The history of mental illness in our world has been a rather tragic one. Persons with mental illness have been tagged as sick, deformed, possessed, and the list goes on. Historically, mental illness has been seen as something that needs to be corrected, outcast, or even surgically removed as if we don’t want to have to deal with those people anymore because we don’t know what to make of them, and we don’t know how they can be “normal,” productive members of society because of their dependence.
However, I want to ask, what is normal?
There are many of us who would be categorized as “normal,” yet we have such deep problems we’re dealing with in our own lives such as anxiety, insecurity, domestic issues, family issues, marital instability, adultery, you get the idea. We hide these things and walk into the world as if they don’t exist and call it normal. People with mental disabilities or illnesses don’t have that luxury. They walk outside, they are still the same people and there is no getting around it or hiding it. They are whom they are for the world to see, even if, sometimes, the world does not want to see them.
Events such as “A Night to Remember” a couple weeks ago challenge the very heart of this issue of “what is normal.” There is a shift happening in our culture regarding mental illness and the church needs to be on the forefront of that shift to ensure it goes in the right direction. Mental illness is not something to be pushed to the side as if it does not exist anymore; it is something to be celebrated. Why? Why celebrate something that brings so much challenge to the patients afflicted and the families affected? Why throw a prom and put down a red carpet for mentally ill patients and families? Because the fact that those who suffer from mental disabilities or illnesses aren’t allowed to attend or can’t have a prom is part of the problem. Because including them and celebrating them should be the new normal and it is something I believe Jesus would “high-five” us for.
We have so much to celebrate and so much to learn from people with mental disabilities and the families and communities that care for them, more than we could ever teach them in return. They challenge our perception of normal and, perhaps without even trying, give us the courage to come out of the dark and refuse to hide who we are to the world anymore. They give us the courage to be ourselves no matter how messy, loud, or different.
When Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 12, it speaks to the heart of what this is all about. A person who is hurting deeply and profoundly moves the Samaritan traveling by to compassion. By helping this person, the Samaritan obliterates walls that had been built for hundreds of years between Jew/Samaritan, clean/unclean, holy/unholy. By breaking down these walls he’s established a new relationship of friendship and love. In other words, through his own conscious choice, he’s destroyed the boundaries we often set of what is “normal” and therefore what keeps many people out. That is something that is worth celebrating and something worth doing as often as we can. The more we do it, the more the kingdom of God shines in this world.