Smoked Ham
Transformation can happen quickly or slowly or be happening at both speeds at the same time. In the story in Mark 5: 1–20, we see a rapid healing of one called a demoniac. Such a phrase, a demoniac. It is defined as one with an evil spirit within him. Jesus casts out the spirit in the man, who names himself not demoniac but instead, Legion. It takes about two thousand sheep to receive the strength of the devil(s) within the legion demoniac.
Oddly this story of rapid, miraculous transformation is at odds with most of the clichés we use about transformation: “The arc of justice is long but it bends towards justice.” “Slow and steady tames the time.” “It is not the 100th whack of the saw that fells the tree but all 99 that came before it.” “We are in it for the long haul.”
Jesus healing story is much more abrupt than these often repeated folk sayings. He calls the devils out of the bedeviled one and tosses them in the pigs. Zap, zoom, magical, quick. I call the patient statements clichés because I have heard them too often. I even hear them from Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942) who put the slow boat route to transformation this way, “Consider that with tolerance and patience, we godly demons may breed a noble world in a few hundred generations or so.” Ironically and oddly, she follows her patience with a sly, wry invitation to a barbecue. “Maybe all of us who do not have the good fortune to meet or meet again, in this world, will meet at a barbeque.” Hurston was smart enough to be egging Jesus on about the pigs.
Many of us conclude sermons this way: let the small matter. Let the meal matter. Let the meal be an Agape or communion, where the crumbs collect densities of meaning. Let the mere meal become the less in the more so that we can carry on, for “one more day.”
Both stories of transformation–the zoom and the slow–are troublesome. The zoom rarely happens, even for the mentally ill, who need to build up the healing chemicals for the depression to cease. It rarely happens structurally, as we remember that women used to make 59 cents on the male dollar and now are up to 79 cents on the dollar in a “mere” twenty years. The three steps forward, two steps back theory of social change is as real as the magic of an anti-depressant.
Healing can happen quickly but ever so rarely. I just had the first of two cataract operations and the magic of the experience is almost overwhelming. It’s scary. I couldn’t drive at night any more. With the zap of a laser and the deft delicacy of a surgeon, I who once was kind of blind can now kind of see. I don’t need my glasses to drive any more. The clarity of the Manhattan skyline brought me to tears: it was so beautiful, and I hadn’t seen it for years. It was blurry—now it is clear. That kind of quick healing raises lots of questions–and note that the same questions popped up for the Gerasenes. When you heal quickly, you wonder why it took you so long to get the operation. Why did I stay blurry so long? When you heal quickly, you wonder why Jesus doesn’t heal everybody stuck in the caves, twisted around themselves, imprisoned by their own consciousness as well as its cave. These are good questions about transformation. Jesus, if you can heal the demoniac, why can’t you heal the legion? Or more particularly why can’t you heal me?
You could argue that Jesus had a giant barbecue out there on the other side of the lake, in the country of the Gerasenes. The role of the swine in Mark 5 that transformed the legion-filled demoniac is rarely discussed. Do we really need a displacement to heal? Does a family really need an “Identified patient” to heal? Does the devil have to be put someplace–in an animal considered unclean in religious and hygienic terms–in order for change to come?
That word displacement gets way too little attention. We speak a lot of the glories of place these days. I don’t mean just “advanced placement,” but living in place, coming from somewhere, having a place. I could hum, “There’s a place for us. Somewhere a place for us. Peace and quiet and all the rest…waits for us somewhere, some day..” We assume the demoniac found a home for himself. He tries to leave with Jesus but Jesus refuses. Stay here. Stay home, he says.
Slow forms of healing are equally problematic. I love the patience of white folk. We know that a misdemeanor crime can free a lawyer to say, “he’s had quite a few run-ins with the police,” and that statement can result in job loss, inability to get another job and lots of revenue for the prison system.
I love how patient I can be about somebody else’s doctor who can’t seem to give a decent diagnosis. I am amazed at how much patience I have for the suffering of other people–and how irritated I am at people who just don’t seem to have enough patience.
