Sanity
In my youth, I thought of insanity as a fairly rare disease that one either had or didn't have. However, as I got older, I discovered that the line between sanity and insanity is a gradual one, and that people are constantly slipping closer to insanity or climbing activity toward sanity. The movement one way or the other is often affected by our own conscious choices.
Psychologists talk about neuroses (or being neurotic) and psychoses (or being psychotic). Virtually everyone is neurotic. It just means that we have some peculiarities that make us a bit different from the norm. It could be that we are fastidiously neat, that our sex life is tumultuous, or that we spend an awful lot of time worrying about our weight. It's only when a neurosis becomes so strong that it interferes with the rest of our lifestyle that it becomes a psychosis. Psychotic people are the ones we traditionally think of as crazy.
Probably one of the reasons that the average person is able to think of insanity as something that only affects other people is that most of us are so obsessed with appearing to be "normal" that we will usually do a reasonable job of achieving that goal even if we fail in every other area of our life. A person can be as neurotic as they like, but if they try hard enough to appear normal on the outside, they can be serial murderers in their thoughts and desires and still not be regarded by mainstream society as psychotic (crazy). It's probably one of the reasons why society is so often shocked when some real serial killer turns up. "He seemed so normal," most people will say.
For me as a Christian, however, this subject of sanity is one that is almost constantly there in the back of my mind. Maintaining sanity is something that requires a lot of conscious effort, considering that so much of my lifestyle as a Christian revolves around deliberately questioning the things that so many other people regard as normal.
My own understanding of sanity is far more exacting than just being able to turn up for work at least four out of five days a week. My understanding of sanity has a great deal to do with my ability to be rational, to question myself, to listen to people with whom I disagree, to imagine how others feel, to detect inconsistencies as well as consistencies both in myself and in others, and to spot errors in logic.
Someone recently commented on the fact that a number of the ex-members who are presently fighting us so fiercely seem to have serious mental problems, i.e. to be a bit crazy. But I had to point out that most of them had similar problems when they were members of our community too, and many of our present members and supporters have mental problems as well. It's just that within the community these tendencies were being dealt with, whereas outside the community they seem to run riot.
I do agree that when people stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to confront problems in their own lives (inconsistencies, bitterness, etc.) then they are moving closer and closer to clinical psychosis. On the other hand, if the ultimate measure of clinical psychosis is whether or not a person turns up for work each day, then we Jesus Christians have lost that battle even before we start. We may faithfully turn up for work for God; but that doesn't count in the "normal" scheme of things. So no matter how intelligent, rational, tolerant, patient, or understanding we may be, the general public (and psychologists are, after all, part of the general public) are going to see us as a bit "crazy" even before the testing begins.
But the kind of sanity I crave is the sanity that will be seen by God (and possibly by society as a whole, sometime after we are dead and gone) as a genuine desire to know the truth. I feel that it is part of my regular spiritual maintenance to continually carry out sanity inspections. It's not easy for critics to get me to give in when I know I'm right; but I do listen to what most of them are saying, and I do take the time to consider whether there is any truth in their criticisms. It is precisely this practice which, I think, keeps me sane. And in practical terms, it is precisely this practice which makes it so hard for them to destroy us.
One of the universal instructions handed out by cult-busters is to exploit contradictions in the teachings of the leader of any group that you wish to destroy. Keep doing it long enough, and you will destroy the leader's credibility. Why? Because contradictions are everywhere. I don't mean the kind of ironies that make one truth appear to contradict another, but outright inconsistencies, usually based on one standard for ourselves and another for others.
But I'm delighted that our enemies have had such a difficult time trying to find those inconsistencies in what we teach. After all, if they did find one, we would probably set about trying to correct it, since we have this craving for consistency.
In a worldwide scramble to find such an inconsistency in ourselves, the best one that could be found was something that appeared on the surface to be saying that I am in favour of people killing other people in the name of Jesus Christ. Well! If that was true, they would have had one fantastic inconsistency, not to mention a shocking and frightening doctrine. But what was all of this built on?
It was built on my hypothetical suggestion that there could be times when someone would be taking another person's life with a loving motive, as in when someone performs a mercy killing or when someone kills a madman who is on a rampage killing many other people. I said that such actions could not be construed as illustrations of hatred or a desire for revenge, the sort of things that Jesus was really opposed to.
Anyway, enough on that side issue. The thing is that we can and should live our whole lives in search of the truth. As we do, we will come to see that side trails leading off toward insanity abound everywhere. Many have strayed down them, and, although they may not have been locked up in mental institutions, they have made shipwreck of their souls.
Let us all strive for a lifetime of sane understanding, never forgetting that all it takes to lose it is a failure to consider that such a fate is possible.
