Once again, on Maintaining our Focus on Christ in the Face of the Demonic

[[ Dear Sister Laurel. I wonder if the way you described praying before and after watching the news means you are not sufficiently tuned into God's will or God's way of thinking. Don't you know that we are bound for heaven and can't be too concerned with temporal matters? Aren't you supposed to be about that because you are a hermit? Also, I wondered why you used the term "demonic" to refer to President Trump and what he and those working for him are doing if you don't usually refer to this? Isn't Trump the one whom God elected? Aren't you allowing yourself to be a bit consumed by temporal (political) matters to call Trump et al "demonic"? One person I listened to today said that perhaps this means you are not trusting God enough to do the best for us. (You are the only diocese hermit I know who wrote about what she referred to). She reminded us that God will never abandon us or let us be bereft and she should know because she suffers terribly, is tested by Satan all the time, and also is a consecrated hermit!]]

Thanks for your questions. I am assuming you are referring to today's Gospel reading in asking me about God's way of thinking. For those who have not read that lection today, it is Mark 8:27-33 and focuses on Jesus' admonition to Peter's reaction when Jesus lays out how he will have to suffer. Let me say that in the situation in the US, I believe I am seeing things as God sees them and that it is precisely so I can continue doing that (and do it even better) that I practice a period of quiet prayer before watching the news and a period of lectio afterward. I encourage others to do the same because I believe this can be helpful for remaining in Christ and allowing our minds and hearts to be filled with the Holy Spirit and not drawn into the destructive, narcissistic orbit or emptiness of the singularity we know as Donald J Trump. Certainly, I trust God is doing his best for the entire United States, but that is not the same as trusting that President Trump's election was something God accomplished or willed.

Granted, God allows human free choice, but simply because God permits something human beings choose to do does not mean God approves of it, or even that it comports with God's will. God does not prevent child abuse, or childhood deaths to cancer, for instance. He did not prevent the last Holocaust* with the torture and murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic priests and religious, et al, but none of these could even remotely be considered the will of God --- even if we see God eventually bringing about a greater good out of all of this. If we begin to think this way we are really suggesting that we should do more evil so that God may do more good! Paul confronted this very question when he observed first that where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more. Then he posed  the question, "Does this mean we should sin all the more so that grace may abound all the more?" to which he responded emphatically, "God forbid!" The first way of seeing the permissive will of God is, I sincerely believe, a human way of thinking. Paul's question and response represent God's way of thinking!

In the Markan reading, Jesus knows he is going to be crucified and die --- not only a horribly inhuman way to die but incredibly shameful as well because it represents the apotheosis of godlessness. Peter, as a good Jew, could never have conceived of God's own Messiah suffering and dying in such an ignoble way (or even in a noble way like that of Socrates, for instance)! It is still hard for us to accept that God wills to love us so exhaustively and generously that he will take on our sin and the reality of godless death itself so these things cannot continue to separate us from his love. But to take further steps and suggest that God willed Trump's presidency so that people might suffer and learn to think as God thinks moves from thinking as Christians dealing with a valid understanding of God's permissive will to idolators serving a monstrous abomination. 

I am not consumed with political matters, or rather, I am concerned with these because I am first and last concerned with the Kingdom of God and the Kingship of Jesus which is a Kingdom of justice, mercy, love, truth, and fathomless meaning. When I look at what is happening here in the USA, and abroad through us as well, what I see is vast senseless damage, much of it apparently irreparable because lives will be or have already been needlessly lost. In Acts of the Apostles, a book my Scripture class is reading now, we talked today about the primary Spiritual value that threads all through Acts, namely that of speaking boldly (parrhesia). This form of speech is about proclaiming the Gospel, of course,  and it means speaking truth to power, proclaiming the Kingship of Jesus, and unmasking the blasphemy of those (including Trump himself) who would like us to believe we have another King who is similarly anointed by God. Because those filled with the Holy Spirit speak out in this way I cannot keep from saying as clearly as I can, we don't have such a system of governance and we can't believe or ask fellow citizens of the world to believe that we do. We Christians have only one King and that is the risen Christ who sits at God's right hand (meaning he is present in this world and reigns with the power that comes from God).

