Ramblings on the devil

I was in a conversation yesterday in which someone asserted that he did not believe in the devil. Even though the Church clearly teaches the existence of Satan and the other fallen angels, (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 391 and following) I think it's not unusual for us Catholics to see such doctrine as imaginary.

I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly we ought to believe in the devil and the fallen angels, not only because it is an article of the faith, but because it is the devil's will that we don't. On the other hand, our concepts of faith and belief are so fragile in our time that perhaps sometimes we're better off not believing in the devil, or at least not having any excuse to advert to his existence. Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think that most people believe in God in some fashion. People easily say that they believe or assent to the idea of a 'supreme being' or an 'intelligent designer' or some other human description of deity. What we fail to do is to believe God, that is to say assent to and believe what this God has said about himself through divine revelation. If God is indeed God, then his communication is primary by definition and demands our total and complete attention and response. Our failure at this, as individual Christians, as Church, and as humanity in general is what reveals our lack of genuine belief.

In fact, then, our society's manner of believing in God is often the way in which we ought to believe in the devil. We 'believe in God' but we do not always 'believe God.' Likewise, we should believe in the devil, but not believe him. For everything the devil says is a lie. Even when it contains something like the truth, is is framed in such a way to mislead us and introduce further misery into the world. Therefore I think the devil rejoices somewhat in the civil faith that posits supreme beings and intelligent designers, for such a faith allows us to think of ourselves as theists while simultaneously absolving us of the duty of religion. It gets us to the old assertion, 'I'm spiritual, but not religious.' That is to say that I am comforted and supported somewhat by something transcendent, spiritual, or supernatural, but am not challenged in any difficult way by what it demands. I am comforted but not converted.

On the other hand, my experience in the care of souls has convinced me that it can sometimes be quite unhelpful to give attention or thought to the devil. Classically, our temptations and difficulties arise from three sources: the world, the flesh, and the devil. My experience leads me to believe that diabolical temptations are the rarest. Indeed, I think it is one of the devil's standard victories to have us blame our worldly and fleshly temptations on him in such a way as to avoid our own responsibility to them. E.g. 'the devil made me do it.' No. I did it. Yes, my thoughts are confused and my will is wounded, but most of my temptations are from the occasions of sin that arise through my own fault, distraction, and spiritual torpor. So many times it turns out that blaming the devil for our temptations and sins is actually a distraction in itself and thus an oblique victory for the devil. This is not to say that there aren't actual diabolical temptations, but I think that they are rare. We are very good at displacing the source of our troubles when it comes to our spiritual life. 'Father, my husband has a drinking problem so I need you to put holy water on the house.' 'The brothers in this community keep me from having the prayer life I want.' 'How can someone be chaste in this culture.' There is no end to such examples.

So let's believe in the devil, but not believe him. Let us be quick to acknowledge his danger and influence, but recognize as a temptation the ease of allowing it to relieve us of our responsibility for ourselves.

Belief and Trust

In preparing to move, I always come across old journals. I don't sit down and read them, but I usually take a glance, just to note what were my spiritual concerns at a particular time. It's often quite interesting. Last night I read a couple of entries from about two years after my baptism. I was very worked up about belief. Did I really believe what the faith proposes? Or was it just that I had become infatuated with the ideas or--even worse--the idea of believing in them?

Somehow, without noticing it, I seem to have moved beyond this problem. Is it because my faith is stronger now? Am I more convicted of the faith than I was? I don't know.

I think that in my earlier years in the faith, the concepts of its truths and my evaluation of my belief in them were all too enmeshed. It was as if my believing it made it true or not. I see this in people sometimes; because they don't know how to believe in God, they decide that there is no God. A non sequitur, for sure. As if my believing in something has any bearing on whether it is the case or not.

Trust is part of it, too. When I was younger I could only see how it was up to me alone to make the intellectual assent, to believe. Now I realize that there is a trust involved that includes other people. I believe in the resurrection, for sure, but it isn't just because I have been able to make a personal intellectual assent, but because I trust the apostolic witness that has given me the first reports of this Event. At the heart of it, I think this is what it means to be a Catholic rather than an Evangelical or a Pentecostal; we live in a community of spiritual interpretation, trusting the witness handed down to us as a key to interpret our own experience.

