I Pledge Allegiance to Ana, Mia, and Ed

By Jon Hagen

 

When she walked into my office nearly ten years ago, she had a recent history of passing out in class. The doctors said she was dying. She was just college-age, but she had already been through a lot. Back around the age of ten she had asked her parents one Sunday if she could go across the street to play in the neighborhood park. The request itself was innocent enough, but her parents said no. Later that afternoon, however, she found a way to sneak out to play. It was at the park, in a utility shed area, that a man trapped and violated her.

 

Nearly seven years later a different lady walked into my office, and she too was dying. Several times each year she had to be rushed to the emergency room for life-saving intervention. Like the younger lady, she had been violated as a youngster. Yet, if you had placed these two ladies side by side, you would have seen two very different images.

 

Like any piece of significant artwork, there are subtle hues and important contrasts all within the same picture. What these two ladies have in common is more than meets the eye. True enough, they both had been violated. Their way of dealing with that offense and pain was both different and the same. The younger lady was dying from starving her body of nutrition; the older lady was dying from issues related to her extreme obesity. Both were using food as a catalyst for dealing with the crime committed against them. Here was their common rationale: since the pain of being violated was so deep, and the anxiety of it happening again in the future was so great, the best way to insure it didn’t happen again was to be unattractive. That way, no man would ever again be tempted to assault them. Two people. Same issue. Same catalyst. Two methods.

 

So a few weeks ago, when an AP story entitled, “Cult-Like Lure of ‘Ana’ Attracts Anorexics” came to me across the internet news, it caught my attention. Martha Irvine, the article’s author, writes, “They call her ‘Ana.’ She is a role model to some, a goddess to others—the subject of drawings, prayers and even a creed. She tells them what to eat and mocks them when they don’t lose weight. And yet, while she is a very real presence in the lives of many of her followers, she exists only in their minds.

 

“Ana is short for anorexia. Followers wear red Ana bracelets and offer one another encouraging words of ‘thinspiration.’ ‘When they do something, they tend to pursue it to the fullest extent. In that respect, Ana may almost become a religion for them,’ says Carmen Mikhail, director of the eating disorders clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. She and others point to the ‘Ana creed,’ a litany of beliefs about control and starvation. At least one [web site] encourages followers to make a vow to Ana and sign it in blood.”

 

From a biblical counseling perspective, my point in this article is to draw attention to at least two basic assumptions we need to keep in mind when reading stories like these and when we are involved in the stories themselves. First, God knows people to be worshippers (because this is what God made us to be, worship is what we are always doing). And second, people are daily looking for salvation experiences. From past offenses to immediate stresses, we all want a way out—a deliverance from the pain, discomfort, monotony, and other pressures we face each day. Or, on the other side, we’re looking to “be somebody,” to have reputation, to construct a self-image that satisfies an internal craving. That too is worship—we call it narcissism. Listen, can you hear the worship coming through in what Irvine continues to report?

 

The AP story goes on, “‘People pray to Ana to make them skinny,’ says Sara, a 17-year-old in Columbus, Ohio.” Getting below the surface, Sara admits the motivation behind her online blog advice-giving: “‘I guess I was attention starved. I really liked being the girl that everyone looked up to and the one they saw as their thinspiration’. For others, Ana is a person—a voice that directs their every move. ‘She’s someone who’s perfect. It’s different for everyone—but for me, she’s someone who looks totally opposite to the way I do,’ says Kasey Brixius, a 19-year-old college student. To Brixius—athletic with brown hair and brown eyes—Ana is a wispy, blue-eyed blonde. ‘I know I could never be that,’ she says, ‘but she keeps telling me that if I work hard enough, I CAN be that’.”

 

Because we are worshippers, we must naturally have a god(s) who can fulfill our desires for what we imagine is our best possible life. If we’ve never been taught the details of how to daily look to the one, true God (and how Christ’s crosswork applies to the details of our life), then we will set up idols in our heart and live in service to them as we endlessly look for satisfaction. As Richard Keyes writes, “An idol is something within creation that is inflated to function as a substitute for God—suggesting that the idol will fulfill the promises for the good life. All sorts of things are potential idols. An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero.” Apart from Christ, we naturally conform truth to accommodate our desires; Christ frees us to conform our desires to the truth.

 

In reality, we’re looking for a relationship with something or someone. The AP news item continues, “Dr. Mae Sokol often treats young patients in her Omaha, Neb., practice who personify their eating disorder beyond just Ana. To them, bulimia is ‘Mia.’ And an eating disorder often becomes ‘Ed.’ ‘A lot of times they’re lonely and they don’t have a lot of friends. So Ana or Mia become their friends. Or Ed becomes their boyfriend,’ says Sokol.” And in that, or through that, relationship lays the hope of salvation experience(s).

 

I mean salvation experience in the broadest possible sense. In biblical terms, salvation includes everything from justification to acceptance to identity to removal of guilt and fear to assurance that God will raise the dead. We receive these gifts of grace from the Father and experience such things in Christ through the Holy Spirit (which magnifies God’s name and reputation through the grace and mercy He conveys to us each day). Or, we will find and experience such things in self-constructed ways (which magnifies our name and reputation through personal effort).

 

The path to Christ requires a humble allegiance that culminates in a person being restored to full humanity; the path of self-construction requires an allegiance to whatever god one may choose (Ana, Mia, or Ed?) and is built on pride that culminates in a distortion (in this story, one dying from anorexia and another from obesity) of God’s original intent. Every day comes with its own evil, and every day we will find a way to handle it. Will we stubbornly seek to deliver ourselves with each pressure that comes, or will we find the authentic deliverance that comes through Christ alone?