Salvation as Sanity

I was recently struck again by the description of the demon-possessed man filled with "Legion" after his exorcism. As you'll recall, after Jesus heals the man the townspeople come and find him quite changed:

People rushed out to see what had happened. A crowd soon gathered around Jesus, and they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons. He was sitting there fully clothed and perfectly sane. (Mark 5.14-15)

The man was restored to sanity. 

When we think of salvation we tend to thing of it in moral terms, bad versus good. But there is also a mental aspect to grace, even a mental health aspect. Insanity versus sanity. As the recovery community describes it in Step 2 of the 12 Steps:

We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

A Power that can restore us to sanity. Deliverance as sanity. Rescue as sanity. Emancipation as sanity. Salvation as sanity. 

Our spiritual state without God is mental confusion. Our predicament isn't just about our wayward desires and cravings, it's also about how we think, our thoughts about ourselves, others, and life.  A restoration of sanity. Here's how Frank Sheed describes a bit of this in his book Theology and Sanity.

[I]f we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world. Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God is everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God's presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there...

God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one's self...

...We live, indeed, in a vast context of things that are, events that have happened, a goal to which all is moving. That we should mentally see this context is a part of mental health. Just knowing that all things are upheld by God is a first step in knowing what we are, so a clear view of the shape of reality is a first step toward knowing where we are. To know where we are and what we are--that would seem to be the very minimum required by our dignity as human beings.