Exorcism in the United Church?

“Silence! Frenzied, unclean spirit,”
cried God's healing, holy One.
"Cease your ranting! Flesh can't bear it.
Flee as night before the sun."
At Christ's voice the demon trembled,
from its victim madly rushed,
while the crowd that was assembled
stood in wonder, stunned and hushed.

Lord, the demons still are thriving
in the grey cells of the mind:
Tyrant voices shrill and driving,
twisted thoughts that grip and bind,
Doubts that stir the heart to panic,
fears distorting reason's sight,
Guilt that makes our loving frantic,
dreams that cloud the soul with fright.

Silence, Lord, the unclean spirit,
in our mind and in our heart.
Speak your word that,
when we hear it,
all our demons shall depart.
Clear our thought and calm our feeling,
still the fractured, warring soul.
By the power of your healing
make us faithful, true, and whole.

This hymn was written in 1984 and published in the United Church hymn book, Voices United, in 1996. It wasn't written in the Dark Ages, nor even in the 1950s. No, it is recent by hymn standards, and though I am no longer a part of any church, I am astounded and appalled at the primeval horror of mental illness expressed in this hymn. Apparently, folks like me, well-meaning bipolar sorts who are just trying to live a good life, are actually demonically possessed and need Jesus/God to drive those devils out. It seems to me the actual "devils" live in the black, black hearts of people who would write and promote such rubbish in the name of "worship".

There is one small but very significant change in this hymn which I recall from its first printing in an earlier United Church hymn book. The original line read, "Silence! Frenzied, unclean spirit" - but in the "updated" version, that exclamation point has been replaced by a comma. Much depends on punctuation - I don't need to tell you, you know all the jokes. But this subtle change is immensely powerful. 

When you say, "Silence," the room may just quieten and hush down from all its chatter. But if you exclaim, "Silence!", there will be a stunned, abrupt ceasing of all noise, all talk, everything. The room and everyone in it, including those unfortunates with demons skulking around in their "grey cells", will have effectively been silenced. 

This was the only change made to the hymn in its "updated" version. But who was it that changed that exclamation point to a comma, and why did they do it? Why this dishonest softening-down of the exorcist's harsh command, allowing all that other primitive garbage to stand? Did the editor believe that "one small change" would somehow make it more palatable, or (more likely) just slip by unnoticed? This gives the church the ready, easy "out" of, "Well, nobody else has complained about it" (case closed).

But Jesus wouldn't have gotten very far with a polite request. These are DEMONS, for Christ's sake, those horrendous unclean forces lurking in our grey cells (meaning, I presume, the human brain). This is mental illness, guys, the big-time! This isn't just any old blindness or lameness or leprosy.  Asking nicely just won't work.

It seems to me the original was more true to the philosophy of mental illness as something that must be forcibly driven out by a powerful, supernatural "rebuke". Hey listen, I'd even try this if it worked, but all it does is perpetuate the most dire mistruths and distortions, sick myths that should have been flushed down the toilet decades ago, things that HURT people and even make them DIE. I happen to know that this repulsive crap is still being tra-la-la'd mindlessly in liberal churches all over the nation (the United Church being, as one wag called it, "The NDP at prayer"), and even taught to children. I remember singing it countless times in church, and nobody complained or really seemed to even notice. I felt very uncomfortable, but I kept on singing. I'm a different person now, but curiously enough, I'm still bipolar, so all that "Silence!" stuff obviously didn't work. But I have to wonder why the church continues to support the idea that a person's "demons" must be silenced. For survivors of abuse, it's a truly horrendous thought.

"Oh, it's just that we didn't SEE it." "Those were different times." That's how the excuses go, always. But why not? Why is mental illness the very last stigma to fall? It still stands like a ghastly totem, each carven image representing the leering face of a different demon (just kidding! Most of them look a lot like me.) I have an idea: rather than taking another fifty years to "raise awareness" and "start a discussion", let's take a chainsaw to this fucking thing. Just burn it to the ground. 

