Rollo May was a very important influence in my early ministry. In one of his books, he analyzed the word demon and its relationship to daimon in Greek. What I remember is that he pointed out that the term daimon was related to the natural urges of the human persona — for example the ability to feel anger, love, desire, fear, etc. A daimon became a demon, he suggested, when the natural urge became dominant in one’s persona. For example, it is natural to feel anger but when anger takes possession of a person and shuts out the balancing urges in one’s life, we can say that one is possessed. People will say, “I just got so angry I couldn’t help myself.”
Reading that helped me make sense out of my own personhood. If I felt anger, envy, lust, fear, etc. I knew that it was just part of the natural human makeup. I spent a summer as an intern in a mental hospital and was struck by how many of the patients had thoughts and feelings similar to mine, but the difference is that they had lost the capacity to balance them with other feelings and to direct their responses to those thoughts and feelings.
May also pointed out that when Jesus exorcised a demon, he named them first building on the biblical belief that to know ones name enables you to have some control over them. I began to think about that with respect to my own daimons or natural urges. When someone did something that I allowed to make me feel angry, if I could name that feeling to myself I retained much more control over it. It was when i denied the anger building within me that I got into trouble. By naming it, I had some ability to exorcise it or at least its power over me.
Tomorrow, I want to suggest an exercise that might help you resist the daimons becoming demons in your life.
