psychiatry, and I elected to spend it on the locked psychiatric ward of the university hospital. Talking to the patients there, I was struck almost immediately by the stark reality of their illnesses. I remember having the thought that I had never before appreciated how much of ordinary, healthy mental functioning I had been taking for granted -until I saw directly when it failed. For example, in one extreme case, after talking to a patient with psychopathic personality disorder, I began to realize how much true empathy I had been failing to notice in the normal behavior of ordinary people.
Another feature that struck me as noteworthy was the prominence of religious experiences among the patients on this ward. Far more than one would expect by chance, people suffering from a variety of psychiatric disorders of several types report intense religious ideas and feelings: from visions, to voices, to convictions that they themselves were god-like. I remember one woman in particular who admitted herself to the ward, saying that she had a history of suicidal depression and could tell she was on the way down. Over the course of several days, she went from simply feeling horribly sad, to feeling that she was a terrible person, to believing that the television was sending messages about her sins, to hearing God speaking to her and condemning her. Over the next couple of weeks, she gradually recovered. She told me afterward that not only could she recognize in retrospect that these were delusions, in addition they were surprising delusions to her since she did not consider herself to be religious.
As a religious person by temperament, and as someone who had had what I felt to be profound spiritual experiences, I was at a loss what to make of this apparent connection between religious feeling and psychiatric illness. How does one incorporate the relation into one's sense of one's own spirituality? People sympathetic to religion tend to recoil from this line of reasoning; whereas those hostile to religion often sometimes take cite these connections as invalidating religion altogether. I will argue against both positions. Instead, we must face squarely the reality of the kinship between Faith and Madness, but at the same time recognize the deep spiritual insights at least sometimes revealed therein.
The first piece of this is to think about religious experiences critically, imagining what we would think of them outside of traditional religious contexts:
Belief in things that cannot be detected, let alone proven. More than that, belief that is impervious to disproof. Belief so fixed that when contrary evidence arises, the belief casts the evidence into doubt rather than the other way around. Belief so intense that the very existence of people who fail to share and honor the belief seems like a threat and an affront. Belief so ingrained that one divides the world into those who do or do not share one's faith.
As a Red Sox fan, I am all too familiar with these symptoms.
In the larger sense, though, and not to belabor the obvious unduly, these are characteristics considered normal (though rarely stated so bluntly) for conventional religion, where the beliefs involve things that happened long ago and far away, or at least topics that no one can really check.
Likewise, the transcendent sense of Truth pouring through you, the feeling that supernatural beings talk to you and guide you, the conviction that the creator of the entire universe is personally directing affairs for your benefit: these are assertions that make people back away slowly and look away uneasily when one talks about ordinary events and deities without a large following. But -and not to put too fine a point on it- a very large number of people give the same sort of ideas a pass when major political leaders invoke them to justify their foreign policies in the name of gods higher up on the food chain. Why is this?
The flip side of commonplace realization that religious-type convictions would seem like mental illness in more secular contexts, is the observation of the pervasiveness of religious beliefs in the setting of real mental illness. People with schizophrenia -at least in my experience- do not believe they are Manny Ramirez, nor do people in flights of mania receive messages from Theo Epstein. (Apologies to non-Red Sox fans: you can imagine famous secular figures of your choice here). Yet in my professional work, I have spoken with no small number of people with clear mental illness, absolutely certain of the divinity of their convictions. Why is it that when the mind fails, it so often manifests intense religious experience?
The last piece of the connection is the historical record wherein a significant number of those we now regard as great spiritual teachers (what James called "religious geniuses") show strong evidence of what we can now recognize as major psychiatric or neurological illnesses, particularly schizophrenia, epilepsy, and bipolar disorder. How are we to connect their spiritual insights, which continue to nourish our own spirits today, with the data that these were brains and minds with what we would now consider serious illness?
Might Religion be a simply brain illness as Dennett describes for the hapless ant on the blade of grass: a mental infection by a parasite of the mind, intent on spreading itself, with no concern for the well being of the host -that is to say, us? Certainly the pattern of an idea that says, "You must believe and you must make others believe" (no matter what the consequences to yourself or others) sounds a lot like the lancet fluke, compelling the ant to act in ways whose only purpose is to propagate the parasite. The geneticist Richard Dawkins has argued exactly that: that just as there are "selfish" genes whose prevalence reflects only their success at getting themselves spread, so are their selfish "memes", ideas that can spread from mind to mind simply because they are good at spreading. These can be as simple as a catchy tune or as complex as a metaphysical system. They prey upon the mind's existing mechanisms for making sense of the world, twisting them to their own ends.
Well maybe so, you might say, but what of it? There are all sorts of odd tangles in human nature. Aside from our sentimental attachments to our Faiths, why should we belabor this particular "bug" of the psyche? A decade ago, this might have been a common response, at least in our comfortable little corner of the world: yes, this is all very well, but only of academic interest to me. Now, of course, in the post 9-11 world, we are all too aware that religious madness can affect us, sometimes in sudden and horrifying ways. Is there anything we can learn that can help us navigate this unfamiliar territory?