Theism

These days I've been in an email conversation with an old friend who is one of the most sensible and brightest people I know. He's also an atheist, and so we are able to have honest and intriguing talks about God and faith and practice. I wanted to share some of one of my emails:


The question of a/theism intrigues me these days, even more so after working as a parish priest for a few years. Some of my colleagues imagine that we are in a struggle with atheism, but for me I'm not so sure of this. My diagnosis is that many people, both religious and not, seem to have absorbed an image or idea of God which isn't credible, and sometimes isn't even attractive. So of course they become 'practical atheists,' because there is nothing compelling or lovely in the idea of God they think they are supposed to believe in.

To me the standard question of theism, 'Do you believe in God?' doesn't even seem to work anymore. Of course I believe God, in the sense that I believe what he has revealed about himself, but to believe in God seems too suggestive of God as some kind of object or some-thing that is sitting some-where waiting for me to assent to his existence. To me God is too immanent for all that. Indeed I think this is precisely the message of Christianity; that God has abandoned everything it ought to mean to be God on our human terms (i.e. honor, power, coercion, etc.), and has emptied and sacrificed himself into our humanity, in order to blaze for us a path out of the misery we insist upon for ourselves with our selfishness and violence. I guess this is part of why Christianity works for me and why I enjoy preaching it; it is a sustained critique and subversion of an idea of God created in our image, of what human beings tend to do and become when given absolute power over others. I'm still just a punk rock kid you know!

My Catholicism

The other day I noticed a Facebook 'status update' from one of the classmates from theology. It was a reproduction of a quote from a 'Catholic' publication in which the hierarchy and priests were put down for being out of touch, and various sorts of deviants and dissenters were held up for what was called their heroic and long-suffering faithfulness.

It's curious to me how people could go through the same course in theology and come out with such different view of things, but I suppose it happens all the time.

I guess my trouble with such proclamations is that despite any sophisitication as a Catholic I have grown into over the years and despite the very fine theological education I have received thanks to the generosity of God's people and the trust of my Capuchin brothers, my own Catholicism still sits at its original location in a desire to 'follow the instructions.'

Part of my own conversion to the faith, and the ferocity with which I pursued it at the time, was driven by my unwillingness to live in a world without unified, demanding, and ultimate meaning. I was burned by one of my first philosophy professors who consented with glee to the conclusion of our class that there was no such thing as a 'meaning of life' but only 'meanings in life.' It wasn't good enough for me; I needed something better to stand on. And from my first St. Joseph Sunday Missal and rosary pamphlet, down to my cover-to-cover devouring of the Catechism when it first appeared in English, to the Code of Canon Law and the GIRM and GILH and my Denzinger enchiridion, I have rejoiced to find in these the authentic, apostolic interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures that I first began to read during the hot summer nights of 1991, when I took my first eager but stumbling steps to go out to meet the Person who had been coming to meet me all along, Jesus Christ.

I just want to follow the instructions and find in them deliverance from the entangled mess of confusion and passion and noise that Christian Tradition calls the 'world.'

Not that I don't have my criticisms of bishops and priests as well. All of us--bishops especially--should be doing public penance for the crimes we have committed against children. Even in this, our bishops made a mess of themselves in Dallas. Though I have known many priests who are among the sea of quiet saints who hold the Church together, men of humility and work, gentleness, devotion, and prayer, I am the first to admit that I am daily scandalized and disedified by priests who seem to take the promises of their state very lightly, seem to relish to indulge the disorderly parts of their personalities, and who display a spirit of bourgeois and privileged entitlement in their lifestyles. These things have been sources of scandal, hurt, distraction, and confusion since my very first day living among religious and clergy. At a few moments in the course of things it has gotten so bad as to distract me from everything else and threaten my own vocation and resolve. So I know what it's like to be hurt and feel betrayed.

But I will never condemn my priests and bishops, nor recommend that they 'get over it' and start to conform to the confusions, errors, and glittering fashions of the world, because it is from them that I have received the apostolic teaching that has given me a reason to live in this world and something to do while I do.

Questions

God has been working on me in various ways from an early age, many of which I'm only beginning to understand. Though I didn't really know what they were at the time, there are theological pressures from childhood that are still with me today.

This morning, hearing Jesus' proclamation from St. Mark as we do each year on the first Monday of Ordinary Time, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel," I was thinking back to the third or fourth grade at good old Worthington Hooker Elementary. There was some kid who was a self-styled missionary for the faith. I wasn't brought up with any religion or sense of God in particular, so I was unprepared (or perhaps perfectly prepared!) for his questions.

I remember how he asked me if I was "saved."

