Invisible Visibility

Gregory Peebles, Companion

Luke 4:38-44 | Tuesday Easter 3 Gospel, Daily Office Book, Year 1

When we moderns hear, or read, a gospel portion where Jesus encounters a person with an unclean spirit, it's pretty standard now to assume that these are people with mental health issues that antiquity was not prepared to address.

Maybe? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the connection between demons and mental illness is culturally old. Even today, people still say someone is “battling demons” when they’re talking about someone’s mental health struggles.

Before [my current] job, I worked with a severely disabled client who had also gone through seminary and was a United Church of Christ minister. While doing my advocacy work with her, since we were both spirit people, we would regularly do God-talk.

One time she shocked me by relating that lots of disabled people are either ambivalent about, or just flat-out don’t like, the miracle stories in the gospels. Maybe this isn’t news to you. I had no idea. You see, I was still thinking of health and wellness mostly from a body perspective. Mine is still pretty able, by comparison.

All these years later, now that I am in the process of coming to accept my invisible disabilities, I can hear it. I couldn’t hear it before. Maybe you can.

She said, “In these stories, Jesus regularly ‘fixes’ people, but those of us who are marginalized by mainstream culture often DON’T WANT to be ‘fixed’ — we’d rather be seen and loved.”

I couldn’t imagine a world where a disabled body was manageable, but the feeling of being invisible wasn’t.

Cut to: May 2025. My struggles are mostly invisible, so unless I scream, no one knows I’m struggling, and that’s doubly awful. And yeah, I can imagine that now.

I can also imagine that the big miracle is not regarding the individual body — however impressive the healing! — but the collective body.

Instead of a person being told, “your faith has made you whole," I am more concerned with the moments when Jesus turns to the crowd and says, “Now, you all take care of this one,” ...and then they do?

Especially when this was someone who, often in these stories, was untouchable only a moment ago. That’s the miracle I’m concerned with. I know it sounds like I'm relativizing, but I'm NOT.

The healing is in the integration of all of us, not in the making this one or that one like the rest. Our collective focus — like mine, for so long — is just wrong. It took it happening to me for me to understand. I'm not proud of that, but that's how it was.

Mental health struggles still make people uncomfortable. I live with near constant mental health issues, and I'm still uncomfortable talking about it. That’s because mental health issues are stigmatized. The wounds of Christ’s passion are called stigmata. This is the season when we remember the wounded body of the Risen Christ. It is very hard to reconcile, and very easy to forget, that all our wounds are holy. But they are.