POST-SCRIPT. And here's the evidence. Buried in what we used to call "the green book" (Songs for a Gospel People), an older hymnary we sometimes used which tended more towards the "traditional" (perhaps, the Progressive Conservatives at prayer), I found this, the original hymn by Thomas H. Troeger, written in 1984 (though the words are more appropriate for 1884). And in this, the original version, the Lord cries, "Silence! frenzied, unclean spirit", not "Silence, frenzied, unclean spirit". What a difference one punctuation mark makes. But unclean is still unclean.

BADDA-BOOM: Let Sir Laurence Olivier have the last word. Driven to the hell of divorce and remarriage by his first wife Vivien Leigh and her inconvenient mental illness, he had this backhanded praise of the way she bore her supernaturally-charged cross:

In 1960, she and Olivier divorced and Olivier soon married actress Joan Plowright. In his autobiography, Olivier discussed the years of strain they had experienced because of Leigh's illness:

"Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness—an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble." 

Those final words are petulant and even hateful. What he appears to be saying is that his bipolar wife did not even bother to dissemble and conceal her mental agony from her husband. She shared it, she let him in on it, and though sharing everything else in a marriage is considered essential (remember "in sickness and in health"?), well, apparently, it's everything but this. It goes without saying that it is simply in a different category.

The references to "possession", "evil monster", "deadly ever-tightening spirals", etc. are even more hateful than the archaic, terror-saturated language in that vile, detestable hymn. I feel as if I am shouting into the wind here, and I never EVER wanted to become an "advocate" for anything, but as this pandemic grinds on and on and no one in my position can find any support at all, this blog is just evolving that way. 

Nuns from hell

The power of Christ compels you!

Stigma, stigmata: let's get rid of it, shall we?

Robin Williams and the talk of the 'stigma' of mental illness


The death of the actor has occasioned many ill-advised opinions





Elizabeth Day

The Observer, Sunday 24 August 2014
Jump to comments (195)





Flowers are placed in memory of Robin Williams on his Walk of Fame star in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP


When a much-loved celebrity dies in a sudden and shocking way, the immediate human desire is to find an explanation. We want to rationalise brutality. We need the reassurance. We kid ourselves that knowledge is a bulwark against falling into the same situation. If we know what caused it, the flawed reasoning goes, we can prevent it from happening again.


So it was that, in the days after Robin Williams took his life, media outlets were filled with speculation. Was it the threat of bankruptcy or career worries or a lifelong battle with addiction or a recent diagnosis of Parkinson's that made him confront the meaning of his existence?


The questions were futile. Depression is not a logical disease, a matter of straightforward cause and effect. Suicide is a devastating and complex beast. In truth, the only person capable of telling you why they did what they did has fatally absented themselves from the discussion. And sometimes, even they would be unable to pinpoint a reason.


But alongside the hopeless search for motivation, something else emerged in the aftermath of Williams's death. There was a lot of chatter surrounding the "stigma" of mental illness. Social networks were clogged with people urging others to seek help for their depression and not to feel "stigmatised" by their illness. There were magazine articles about mental health issues being "taboo" and how we must counteract this state of affairs by talking about our own struggles.


All of which is entirely admirable, but is there a stigma? The very fact that the internet was abuzz with people sharing their own stories of depression and encouraging others to do the same suggests that, thankfully, we live in a more accepting age. Most of us will know of close friends or family members who have dealt with depression. Some of us, myself included, will have experienced a form of it ourselves. Celebrities, too, have spoken out, fostering this culture of greater acceptance. The actresses Carrie Fisher and Catherine Zeta-Jones have talked about their bipolar disorders. Stephen Fry has written movingly about his depression.


As a result, I don't view mental illness as a scary, strange thing or as a form of weakness. Do you? I doubt it. And because we are talking more openly than we might have done in the past, many employers have become more attuned to dealing with it. If a workplace failed in this duty of care, there would, rightly, be outrage.


Stigma exists in other places – in the long-term care of the elderly, for instance: that unglamorous world of colostomy bags and daily drudgery we don't like to talk about because we're scared it lies ahead of us all.


