Would you believe I’d never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until this, my thirty-ninth year of life?
In the name of Halloween and literacy (and in-class read-aloud-ability, although I quickly determined this not to pass muster) and my kids who willingly swap around books with their mother, I picked up an abridged version of Stevenson’s classic.
It went the way I expected, with Dr. Jekyll drinking green bubbly formulas to turn him into the coarse, reproachful other self of Mr. Hyde and then vice-versa. I guess I didn’t know that the Jekyll part of him was his original identity and that he began transitioning to Hyde as a way to live out his lustful, sinful nature as a separate self so it “might not harm anyone”.
The surprise isn’t that he killed himself in the end as Mr. Hyde, his self-medicating ways no longer effective (do spoiler alerts count 140 years after a book was written?), but that my kids who read the book asked, quite innocently, if something like that could happen in this day.
Could a person really take drugs to make themself turn into a different person?
How fascinating, I point out to them, that Stevenson probably knew little of medicine but could conjure up a story where it was possible to live two contradicting lives thanks to pharmaceuticals. The old live-by-the -Spirit-and-you-won’t-gratify-the-sins-of-the-flesh loophole. He was a man ahead of his time.
Yes, I tell my kids. Yes—a person can and does take drugs today to become a different person.
What is the moral implication? Where does willful behavior turn into shame, fear, or guilt that turns into mental illness that changes the brain’s chemistry and is, eventually, medicated? Why do we toe the line of instability?
We Christ-followers recognize this truth:
…each person is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.
James 1:14,15
So what about adding medication to the mix makes it seem so next-level? As someone who formerly took pills for anxiety as a young person (and thankfully got off them*), I think it boils down to drug dependence. Jekyll relied on drugs to turn him into Hyde, but he relied more on the drugs that turned him back into the respectable version of himself. Sin, he admitted, was present in both versions of himself, but he felt it manageable and worth the expense—not fully considering that death was part of the equation. When they no longer worked, he was more helpless and hopeless than he’d started out. It was no longer a physical death he faced, but a slow, agonizing spiritual death of hiding his true self.
In the book, The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks write about the benefits of metabolizing shame. We are in a culture today that cringes at the mention of shame, but shame has a very specific, healthy, wonderful purpose. Shame** serves as a signal to the brain that behavior needs to be corrected, not to be ignored or defended.
This is something we need to think about when we start looking at medication for relief in mental health situations. Should excessive worrying, anxiety, fear be part of a believer’s life, one who trusts that “God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, and love and discipline” (2 Tim.1:7)?
Even more compelling is the prophetic words of John in Revelation where he describes “the rest of mankind” in the end of the age who “did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts” (Rev.9:20-21)—sorceries translated from the Greek word, pharmakeia—in other words, medicine, or drugs.
When I think of our culture of abortionists, sexual deviants and scammers—repenting of pharmaceuticals—drugs, even—this is certainly something to consider, familiar as it is. They did not repent of their…pharmakeia… Why should they repent of it unless it were something shameful? Something character-altering, replacing, as it were, the Spirit inside us?
In 1906 Dr. J.A. Seiss wrote,
“We have only to think of the use of alcohol stimulants, of opium, of tobacco, of the range of cosmetics and medicaments to increase love attractions, of resorts to the pharmacopoeia in connection with sensuality—of the magical agents and treatments alleged to come from the spirit-world for the benefit of people in this—of the thousand impositions in the way of medicines and remedial agents, encouraging mankind to reckless transgression with the hope of easily repairing the damages of nature’s penalties—of the growing prevalence of crime induced by these things, setting loose and stimulating to activity the vilest passions, which are eating out the moral sense of society…”
Has your shame caused you to repent? Does your sin, hidden or drugged, harm other people? Jekyll thought it could be managed, and he, though fiction, ended his life as a miserable shell of a man. It affected everyone around him and they ended up having to clean up the mess he’d made.
Our sin has long term consequences—death, to be frank. It reeks and lingers long after we’re gone.
…do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.
Ephesians 5:11-13
But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.
*I am not anti-medicine by any means. But clinical anxiety and other such issues are much better dealt with through long-term healthy relationships instead of chemicals.
**Wilder and Michel explain the difference between toxic shame (condemnation) and corrective shame—the former should be rejected, the latter is formative.
The friend that kindly gave me this book was helping me understand some mutual past relationships with a narcissist.
The book says, “Narcissists use condemnation skillfully as a strategy for success. If your community has a narcissist in a position of influence, you must train yourself to reject his or her toxic shame. Condemnation should roll off of you like water off a duck’s back. A firm rejection of condemnation also is a way of loving a narcissist. You are giving them a window into a life free of toxic shame. Who knows, maybe God will use you. Your refusal to accept condemnation may be their first step toward healing.” (Pg.137, The Other Half of Church, Wilder and Hendricks. Moody Publishers, 2020.)