So what is transformation, the kind that is caught between the rock of the exceptionality miracle and the platitude of patience? Let’s make it personal: when are you going to be changed or saved or rid of the divided self or no longer be chased by your own shadow? What is your time line for transformation? If you don’t like personal, let’s do it general: is transformation different for those in active suffering and outside of it? Harvey Cox says something wise when he says that there is an empire outside of us and inside of us. We internalize our oppression and we externalize it. In the story about the pigs, the evil is externalized. It is displaced on the pigs. The assumption is that the devil is so real that the devil has to be put some place. Thus the convenient pigs, the smoked ham of the rush to the sea.
Annie Lamott tells us that the main question most people have is the question of blame. Let’s find someone to blame, and we will be done with the problem and won’t have to worry any more about transformation. We won’t need transformation if we can displace our devils on somebody or something else. We take a Pilate, we wash our hands, if we can just find someone to blame.
Kathleen Cormley says that the women went towards the tomb and the men went away from it–and that the women are the heroes of the crucifixion story because of this direction towards rather than away. Being a woman, I started patting myself on the back. But then I realized that her theology was just another theology of blame and displacement. I heard that old scapegoating song singing in the background. Why do I need to demonize men to make myself feel good? Why does gossip bind groups together into them and us factions at the water coolers of our lives? Isn’t that what Jesus did to the pigs–already demonized as unclean in so many cultures?
My problem with this particular miraculous healing is here: why did the pigs have to be hurt? Why did the swine herders lose their income? And these little questions carry my larger question: does somebody have to be blamed for something to change or is there a Jesus way beyond this particular Marcan way? Does not the need to blame skewer the gospel, the one where we name Jesus as the one who refused to have an enemy? Do we need an outsider to be inside? Or does Jesus’ larger love need all of the stories about him to explain itself? Did he not point to a way beyond blame, even a love that refuses to blame?
Did Jesus turn the pigs into a useful vehicle in this transformation story? I think not. I don’t like this narrative of transformation because I think it is actually not transformation at all. It is same old, same old.
Likewise the platitude of patience: That arc surely bending to justice is fine for those without an elephant stepping on their foot.
I know. Now I have to say what I think transformation is, the kind that has no displacement, no enemy, and probably no time line. Transformation is trust in the now. Transformation is the trust below and above the elephant on your foot. Transformation is also the ability to face the inadequacy of displacement and the inadequacy of patience. Transformation won’t happen unless we take on our dead ends spiritually, intellectually, and physically.
Bill Coffin said, “We avoid sorrows too deep and therefore lose joys too large. This emotional mediocrity is what empire does to us.” I love the phrase “emotional mediocrity.” Emotional mediocrity means the refusal to face the trouble of our scriptures, our clichés, our dead ends. Emotional excellence has to do with praying the devil back to hell. Thank you, Abigail Disney.
What I really think is that we need crutches on our way to the sprint of transformation. We need the identified patient, the displacement, the pigs to carry the devil away from us. Ouch. That is harsh and hard.
Consider the New York Times article titled “Pearls before Congress,” and you will remember how convenient a herd of swine can be. It may be fun, even funny, to mock Congress but transformative it is not. The bonding is not transformative. In fact, it is counter-transformative. The bonding gets in the way of the pain that it takes to stop the division. Tribal bonding, against someone else, animal or human, will simply go on to repeat the suffering. Tribal blaming displacement-bonding sounds like it is giving the devils their due, but it is only repeating their pattern.
Zora has it a little more right: let’s just eat together and take our time with each other. At least on the slow boat, everybody has a place. And on the slow boat, nothing much happens.
Transformation may involve taking a break from the old roads to transformation–that urgency to be better and to be better now–and you may find a place to put yourself long enough to at least avoid displacement.
Every minute we can free from blame and shame, especially the minutes in which we refuse to shame and blame ourselves gives the devils their due. Loss we might argue is grain. Not gain but grain. Loss is loss. Less is not more either. Less is less. Both less and loss though can be grain. Faced, acknowledged, they can be a dough that rises in us.
A closing story from Caleb, my grandson, the never-ending supplier of illustrations. Caleb is five and learning to read. Thus he spends all his time sounding out words. H-a-m. B-r-e-a-d. He saw the word “wrong.” He was stumped. I said just put your hand over the “w.” Wrong, he said? Yes, wrong. He started laughing his head off: “You mean the word wrong is spelled wrong?” Yup. And I offer his transformative wisdom to you.
