The Unseen Wound

"What if I don't get better?": Part II

John Martin: The Valley of the Shadow of Death; Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In her book, The Evangelical Imagination,

Karen Swallow Prior

challenges the reader: “Look for the images, metaphors, and stories that fill your own imagination, your community’s social imaginary, and your own cultural experience.”¹

Thanks to

Marissa Franks Burt

&

Wendi Nunnery

for posting on religious scrupulosity & OCD.

Part I here.

“And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee. And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs.” (Luke 8:26-27, KJV)

When I reached puberty, I went through two rites of passage. The first was common to the credobaptist religious community of my family. Freely confessing my Christian faith, I was baptized by immersion in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in front of the gathered church.

The second was attending the seminar series required for all apprenticeship age students of the homeschool Program my family had joined.² In the full auditorium of the largest church in the largest city in my nation for a full week, I watched the talking Head of the Program on an enormous screen. The seminars taught basic principles for spiritual success. Each was backed by anecdotes that instilled a desire to never be an anecdote, plus a few Bible verses quoted with the brevity of an ad disclaimer. The Head identified spiritual success with material prosperity, good reputation, and good health, both physical and mental. Mental illness was due to unresolved guilt or lack of responsibility. The Program indicated severe mental illness was demonic. Published Program material provided a backstory for the Gadarene demoniac, sketching how violating basic principles led to demonic possession.

As my mind matured, a recurrent childhood fear of losing those I held dearest also grew. An adolescent Christian, the one dearest to me was my God. The Program held that proper repentance for past sins was necessary to resolve guilt.³ As a preschooler, I had been a secondary victim of a playmate who was a victim of sexual abuse. What my child mind had not understood haunted my maturing mind. Unwanted thoughts crowded into my brain. I searched the Bible, seeking assurance of forgiveness. One passage I found was Mark 3:28-29.⁴ The study Bible issued by the Program had a long note under it on the unforgiveable sin. In a brief moment, words flitted through my mind and it seemed I had doomed myself to everlasting perdition.

The thought that I was cut off from my source of life and light and joy splintered my mind into pieces. Hopelessly begging for forgiveness began a cycle of unwanted thoughts and compulsive prayers that dominated my broken brain for the next five years.⁵

Religious Melancholy

My bewildered parents did not understand my obsessive fears, but their reassuring love lit a spark of hope that God might be as unconditionally loving. Although they did not know how to help me, they allowed me an unusual privilege. Realizing that my fears kept me awake for hours at night and seeing the fears abate when other matters occupied my mind, my parents let me turn on my bedside light and read as long as I needed. I often read into the early hours of the morning and then slept as it became light.⁶

I read novels at night.⁷ During the day, I read all I could find about my spiritual state. For its history lessons, the Program often recounted the lives of famous Christians. In its biography of John Newton, the material mentioned briefly that Newton was a friend of the poet William Cowper, helping him after Cowper attempted suicide due to fear that he was not of the elect.⁸ I knew Cowper as the author of the beautiful hymn ‘There is a Fountain’.

That brief acknowledgement of Cowper’s religious melancholy was a gleam of hope that perhaps not all mental illness was due to spiritual failure. One of the films my siblings and I permitted ourselves to watch in those years was the 1994 Ang Lee adaption of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. There is a comic scene where Edward Ferrars struggles to read a poem to Marianne’s dramatic taste. The lines read are from William Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’⁹:

No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone; When, snatched from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

I realized the lines were Cowper’s when I found the entire poem in an old school anthology. The poem’s image of despair mirrored my own experience.

Religious scrupulosity

My parents encouraged reading fiction. The Program did not. Historical Christians who eschewed novels were models. A recurrent peer testimony at Program conferences was the commitment to give up novels. Commitments ensured good behaviour. In seminars, the Head gave commitment ‘altar calls’ and then, with ad disclaimer speed, quoted verses on the sin of breaking vows. Apprenticeship students were issued commitment booklets with lines for signature and date. In desperation I made a commitment to not read novels. When I could not keep it, guilt intensified

There was one exception the Program made. The allegory of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was too much of a Christian classic to dismiss. On the one hand, Christian’s repeated encounters with despair was a ray of hope that I might not be alone in my experience. The demon that whispered in Christian’s ear in the Valley of the Shadow of Death resembled my unwanted thoughts. On the other hand, I feared I might be the caged man in the Interpreter’s house, unable to repent.

The internet was still in its early days in my adolescence. The Program warned with anecdote against it. But by my late teens we were cautiously using it. One of my earliest searches was whether Christians could have mental illness. I found a page that suggested Bunyan may have had obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).¹⁰ I had only recently learned, from an old Reader’s Digest article, that OCD was a mental illness.¹¹ The page quoted from Bunyan’s autobiography, Grace abounding to the chief of sinners. His descriptions shone light on my own struggles.