The very fact that I take Christ's Kingship seriously with the kind of faithfulness and commitment it calls for is the reason I MUST also pay greater attention to Donald Trump's idolatrous excesses. Am I consumed with Trump or with politics? No, and I am trying to remain centered on Christ and all his resurrection and ascension mean for our world precisely so I can be appropriately informed without losing my Christian identity at the same time. If your hermit friend wants to criticize me for this, she is welcome to. She might choose to focus on an otherworldly "heaven" while denigrating the new heaven and new earth inaugurated with Jesus' incarnation of the Word of God, in his resurrection and ascension, she can do that too --- though not, I think, if she wishes to honor the Incarnation appropriately. Similarly, she might put up video after video speaking about how frequently she deals with Satan or sees Satan behind every bush or in every person who simply disagrees with (or, alternately, mirrors) her, and she is free to do that too, though I believe that trivializes the weight and extent of the evil the truly demonic represents. What she is really not free to do is to suggest that because I identify the Donald J Trump/Elon Musk duo as a demonic reality in the Tillichian sense of that term, I am not trusting in God sufficiently or thinking as God thinks! Those are judgments only God can make.

As I noted in my last post, I use the word demonic rarely, cautiously, and in a highly theologically nuanced way. My world is not peopled as some persons' worlds are reportedly peopled with demons or Satan who is always about tripping us up, making us ill, etc. However, I recognize what Paul referred to as powers and principalities that are still at work amongst us. I recognize that there are idols and idolatrous movements afoot that some**, I believe rightly, call Anti-Christ because of the degree of hatred these manifest and the degree of power and damage they intend to wield and do to those they are called instead to love as themselves. Absolutely God will never abandon us or leave us bereft!! He will fill us with the Holy Spirit of both Father and Son, the Spirit of comfort and courage, and he will expect us to do what Peter and Stephen, et al, do in Acts of the Apostles. Namely, he will expect us to speak truth to power, proclaim the Lordship of Jesus boldly, confront idolatry and blasphemy with the power of our own knowledge, hope, courage, and love, and to love one another not only with the gentleness of doves but to do all of this with the shrewdness of serpents!!

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* Though I have a minor in holocaust studies, I heard a figure I had never realized before last night. It was not only striking, it chilled me to the bone because I had already thought it had been unimaginable that our constitutional republic could be dismantled so quickly as has happened thus far in Trump's administration. The quote referring to the Third Reich and the German Republic was the following: [[The Nazis took 1 month, three weeks, 2 days, 8 hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.]] Consider that. Please consider that.

** I have been referred to Matthew Fox's book here on Trump and MAGA by a bishop whose theology and spirituality I generally respect. The title is Trump and the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ. I have not yet read it. It referred to these entities before the last election so it has not been written in light of the last month of willful, careless, and cruel destruction at the cost of the least and most helpless. I suspect Matthew Fox's position would be even more emphatic now.

Once Again: On Maintaining Hope in the Face of the Demonic

 In my last couple of posts, I wrote about maintaining hope and being those who already have a king and are not looking for another one. I want to reemphasize all that I said there and maybe push that a bit further here. I would especially like to sharpen my thoughts on what it means to be a hope-filled people of prayer and love with Christ as their King when our focus and attention is constantly drawn to Trump into a kind of mesmerism or fascination by the tragedy to democracy he represents.

When Trump was elected president this time, I promised myself I would not watch the news much. I heard a couple of other friends were attempting the same thing. As I wrote to my director last week, "That has pretty much gone by the wayside." I did not make this promise because I believed that hermits should be completely separated from all of that or insulated from the truth of this world and its needs. I don't believe that at all. It was that I remembered the way the news of Trump's blundering and self-centered (narcissistic) excesses and stupidities began to take over the last time Trump was elected, rather like a terrible accident makes it almost impossible to look anywhere else or remain sufficiently about my own life and ministry; I didn't want that to happen again. After all, my life has a very real focus and it is not Trump. In fact, my baptism and eremitic consecration, the canon that governs my life, my vows, my Rule of Life, my own conscience, and daily praxis, all tell me it must not be Trump!  