"From what?" I asked.

Did I believe in the Good News?

What was good about it, and what made it new?

My poor classmate was not yet very advanced or subtle in his own evangelical understanding or strategy, and was a little stumped by my responses. Even though I was asking in innocence and ignorance, my questions are important. We need to have a sense of the content of the good news of our salvation, of what is 'good' and 'new' about the Good News of the Gospel. We must, as Peter tells us, " always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope." (1 Peter 3: 15)

Charles Laughton Storyteller

Driving home from Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, their old cat, my brother and sister-in-law and unborn nephew, I tuned in this recording on the far left of the FM dial, somewhere around the border of Connecticut and New York.

Somehow I found it all very encouraging in some way that really matters to me.

Atheists

There's an interesting article in the New York Times this morning about atheists who are organizing themselves to find the support of community and to advance their agenda.

Whenever I read something like this, I'm always led into a reflection by how little I am offended as a committed theist and religionist. Why doesn't it bother me? Shouldn't committed atheists offend me? Why don't they?

First, it seems to me that the reasoned and thoughtful atheist is not the real atheistic enemy of faith and religion. The real atheistic danger to faith in God is the practical atheist; the person who may say they believe in God but for whom God makes no practical difference in their life. In fact, I think that the committed atheist is much closer to the theist than the person who may observe a religion on the surface but for whom God has no dynamic place in their heart and mind. The professed atheist is at least trying to be true to his conscience and the reasoning being God created him to be, while the practical atheist fails to truly face the searing and subtle question of God at all. In this they risk breaking the commandment that prohibits the vain use of God's name, and because they are "neither cold nor hot," they can expect to be "spit out." (Revelation 3:15-16)

Second, as I have said here many times, it's hard for me to blame people for not believing in God. This is because it is my experience that most people have been taught--or have somehow absorbed--a concept of God which isn't very believable for a thoughtful adult. The God they think someone wants them to believe in is closer to Santa Claus, Papa Smurf, or the Great Pumpkin than it is to the original Mystery whom we name as Unbegotten Source, Word, and Spirit.

Third, I have a sort of a practical connection with these professed atheists in their desire for the ruthless application of the separation of church and state. Perhaps they want it so that civil society can be protected from religion, while I want it the other way around: so that the faith can be protected from the world and from the numbing lowest common denominator of our American "civil religion."

Check out the article here.

Believing in God

This morning I've been reflecting on the idiom "to believe in," and how it has varying senses depending on the object.

When we say we 'believe in' an idea, we usually mean that the idea is true or that it is a good idea. For example, 'I believe that life is sacred,' or 'I believe in the legal protection of life from conception to natural death.'

On the other hand, when we say we 'believe in' a person, we express a certain faith in him or her. It is a sort of confession of our belief that someone has the resources to succeed in some task or to be the person he or she is called to be at a certain moment. It often happens that someone struggling with self-doubt is encouraged by those who say, 'I believe in you.'

Belief 'in God' belongs in the second category, but is far too often expressed in the first. Even the question, 'Do you believe in God?' is usually to ask whether or not we believe in the 'existence of God.' But to actually believe in the existence of God is to confess the surpassing import of God; otherwise we are not believing in a god that it is really God. As Abraham Heschel famously put it, "God is no importance unless He is of supreme importance."

To believe in God is to believe in him in the same way we say we believe in another person. It is the confession that God has the power and will to carry out the promises he has revealed to us. As Isaiah the prophet puts it to us during Lent:

For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down And do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, Giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

Why I Don't Mind Weddings

Over the years I've gathered that most priests regard marriage preparation and the execution of Nuptial Masses and ceremonies to be among their most dreaded chores. I think that this is because, for one thing, they take up a lot of time. With just over a year now in my career as parish priest, I have witnessed seven marriages and have sixteen more in production. Very few go by without any hitch at all; you almost always have to do something extra, like finding baptismal records from suppressed parishes, figuring out inter-ritual or inter-religious dispensations, obtaining decrees of nullity from previous marriages lacking canonical form, or asserting your rights and jurisdiction against the dreaded "wedding planner." All I can say is thank God one of my best friends in the Order is a canon lawyer.

Not that these things are always a terrible hassle, but in most cases you are doing them on behalf of young people with little more than a tangential relationship to their religion, much less to the parish. (There are shining exceptions.) Most, sadly, are "cultural Catholics" who probably won't be seen in church again until the next spiritual emergency, like when they have to baptize a baby. So I think that a lot of priests find it to be a sad situation and resent having to spend a lot of time on it.