There is still work to be done. An applicant for a job might feel less inclined to mention a history of mental health problems than, say, a battle with cancer. That is wrong. But bandying around the term "stigma" in reference to mental illness is unhelpful. It does precisely the opposite of what it intends to do: it means we're actually more likely to think of it in those terms because of the repeated association. Can't we just ditch the word?


What does "stigma" mean, anyway? The original definition has its roots in a Greek term that referred to the marking – by cutting or burning – of socially undesirable types such as criminals, slaves or traitors. Later, the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman defined social stigma as "the phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute which is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute".


Does that apply to mental health? Increasingly, I would say the answer is no. Yes, we should keep talking about depression. Yes, we should be profoundly sensitive to those who grapple with it every day of their lives. But let's stop saying there's a stigma attached to it.


(Emphasis mine. This article echoes one of my previous posts, expressing the belief that juxtaposing the ugly, scary word "stigma" with ANY condition "marks" it in a way which reminds me of the plural of stigma - stigmata. No more bleeding wounds, eh? No more creepy supernatural manifestations, "demons" (a word people casually use to describe mental illness without ONCE stopping to think exactly what they are saying), or any of the crap that still hangs around human pain. Let's get real, use some sensible and sensitive language, and get on the path to real healing.)

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Never trust a clown with a social disease

His Satanic Majesty, the Milkster, is back. All it took is one mis-reference in my last post (i. e. the title of a Harold Lloyd movie, The Milky Way) to trip off the awful synapses, releasing the nightmare miasma of my Milky memories.

Though Milky never actually inspired a suicide cult, he could have. You could just as easily put cyanide in Twin Pines milk, couldn't you? Actually, it might even be more pleasant to take. And there's something else about Twin Pines. . . 

IT'S MAGIC.

No one has figured out yet just HOW secretions from a cow's udder could have this sort of paranormal power.  No one has figured out yet, either, why anyone would have kept a festering old milk carton from 1962 which obviously has mold growing on the top. 

I have no idea what this is or how it got here. It just appeared like boils from a plague. It could be a very, very stained old tshirt, but why leave us hanging with such a motto? "Milky" Says - WHAT?? Maybe you turned the shirt over and it said "blow me".

I always suspected Milky had superior mathematical skills, and now I know it. Just look at this fraction here, it's unbelievable, isn't it? Never mind that it looks like his mother made that suit out of an old bedsheet. He was on a different system from all the rest of us.The system of clowns whose  brains had been eaten away by social diseases contracted during their low-budget Shrine Circus days. The system of hot dirty canvas and heaving sawdust and straining ropes. The stench of animal dung and the screams of little children.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Teeny tiny terror: the doll that pees!

My doll history: frightening.

Actually, I didn't have much of a doll history until now. Until I cracked the code, or something, and came to realize with a subversive little shiver just how pleasurable it can be to dress and undress dolls. . .especially with clothes you've made yourself.

As a kid, I was sullen, uncooperative, usually bad-natured and mainly interested in bugs and half-metamorphosed tadpoles, awful blobby things with legs that my mother wouldn't let me keep in my room. Murky jars abounded in the basement right next to the preserves.

I just wasn't a proper little girl. At all. My mother, at a certain point, noticing I wasn't Quite the Thing, pressed a doll on me. Her name was "Deb" and she wasn't even a real doll, not a baby doll or a Barbie. In fact, she looked a little bit like my mother, bland-faced, her hair a perfect helmet of black. Deb was short for Miss Debutante, and how an eight-year-old would understand that word or be able to prounce it is beyond me, but my parents howled  when I referred to her (coldly) as "Miss De-BUTTON-ty." She was quickly discarded along with the manicure set designed to make me stop biting my nails.

I don't know, I guess a Barbie or two drifted my way, I'm not sure I recall, though I do remember one of them ended up in a sarcophagus wrapped in perfume-soaked strips of white pillowcase. Most Barbies, no matter how impeccably dressed, always seem to end up at the very back of the closet, naked with their legs obscenely splayed, their hair in a feral, impossible frizz. No one knows what happens to the clothes.

