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Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – August 30, 2009
Never mind the ABC’s. This is the year of the H1N1 - formerly the Swine, flu - and as students and teachers across the nation return to the classrooms, the three C’s are at the top of everyone’s lesson plan. In order to curb the spread of this illness, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that “students and staff should step up basic health hygiene practices like the three Cs – clean, cover and contain. Clean – wash your hands frequently to prevent the spread of germs. Cover – your cough or sneeze with your elbow or sleeve. Contain – students and staff should stay home if they’re sick.”
Yes, there is a reason that the first C refers to cleanliness, most notably hand cleanliness, the best way to prevent infection. “Hand washing is a simple habit that can help keep you healthy,” says the Mayo Clinic, “an easy way to prevent infection.”
”Throughout the day,” they say, “you accumulate germs on your hands from a variety of sources, such as direct contact with people, contaminated surfaces, foods, even animals and animal waste. If you don’t wash your hands frequently enough, you can infect yourself with these germs by touching your eyes, nose or mouth. And you can spread these germs to others by touching them or by touching surfaces that they also touch, such as doorknobs.”
There’s more, much more, from the Mayo Clinic website on the benefits of hand washing, five pages to be exact. The point is made, and then it is made again, not quite obsessively, but close. And, when it comes to hand washing, there is indeed a fine line between observing best practices to maintain good physical health and becoming prisoner of an obsession, acting out compulsions, sure signs of ill mental and spiritual health.
More than quirkiness, as Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder – or OCD - is often portrayed in the media – think the private detective “Monk” on television or the character played by Jack Nicholson in “As Good as it Gets” - the people who suffer from this disease suffer indeed.
According to The National Institute of Mental Health, “People with OCD have persistent, upsetting thoughts (obsessions) and use rituals (compulsions) to control the anxiety these thoughts produce. Most of the time, the rituals end up controlling them. For example,” and notice that this is the first example cited, “If people are obsessed with germs or dirt, they may develop a compulsion to wash their hands over and over again.”
Now, there is nothing wrong with rituals. In fact, says the University of Virginia Health System, “During the normal growth and development of children and adolescents, rituals and obsessive thoughts normally occur with a purpose and focus based on age. Preschool children often use rituals and routines around mealtimes, bath, and bedtime to help them stabilize their expectations and understanding of their world.” (Every parent knows what it means to read the same story every night before your child will go to bed. God forbid you should leave anything out! The kids have it memorized but they still need to hear it.)
As children age, their thoughts and behaviors change; they will collect objects or develop hobbies or favorite activities, rituals which help them to socialize and learn to master anxiety. But when the rituals take over, socialization diminishes as anxiety increases. “A child or adolescent with OCD,” says the University of Virginia, “has obsessive thoughts that are unwanted and related to fears (such as a fear of touching dirty objects) and uses compulsive rituals to combat the fears (such as excessive hand washing). When OCD is present, obsessive thoughts cause distress and compulsive rituals can become so frequent or intense that they interfere with activities of daily living and normal developmental activities.” As an example, one patient washed his hands in excess of 100 times a day.
But it’s not just adolescents who exhibit this behavior. When I worked in a mental health clinic in Chicago years ago, I had an adult woman client whose hands were rubbed red and raw from all the time she spent scouring them under the sink.
This is where a healthy habit of cleanliness becomes a pathological pattern of obsessions and compulsions. After an extreme preoccupation with dirt, germs and contamination showing itself in repeated hand washing, the second most common symptom of OCD, according to the University of Virginia, is “repeated doubts, for example whether or not the door is locked.” This shows itself, as you would imagine, in repeated checking and rechecking. In fact, the French refer to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as the “Doubting Disease.”
Now, you don’t need to be a mental health expert to know that washing your hands 100 times a day or checking the locks ten times an hour is over the line. The key question, of course, is this: where is the line to be found? The National Institute of Mental Health says that, “Healthy people also have rituals, such as checking to see if the stove is off several times before leaving the house. The difference is that people with OCD perform their rituals even though doing so interferes with daily life and they find the repetition distressing.
One OCD patient said, “I couldn’t do anything without rituals. They invaded every aspect of my life.” Another reported, “I knew the rituals didn’t make sense, and I was deeply ashamed of them, but I couldn’t seem to overcome them.” And, another added, “Because of the time I spent on rituals, I was unable to do a lot of things that were important to me.”