A hallmark of both mental illness and religious conviction is the "idee fixe", the fixed idea, or what in psychiatry is called "fixed delusional belief": a conviction that cannot be altered no matter how strong the evidence is against it. It seems to me striking that unshakable Faith is considered not only normal but admirable when applied to supernatural beliefs, when it is easily seen as unhealthy -at least in others- in reference to the rest of our lives. The first thing to realize about this tendency toward fixed ideas is that it is not some exclusive property of deranged minds, but rather seems to be a general feature of "normal" people that becomes exaggerated in certain types of mental illness. We compartmentalize our ideas and declare certain parts off-limits to critical analysis. We apply flexible standards of evidence, accepting uncritically what confirms our beliefs, while demanding impossibly high standards of proof for claims that challenge us. We respond to unavoidable contradictory evidence either by ignoring it or by creating ever more elaborate and tortuous ad hoc explanations to shore up our pre-existing convictions. In small amounts, this probably helps us maintain balance against the buffeting of a too complex world. Unconstrained, it leads to delusion, to what the psychiatrists call "failure of reality testing", and to a dogmatism where one feels in possession of absolute Truth, justified in using whatever means necessary to further the one True Way. At this extreme, this natural human tendency can become harmful, not only because it blocks us individually from learning and growing, but because collectively it can and often has caused large groups of people to go psychologically off the rails (sometimes deliberately and cynically provoked by their leaders), and to let their ordinary standards of decency and empathy be trumped by a sense of Divine mission.
And yet, what is the difference between this burning zeal, this sense of absolute Rightness, and what we read in the words of the great saints and prophets? Are these just different varieties of diseases of the mind, like different species of viruses, distinguishable in the particulars of their symptoms but essentially the same in mechanisms of action? Must we have one to have the other? Should we work to expunge both from human societies, the way we suppress other natural but harmful human tendencies like infanticide, or vendetta?
I do think it is important for religious people, and I count myself among this group, to face up to the overlap between spiritual experience and mental illness with honesty and courage, both in recognition of the realities of human history and in the pressing needs of the human present. We need to be able to recognize it and to challenge it in ourselves as well as in others, for unchecked it can do great harm.
I want to offer another perspective, though; one that I hope avoids throwing the baby of religious genius out with the bath-water of religious delusion. As Dennett and James and for that matter Darwin all noted, the ubiquity of Religion in human societies suggests that it reflects some deep biological property of the human mind, and that understanding religion will require in part a study of the underlying Biology. The evidence of Biological history would suggest that conscious minds are a very difficult thing to pull off successfully. Something so complex, that must build itself embryologically, maintain itself and even to some degree repair itself, yet remain variable, flexible and nimble enough to respond to an ever-changing world, this seems to be at or near the limits of the biologically possible. In this setting, it is no surprise that minds fail, temporarily or permanently, individually or collectively, selectively or completely, at a substantial rate. It is also no surprise that a significant fraction of the mind's structure and function involves preventing and recovering from the many possible kinds of failure modes (what in the computer era we have learned to call "crashes") to which all complex systems are vulnerable.
In the Biological sense, the Mind is not a Truth detector, but rather an information processing instrument, evolved to get reasonably accurate, relevant, timely, and useful data about the world, so we can figure out what is going on and decide promptly what to do about it. This is what we want from our minds most of the time, but it may be that this kind of practical, pragmatic equilibrium is not the optimum design for perceiving deeper truths than what we get from everyday experience and conventional wisdom. Perhaps the evolutionary forces that gave us a craving to know what things mean are to some degree at odds with the brute neurological requirements of getting the mind through the day in one piece. I have argued that religious experience is in some sense a failure of reality testing very much like psychiatric illness, and that it should not be given amnesty from our rational, critical faculties, for that way lies madness and worse. I have noted that failure at various levels is the unavoidable price complexity, and that we need to deal with the fact that a significant fraction of the total mental workings of humanity will at any given time be broken.
In a humane sense, how we respond to those around us suffering from minds that are failing is a major moral test of ourselves both individually and as a species. Life is ever opportunistic, though, and given that pieces of our minds are breaking all the time, what can we make of that? Perhaps the prevalence of mental illness among religious geniuses is telling us that the kind of mental checks and balances helpful at not falling off the cliff, getting lost in the woods, or saying the wrong thing to the tribal leader, are actually impediments to seeing visions that no one has ever seen before, or to having ideas that are completely mad, but at the same time deeply true. Maybe in the same spirit that we try to protect and comfort those who suffer from the crashes of their own minds, so too can we allow a protected space for those parts of ourselves whose mental "failures" might help lead us forward.