Not long ago I became fascinated with the dolls of Marina Bychkova, a Russian-born Vancouver dollmaker who creates disturbing pubescent creatures that exude an air of captivity, their eyes often brimming with tears. Their alabaster skin suggests a strange sort of necrophilia, their identical bodies (all hideously jointed) a uniformity that is kind of scary. They're often naked, elaborately tatooed, with realistic genitalia and even pubic hair, or  else heavily costumed to the point of suffocation. Here is where Bychkova truly excels: it's hard to believe what she is able to create with beads and brocade. And those tiny, tiny shoes.

I couldn't own one of these dolls because they cost upwards of $10,000.00. But some time ago, a couple of years maybe, I was scouting birthday presents for my granddaughter Lauren, a sunny soul who so valiantly carries what might be the burden of Type 1 diabetes that she seems to send it whimpering into the corner.

Every year the family takes part in a jolly occasion, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure.  Our team is called Lauren's Ladybugs (or "wadybugs" as she used to call them), so anything ladybug-esque is of interest to her.

I was dithering around not finding anything, standing in an upscale toy store too expensive to think about buying in, when!

I saw THIS.

Me, who hates dolls? who never played with dolls? who thought dolls were dumb? who didn't know why anyone would even purchase a doll? let alone play with one? Oh my goodness. This was LOVE. Then I turned and walked away, talked myself out of the whole thing. Far too expensive! I was on the other side of the mall when I realized Lana Ladybug was only twenty bucks, and how could I NOT buy her anyway??

But that's not the last of it, or even the beginning, because as L. L. slept in my closet awaiting wrapping, "something" began to eat at me.

I WANTED that doll. I wanted to hold that doll, take its dress off and put it back on again, set it on my bookcase to watch over my most cherished books.

It took a while before I gave in, and even at that, it's only recently I've started to make clothes for it. Actually, not for mine (and I have two of them now - only two - so far, that is - ) but for my granddaughters'. They must have at least ten of these Groovy Girls stuffed in a box (and they're almost always naked, perhaps a sort of tribute to their ancestral goddess, Barbie).

 These little doll-smidgens are ideal to knit for: long, slim and tubular, so that you can make tops, skirts and dresses all along the same lines.

So that's what I'm doing, to surprise them. I had to try them on my own dolls, of course, and that's when I got this strange feeling. What was it? Intimacy? Can't be that. The doll's pliable arms and legs made it possible to bend her limbs in half. So she was malleable. Vulnerable. Recognizably human. Her face was sweet, her hair a tousle. I don't know! What's happening to me? Am I going all soft? Is this weird or what?

It feels good to dress these dolls, as if the little girl in me, the one who never had a chance to develop because she was too busy being a tough little survivor, is finally coming out to play.

I see my blondies, my grandgirls, all done up in their sparkly butterfly tshirts, their glittery shoes that light up when they run, fluffy little tutus, stripey candycane tights, and I think: I missed that. All that. I was all done up in my brother's castoffs. In some cases they'd been through two brothers, who were five and ten years older than me.  So those clothes were very old and very shabby indeed, usually held on me with big safety pins.

Is this Cinderella awakening in me, or what? Why now? I'm not happy, don't ever get that idea. I'm one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. But I'm not dead inside. Not quite. Bad mental health, rotten luck and being thoroughly cursed has not quite stamped out that tiny ladybug of joy at the centre of my heart.

Baby Laugh-a-lot!

OK, I got carried away today. I dredged these ads up for my 7-year-old granddaughter, she of the gappy teeth and amazing mind. She loves this kind of nostalgia and makes video ads of her own, with Chatty Cathy saying all sorts of subversive things. This one is the limit, I think. Nowadays parents can find the battery chamber and disable toys like this, but this one. . . it's a whole new definition of crazy.

As for the others, I was aghast at Barbie and her pooping dog, and even more taken aback by Willie Wee-Wee or whatever it is, a little boy's peeing penis on full display. I remember there was a Baby Joey when Gloria had a baby on All in the Family, and there was a huge dispute about it because he was anatomically correct. I think they pulled it off (excuse me) the shelves and/or neutered him. So how did this little devil get by the censors?

The Meow Mix one. . . what can I say. It sends my grandkids into peals of laughter every time.