I also find it sad, but I've also come to appreciate these young people. Even though they have not kept up with their faith--probably because it was never taught to them in a way that was relevant to their lives or portable into adulthood--I find them to be people of faith. It is an amazing act of faith to get married, after all; to bet that your own mutual love and regard is stronger than a future you can't even know. To me, that's almost the definition of faith.

In this world with its utter disregard for the creation and the gift of life within it, with its violence and morbid desire to see its own shipwreck, I find it very encouraging that people still insist on falling in love with each other. And they know at some level that love demands a complete commitment, even though we can't know what forever or complete is going to mean. But we do it anyway, because love is the way we touch Eternity and only eternity satisfies it.

Flesh and Spirit

Today the liturgy celebrates the dedication of the Lateran basilica, the proper cathedral of Rome. I've visited twice, and both times I was struck by the statues of the apostles that line the main nave.

These apostles are huge, strong, burly men. Their hands look like they would crush the skull of anyone they tried to ordain to follow them in the apostolic ministry. But for people who were less hampered by our modern denial of the spiritual, I suppose it was less dissonant to express the spiritual strength of the apostles by showing them as physically strong.

The more I think about it, I believe that the problem isn't that people don't believe in God. The problem is that the notion of God they think they are supposed to assent to is unbelievable. And when you tell them that if they have some experience of love or truth, then they have a glimpse of what is meant by the utterance, "God."

But those are "just ideas," they protest, by which they mean that they aren't real. Nevertheless, people routinely make life decisions based on their experience of love or truth, and that seems pretty real to me. This is what I mean by our hampering of our spiritual imagination.

The Great Pumpkin

Last night I watched a little bit of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, before being called away to solve an equipment crisis in the sacristy. Any praying person has to identify a little with poor Linus, as his primitive belief in the Great Pumpkin, though doomed and ultimately inadequate, has some elements of theological sophistication.

First, he knows that the Great Pumpkin will not appear if he is dismissed or disbelieved. He requires sincerity and faith, just like the God for Whom believing is seeing. And one only has to peruse the gospel according to John lightly to see that this is indeed the case; to believe and to see God are ultimately the same thing. Meister Eckhart knew this when he famously said, "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

Second, Linus knows that the Great Pumpkin is not just a fulfiller of selfish human wishes. Unlike Santa Claus, he does not take requests. He brings you something, yes, but you can't choose it and are only called to be grateful.

Third, Linus knows that, despite the failure of the Great Pumpkin to appear, or better, our failure to allow him to appear, Linus must remain faithful.

St. Thomas

One of our homework assignments in theology was to decide whether our faith in the Resurrection was the same as that of the apostles. There wasn't a right or wrong answer. It was more of a test to see if you could make a theological argument.

Some said our faith was the same, some said different. One of my favorite answers came from the classmate who said that our faith was better because of the blessing that Thomas had earned for those who have not seen but have believed nonetheless:

Jesus said to him, "Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed." (John 21:29)

Faith and Death

Last night I was driving home from my weekend deacon gig, when Death Cab for Cutie's I will Follow You into the Dark came on the radio.

Now I generally find songs like this one overly light and precious, but it was a dreary night and it seemed to fit the mood, so I left it on.

It made me think about faith and death. I presume that the song is about dying--the whole going "into the dark" thing. Death is, after all, the final, mysterious limit of our experience and personality in this world. It is an unknown, a permanently veiled moment, a darkness.

But faith, both as a grace and an act, is a lot like that too. Faith is darkness to the intellect. It is the willingness to risk stepping into a cognitive obscurity that does not satisfy our normal standards of knowing anything, of "getting" it. The Light of God is so brilliant that our hearts and minds only perceive It as darkness--what John of the Cross called the rayos de oscuridad.

In this sense I was thinking about how faith is a remote preparation for death. We have already risked a step into the obscurity and darkness of faith. And we have found it trustworthy. So maybe that will help us to go into the final darkness of death with more peace and trust.

Orbit

Do you believe that the earth revolves around the Sun, or the Sun around the earth?

The earth orbits the Sun, of course, everybody knows that.

And yet, every day you see the Sun rise from the east, travel across the sky, and set in the west. Therefore, based on ordinary sense experience, it's obvious that the Sun goes around the earth.

