The Age of Miracles is Long Past

reframing the gospel story

There is a gospel story (Mark 5:11-17) that has always bothered me. In the story, Jesus meets a man, who lives in a graveyard, who is possessed by "demons." 

Jesus tells the demons to come out, but the demons beg Jesus to throw them into the herd of pigs grazing on a nearby cliff. So Jesus does this, setting the man free. But those poor pigs! The whole herd of them runs screaming off the cliff. Whenever I heard this story, I was much more concerned with the pigs than with the poor man!

In 2018, in a very low place, I wrote this poem. I am bipolar, and I have a brother who is schizoid-affective. Both of us could have easily ended up living in a graveyard, raving and lunatic. 

In this poem I try to capture the soul of this man forced to live in a graveyard, alone, tormented with mental illness--utterly cast out from society. 

I am also trying to convey the larger point about miracles--we don't need them. We need each other. 

I think that's the hardest lesson to learn when there's so much religion getting in the way. Perhaps you will know what I mean.

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The Age of Miracles is Long Past

Father, 

I am like this man, 
the man raving through the graveyard, 
mind howling, 
racing. 
No rest. 
No stopping.

This man moving among 
the stones, pausing to trace 
their etchings-- 
what is left of his family, 
a friend he once had.

This man broken, 
whirling, 
full of leathery wings 
and pronged sticks. 
Forks.

Fear, fear, fear.

I am like this man, 
this lost man, 
his brain full of bees, 
full of the relentless 
swarms of voices.

Father, 
I am the same as he--
unclean, 
thrown out, 
hidden. 
I am that man.

Father, Father, 
I also am 
broken, 
bent, 
head turned inside out 
and soulless. 

Can you hear him, Father?
He says what I have said--
that I took these voices for 
angels once, 
for gods, 
until they turned me loose here, 
with only stones here, 
only black-winged 
birds for solace, 
only the dead to hear me, 
only the low-slung bitter sky 
to hold me.

Father, Father, 
This man could be me.

When you come walking toward 
him hiding in his prison of rocks, 
he runs out to meet you.

He bows before you, 
and the window of his chest 
is smashed open
and all the voices in him 
cry out--

please, please don't hurt us, don't hurt the man. We are so many, there has always been room for us. Please just chain us to the stable wall again, please just lock us in the cage again so the children can come and torment us, but please don't hurt the house of the man, 
we have always lived here.

Then Father, 
you gather all the voices, 
these long-time residents of his head, 
and you take up this cup, 
you take up this broken cup of man 
and you smash the misfiring, 
diseased sections of his brain into a 
ball and kick it into a herd of pigs 
who devour it, 
and run crazed and screaming 
over the cliff, 
never heard from again inside this 
now scoured-out-clean soul of man.

But I am not this man, 
on this Monday, 
this year of our Lord 2018. 

There is no one to
cast me out over the water 
and reel me back clean. 
There is no one to snatch 
whatever is sick in me 
and toss it over the cliff. 
There are no miracles here.
The age of miracles has long since passed.

But maybe it wasn't a miracle. 

Maybe Jesus lifted this man up
from the ground and kissed his forehead. 
Maybe he looked into this man's eyes, 
this lunatic, unclean, smelly, 
desperately lonely man 
and pulled him to his chest. 
A chest large enough to hold 
all this man's sufferings. 

Maybe he just held him, 
and then led him away from the gravestones, 
and introduced him to his friends, 
and said, 

"Come, eat with us. 
We are all one here."