Monsters
Hi friends! It’s been quite a while since I shared any writing in blog form, but I want you to know that it’s because I’ve been busy working on my first book! I’m about at the halfway point, and I thought I’d show off a snippet of my work to see what y’all think.
One note: This is an actively evolving work, so what I’ve written here may or may not fully make it into the finished book, but for anyone out there who has been following my writing you will get the real behind-the-scenes view of how these ideas become formed!
The book doesn’t have an official title, but its central premise so far is how Crisis (in the broad and technical definition) is the engine of transformation. I won’t say any more about that… I’ll just leave it there.
The following segment is from a chapter on the word “horror.”
I’d love your feedback!
MONSTERS
One of my favorite scenes of a horrified person happens in the Bible when the Hebrew prophet Isaiah writes about his brush with The Holy in The Temple. Here in the place where he expects to pray, he is confronted by monsters. Huge-winged creatures are flying and shouting worship to God. The whole place is inexplicably shaken and filled with smoke, and he cries out in horror, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5)
Often in Scripture, when God wants to communicate a direct message to a person, the messenger is a monster. The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum” meaning “a divine sign” or “warning” (which shares the same origin as the word “demonstration”). The word is also closely related to the Latin “monere” meaning “to remind, “recollect,” “think of.” These monstrous divine reminders are all over the Bible, and a majority of them are not from an evil source; they are agents of God. They are monsters precisely because they carry the crisis in their bodies.
Monsters can be very human-like with non-human features like multiple wings and multiple faces (Ezekiel 1:5-11), or hybrid animals like Lion-Eagle beasts ( Daniel 7:1-28) or Locusts with human faces (Revelation 9:3-10). Angels, who over time became sanitized in art as stunningly beautiful, glowing humans, are not the beings depicted in scripture. Their appearance is such that the first thing they say to any trembling humans who see them is, “Do not be afraid!” But fear is the natural response when confronted by the Holy, a word which here means “totally other.” How does the Holy show itself? Maybe, more often than we are comfortable with, it is through the presence of monsters.
To me, it doesn’t matter so much if the characters in the stories truly met these creatures in the physical world or if these beings were born of a divinely inspired imagination to help readers see a deeper meaning to the text; the result is the same. Monsters change the way we see the world.
Despite the overwhelming biblical evidence, somehow, when we ask to “hear from God,” we don’t expect The Divine to communicate through monsters. We expect to get our messages in entirely pleasant ways, always looking for signs in surprise gifts, unexpected favor, or recognition. Nobody says, “I was terrified and barely escaped with my life! Finally, God was really talking to me!” It seems like God is happy to communicate through signs; they just may not be the signs we know how to read. Yet.
In the ancient Jewish world, virtually anything that did not adhere to the typical human form was a sign, but usually not a good sign. If your body had “too much” of something like exaggerated features or deformities, or if your body was missing something like eyes that worked properly, these were seen as omens of a person’s character. Missing limbs, or diseases of any kind, were seen as a sign of God’s punishment on you or your family. These “monstrosities” were isolated socially, economically, and politically from the community. Being a monster always has political and social impacts.
The same was true of any who were gripped by brains that didn’t function in the typical way. There was no concept of psychology or neuroscience, so what caused a person to behave in unexplained, antisocial ways was a mystery typically explained in spiritual terms. The reason most often given for the plight of these poor souls was “demon possession,” a term which here means a body controlled by a “lesser god;” an “unclean spirit”. History has not been kind to people whose behavior is uncontrolled and unusual due to atypical brain function. Living as a monster was often a fate worse than death as the “demon-possessed” were isolated, starved, beaten, or even murdered without remorse.
We can see a common public attitude toward what we label today as the “disabled” in a story from John’s gospel. Jesus is in Jerusalem with his disciples, and they come upon a man whom the author says was born blind. The disciples with Jesus ask, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). This question reflects the pervading belief that physical abnormalities are caused by sin. Somewhere in this man’s history, a decision was made by him or his ancestors to break God’s laws in such a severe way as to cause a curse of life-long physical, social and political torment to one man.
I won’t go into the intricate structure of Levitical laws that were intended to protect the community from all kinds of threats other than to say this: separation was the first response to a disease or unexplained deformity. Even in biblical terminology, there is a difference between being “unclean” and “sinful.” In this passage, the question is clearly about sin being the reason for this man’s deformity. But Jesus refuses the premise of the question. The man’s blindness is not about sin but about God. “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him.” (John 9:3)
A common interpretation of this passage reveals the prevailing ableist lens by which many Christians view disability. At first glance, it appears that Jesus is saying that the purpose of all of this man’s suffering was so he could be made a demonstration of God’s power to cure people of disability and make them “normal.”This miracle, I imagine, would be welcomed by the community because who doesn’t like a magic trick? But this is not the story scripture tells. This healing is more disruptive than anyone expected because, in this act, Jesus exposes that God doesn’t make monsters; people do.
In this healing and several other healings Jesus performs, he threatens the power of the prevailing religious authority of the day and confronts people with the truth that they constructed God into an ideal human image; a god who punishes people for bodies that fail the standard of “normal,” and sanctifies an economic and political system that keeps all those labeled “unclean” away from the privilege of full citizenship.
During this time in Jerusalem, in order to enter the temple to worship, disabled people had to pay a fee to be blessed by a priest in order to be “forgiven” of the sin that caused their disability. When Jesus heals or “forgives” people without a tax, priest, or temple, he is openly threatening the livelihood built around the unjust practice of a temple disability tax. In this healing, Jesus condemns the system that usurps the authority to name people “monsters” and destroys the dividing wall between “them” and “us.” By curing this man’s eyes, Jesus reveals the community’s blindness and need for healing. Based on the witness of scripture, they do not see the good news in this. They interrogate the healed man, doubt his identity and his honesty, double down on their own concept of the world and insult him. They are horrified that this man’s eyes didn’t need to work properly to be restored to wholeness in the community and treated as an equal citizen. It was they that needed the healing, not the “monster.” The monster was there to deliver the message. The monster was there to reveal God’s glory and presence. Healing and wholeness are what Jesus came to bring to the world, and it is healing like this which made Jesus into a monster, too.