So why do we believe the opposite of our plain experience? Because somebody has told us that it is so. Because we trust that the astronomers and science teachers and textbooks we have read know what they are talking about. We trust them, and that's enough for us to discount our experience and believe the opposite, without even being bothered by the dissonance!

Well, then, why not believe in the apostles who assure us that Jesus is risen? Surely they also know what they are talking about.

Appearances

After morning prayer one of the brothers looked out the window and announced that the orange cat had been run over. He's one of our neighbors. We all looked, and there he was, lying there flattened on the street. The gray tabby, another neighbor, was sniffing and poking at him.

We discussed what to do, and decided we ought to go scoop him up and dispose of the corpse. But when I went outside, I discovered that it wasn't a cat at all. It looked like some kind of orange ferret. Another brother came out with a shovel and when we had scooped it up, despite being flattened, it showed no sign of injury.

So we couldn't decide if it was real or not. Finally we agreed that it was some kind of furry creature that had long since been slaughtered and turned into a scarf or some other fashion accessory. Then we threw it out.

It was still kind of sad, to think of this bright orange ferret-looking thing being killed to become somebody's tacky decoration, only to end up flattened and wet in the middle of the street, being inspected by confused cats and friars.

Words

Old friend Scott brings up an important critique of yesterday's post, in which I was writing about the spiritual values of freedom, love, and truth:

From a different perspective, I feel like I have been bombarded with concepts like love, freedom, and truth since day one. Unfortunately there is usually an agenda behind each one: love is for selling products, freedom can be reconciled with torture, and truth is whatever justifies our side and demonizes the other side. For me, I have seen more damage due to the perversion of the concepts than the exclusion of them.

The world around us always co-opts our spiritual language and uses it for its own purposes, even up to and including the utterance, "God." As one of my teachers put it, it's a real challenge to preach the good news in a world where "Coca-cola is 'life' and 'infiniti' is a car."

I don't think we're quite at the Orwellian limit of things, i.e., "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength," but we're not far from it either. That's why you always need to apply a very suspicious and critical hermeneutic to anyone who tries to preach to you about love, freedom, or truth, even if it's a "religious" person, and especially if it's a politician or the media.

We all know in our hearts that what we call love easily becomes possessiveness and control, what we call freedom is often simply just being able to do whatever selfish thing we want without interference, and truth is whatever opinion serves our particular interests best. So it should be no surprise that these inner distortions break out into the wars and madness of the world.

But a reflective heart knows that behind all of the sinister spin of this world, there are such things as love, truth, and freedom.

Insight

I had dinner with an old friend last night, and he told me his "latest theory" on God:

"To say that someone else exists in the world is already religious."

I thought it was utterly brilliant. To admit that someone else exists, with feelings, thoughts, dreams and hopes is to make an act of faith and to go outside of the lonely prison of yourself. You'll never really know the inside of another person; but to admit that it is there, and is as central to the world as your own inner self, well, that's a spiritual assertion made by faith.

If then you start to manage your life around the admission that other people exist apart from your own needs and desires and gratification, then you've moved from faith to practice.

Sin is simply the failure to see others apart from our own terms and needs and desires. They're just props in the world to help us with our need for recognition, praise, pleasure and security. When it's really bad it gets called ministry: other people exist to serve our need to help them or save them. This kind of selfishness is the worst because it masquerades as altruism and helpfulness.

To admit that you yourself aren't the center of the world, in spite of all appearances and suggestions to the contrary in your own mind and heart, that's the beginning of spirituality. To admit that there is an "other" is the beginning of admitting that there is Otherness Itself, the mystery that we clumsily call "God."

Doubting Thomas

Today is the feast of Thomas the apostle, famous for doubting the Resurrection. He wanted to put his hand in Jesus' wounds before he would believe, and the Risen Lord indulged him.

The Cross is, quite literally, an intersection. It is where God meets humanity most deeply. Mysteriously, God meets us most strongly in the most unlikely place: in the depth of human suffering, pain, and despair.

So if we want to know God, if we desire the presence of God, we must imitate Thomas and put our hands into the wounds of Christ. We must get involved with the suffering of the world. God has identified his own life with the suffering of the poor, the sick, the desparing, the unwanted; this is the meaning of the Cross.

When we're willing to get our hands dirty with the pain of the world, to be in solidarity with those who suffer, to accept the vulnerability of having all of our easy answers fall apart in the depth of their despair, that's when, like Thomas, we can find the eyes to see the Risen Christ.