We are surrounded by a babble of words. Do we increase their volume or allow for a moment of silence where we communicate through the power of presence? Politicians and preachers offer slogans for the times but today pause and wait – there is power in silence.
The doctor showed only mild professional interest in my litany of aches and pains and the need for remedies. He distracted me with his reflections on St Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. He asked would I consider those who had found their ‘recollection’ of life through their ‘devotions to silence’? This was beginning to sound more complicated and introspective than I had bargained on. I came for prescriptive words on the side of a package, the GP offered instead the most exotic of remedies that no longer desiring all, I might have it all without desire (broadly based on John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, Book 1, chapter 11).
It wasn’t easy to grasp his meaning. What he seemed to be saying was that I might find the healing I needed when I had learnt to refocus my desire. In other words ‘desire’ itself needed to be liberated. Recollecting, re-collecting need, ambition and self-affirmation I must face the ‘silence’ of waiting where ‘the soul’s spiritual sight would become clear’. I might expand beyond the confines of my ego-expectations to sense life’s possibility.
Yes, there is a place and time for words, but today I plan to examine Luke’s text from his chapter 8 verses 26-39 in terms of its silences: ‘a man of the city had demons … For a long time he had worn no clothes … he did not live in a house but in the tombs’. Luke explored this theme on the vast plain of loss and liberation. Here in Luke 8 he confronted the reader with the ‘dark night of the human soul’. Eckhart Tolle describes this as ‘a collapse of a perceived meaning in life … an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness’.
As you think about your own lives you must often have been there – as you gathered your children away from someone’s violence, as you spoke up for your or someone else’s rights, as you packed your small belongings and closed the door on unhappiness. Everything you had ever hoped for had collapsed, along with ‘the meaning that your mind had given it’. Luke described this dark place as a tomb ‘kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles’, driven by demons (8:29).
All you could call on in that moment was ‘the power of presence’; you might have been overwhelmed, you might have turned back, you might have given in to the oppressor but for the briefest moment you were a Christ figure. In your own way you became cruciform in the face of degradation, contempt and hostility.
There, life gained a meaning it never had before. It may be beyond your ability to explain but you know that you have somehow awakened to a fresh sense of possibility and discovery. In Mark’s parallel story all Jesus was able to say was ‘Move’ – no gestures, no promises, no threats – little more than silence – simply being there. Eckhart Tolle says it better than I can so I offer you here his words:
The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
This is the essence of the Gospel text. We are in unchartered territory; there are no comfortable rules of engagement – that is how it was with your divorce; that is how it was when your job folded; that is how it was when bullies threatened you. Now grasp the Gospel’s imagery repeated twice in this centre section of Luke chapter 8. In your own personal time, read the whole text of Luke 8 from verse 22 through to verse 39. That image of chaos so dominant in these verses lies deep in our own mythology – Beowulf and Grendel, Saint George and the dragon.
From the story of creation onwards, humans encounter ‘dragons in the deep’. The deep is the place of profound emptiness; the deep is the experience of chaos, where at any moment we might be swept into a void. Here is the image of our life story, and always we are born again out of the deep, out of the chaos and confusion of loss and emptiness. The deep is not just out there, the deep with its legion of dragons is profoundly inside us.
This account, as recorded in the Gospel, depends for its meaning on Isaiah chapter 65: it is effectually an exposition of Isaiah’s insights into the re-collection of desire after the depth and darkness of the soul’s night. Read it carefully and thoughtfully with a mind steeped in the stories of crucifixion and resurrection. This prophetic insight entirely frames Luke’s version of the Gadarene story. In other words, what you have in this text is the universal human journey.
In gathering this multitude of image and myth, Luke was more than an ancient storyteller; he sought to engage the crises of his day where people were ground under the heel of dictatorship, political corruption and personal vendettas. Their only offering in the face of devastation and loss was where recollection and imagination might draw God into the same place of crucifixion. There, they lived with ‘the power of presence’, facing the only question that mattered – what do I really need? Only people willing to stand at the place of life’s utter emptiness will encounter the instant of fullness, discovery and awareness that opens them to liberation.
Luke’s gospel chapter 8 is packed with this drama – today’s account of the demoniac draws these stories to a climax. Luke intends that his readers see power at work, power over the elemental forces that control life. And the power he speaks of is the power of presence.
This is strange territory for contemporary readers: power of the dominant, intrusive type apparently described here seems more to be avoided than embraced. There is so much expression of naked power in the world around us that we almost want to cringe in its presence. And then we watch the media presentation of hundreds of people standing silently with the sole protester in Taksim Square Istanbul: ‘his stand … has quickly become one of the strongest symbols of resistance to the government in the current wave of Turkish protests’.
