Exorcism: Jesus-Style

Ahead, the rush-hour gridlock was easing, making the voices in her head sound even louder. They were honing in now on a single command, and repeating it over and over: kill them all. Pam steered her car to an exit lane, abandoned it, and then began running. A police car managed to block her way back onto the expressway, saving her from the on-coming traffic.

For a long time, Pam (not her real name) has been in the clutches of something that has  re-defined her identity just as insidiously as Alzheimer’s disease eventually erased her father’s own. With respect to both, I have often called to mind the description in Mark’s Gospel of that agitated, out-of-control, unapproachable man of the tombs and the hillsides, crying out day and night and beating himself incessantly. (5:2-5)

Was that ancient tomb-dweller “psychotic”? Without a doubt. More importantly, he was “possessed.” And when I am honest with myself about Pam, what I most wish for is someone, anyone, who could make her own demons leave her for good. So when I recently read Scott Peck’s latest account of performing exorcisms himself as acts both of care and of desperation, I knew exactly the kind of impulse that could lead a Christian believer to take on a loved one’s demons directly.

Jesus took the demons on all the time. For St. Mark, his exorcisms clearly played the prominent, and perhaps even the decisive role in confirming everything else that he sought to convey in his singularly focused message about the kingdom of God. For us, the trouble is that Jesus’ exorcisms often impress more than his teachings do, and make people clamor for wonder-working more than for wisdom. It is easy to forget one important truth about confronting states of possession: without Jesus, exorcism is a problematic healing strategy at best, and when it isn’t effective (only one of Scott’s two exorcisms was), what we have to rely on is love.

Once, Pam had plenty of it. She and other “out of the closet” schizophrenic members of her church received regular support by a compassionate and understanding group of laypersons who prayed regularly for them and for the therapists who treated them. These prayer partners also offered very tangible kinds of help to family members struggling daily with the otherwise crushing responsibilities of being their stricken (adult) childrens’ and siblings’ primary, and sometimes only, caregivers.

One thing Pam’s own therapist was especially grateful for was the caregivers’ ability to communicate effectively an abiding love for her especially in and through her most off-putting episodes. He told me in amazed tones that they always seemed to be able to figure out new ways not only to keep things from getting worse, but to reduce the frequency and intensity of his patient’s most florid psychotic episodes. Tragically, this support group slowly slipped away, and when Pam moved to another city in the interest of what looked to be a major career advancement, her condition deteriorated irreversibly.

Loving actions can have a remissive effect on psychosis and possession, even if only temporarily. Pam’s own episodes were crippling, but  they were also relatively infrequent. Usually, she could hold them at bay by staying on her prescribed medications and in therapy, and by her harried parents’ keeping their home environment’s emotional force field at relatively low levels of intensity. But other things in Pam’s life helped too, especially her close and compassionate circle of friends in the church, and her active participation in worship, especially at Eucharistic celebrations and through what for her was the sacrament of confession and penance.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association posits that psychotic disorders like Pam’s affect perhaps as much as one percent  of the population. Since her congregation now numbers about 4,500, it is reasonable to speculate that as many as 45 of its members may be struggling as Pam did with a kind of distress that often looks like nothing less than states of possession. At one time, the pastor personally knew of seven.Where might the others be?  
Some of them are almost surely living in protective back rooms of their families’ homes, because they cannot function on their own and because institutions that once could have helped them are no longer accessible. Others may be on the streets, in alleys and parks,  living as the detritus of a society enamored with success, wealth, and fame and contemptuous of anyone who suddenly becomes inconvenient to its “well” members’ illusory sense of well-being. These psychotic, yes, possessed men and women are the tomb-dwellers of the modern world.

If we cannot exorcise their demons, though, we do not have to leave them “crying out day and night,” alone.

Exorcism, Scott Peck-Style

If you never got around to reading Scott Peck’s 1978 book, The Road Less Traveled, be grateful that it is still in print, pick it up at the library or your favorite bookstore, and start in on it before other things distract you again. The Road … represents a brilliant psychiatrist’s take on life’s difficulties and possibilities, from the perspective of his newly aroused interests in the world of the spirit. Seven million copies of this wonderful book have been sold thus far, and it made the New York Times best seller list for over ten years.

Peck’s second book, however --- People of the Lie --- is another story. It is about evil, evil-doers, and most startling of all, an Evil One who is often involved in both. Evil? You better believe it. Evildoers? Absolutely. But Satan? Well… And a psychiatrist telling the story? That’s just too much. At least, a lot of Peck’s reviewers said so at the time. His readers felt otherwise, however. Though sales of this book came nowhere near The Road’s, the two books together were enough to keep the good doctor comfortably retired from further psychiatric practice and delightedly on the lecture circuit thereafter.

It was chapter five of People of the Lie that unnerved even some of  Peck’s most ardent admirers. This chapter is about possession and exorcism, and contains one of the book’s most significant, and from a psychiatric perspective most startling claims, to the effect that possession is a mental disorder --- now, we would say, with both narcissistic and dissociative features --- involving in addition demons, and sometimes even Satan himself/herself/itself. In that chapter and elsewhere in the book, Peck described his positioning of himself in the midst of two exorcisms as an interested observer, and hinted that a fuller exploration of the whole subject might be forthcoming in a subsequent book.

It took a while, but Peck has now made good on his implicit promise, with the release of Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption. This book should prove even more unnerving than People of the Lie did, but it will be important to keep in mind just why it should. What is especially disturbing about it is that Peck’s re-visiting of the two exorcisms includes the shocking admission that he was not merely a participant-observer in them, as People led us to believe, but the principal exorcist himself.

On any reasonable caregiver’s definition, whether from the standpoint of the mental health professions in general or of spirituality in particular, Scott Peck’s exorcisms of more than twenty years ago look for all the world like actions performed by an unworthy practitioner who could easily have made already very bad situations even worse. I use the term “unworthy” here quite intentionally, because at the time in his life that Peck conducted these exorcisms, he was also describing himself in the very terms that should have stopped him from even thinking about making the “massive therapeutic intervention” of exorcism (his words) part of any treatment plan.

By his own account, Peck was then a “recent convert” to Christianity, who had much to learn about God, the church, the salvation process, and just about everything else Christian. And the cavalier attitude toward organized religion that he exhibited in spite of his conversion has not changed all that much. For example, in a recent interview he spoke engagingly of prayer and God’s presence in his life, but continued to insist on his “nondenominational status,” but that he might-possibly-maybe become a Roman Catholic --- if we “put a gun to his back.”

Why are these otherwise tacky observations relevant? Because Peck declaimed from the rooftops in People of the Lie that exorcism is a very serious and dangerous business, to be performed only by very knowledgeable, skilled, and gifted people, and only with the full backing of their churches behind them. When I pressed him on the matter during a colloquy we had in Dallas years ago, Scott said in no uncertain terms that his conscience dictated his caution, and that everyone else should be similarly tentative about the whole subject of demonic possession. Now, he confesses that he performed the exorcisms because he could not find anyone else to do them. I doubt seriously that he would do brain surgery for a similar reason.

It saddens me deeply to contemplate that Parkinson’s Disease may make Glimpses of the Devil the last book we will ever have from this much cherished physician, guide, and friend. Without doubt, Scott himself deserves better from life, as do all sufferers from this terrible disease. But we deserve better, too, from this immensely caring and insightful man than he most recently chose to give us. Happily, though, The Road Less Traveled is still out there, and will be for many years to come.

[The March 23 column will consider Exorcism, Jesus-Style.]