The God Sickness
August 12, 2007
by Michael Ellick

To illustrate the oddity of my circumstances in writing a sermon for Judson, I offer the following illustration: about a month ago, I went out for post-church brunch with some friends, and over my toast and coffee I was for the first time introduced to Mr. Harry Koutoukas. Now I can't remember all the details, but I recall giving him my "standard background package," - my name, the name of the island where I grew up, and finally how I came to Judson last year with the intention of one day being ordained for Christian ministry. Very pleasant, very brunch-y.

But when Harry heard this last part, he laughed, he laughed in my face, and he said, "My boy, you're ill, you're sick!"

So I stammered, or something, and I said, "Excuse me?" because I was trying to fit in, and of course I knew that I wasn't yet on the inside of any jokes.

"You're ill, you're ill," he said, "You're going to be a minister, you've got the God Sickness," he said, and then everyone laughed, and I got the distinct impression right there and then while Harry was on his way out to smoke a cigarette, that I'd been outed in the only way you can be at Judson Church. Harry, of course, was right - I do have the God Sickness.

But this is subtle: on one hand saying you have 'The God Sickness' is just good old-fashioned "in-crowd" Judson blasphemy - blasphemy, which I have come to respect as one of the greatest of all Christian virtues, because blasphemy alone keeps us from worshiping our symbols rather than that which they point to. So no problem there, this perspective comes from strength and heart, and here at Judson there is simply a collective cringe at any or all God-talk that is unsupported by God-action, and most of us consider ourselves lucky to have found a place that puts its emphasis on the latter.

But on the other hand, Harry's quick deduction of my "God Sickness," reflects a far less acceptable truth. Here it is at face value, whether or not Harry actually intended it this way: overly religious people are unhealthy. They are sick, in a very real way, and judging from my own experience of being one of these people, I can't argue, and I'm not trying to be cute, either. For the few of you here who haven't been to Seminary, they say the same thing about future ministers that they do about future therapists, specifically: that those who strive to heal are they themselves most in need of healing. But this is still being polite. I can't tell you how often I've heard that ministers are either mushy-headed idealists who are too naïve and sensitive to confront the real world without wrapping it an escapist fantasy myth, or that they're all damaged ego-maniacs with poor organizational skills, and who function as psychic vampires to everyone around them.

On some days, I'll actually admit I'm both these things. And - though I can only speak for my close friends, some of whom are here today - I think this goes for a lot of us. Metaphysics, spirituality, etc. There's "something" wrong with us. Maybe that goes for anyone who goes to any church, for any reason, I don't know. Why isn't Judson just one big community-center-slash-social-justice-dojo, why is it still a church? What else do we think we're going to get? Why are we bothering with all this archaic jargon and fantasy projection anyway, now that, as Eleanor pointed out last week, the new iPhone is finally out?

I would like to suggest that all of us here, except for Harry, do have this God Sickness, in one form or another, and whether we call it that or not is really quite beside the point. But I would also like to suggest that the fact that we do have it is the good news that we've all been waiting for, and if you don't know the reason why yet, I'm going to tell you what I think it is right here today.

First, some perspective: the God Sickness starts as a suspicion, a thrilling intuitive sense that the world is bigger and more complex and beautiful than anything our limited perspectives can grasp. For me this first came from art and music and mystery, but once I saw it, it threatened the entire structure of my personality. I remember thinking that, just as my ears could only hear a small bandwidth of all the sounds that we now know are out there to be heard, in the same way - how could my limited electrical brain ever hope to understand the true nature of reality and my place in it just by thinking? As Buckminster Fuller said, "Universe is a non-simultaneously apprehended Event," which is a fancy way of saying that we only ever see a small part of it. In the beginning, this line of reasoning was comforting to me, it gave me an intellectual justification for rejecting the intellect and following my own flights of fancy, and for a time, this was enough.

But soon things began to sour. If you're anything like me, speculative, philosophical hopefulness does nothing to assuage the real life terror of meaninglessness or injustice once you begin to confront it the world and in yourself, and this terror is the second stage of the sickness. It can take many forms: the fear of death, the fear of being left behind, the fear of being used instead of loved, or in my case, the fear of becoming a monster. The God Sickness takes us to some pretty cold and pretty scary places, because the more it takes hold, the less satisfying things are in relation to what you suspect they could be. The world becomes poisonous and alien, and soon the mind rejects all of it - good and bad.

Often this is written off as the "artistic temperament," but in these modern times when cases are more and more common and more and more severe, it is often cloaked by drug and alcohol abuse, or misdiagnosed as either depression or any number of dissociative disorders. In this light the God Sickness presents itself as a tragic hallucination, a farce, a cruel biological side effect, the mechanical projection of meaning where there is only blind mathematics.