First, all my comfort was taken from me; then darkness seized upon me; after which, whole floods of blasphemies, both against God, Christ, and the scriptures, were poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment.¹²

In these days, when I have heard others talk of what was the sin against the Holy Ghost, then would the tempter so provoke me to desire to sin that against sin, that I was as if I could not, must not, neither should be quiet until I had committed it...¹³

Sometimes again when I have been preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the congregation.¹⁴

Public domain books were not then as readily available. I finally read Grace Abounding a decade later, while recuperating from serious illness. The full account of his mental struggles might have been describing my own.

The Vulnerable Brain

While seeking answers, I found suggestions that the Apostle Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was a demonic “messenger of Satan”.¹⁵ If so, then demonic oppression, contrary to Program claims, might not always be due to a violation of their pet principles. As I closely read Bible accounts, I realized the Program made up details to match their principle paradigm.¹⁶ The Gadarene demoniac had no backstory. Nothing in the Bible linked mental illness to spiritual failure or demonic activity.¹⁷

Was mental illness a physical illness that manifests in mental symptoms? In training for my healthcare profession, I was given a wide variety of experiences, including in mental health. Some mental health patients had developed the illnesses after physical trauma. Many physical illnesses could produce mental symptoms.¹⁸ I began to understand that my mental symptoms were as much due to a physical vulnerability as my asthmatic symptoms.

I have never had an official mental health diagnosis. My nation’s public health insurance plans do not fully fund mental healthcare, perpetuating the perception that mental illness is not a physical illness. When I looked into having a psychological assessment, I could not afford it. The only way I could get such an assessment is to go into crisis and have an emergency assessment. Not a path I wish to take.

After those first five years, my symptoms receded. They still return in times of great stress and fatigue, but have never lasted as long. In recent years, similar symptoms have occurred in younger members of my extended family who were raised in a different environment, indicating a familial vulnerability.¹⁹ My experience helped at least one of those younger relatives get a diagnosis and treatment.

Why am I still a Christian? At my worst, the thought that God might not exist was more horrific than the thought I was eternally doomed. Searching the Bible, I discovered God was more loving and forgiving than the Program portrayed. I have found in my weaknesses that his strength is perfect.²⁰

1. Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023), 6

2. As mentioned in Part I, I am not naming the Program to keep the focus on the main point, but IYKYK.

3. The Program used C. G. Finney’s ‘Break up your fallow ground’ to emphasis this. I hesitated to share it, as Finney was a Pelagian heretic, but it is a masterclass on how to trigger religious scrupulosity.

4. ²⁸ “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for all sins and whatever blasphemies they utter. ²⁹ But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3:28-19, CSB

5. My memory of those years is somewhat fragmented due to the daily long hours spent mentally circling inner fears. I remember clearly what I read, but not always when I read it.

6. I tried to wait to turn on my light until my younger sibling was asleep, but later learned I was not always successful in judging the signs of sleep.

7. I had permission to raid my father’s shelves. The complex plots and vivid characters and descriptions of Charles Dickens were the most mentally engrossing. I also read R. L. Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Kingsley, Howard Pyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and translations of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas père. I supplemented these with Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, L. M. Alcott, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

8. The Program material was often unreliable but got this detail correct. William Cowper’s religious melancholy is a well known historical fact.

9. William Cowper. The Castaway. Final stanza.

10. The page was part of the early internet now lost in technological rot. A quick current search reveals the idea that Bunyan had OCD has endured and multiplied pages.

11. Definition and description of OCD.

12. John Bunyan. Grace Abounding to the chief of sinners. Section 96

13. Bunyan. Grace Abounding. Section 103

14. Bunyan. Grace Abounding. Section 293

15. “So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.” II Corinthians 12:7, ESV.

16. The Program added detail to other accounts, such as the rapes of Dinah and Tamar, making the victims appear at fault. The implication was always if the principles were followed, then nothing bad would happen. If bad things happened to one, one was at fault somewhere.

17. a) Linking mental illness to demonic oppression is, of course, not unique to the Program. It is a pet peeve of mine when I see a Bible with headings label the miracle of Jesus casting demons out of the young boy (Mark 9:14-29) as ‘Jesus heals the epileptic’. Really Bible publishers? Do you live under a rock? Epilepsy is an organic illness. Demonic possession is not epilepsy!

b) I have seen what might be, after medical examination to rule out organic causes, described as demonic possession. It did not resemble either any mental illness or epilepsy.

18. This has always been recognized, of course, in historical descriptions of delirium. But the most common conditions can trigger mental illness. Heart attacks and strokes both commonly trigger depression in survivors, while mental changes resulting from giving birth run from the common ‘baby blues’ to postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.

19. Our familial vulnerability is also apparent when considering the ‘eccentricities’ of previous generations.

20. “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.” II Corinthians 12:9, CSB