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 Frenzied, unclean spirit" - but in the "updated" version, that exclamation point has been replaced by a comma.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. 

My Lord, What a Morning!

Music from my old church choir, circa 2001: two mikes, ten singers (all untrained), led by a jazz musician who had never directed a choir before, and without a penny for good sound equipment. We recorded these songs a cappella, in somebody's living room, interrupted by doorbells, phones ringing and dogs barking, not to mention the occasional giggle fit. The result wasn't perfect, but I think we sound pretty darned good for a group which started out with very limited skills. The songs Bill Prouten arranged and composed sound strange, because most of them are dissonant, with very tight chords, and do unexpected things (listen to the end of Coventry Carol!). Often he'd come to choir practice with a sheaf of handwritten music, the ink still fresh on it like something out of Amadeus, and we'd work all evening trying to master it. He made us better singers and better musicians than we knew how to be, or ever thought we could be. Bill Prouten was a major influence in my life for five years, and what he left me with is permanent. It's only now I can bear to listen to this, and why, I do not know! My dub onto YouTube added an extra problematic level of sound reproduction due to the crappyness of my sound equipment, but it's better than not having the songs at all. I chose the cover because from the back, that might be Bill himself.

Plastic Jesus

ARTIST: Trad and Anon
TITLE: Plastic Jesus


Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

{Refrain}
Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

I don't care if it rains or freezes
As long as I've got my Plastic Jesus
Glued to the dashboard of my car,
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He's Pink and Pleasant,
Take Him with you when you're travelling far

{Refrain}

I don't care if it's dark or scary
Long as I have magnetic Mary
Ridin' on the dashboard of my car
I feel I'm protected amply
I've got the whole damn Holy Family
Riding on the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin' ninety, I'm not wary
'Cause I've got my Virgin Mary
Guaranteeing I won't go to Hell

{Refrain}

I don't care if it bumps or jostles
Long as I got the Twelve Apostles
Bolted to the dashboard of my car
Don't I have a pious mess
Such a crowd of holiness
Strung across the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

No, I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
But I think he'll have to go
His magnet ruins my radio
And if we have a wreck he'll leave a scar

{Refrain}

Riding through the thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead, but he don't mind
Trouble coming, he don't see
He just keeps his eyes on me
And any other thing that lies behind

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Though the sun shines on his back
Makes him peel, chip, and crack
A little patching keeps him up to par

When pedestrians try to cross
I let them know who's boss
I never blow my horn or give them warning
I ride all over town
Trying to run them down
And it's seldom that they live to see the morning

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
His halo fits just right
And I use it as a sight
And they'll scatter or they'll splatter near and far

When I'm in a traffic jam
He don't care if I say Damn
I can let all sorts of curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn't hear
For he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Once his robe was snowy white
Now it isn't quite so bright
Stained by the smoke of my cigar

God made Christ a Holy Jew
God made Him a Christian too
Paradoxes populate my car
Joseph beams with a feigned elan
From the shaggy dash of my furlined van
Famous cuckold in the master plan

Naughty Mary, smug and smiling
Jesus dainty and beguiling
Knee-deep in the piling of my van
His message clear by night or day
My phosphorescent plastic Gay
Simpering from the dashboard of my van

When I'm goin' fornicatin
I got my ceramic Satan
Sinnin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
The women know I'm on the level
Thanks to the wild-eyed stoneware devil
Ridin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Sneerin' from the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Leering from the dashboard of my van

If I weave around at night
And the police think I'm tight
They'll never find my bottle, though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For His head comes off, you see
He's hollow, and I use Him for a flask

Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Ride with me and have a dram
Of the blood of the Lamb
Plastic Jesus is a holy bar

I did not write any part of this song. I remembered Paul Newman singing it in Cool Hand Luke, and wondered if I could find a video anywhere (which I could), then looked up the lyrics. Most versions had one or two verses, but this one went on forever, apparently written by that celebrated lyricist, Arthur Unknown (sometimes known by his pen name, Anon).

It's a strange thing, obviously a sour parody of What a Friend We Have in Jesus. The thing is, it was not so very long ago that I was a churchgoing Christian and even a lay minister, a preacher. Seems like a lifetime ago. So I can't quite join in wholeheartedly. But when I saw what was happening to "my" church, its slickness and desperate attempts at hipness to attract a "younger" crowd (i. e. people under 80 with more disposable income), I felt sickened. All of it was done in the name of finance. In all the time I was with that church, the main thing I heard about was not the gospels, but a desperate lack of money and the need to give, give, give.

This wasn't about hungry people overseas or Christian education, but (mostly) paying a mortgage 

which always seemed to be shockingly in arrears. If we as individuals had conducted our finances that way, the bank would have put us in foreclosure. As it was, the larger church carried us as perpetual deadbeats.

Guilt trips abounded if you didn't or couldn't raise the amount of your offerings annually, because after all, the church's expenses kept going up, and it was up to us to take up the shortfall. Don't you want to support your church? Tell us, then, just what are your priorities? Didn't we hear you went on a vacation last year? (WHAT, you went to Vegas?) Once a year, incredibly, someone came to each person's house to ask them how much they were giving, and gently but firmly pressured them into giving more. I hated this and felt it was a violation of privacy and completely unfair, but I never said anything because you just didn't say anything.  I knew if I did, I would likely be gently pressured back into the beliefs and policies of the fold (with a vague but palpable ostracism as the penalty
if I didn't), or perhaps genteelly labelled "mentally ill" (well, dear, she can't help it, you know). 

As a symptom of a structure that had been rotten for years , leadership finally caved in, and no one had the first idea why it happened, or how. It's like my "do husbands fall from the sky?" post. Jobs don't fall from the sky. Husbands don't, friends don't. WE PICK THEM. We vote our leaders in, then bitch about them endlessly, even demonize them. We were snowjobbed by a shallow huckster, fell for him hook, line and sinker, then turned him into some sort of Satanic figure who had destroyed our innocent little lamb of a church.

Bullshit!

So I walked away, even tried a few other churches and was suffocated and frankly bored. The wheezy hymns, the lack of life, the lacklustre attempts to inject some enthusiasm and relevance into the services, all of it fell flat for me. More than once, when I tried to sit down, someone put their hand out to cover the spot on the pew and said, "My family sits here." No hello, not even a "sorry", just a "go away".

It left a hole, because for some fifteen years I was deeply involved, but the last several years were just hell for me, because there was absolutely NO ONE I could talk to about it all. It would be seen as "disloyal".

But I could no longer adhere to a church with such shallow values, a church which would not or could not or just didn't want to take responsibility for all its bad decisions.

Plastic Jesus, indeed.

(CODA. As usual , while I work on these things, or after I post them, more comes to me. In this case, it startles me that I wrote the words I just wrote. I had no idea I was going to. Not that I've never written about church disillusionment before. I have, and I will again. But in this case, I merely came across a YouTube clip from Cool Hand Luke, then thought of the song, then Googled the lyrics. Funny stuff, and strange, too. And that, I thought to myself, would be that. But in the world of exploration through writing, "that" is NEVER "that" - and I thank whatever God I still have for the process.)

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