You know from this account, as you know from your own life experience, that there is power in silent protest. When each of us crosses the demarcation line that defines our difference, we join the power of solidarity where our presence at least counts as much as our words. I remember in 1998 standing in the MUA picket line with dock workers against Patrick Stevedores. Some of you remember standing against the Vietnam War. You know the passion of bringing your own presence to bear as you confront the forces that seek to control and undermine life.
For Luke, the Christian faith was such a protest movement. He drew on Mark’s and other early stories about Jesus’ ministry to shape them into the language and face-to-face presence of a liberation movement. And that is the heart of today’s text. As we explore it, do not allow yourself to be distracted by its story-telling flourishes: come to the intended centre where Jesus simply stands in the presence of the chaos and confusion, of the loss and emptiness that left people in turmoil. His word and presence were about liberation.
The distraction in this story is its apparent focus on exorcism. That instance is peripheral to the meaning of the account. Exorcism, then and now, is an edge of faith issue. Its practice seems to have revived in our day, much as it did in Luke’s day, because religion had lost its tough, community, values-based challenge. Too much religion then and now was about nationalism, ethnic identity, conformity to outdated patterns of belief and avoidance of intimacy.
In Luke’s world and ours superstition and a focus on the supernatural distract us from the day-to-day encounters where each of us meets our fears and longings with courage and a determination to begin again. Yes, we live in uncertainty:
caught up in behaviours that are outside the realm of the normal … and for which there is no explanation either in the physical world or in the world of medical and psychological and psychiatric science. Once you turn around and say there is no scientific explanation for this person’s behaviour… then you’re confronted with the question of what the hell is it?’ (Dr Gerard Stoyles, psychologist and Catholic priest, University of Wollongong).
Is there a supernatural world beyond us, which impacts our lives and responses? And does it finally matter, when what counts most is the power of your presence.
In the primitive and mythological imagery of the first and earlier centuries Luke was addressing this issue. A superficial reading of Gospel text set for today seems to suggest an external world of demon possession. I think there is evidence that Jesus saw life this way. He spoke of angels, demons and God as all external to us: each invading us, and our world, from the outside.
I can see no value in denying that, even if I cannot believe it for myself. This is part of the mythology that shaped the language of the first century. We are molded by different images – dare I call them mythologies – that derive their language from neuroscience and anthropology. We abandon this, and the medical science that goes hand in hand, at our physical and emotional peril. And yet, we live every day with a sense of anxiety about things that lie beyond us, such as illness and death and things closer to hand like violence, genocide, corruption and greed. Before I add another word, listen to Jesus’ own comment on this: whatever else is beyond and outside us, ‘evils like these come from within and defile a person’ (Mark 7:23).
Let the exorcism language slip to the edge and hold onto that statement of Jesus as we explore Luke’s text – beyond its first century mythology. This is one more stock-in-trade story repeated in three of the Gospels. Each writer developed it to his own purpose. The geography is impossible. The town described as Gerasa or Gadara were respectively 60 kilometres and 14 kilometres distant from the Sea of Galilee. The writers must have seen the absurdity and yet retained the primitive account. Try to imagine the pigs running that distance to be drowned in the lake – and at once you will realise that something other than the literal is intended here.
At each point in the story, you are introduced to the world in which the evangelist worked. The hearers would have understood the terminology and would also have understood the need for reticence or disguised imagery. These were hard days when ‘Legion’ might invade at any time. Yes, ‘Legion’, an army unit that may have consisted of 6000 troops, ready to protect Rome’s heartland; ‘Legion’ already dominant in the destruction of the Jewish homeland; ‘Legion’ as the external face of terror.
And facing Legion is the Man with nothing more than ‘the power of presence’ which is all any of us can offer in the face of what might harm or destroy us. ‘The power of presence ’ is so fragile, and leaves us so vulnerable. If you want ‘the power of presence’ to capture your imagination, listen again to Martin Luther King:
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
Hear Mahatma Ghandi remind you:
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
Or take to heart this double-edged story with all its personal limitations:
It was Sunday night, church was over and supper called – so I walked through the now deserted church grounds to buy milk at the grocery shop opposite. A crowd had gathered while one man was being savagely beaten. I tried to look away but he called me, ‘Are you going to walk by and leave me here?’ Without the reflection that I perhaps I should have taken, I found myself standing cruciform between the combatants. This was not an act of bravery and may well have been an act of blind stupidity – but I didn’t think about it. For the moment ‘the power of presence’ galvanised the inner being to face a crisis out of my own vulnerability.
You could add a myriad of stories of your own. In all of them you search to find yourself ‘seated, clothed and in your right mind’, but that is only possible for those who, knowing the power of presence, have discovered their own re-birth. There is a time and place for words – there is power in silence.
A Meditation Homily based on the Gospel reading for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke’s Gospel chapter 8 verses 26-39.
Bill Lawton
21 June 2013