Okay, I better stop now before you all run home to make sure your door is locked and your stove is turned off. Habits and rituals have an important place in our lives; they keep us healthy and order our worlds. I guess you could say that they lose their place when they take the place of everything else. When observing a ritual becomes more important than the original purpose of the ritual, nothing but ill health will follow.
Given the emphasis on the word “ritual,” it should not come as a big surprise to know that there can be a religious component to Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, a sub group of symptoms and behaviors known to physicians and theologians as “scrupulosity,” in which individuals are consumed by religious and moral fervor. Some think Martin Luther might have suffered from this; when he was a priest he reportedly spent hour after hour in confession, repenting the same minor sins over and over again.
A heightened concept of sin seems to lie at the heart of scrupulosity, which makes sense, since so much of OCD is about an exaggerated desire for cleanliness. “I can’t stop thinking about my sins!” reads the headline in an article on scrupulosity in a recent issue of “Catholic Digest,” before recounting the story of a woman named Kay who said she attends Mass every morning. “I receive communion after I beg God’s forgiveness for any offenses I’ve committed since Mass yesterday. If I offend God before I get home from church – or even back from the pew – I immediately pray the Rosary.”
Everyone thinks she’s such a religious person but, Kay says, the reason she follows such a rigid regimen is that she just knows that something awful will happen to her if she doesn’t. She doesn’t know exactly what will happen, just that it cannot be good. Of this, she has no doubt at all. So, the doubting disease leads us into misplaced certainties, into the paralyzing world of fear rather than the liberated world of faith.
Now, there is nothing wrong with having scruples; we would be hard pressed to live in society without them. By reminding us of our principles, by causing us to hesitate before making a wrong decision, they keep us on the right track. They are an interior warning system; they don’t teach us the right thing to do, they just tell us when we’re doing the wrong thing, poking our conscience when we would be led astray. In fact, the Latin root, “scrupulus,” means “a small, sharp, or pointed stone.”
Scrupulosity, though, is more than a pebble in our shoe; it is a giant stumbling block on our way to fullness of life in the kingdom of God. Remember Kay’s words, “I can’t stop thinking about my sins!” If we never feel clean, never feel forgiven, we remain stuck on ourselves, paralyzed by our doubts, and that is the opposite of a trusting faith; the opposite of the life to which God calls us. Says one therapist who specializes in this disorder: “Scrupulosity tends to take over sound reasoning, seep into good judgment, and substitute for a genuine relationship with God.” Alas, at times an obsession with maintaining tradition can come dangerously close to such a broken state.
Why else would Jesus accuse the Pharisees and scribes of “teaching human precepts as doctrines? Why else would he berate them by saying that they “abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition?”
Because, you see, the distain heaped upon Jesus and his followers by the Pharisees and the scribes comes from what they perceive to be his neglect of religious rituals that had been handed down orally from generation to generation but nowhere mentioned in the Torah, only implied. In Exodus, Moses is instructed to make a bronze basin for washing “between the tent of meeting and the altar,” for Aaron and his sons; the priests. “When they … come near the altar to minister…They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die.”
Genuinely concerned with trying to do God’s will, the Pharisees intended to provide people with a means of applying Torah principles to every day actions, like washing before a meal. This had, of course, nothing to do with hygiene. It would be centuries before germs were discovered. Hand washing was a religious ritual, a way to demonstrate that one had a genuine relationship with God and, just as important, washing was a way to proclaim a distinct identity, a distinct tradition.
Jesus, whose life was devoted supremely and solely to God, did not find it necessary to teach his followers this particular tradition to reinforce a sense of identity in the wider culture. Instead, he said that ritual practices, while having a legitimate purpose originally, had taken on a life of their own, becoming more important than the meaning behind them.
Instead of fearfully obsessing over whether or not you are clean enough, he says, have a joyful heart for God and use your hands to aid your neighbor.
Put these words at the top of your lesson plan; make them part of your spiritual ABCs. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” he tells a scribe in Mark, “and…you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
So, to prevent the spread of the flu, heed the words of the Centers for Disease Control and make sure to wash your hands, just exercise sound reasoning or you’ll end up with a different disease. To practice religion that is pure and undefiled, heed the words of the Scripture: serve God with your hands and love him with your hearts. If you do so, I have no doubt, only good things will follow.