Benjamin Rush
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 25, 2009
This past week I received an invitation to attend a ground breaking ceremony for yet another facility in our community being erected by Harbor Homes. It's going up on Factory Street and will be called the Dalianis House. It's part of a "Veterans First" program and will provide housing for military veterans who are experiencing certain mental and emotional challenges that call for a level of assisted care, but who are also capable of leading largely independent lives. This will be similar to the residential program offered at Buckingham Place - downtown next to the Post Office - which is also operated by Harbor Homes. For over 25 years now Harbor Homes has provided housing services for persons who are dealing with mental or emotional disorders; these are men and woman who are not in need of institutionalization, but who do need some level of assisted care while living as independently as they are capable of doing.
Some of the impetus for bringing Harbor Homes into existence began here in this church. It was Lee Page who saw the need for such a facility in Nashua when she was a social worker with Community Council. She took her concerns to my predecessor, Rev. Donald Rowley, and together they got the conversation going in our community about the need for assisted living for persons who had developmental disabilities of a mental and emotional nature, and who had no place to live.
This upcoming event also serves as my lead-in to the person from our Unitarian Universalist - it's Universalist in this case - story whose life I want to hold up today. It's that of Dr. Benjamin Rush, an 18th century physician who came to be known as the Father of American Psychiatry, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Dr.
Rush also played an instrumental role in shaping and defining the Universalist Church in America, one of the predecessor organizations of our present Unitarian Universalist Association. Dr. Rush is one of those founding patriots who significantly contributed to the creation of our country, but who - as our history came to be told - became overshadowed by such greater luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the Adamses, and the like. In fact, one of his better known achievements is being the person who helped to reconcile the friendship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson after the two had become estranged from one another.
Beginning some 3-4 years ago I created a sermon tradition for myself by using the Sunday closest to the date of the execution of Michael Servetus, which took place on October 27, 1553 in Geneva, Switzerland at the hands of John Calvin as a "UU Heritage Sunday." Servetus' "crime" was to challenge the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which Mr. Calvin could not countenance. So when Mr. Servetus made the error, the fatal error, of going to Geneva to debate Mr. Calvin on that issue, John Calvin, who was the power behind the civil authorities in Geneva, saw to it that Servetus was permanently dispatched by having him burned at the stake. So, as I say, I use this "Michael Servetus Sunday" to hold up and celebrate the life of a figure from our UU history. This year I'm working the Universalist side of the family.
But before jumping into the life of Dr. Rush, though, I want to spend just a few more minutes on the topic I opened up with - which has to do with our attitudes towards persons who are dealing with some form of mental illness, and how their lives affect ours. This was the matter that Dr. Rush, in the latter years of the 18th century, was also dealing with.
Last spring, one of our members, Kathy Fletcher, told a very moving story about her growing up with an autistic brother; and of her experiences in taking him to church with her. With her permission I'll cite some of what she said: "On more than one occasion [in a Sunday Service] my brother raged...screamed and cried. And I was the one responsible for leading him out of the service. I (felt) like everyone in that sanctuary was staring at us. And judging us. I felt huge shame. I was also angry...But there are no hardships that do not also offer a blessing. And what are the blessings of growing up in a family with my brother? I'm not afraid of people...people different from me...I went to a big university. I met a lot of different people. I met Black people. Gay and Lesbian people. People with dyslexia. People my own age with children. People who had been sexually abused. And from growing up with someone I thought was so "different," I think in learned not to judge. I learned to meet people and talk to them "where they're at." And that certainly in a blessing." I thank Kathy for these fine and powerful words.
Another very powerful, poetic, and in this instance, gut-wrenching account of how mental illness can have a ripple effect in a family is found in the late poet Allen Ginsberg's poem Kaddish. A Kaddish is a Jewish prayer for the dead, and Allen wrote the poem in the aftermath of the death of his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, which came after a long institutionalization for her paranoid schizophrenia. This illness came onto her when Allen was quite young and Naomi sank further and further into it until her death. The poem itself, which takes over an hour just to read out loud, chronicles his mother's life and then tells of Allen's experiences with her - when he was still a teenager - and was left to take care of her when his father went off to work and his older brother was away in school. He experiences, in equal quantities, his love for his mother and his increasing sense of helplessness about being able to do anything for her.
In one part of this long poem-narrative Allen recalls the beautiful woman of family photographs - the daughter of Russian Jewish émigrés who fell in love with and married his father: "O Russian faced woman on the grass, your long black hair is crowned with flowers, the mandolin is on your knees...sit here married in the summer among daisies, promised happiness at hand..." And then later the scene shifts to a ward in a mental hospital: "...small broken woman - the ashen indoor eyes of hospitals, ward grayness on skin. 'Are you a spy?' I sat at the sour table, eyes filling with tears. 'Did Louis send you?' She beat on her head. 'I'm not a bad girl...I raised two children - 'Two years since I'd been there - I started to cry - She stared. Nurse broke up the meeting a moment. I went into the bathroom to hide, against the toilet white walls."
I find it hard to read this poem without weeping in places myself; it's about a son striving and struggling to see the humanity in his mother and striving to preserve and proclaim his love for her even as he sees her being overtaken by madness.
Well, it may seem like a bit of a leap to go from Allen Ginsberg to Benjamin Rush, but that's where we're going now. The common thread between Kathy and Allen and Dr. Rush is their striving to touch and uphold the humanity of those who have had some of the more essential pieces of their humanity taken from them. On this note, let's look at the story of Dr. Rush.
He was born to privilege in the Philadelphia area in 1745. After losing his father at age six, the primary male influence in this life was an Uncle who was also a Presbyterian minister. Young Benjamin must have been one of those precocious kids, for whom other parents held up as an example for their own kids, since he earned a Bachelor's degree at age 15 from the College of New Jersey - which later became Princeton University. From there he went to England where he got his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, and then returned to Philadelphia where he opened up a medical practice at the age of 24 - and became a Professor of Chemistry at what is now the University of Pennsylvania. (I wonder what he did in his spare time?)
In his spare time I guess he did politics. He was a strong supporter of the American Revolution, and collaborated with Thomas Paine in Paine's writing of the pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense. He got himself elected as a Pennsylvania representative to the Continental Congress, and as noted, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Dr. Rush's resume, as it were, goes on and on like this to the point that I'm not going to belabor it further. I will note that he even managed quite a family life in the midst of all his other doings. He married a woman named Julia Stockton - whose father was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence - and they had 13 kids. Dr. Rush apparently was not one to do a half-way job at anything he undertook. Four of the Rush children died in infancy; and that was not an uncommon survival ratio at that time, even in families of means and status.
It is his religious and humanitarian views that I mostly want to shed some light on, though. He was raised, as noted, Presbyterian, largely due to the influence of a minister Uncle. He was a devout Christian and founded the Philadelphia Bible Society. And at some point he became convinced of the truth, as he saw it, of Universalism, or universal salvation. The underlying principle of Universalism was that the love of God for human beings was paramount, to the point that such a loving God would not condemn any human being to eternal damnation and punishment.
Rush was of that school of Universalism called Restorationism, which held that those who had been especially bad sinners on earth had to do a little time in a Universalist version of Purgatory before they could be restored to a full reconciliation with God in an afterlife. His religious beliefs - as was the case with all the early Universalists - did include an afterlife. And his Restorationist views were his way of dealing with the age old problem of evil - and how human beings are ultimately held accountable for the evil they do.
But he was a Universalist, and when the fledging Universalist churches in the eastern United States held a founding convention in Philadelphia in 1790 it was Benjamin Rush to whom they turned to draft their founding document. This document was one of the many forerunners of our current UU Purposes and Principles.
As a side-note observation here, I'll point out that given his pedigree, Rush would have well embraced in the more rarified atmosphere of the Unitarian circles in both Philadelphia and throughout New England. The Universalists, in their origins, were much more of a working-class, rural based, farmers-working-the-land, type of denomination, whose adherents - while bright people by and large - had limited formal education. In being a Universalist Rush was going against type, but these were the people with whom he felt an affinity even though he was of a difference class himself.
So, as I say, when the Universalists began to get organized they turned to Dr. Rush to compose their founding documents. And when it came to putting forth their doctrine of God, here is what Dr. Rush wrote, and what was adopted: "We believe in one God, infinite in all his perfections, and that these perfections are all modifications of infinite, adorable, incomprehensible and unchangeable love." God, then, is the presence and power of infinite love; and, keeping it in a Christian context, Rush maintained that Jesus was the earthly, timely embodiment, or incarnation, of this infinite love; and Jesus' mission on earth was to show human beings what the love of God looked like in human form and in human activity.
However quaint that theology, and Christology, may seem to some now, it was this Universalist idea of a God whose love for human beings was infinite that finds a more humanistic expression in our first Unitarian Universalist principle which says that we affirm and promote the "inherent worth and dignity of every person." There is a theological root to this humanistic affirmation of ours, and Benjamin Rush was one of the primary authors of those origins.
For Dr. Rush they were not just words in a document he was asked to write by a fledging religious denomination. They were a guiding principle in his life that made him, in addition to everything else, a devoted humanitarian. He was a strong abolitionist, and enlisted many of his fellow Universalists in the anti-slavery movement. He was also an opponent of capital punishment. And when the post of a Secretary of War was created for the President Washington's Cabinet (which later became the position of Secretary of Defense); it was Rush who also advocated - unsuccessfully as it's turned out - for a post of Secretary of Peace. There have been advocates, that is to say, for a Department of Peace for as long as there has been an American Presidency - and Benjamin Rush was among the first of them.
But his most noted contributions when it came to how Dr. Rush applied his Universalist principles was in the area of the treatment of the mentally ill, and his insistence that mental illness be largely treated as a medical condition. This went rather strongly against the grain of his day where persons who were struggling with a mental illness were seen as being demon possessed, or as being punished by God for some undisclosed sin, or simply showing human weakness by an inability or unwillingness to pull themselves out of the condition they were in.
His treatment methods, as we would judge them now, were crude. Many physical maladies in Rush's day were attributed to "bad blood" and the treatment, therefore, was to do blood letting in the hope of getting the bad stuff out. Germs and viruses and such things as that were still largely undiscovered. So, as this line of reasoning went, if mental illness was a medical condition then the medical model remedy was to get rid of the bad blood that was causing it. All that really did was cause a loss of blood.
But Rush was among the first to propose a medical model for the treatment of the mentally ill; which did pave the way for the eventual whole field of psychopharmacology. And for Rush this approach stemmed from this religiously based view that persons dealing with a mental illness were not people to be condemned for a personal weakness, or because they had found disfavor with God, but rather human beings whose dignity was to be respected and who were to be treated as humanely as possible. It was this same conviction that led Rush to push for the establishment of mental hospitals where such treatment could be focused. Here again, those initial attempts at institutionalization may well seem crude by our contemporary standards; but to even advocate for special facilities for the sole and focused purpose of treating the mentally ill was quite a radical notion in Rush's day.
Today much of the treatment of mental illness combines a medical model and a therapeutic model - some form of both counseling and medication, that is to say. There is an indebtedness here to Dr. Rush for demonstrating the medical component of mental illness, and his dispelling of the notion that it could simply be attributed to human weakness and/or some kind of divine activity.
For all of the advances that have been made in the treatment of the mentally ill; practically any family who has had to deal with the more mild to the more severe forms of mental illness know what a stress and strain on the whole family system such a situation can be. While I support the granting of the most appropriate levels of personal autonomy to persons with mental and emotional maladies, I'm also aware of how the refusal of medication can push those family stresses to even greater levels. This is a most crucial and difficult balance to achieve. How much self-direction can properly be given those struggling with a mental illness versus how much intervention can, again properly, be imposed? This is an ongoing issue and struggle. However one feels about it we still have Benjamin Rush to thank beginning a process in the treatment of the mentally ill to the point where we're now having such a conversation. His designation as the "Father of American Psychiatry" is well earned.
To pull this together now, this life of one of our Universalist forebears is a truly remarkable one. I especially hold it up as a sterling example of how one's religious convictions inform and direct a person's living a life of service to one's fellow human beings; and to be a passionate advocate for social justice for the sake of the greater good. Next Sunday I'll be taking up the topic of whether a rational person can also be a religious person - especially in light of the recent claims by such men as Christopher Hitchins or Richard Dawkins who are united in their opinion that a man or woman cannot be both and still be an authentic human being. What I see in the life of a man like Benjamin Rush is one of the most highly educated persons of his time and place, and one of the most dedicated humanitarians of his time and place, and one of the most passionate devotees to social justice of his time and place - was also one of the most devoutly religious persons of his time and place.
When he reached for what he regarded as the ultimate motivation for how he lived and dedicated his life he eventually got back to that Universalist belief in a God of universal love and caring and compassion. The message from his life to ours, as I see it, is not that we necessarily embrace his religion, but that we continue to explore and dig ever more deeply into our own as we seek the most authentic ways of living our lives as well. This, indeed, is why we come together in community here; so that we may continue to grow a life and grow a soul that will be a blessing to all the other lives we encounter.
Stephen Edington
October 25, 2009
