To Be Human Is Divine: Week 4
The Eye of the Storm
Calida Rawles – Radiating My Sovereignty
“Then the storm broke, and the dragons danced.”
George R.R. Martin, Fire & Blood
My mother was bona fide crazy. We didn’t like that word, but the label stuck: Crazy Nada. And since it was the 80s and no one cared about the feelings or dignity or humanity of people living with mental illness—especially Black women living with mental illness—it’s what the police reports called my mother whenever there was trouble at our house, “Crazy Nada’s at it again.”
But I was my mother’s youngest, fantastical and dreamy daughter. I was the one that everyone said looked just like her, and maybe this is why I couldn’t see my mother as anything but a reverie who occasionally took poetic license with her life.
When she perfectly arranged our entire living room on our front lawn—first the rug, then the green velvet sofa flanked with end tables, followed by our oval glass-topped coffee table accessorized with her stack of Better Homes and Garden and Ebony magazines—I thought she looked glamorous, lounging in an armchair smoking her cigarette, waiting for company. True, I was just a kid who didn’t know any better, but the whirlwind of her most spectacularly abnormal behavior, the tempestuous deluge, was reminiscent of Diana Ross live and singing in Central Park in the midst of a torrential downpour of city slick rain – glamorous despite being wind-tossed and soaked to the bone, unforgettable in the command of her art. Or she was like a siren, eerie and beguiling, wrecking ships and terrifying. It was a thrill to have something so powerful that belonged to me, if only by my proximity to the eye of the storm.
When I was 25 years old and less enamored of my mother, feeling more abandoned by her life and all its diagnoses, I watched a made-for-TV movie in which Diana Ross played a woman with schizophrenia, the same illness for which my mother was treated. The Diva’s performance bore no resemblance to any memory of my mother. Twelve years later, when I was 37, I watched Ross on In the Actor’s Studio. During the interview, she told the host and audience that she “affected” the gait of a homeless woman living with mental illness by placing an orange between her thighs so that she would hobble along during the scene when she gamboled down an alley rummaging through trash cans. I felt betrayed by the illness, the movie, and God. Not everybody rummages through garbage cans in a psychotic state. Many have beautiful homes and story-crafting daughters who sit on the living room lawn with them when no one else will.
Calida Rawles – Infinite From Root to Tip
There are no stories about psychiatric illnesses in the Bible. None. In the primitive world of biblical times, there was no such thing as psychology or psychiatry. But there are also no stories about cancer or autism or diabetes or Alzheimer’s or arthritis, at least not explicitly. There are plenty of stories about boils, epilepsy, dysentery, fevers, leprosy, pestilences and disabilities. For the most part these illnesses and disabilities are attached to some sort of sin or punishment. And it doesn’t help that the Bible is filled with verses that declare any person who is ill or has a disability as unclean and untouchable, condemned and unholy, mad and demon-possessed.
The apostles Mark and Matthew tell the story of a man named Legion who lived amongst the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones. The translations vary on Legion’s exact diagnosis:
The New International Version: “a man with an impure spirit”
The New Living Translation: “a man possessed”
The Amplified Bible: “a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit”
The Common English Bible: “a man possessed by an evil spirit”
The Living Bible: “a demon-possessed man”
The Voice: "a man who was tortured”
The Worldwide English Bible: “The man had a bad spirit in him”
The Mace New Testament: “he met a demoniack”
The Aramaic in Plain English: “a man met him from among the tombs that had a foul spirit in him”
The Passion Translation: “a demon-possessed madman”
The Easy English Bible: “a man with a bad spirit”
The Message: “a madman from the cemetery”
Bible scholar and commentator William Barclay wrote this about Mark’s story of Legion:
Here is a vivid and rather eerie story. It is the kind of story in which we have to do our best to read between the lines, because it is thinking and speaking in terms quite familiar to people in Palestine in the days of Jesus but quite alien to us…
It was always supposed in those days that, if a demon's name could be discovered, it gave a certain power over it. An ancient magical formula says, ‘I adjure thee, every demonic spirit, Say whatsoever thou art.’ The belief was that if the name was known the demon's power was broken. In this case even that did not prove enough.
There were many neighbors who considered my mother to be a legion of demonic possession. To them, my mother’s home was a catacomb filled with terrors. Many of them would cross the street rather than walk on the sidewalk in front of my mother’s house. Only others bearing legions of their own demons would dare to cross her threshold. The ones who kept their distance would have been surprised at my mother’s hospitality, her eye for color, pattern and texture, her sewing skills and her flawless attention to detail. They also didn’t know that every day, my mother would rise, wrap her head, open her Bible, and read and pray while taking a ceremonial toke of weed as an offering to heaven.
The neighbors also didn’t know that demons don’t twist and distort and maim themselves. They aren’t caused by illness but by greed. And demons are as clever as chameleons. They look just like everybody else and are followers not leaders. They are minions. Not divas like my mother.