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i KNOW WHO YOU ARE

February 1, 2015
Mark 1:21-28

Whos your favorite movie bad guy?

How about Darth Vader, destroying planets faster than the fossil fuel industry and trying to
seduce his own son over to the dark side like some addict getting high with his kids?
Or President Snow, he of the Hunger Games with his sinister white rose - a tyrant who
manipulates the media and wages war to enslave the people he leads and underwrite the
extravagant lifestyle of the privileged few?
Or Voldemort, one ugly dude, so powerfully evil hardly anyone this side of Harry Potter can even
mention his name?
Well, as far as heavies go, I think all those guys are lightweights - kids villains. If you want a bad
guy grown ups can delight in, my candidate is Hannibal Lector, Hannibal the Cannibal, whose
few minutes onscreen in The Silence of the Lambs dominate the story and elevate it into the
great film that it is. I cant tell you how many times Ive gone back to see him loom menacingly in
the sophisticated, even charming way that he does, and it never seems to get old, never fails to
give me shivers at the same time Im rooting for his success.
When Lector first meets Clarice Starling, the movies heroine, he warns her not to lie to him,
because hell know. And we get that. He will know. His uncanny ability to see inside her minds
rings true. I think thats at the heart of what makes us, or maybe I should say some of us, love
Lector when those other heavies dont arouse much empathy. The great (and chilling) thing
about this brilliant, manipulative, disturbingly attractive but sinister, human flesh-eating monster
is that hes all too real; and if he can peer into Clarice, how safe are we?
Most of my practice as a psychoanalyst wasnt with true psychopaths or with people afflicted by
chronic psychosis, so I have less insight into over-the-top pathology than whatever little
expertise I might have about less severe disorders. I did work with one young man, however,
whose bipolar disorder frequently cycled into delusional paranoia. And one thing I can say about
him is that he probably sussed out more about me than anyone I ever worked with. Much as
Clarice learned with Hannibal Lector, I learned that the only way I could effectively work with
Mark was to be absolutely straight with him. He was amazingly adept at finding me out, and it
took accepting that and my own vulnerability to his perceptiveness to get anywhere with him.

Maybe thats why there are five words in the short story about Jesus casting out a demon we
just heard that stand out in my mind: I know who you are.
That demon was Lector-like in his insight; but how readily, miraculously, Jesus disposes of him.
All four of the Gospels in the New Testament contain no shortage of stories about miracles.
What are we supposed to make of them? For literalists, no problem. Its magic, what the pope
recently referred to as waving a wand. The Lord suspends physics and the rest of natural law
when he chooses to. But for the rest of us, its more complicated. We look for meaning in the
symbolism of these stories, in their context and also in the light of what we know of human
nature and how weve come to believe the universe works. We acknowledge that all great
stories, scriptural or not, strike a chord of deep human resonance.
In Dostoevskys great story The Grand Inquisitor, Jesus has returned into a 15th Century
Spanish town square where hes busy healing the sick and casting out demons, but the only
person who recognizes him is the evil, grizzled old Cardinal Inquisitor. I think theres something
in that story and in The Silence of the Lambs and in Marks telling of the evil spirit Jesus cast out
that rings true: the clairvoyance of the demonic. Have you ever had a conversation with
someone in a psychotic state, or perhaps an advanced addict of some kind? Not always but
sometimes you might find it disturbing how he or she can see right through your defenses into a
part of yourself hidden so deeply you might not even have recognized it yourself. Theres a case
to be made that theres something as liberating about madness as there is about its relief. Most
of us relate with each other through a process that goes from our guts through our minds to the
other persons mind and then maybe down to her gut. There are any number of filters along that
route that work to keep things civilized. God help us if we all lived in a world without filters . . . if
the only way we ever related was through our ids, our reptilian brains. But sometimes the filters
arent there. And while that can lead to mayhem, it can also lead to insight . . . to views inside
that were rarely afforded.
Who or what, are your demons? You may or may not relate to that particular word, but Im pretty
sure most if not all of us carry around hidden inner lives that may know us, and the world around
us, better than we know ourselves. In much of my practice as an analyst, Ive found it more
effective than not to look at and speak of buried, traumatic and painful memories as demons.
Im not talking about proselytizing, which just doesnt belong in psychotherapy, but portraying
our deep-seated troubles as demons can portray the relationship we have with our inner lives
better than most psychobabble I know. Conceptualizing demons sets a context of examining our
relationship with ourselves. What are these demons? They can be organic - part of the
constitution were born with - or they can be formed by any number of the traumatic experiences
we endure - memories so painful theyre often repressed, losses that punctuate our lives
virtually daily, displaced emotions, reactions to lifes battles such as the PTSD that warriors and
abuse victims so frequently suffer, and so on.

Characterizing these and other inner experiences as demons can cast a spiritual light on how
they affect us and on the process of working them through, especially if our religious vocabulary
is comfortable with that language. That may explain why theres often something valid to even
the most dramatic, revival tent kind of faith healing (although I wonder about the follow-up, the
less dramatic part so essential to true healing).
But since I dont believe there are too many revivalists here (and that includes even you
recovering Baptists!), let me take a stab at suggesting that even for us Episcopalians, even for
Gods frozen people, casting our troubled emotional baggage in spiritual language that portrays
what afflicts us within as demonic makes sense. It makes sense because even if we find more
of our faith in our heads than in our hearts (where I believe it more authentically belongs), we
show up here in church to pursue our spirituality, to reconcile our everyday lives with our
awareness of and hunger for something that transcends them. And beyond that, we keep
coming back because no matter how literally or figuratively we take them in, theres something
in the stories weve come to know about the man Jesus that resonates within us and brings us
together in communion with each other and the world around us, inspiring us to live more
fulfilled and noble lives than we might without his story. And no matter how literally or how
metaphorically our faith vocabulary works, no matter how jargon-filled or jargon-freed our
language, no matter how consciously we do or dont recognize this, the inescapable tenets of
our faith revolve around what Christ in the world, represents - LOVE and FORGIVENESS - the
two great fruits of relationship.
A couple of weeks ago Sue and I got around to seeing Saving Mr. Banks - a pretty good film
about how Walt Disney convinced P.T. Travers, the author off Mary Poppins, to overcome her
resistance to allowing that wonderful story to be made into a film. The whole movie intertwines
the events of her past and present life to show the emotionally charged reasons why she was
almost pathologically attached to aspects of her story she couldnt even bring herself to talk
about, much less give to the cinema world.
Travers spent a lifetime creating a poignant if off-putting persona that didnt let anyone in. In the
climactic scene of the film, Disney breaks through her shell in a short speech that underscores
how the healing power of an emotionally resonant story trumps obsession with its details. In
effect, he holds up story - not just any story but the kind of story whose deep human pathos is
ever so much truer than its facts - as a sacred thing (although he doesnt use that word). As I
was watching and finding myself surprisingly moved, I turned to Sue and said thats Jesus.
She nodded, intuitively getting, I believe, exactly what I thought and felt - that we were watching
the essence of his story too.
Love and forgiveness are there ready to be found in our story. If we all carry demons, as I
believe we do, then we all cry out for exorcism - a largely alien and strange word, but it fits.
Exorcism has nothing to do with pea soup or rotating necks. Its all about liberation - freeing us
from our burdens in order to live our lives fully. It has to do with Ms. Travers saving herself and
Mr. Banks, her avatar father, through the love and forgiveness of a great story. That story is
hers. Its only loaned to us so that we can see through it to our own. And theres another story
thats going to help much more if we let it. Some people call it the greatest story ever told.
Amen.