The opposite is true. The harsh symptoms of the God Sickness represent the purging process of something else entirely, and though it is often experienced as a world-destroying, time-collapsing apocalypse, it is in fact, if allowed to run its course, the very essence of revelation. We do not project naïve hopes of compassion and intelligence on to a blind, indifferent universe - this is the myth of modernity - it is that we are projecting our fears of blindness and indifference on to a universe that is very much alive, very much intelligent, and webbed together from atom to supernova by unbreakable chords of wisdom and compassion.

I propose that the unrequited God Sickness that many have and know firsthand, is our inherent, indwelling sense of the real world chaffing up against the hallucinated society that our human thinking has created, and we all keep acting out. The God Sickness is our natural sense of the world, of God, activated fully only when the conceptual barriers and cultural artifacts inside our minds have been melted away. Racism has to go. Sexism has to go. But if you really want to find God, every 'ism' has to go.

This indwelling sense of the world comes from the fact that we are the world, the scientists figured out that we're made form the same stuff it is, and whether we decide to believe that our intuition is the inherent feeling of us actually being nature, or whether we decide to believe that this is God's holy spirit reminding our souls that we were all made by the same creator and in its likeness, we are all of us believers, and this so-called God Sickness is our haunting suspicion that there is something bigger out there to believe in, grander possibilities of experience than anything our current catalogue of ideas have been able to provide. Likewise we are reminded that the social world we inhabit - with all of its preset boundaries and static religions - is in fact a false idol of our own fashioning. It is the communally invoked power of all our ideas coalescing into a binding magic trance that, once cast, has taken on the seamless gloss of reality.

The God Sickness is our escape hatch, and we all have one. It is our primal, internal reminder that there is more to us and to the world than the little plays we've been acting out. It is a stern admonition to humility in our worldviews, but also a seducing lure into something else, something amazing, something that language and ideas cannot convey, and that you will have to see for yourself to believe.

It is this intuitive pull toward the real world that makes us rebels, heretics, and challengers of the unknown in the face of rote dogma and static ideologies. The God Sickness isn't faith or hope, it is our sampling of the real thing, the soul, that little bit of us that is everywhere at once, and offers us a sneak peak into all dimensions of creation. The God Sickness speaks to us in parables, flashes, and strange constellations of the imagination and synchronicity, not because it wishes to remain opaque, but because conventional communication can never get you there, and words only serve us like the finger that points beyond itself to the moon.

Naturally artists and poets understand this better than better than statisticians and academics do, and often artists seem to suffer their infections most acutely. Through the disease we are reminded of our impermanence, our mortality, but likewise, as this sickness continues to metastasize throughout our nervous systems, our interconnectedness to all things becomes obvious.

This twilight knowledge drives us toward compassion and social justice, not because some moralistic set of ancient guidelines has told us that it is the right thing to do, but because, if we are humble, we can see where those guidelines were always pointing. This is the natural consequence of the protestant reformation, and the third stage of our God Sickness, that we can sense directly our intimate relationship with God and the Universe, and once this insight breaks upon us, we know first hand that whatever we do for others, we are quite literally doing for our selves.

As a Christian trained to serve within the Christian tradition, I propose that this sense is not some vague construct of a hopeful imagination, but that it is itself the thing that we've all been looking for, hidden in plain view, and patiently waiting for us to open our eyes and see what has always been. The Good News. The truth - not only that we are forgiven - but that where we are damaged and broken and dying is where we most see God and God's providence throughout the cosmos.

Time has already been fulfilled, the Commonwealth of God is already at hand, and the good news is that it is far bigger, far more complex, and far more beautiful than any idol, or religion, that we could have ever fashioned in its likeness. The menu is not the meal. The poor and the sick and the broken hearted have been right there all along, not because of their broken hearts, but because of what of what is revealed to those whom society and society's myths stop serving. This, I believe, is the true grace, the ever present miracle that only requires our faith and courage and steady decision to act upon what we can already see, and have no need to prove. The Commonwealth of God is the world outside our fears and judgments, and instead of me trying to prove it with more words and ideas, let me encourage any takers here today to go for one week forgiving everyone for everything, including yourselves, and you will certainly find it.

This is the truth of the downtrodden, the hanged man, and the God Sick: Trapped is the new free! Dying to this world means being born into the real one. Such wisdom does not breed the complacency of new age fantasy, or the paranoia of fundamentalist dogmatism, but rather grants us the experiential bedrock of true certainty, and transfigures us into messengers of clarity and compassion with the whole universe as our friend and ally. And though we may still struggle to see more clearly, and though we may still fight for a just society that reflects what our hearts already know, we have already won this battle, we were never the underdogs, and this is now a rescue operation for all our brothers and sisters, including ourselves, who cannot fully see the way, the truth, and the life we know to be there.

The last line of Donna's sermon two weeks ago was to my ears one of the most interesting things I've ever heard in a church, so I'm going to go ahead and say it again as my closing prayer of gratitude: "We are already saved. We are already free." Amen.

*****

Ancient Testimony: Gospel of Thomas 2:1-3