Don’t Have a Fit

The stories of the Gospels are historical, they recount actual events in the lives of Jesus and his disciples. But in all of these events is a lesson to be learned, each having a significant, spiritually instructive aspect. It is easy to see the spiritual lessons in the healing of a lame man (who hasn’t felt spiritually crippled from time to time), and in the healing of a blind man (you’d have to be blind to miss the symbolism), but what can we learn from the healing of this desperate father’s son.

Many scholars believe that the boy’s malady, as described in the Gospels, was epilepsy. St. Matthew uses the word σεληνιάζομαι (seléniazomai), which is from the Greek work for moon, σελήνη (seléné), so that the literal meaning is “moonstruck,” or lunatic (itself based on the Latin word for moon). In St. Mark’ Gospel, on the other hand, the father blames a mute spirit, but gives a more precise description of symptoms that closely match those of an epileptic seizure. Whether it’s a neurological disorder or a demon, Jesus heals the boy and upbraids the father and His disciples for the lack of a faith that prevents them from doing the same. Then, curiously, he adds that “this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”

The fact that both Greek and Latin describe being afflicted with a severely disordered state of mind using words relating to the moon reflects the ancient belief that seasons, or even the moon itself, influence one’s manner and disposition, like the werewolf of legend who during most moon phases is a completely normal man, but in a full moon turns into a blood-thirsty animal. Ancient philosophical minds looking to common occurrences when seeking for causes hang the responsibility for episodic fits of insanity on moon phases. However, before we dismiss such notions as antiquated, we should consider how our own mentality does tend to change with seasons—I can’t be the only one who’s ever suffered from cabin fever in the winter.

All of us go through seasonal changes in life. They are often repetitive and predictable, and may take weeks, months, or even years to complete. Others can surprise us. For example, someone whose life is coasting along in its predictable cycles, but every once in a while suffers a disruption and goes “off the rails.” Considering this, the lesson I take from the Gospel reading this week is that while some of us are spiritually lame, and some are spiritually blind, there are others who are spiritually epileptic. We seem to have it all together professionally, personally, spiritually. Then all of a sudden we don’t. A man four years sober goes on a bender; the Sunday School director profanely curses one of her teachers; an honest child is caught in a lie, and it happens more than once, in a cycle. The second century theologian Origen of Alexandria describes the problem this way:

This affection attacks the sufferers at considerable intervals, during which he who suffers from it seems in no way to differ from the man in good health, at the season when the epilepsy is not working on him…then, sometimes, as if they were seized with a kind of epilepsy arising from their passions, they fall down from the position in which they seemed to stand, and are drawn away by the deceit of this world and other lusts.

Origen goes on to allegorize the results of the epileptic son’s seizures, writing that when fits throw them into the fire the spiritual epileptics “become adulterers, like a pan heated for the cooking from the burning flame,” and when it throws him in the water “the king of all the dragons in the waters casts them down from the sphere where they appeared to breath freely, so that they come into the depths of the waves of the sea of human life.” It is a warning we should heed: no matter how secure we think ourselves spiritually, at the changing of the moon or mood we may be overwhelmed by our passions or by the cares of life. So how do we avoid such a fall?

When Jesus told the disciples the remedy for this disease, he didn’t say “you can only cast out this kind by prayer and fasting.” He said, rather, “this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” For protecting ourselves from spiritual epilepsy, our two silver bullets are prayer and fasting. We cannot stop the changing of the seasons, nor perhaps can we prevent the periodic afflictions such changes bring, but we can keep from becoming a victim of those changes if we anchor ourselves through constant prayer to Jesus who is the same yesterday and today and forever. The dragons of the waters will find it more difficult to overwhelm us with the cares of life if we always prayerfully remember our eternal salvation. Through fasting we can turn down the heat in our frying pan so that we will be less likely to be cast into the fire. With a regular, disciplined approach to prayer and fasting together, the epileptic spirit will come out of us and, hopefully, keep things from getting really hairy.