March 15,1998

James A. Todhunter

"The Spirit's Return"

As a child I loved to be read the stories of "The Jungle Book," by Rudyard Kipling. In the story "Kaa's Hunting" the boy Mowgli is beguiled by the banderlog, the monkey people, the outcasts of the Jungle, and is led to their city deep in the forest. The city is called "the Cold Lairs" and was abandoned centuries before by the people who once lived there. The Jungle has now moved in on this once grand and wonderful city. And its elegant but crumbling marble buildings are now inhabited by screeching, silly, dangerous monkeys. Mowgli is imprisoned by the monkey people who want to ransom him in hopes of attaining to even greater glory than the humans who came before. Fortunately Mowgli's friends, including Kaa, the giant rock python, come to his rescue.

I thought of this story in reading the scripture from the Prophet Isaiah. The Prophet is rebuking Babylon, conqueror of Jerusalem and captor of the Hebrew exiles. Babylon will be overthrown and will no longer be the home of human habitation. Instead it will be populated by animals. Isaiah says, "...its houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will live, and there goat-demons will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces." What wonderful imagery of moral and spiritual chaos and decline whatever the great city - Baghdad or Washington.

People of antiquity, and certainly the people of Jesus' time, believed that personal ill-fortune, including most illnesses, was due to demon possession. Jesus, as well as the authors of the gospels, believed it literally. Many of Jesus' healings follow a pattern in which he comes to heal some infirmity, recognizes the demons that are causing it (frequently they also recognize him), Jesus casts them out, and the patient is healed The Gerasene madman has his demons cast out and they flee to a herd of swine, who, maddened themselves, plunge over a cliff. Jesus heals a woman with a spirit of infirmity. Sin itself is sometimes portrayed as such a demon possession.

The biblical understanding is that we are bodies inhabited by spirit. The first living soul, Adam, is made from the dust of the earth, and animated when the breath of God is blown into him. That is what it means to be a living soul. To be sick, or mad, or dysfunctional is the result of demons taking up residence in our bodies - alongside or even in place of the Spirit of God. Today some would say this is a striking image, a metaphor, not to be taken literally. Others seem quite sure that unclean spirits need to be taken literally. I would have to say, for myself, that whether literal or figurative, much human pain is the result of some kind of mental or physical possession - an addiction, a neurosis, chronic physical suffering - they bring a malevolent force that turns the body into a battleground. Popular language talks about the "monkey on someone's back," and I think we all know what that means - monkeys from Kipling, or howling creatures, ostriches, dancing goat-demons or Jackals from Isaiah.

Amid all the wonderful healing stories of Jesus' casting out demons, we find this curious gloss on the subject. Picking up where the other stories end with the person healed and living happily ever after, Jesus says:

Interesting story, isn't it? I am not exactly sure what it means. What does it mean to say, for example, that when the unclean spirit is cast out, its former residence (the body) is empty, swept, and put in order? Does this somehow mean the person has normalized the experience of not having a spirit of any kind dwelling within? The Bible talks about both good spirits and bad spirits. Or what is the difference between being possessed by unclean spirits and being empty? We know the pain of illness. We know the various kinds of suffering that come as the good spirits and the evil spirits battle within our bodies. But, it seems to me, that spiritual emptiness is different from this. And I think Jesus' story is telling us that it is important to understand and deal with spiritual emptiness correctly, because it can be very dangerous. For in the spiritual realm, as in the physical, nature abhors a vacuum. There is tremendous pressure to fill a spiritual vacuum with something. What can we say of this?

First, it is important to recognize spiritual emptiness. It is different from the experience of being possessed by something evil, which feels terrible. On the other hand, it is also different from being filled with the Holy Spirit. How do you experience spiritual emptiness? Somehow what comes to me is a feeling of letdown, ennui, loneliness. The termination of a unhealthy relationship with someone may leave you with a sense of relief, but also there is an emptiness that is disorienting. Emily Dickinson wrote:

It may be the feeling of "what now?" after some traumatic loss or even great achievement has sunk in. It may be what grief feels like when everybody else has gone on with their lives and you are left alone. Not pain now but, well, emptiness. Maybe it is simply a feeling of nothingness. Trying to truly recognize this feeling is important for it allows us to stay with that feeling.

Next the question is what to do about it. I think there are three possible responses to the recognition of the inner emptiness that comes when unclean spirits are cast out.

The first is, to normalize it. One says, this is what life is really like now. Live with this emptiness, get used to it. Tidy up the room, put things in order, as in Jesus' story, and live with emptiness as if it were the normal course of affairs. It is not living with great pain. It is just living with no real feeling at all. Living in a neat but empty house. Religiously speaking, this means living with no faith at all. A kind of agnostic existence recognizing neither good nor ill spirits, Just the emptiness of one's life. But this is dangerous, for as Jesus story suggests, this is an invitation for the same evil spirit to return, and bring along more new demons in the process.

That grizzled American man of letters, Mark Twain, was a genuine non-believer. Yet, he had a strange kind of gullibility. He lost a lot of money over the years on schemes in which he was hoodwinked or self-deluded. And when his beloved daughter was dying, he agreed to have her visited by a faith-healer, which turned out to be a tragic and painful fiasco. G. K. Chesterton said that someone who believes in nothing, will in the end, believe in anything.

Another response to inner emptiness is to regard the experience as Just unbearable. It is to say HI cannot stand this emptiness, I must fill it with something at once." This is the game of "pick your addiction" - drugs, alcohol, sex, work, another person, doing good, consumerism, power, politics, control - etc. You name it. When waiting in one's emptiness is intolerable, something must be invited in. And anything, no matter how wonderful it seems, can become a new demon - anything can take possession of us. The proliferation of twelve-step programs should tell us our inability to stand spiritual emptiness very long opens us to a desperate quest to fill the void.

Living with emptiness as normal and falling prey to returning spirits, or compulsively filling the void by picking something from the long menu of our consumer society: those are two responses. Now for the third possibility, I imagine you think I am going to say, "Go bring in the Holy Spirit to fill the void.. My answer? Not quite. Or at least, not yet.

Of course, to be whole and holy, to be a healthy human soul, means to be filled with the Holy Spirit of God; to be mortal flesh made from the dust, into which the breath of God has been blown; to see our physical befogs, even if they are ravaged and broken, as yet the residence of the Holy Spirit. Yes. But what do we do to make it happen? What do we do to get the Spirit to enter us? The simple answer is "nothing." Wait in the emptiness for the Holy Spirit to come. The Spirit blows wither it will. The very act of doing anything puts us at risk of welcoming the wrong kind of spirit. Sometimes someone will say to me, "When I feel bad or empty, I Just think of others in greater need than and go out and doing something for them. Then I feel better." Well, perhaps so. But, one might ask, is that because the Holy Spirit within has led you to do this, or is it because you have rushed out and appropriated the spirit of "doing good" and that has made you feel better? There is a difference. St. Paul said, "I may give away all I possess and even give my body to be burned, but if I have not love, it means nothing." Doing good may make you feel better as a short term fix, but may not nourish you.

But there is something we can do. In fact, it is the only thing. And that is prayer. Last Sunday I was talking about the paradox of prayer. It is both assertive and receptive; speaking and listening; invoking and discerning. Prayer can be seen as the active invitation to the Holy Spirit to enter our emptiness, and the careful discernment of what kind of spirit appears. Jesus' story says that evil spirits are always ready, willing and able to get right back in, if we aren't careful. But if we wait, if we invoke, if we discern, God comes to us. Paul says "the spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words." As the old spiritual declares "Jesus is always knocking at the door of your soul." Be careful, discern and ultimately, trust.

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