Sermon: Only More So – Rev. Eric Banner

One of the things I love about serving a congregation like this one is the way we’re real with each other. A lot of churches are filled with people who, by dint of pressure or personality, feel like they have to show up perfect, or not show up at all. And there are a lot of amazing people in this congregation. Stories of success and service that make me hope I can be like them when I grow up. But it’s also a church that has room for us to show up and talk about the hard things, the things that aren’t working in our lives, and be our full selves, as we are, and as we hope to be. It says it right in our vision for this congregation, “a mosaic of diverse generations, backgrounds, and identities, where we can bring all of who we are, and who we hope to become.”

I mention that because we are in May, and for many decades, though I wasn’t aware of it until I heard about it from a leader in a congregation I once served who was active with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI, May is Mental Health Awareness month. And it felt like a good time to go back to something we did last fall, where we had a whole service with nothing but questions you had, and some of them were simply too big to handle then. One of them asked – “How do we, as UUs at large, and in this church in particular, help and show up for (those facing mental health issues) and do we include the severely mentally ill in our social justice efforts and how?”

Now, there’s a lot in that question, and the truth is, the scope of our social justice efforts is defined largely by the interests of our members, both here at First Universalist and in the larger faith. But the truth is, part of what happens is that it can be hard to talk about, because unlike a cancer diagnosis, or diabetes, or osteoporosis, or a hundred other physical health diagnoses we might have, there’s still a sort of stigma about saying our brains aren’t working quite right.

She wasn’t explicitly talking about mental health, but I’ve been struck for a long time by the truth of what the poet Audre Lorde said in an interview about how she had survived so much, and for so long.

“I feel I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain… All that anxiety, pain, defeat must be shared. We tend to talk about what feels good. We talk about what we think is settled. We never seem to talk about the ongoing problems… In other words,” she said, “we have survived the pain, the problems, the failures, so that what we need to do si use this suffering and learn from it. We must remember and comfort ourselves with the fact that survival is, in itself, a victory.”

Mental health is a big broad category. Just as physical health runs the gamut from a broken pinkie toe to stage four pancreatic cancer, so too is mental health a constellation of things that exist on a continuum, distributed across the world and individual communities no differently than height or intelligence or temprement, as Dr. Awais Aftab of Case Western reminded readers in the New York Times just earlier this week. The National Institutes of Health has a whole page dedicated just to the prevelance of mental illness, including both any mental illness and serious mental illness, which are observed, respectively, in about a quarter of the population in any given year, and about 6% of the population, for serious mental illness. In a community like ours, that means that in any given year more than a hundred of us will experience some sort of mental illness, and dozens of us will experience serious mental illness. For some, shadows & monsters, for others something less, but many of us, each year will find ourselves in the grips of a mind that isn’t working the way it should.

Part of the work of living faithfully with that reality is coming to terms with it in our lives, and in the lives of our families, knowing what we can do for ourselves and each other, and when and how. I stole the title of this morning’s message from a book written by Mark Vonnegut. He’s a pediatrician, practicing in Massachussets, once named Boston’s number 1 pediatrician, in fact, and the survivor of four separate mental health breakdowns that left him hospitalized. And yes, he is also the son of noted author Kurt Vonnegut. In his book, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So, he traces both his own journey and his family’s journey through all sort of mental health challenges, and the role of the arts in saving them.

“Craziness,” he wrote, “also runs in the family. I can trace manic depression back several generations. We have episodes of hearing voices, delusions, hyper-religiosity, and periods of not being able to eat or sleep. These episodes are remarkably similar across generations and between individuals. It’s like an apocalyptic disintegration sequence that might be useful if the world really is ending, but if the world is not ending, you just end up in a nuthouse. If we’re lucky enough to get better, we have to deal with people who seem unaware of our heroism and who treat us as if we are just mentally ill."

Dark humor runs deep in the Vonnegut line, and in many who trace serious mental illness through their lives. Just a page later he notes that if you want to see who went crazy from time to time in his family, you just needed to look for the ones who appeared 10 years younger than they were, from laughing and crying a lot, while trying to figure “out what to do next. It keeps the facial muscles tones up.” And that’s all just chapter 1.

Chapter 2 is titled simply, “Raised by Wolves,” and opens with Vonnegut noting that “The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I’ve saved myself trying to be normal.”

But what are we to do with all of this? As individuals and as a community. Well, you’ve already met Barbara Meyers this morning. She introduced the offering, our shared gift to the UU Mental Health Ministry, which she founded, and leads. She wrote a book years ago about “showing up for each other’s mental health,” and in it she shared the story of her own journey, including her hospitalization for psychiatric care, first as she suffered from severe post-partum depression, a condition that affects 10-20% of women in the first year after a child is born, across a range of severities, and then nearly a decade later in the midst of a manic episode that included visions, and led to an involuntary hospitalization.

In her book she shared the insights of Dr. Mark Ragins “a staff psychiatrist at The Village, an integrated service agency in Long Beach, California, that is renowned for its success in treating difficult psychiatric cases, often involving homelessness, schizophrenia, and substance abuse.

He says, ‘When I ask psychiatric patients who have done well what I did that was helpful to them... they almost always recount some moment of human connectedness: "It was when you hugged me and I could tell you knew how much it pained me to have my child taken away.” “It was when you believed in me, when I couldn’t believe in myself.” “It was when you lent me $5.00 even though you’re not supposed to.” “It was when you drove me home from the hospital in your car even though I was smelly.” “It was when I knew you really cared and wouldn’t give up on me.”’

In other words, it was when they were the recipient of an act of human kindness or when someone believed in them. These moments are what help in healing. Here is where the faith community comes in. People of faith are experts in human kindness. We can believe in people. We can see something inside them that they aren’t able to see themselves. We can give acceptance and love even when an illness is untreated or a person feels hopeless. And these may be central factors in recovery.”

This is part of what it means to talk about all of who we are, and who we hope to become. Not to deny the struggles, or the challenges, or to paper over them, but to make space to hold them, for ourselves and for each other. It takes all of us. The kindness we show to ourselves, and the kindness we show to one another. It is the recognition of our own inherent worth and dignity, and the inherent worth and dignity of the stranger and friend.

You might be thinking I’m telling you to set aside your own safety, to engage directly with someone whose mental illness has made them unable to make good, safe choices, and unless that is something you are trained in, you probably shouldn’t do that. I remind our staff and leaders with some regularity of the limits of our own skills and training. I am not a licensed mental health professional. I’m not trained in dealing with psychotic breaks. But I can be with someone while they are in a hard time, and, over the years, I’ve learned I can be with myself in those moments, too. With time, therapy, activity, and yes, even medication, each of us suffering for, or with, mental illness can make it to the next day, the next week, the next joy and possibility, but it is so much harder to do so if we can’t make space for holding oursleves and each other.

So let me leave you with some words from the Quaker writer Parker Palmer, who was himself also hospitalized for severe depression three times in his forties.

“If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, …
I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else!
My life is not only about my strengths and virtues;
it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.
An inevitable, though often ignored, dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.”

This week you will encounter someone suffering from mental illness. It might be you. It might be a loved one. It might be a neighbor. It might be a co-worker. But whoever it is, may you make space for the wholeness of life, in wellness and in illness. May you offer to yourself, and to them, connectedness and care, instead of turning away. Mental illness isn’t contagious, but love and care are, and the more of those we spread, the more there will be to hold us all when our day comes, and what we most need is the light that heals and holds us, all the way through.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister