A demonized man came from the graveyard to meet Jesus. He had been bound with chains, but they were ineffective because he was so strong that he broke the shackles. He yelled constantly and cut himself with stones. He ran to Jesus and yelled out “What business do you have with me, Jesus, you Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torture me.” All the while Jesus was saying “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” And Jesus asked the man, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And he begged Jesus not to send them out of that region. (Mark 5:2-10)
It is not clear till later who is speaking when the man speaks, whether it is he or his “unclean spirit.” But when Jesus speaks, he differentiates between the man and the demon.
William Stringfellow speaks of a person’s “image” as one aspect of the demonic. It is hard to distinguish between a person and that person’s image, but one sure distinction is death. Stringfellow suggests Marilyn Monroe as one whose image outlived the person. She, image and person, body and face, sugar and spice, is a good example of that outliving for many of us who reached puberty in the mid-‘60s. “The image called ‘Marilyn Monroe’ did not die but went on to a new and, some would say, more vigorous life.” It was, in fact, effectually freed for that “more vigorous life” by being separated from the somewhat troubled life of the person, and it did not have to learn how to age as it would if still bound to a living person.
Whom does God love? Not the image but the person. And he can tell the difference at a glance. Whom do I and people like me love? The image, the unreal famous person, the face of one who knew better than any other how to work the cameras and who does not age much beyond Some Like It Hot, but not the person who remained when the cameras were absent. Her I have never known, though I may have thought so, confusing the image for the person.
But that distinction is there, and it works for people less known, image-wise, than Marilyn Monroe, such as my personal enemy. Whom do I hate? I might say I hate the person, but in order to affirm, justify, and feed my hate, I will build up for that person an image, a demon if you like, that is as obviously evil as the prince of demons and that steals the name and face of the person. Meanwhile, the person is far more complex than what I hate, perhaps more uncertain or cautious than I think. It is that person whom God loves. And if it seems impossible to love some particular person, the problem is that I am thinking of the image, whom no one has told me to love, not the person, whom Jesus has told me to love.
In wartime the government, the Zeitgeist, or the speechifiers perform a service for us by substituting image for a person whom Jesus has particularly told me to love — the enemy. It is so much easier that way. I do not have to work at building up the image because somebody else does it for me. And if I begin to make the mistake of thinking about the person, plenty of people are ready to help me back to thinking only of the substitute, the image.
I can do the same to myself, substituting an image for the person who is myself, and the consequences are the same: the person cannot survive. Victor Frankl wrote about that, about people in the concentration camps who could not survive when their bourgeois self-images and their circumstances parted company. On the other hand, Stringfellow says: “It may be that long before his actual suicide the person named Hitler had been wholly obliterated by the principality named Hitler; that the person had indeed been possessed by a demon of that name. . . .” Just like Hitler and other famous people, each of us unfamous people can be overcome by our image/demon, to which we feel called to sacrifice self, family, morality. We feel inadequate if we do not measure up to image, so we subject humanness to our efforts to do so.
- William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience (New York: Seabury, 1964), 53-55.
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (Boston: Beacon, 1984).
The One Story 
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