Of Demons and Spirits

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator

Middle Easterners view their world differently than our Western culture. Theirs was a world controlled by forces they called spirits while ours is a world controlled by the laws of physics and the biological sciences. Where they saw demons and spirits, we see illnesses, conditions, and syndromes. Our understanding of illness has gone beyond the world of the purely physical or organic and embraced the world of emotions and psychiatric states. For instance, epilepsy was once thought of as a matter of being possessed by a spirit or demon. Today we know that epilepsy is caused by erratic electrical signals in the brain that cause seizures.

Today's Gospel labels a person as a demoniac, one possessed by a demon. The man was mute. Once the "spirit" was driven out, the man was able to speak. In our modern day world, the person's condition might have been called a catatonic state or some other affliction that made it impossible for the person to speak. Other such "demoniacs" are described as thrashing about and frothing at the mouth, perhaps what we know as a seizure.

However, the point of this essay is not to label the diseases with which these people were afflicted. The point here is that just as so-called mental illnesses isolate people today, they also did so in Jesus' world. They would have been avoided and relegated to the fringes of human activity much the same as they are today. Jesus touches these people just as he touched the blind, the deaf, the lame, etc. His response to their plight was compassionate as well as salutary.

CUSA has been able to include many who suffer from cognitive and emotional disability. Obviously, it is not always able to embrace all such disorders. However, this does not mean that people so afflicted are not part of our concern. Like Jesus, it is important that we make every effort to come to understanding and to extend compassion to our fellow sufferers.