And yet, the unprecedented nature, quality, and degree of the chaos and destruction Trump/Musk is visiting upon our country and the world around us makes it almost impossible not to be sucked into focusing our gaze and energies on him. I believe this same tendency to lose our real focus, our life-giving and meaning-conferring focus is what makes hope so difficult to maintain at this time as well. So how do we hold these two competing foci together without relinquishing the real telos (intention and goal) of our lives? How do we keep ourselves from losing ourselves? Is there anything in Scripture or our Christian Tradition that can help us here? Several things come immediately to mind: 1) the story of Jesus' temptation in the desert, 2) Jesus' continuing ministry and teaching in the face of political and religious threats to his life, 3) canon 603's requirements of stricter separation from the world and assiduous prayer and penance, and 4) the desert Abbas' and Ammas' tradition of battle with demons as intrinsic to the spiritual life. I want to look at all of these over the next days, but for now I want to start with number 3.

Hermits are called to embrace a stricter separation from the world at the same time they embrace a life of assiduous prayer and penance. This dynamic can be misunderstood as implying we simply close the hermitage, convent, or monastery door on the entire world outside us. But "world" in the sense used by canon 603 means "that which is resistant to Christ" and can also be understood to mean "that which promises fulfillment apart from Christ."  At the same time, the hermit is called upon to be hospitable and to open her door to anyone who should come knocking in search of food, rest, a word (from God), or whatever the hermit can provide to ease their journey. This might look like a conflict, but really, it is a paradox. The hermit is one who offers hospitality to God in every way God can come to the hermit. This means first of all she lives a life of assiduous prayer and penance in the silence of solitude, and then too, a life open to anyone in whom God might dwell (and who might be served in their vocation to make that more real by the hermit's hospitality). Both pieces of eremitical life must be preserved by the hermit in a single focus on openness to the presence and sovereignty of God. After all, this is who she is!

As I look at this paradoxical set of values and responsibilities and the task of maintaining an appropriate focus, it reminds me very much of the way we must handle the situation in which we in the US find ourselves today. We cannot shut our doors and windows to the evil happening beyond our hermitage boundaries, but neither can we fling them open so wide that the hermitage ceases to be what it is, namely, a place where God is hosted and may also be found by others. In other words, we must maintain our focus on God and hospitality to God so that God might truly be Lord of this world and transform it with (his) presence. If we can retain this focus, so too can we look evil full in the face and make decisions on what more we are called to do. But what does this mean? How do we do this?

In my life, it means to pray both directly before and after I watch the news. What I have begun to do is to pray quietly before watching the news and read and meditate on Gospel stories afterward. (So far, favorites include the story of the Good Samaritan and Christ's temptation in the desert. I will move on to others as these cease to nourish and strengthen me so much (one story I am sure I will be spending time with is Jesus' trial before Pilate and the conversation he held with Pilate there!). The idea is not to cede President Trump much real estate in my head or heart so that I don't become a kind of satellite of his narcissism; it is to maintain my focus on Christ, and on all those who are suffering in light of the current political situation the US finds themselves in and whom I might serve. In a very real way, it helps ensure I do not lose myself or my integrity to the soul-devouring emptiness and heartlessness we know as Donald Trump and those sycophants who cater to him. This praxis helps me to remain myself and strengthens my identity as imago Christi; in other words, it helps me to live to serve Jesus as Lord and King as the person I am called to be.

Some people will find their own focus and necessary praxis will differ from mine but their goal will largely be the same. A constitutional lawyer may make sure his/her attention is on the law, on statutes they have not paid attention to for some time and on working directly for the constitutional democracy that is currently endangered. A poet or musician will spend time writing and reading poetry, or listening to and playing music even more assiduously than they perhaps did in less chaotic times. All of us will try to be a positive presence contributing what we can for the sake of our world, especially those looking for a way to maintain hope. Again, the point is to not cede President Trump/Musk personal "real estate" in our minds and hearts as we entertain and are strengthened in the real values and relationships with those we are called to serve. This, I sincerely believe, is an instance of what c 603 calls "stricter separation from the world"!

For Christians, then, I believe the approach I suggest above will be helpful. We have one Lord and it is not Trump (or Trump/Musk)! We must be careful that Trump's vacuous heart does not suck us up into his orbit! Karl Barth once famously remarked that when he did theology he kept a newspaper on one corner of his desk and a Bible on the other. What I am suggesting is a variation on that. We must be informed. We must watch the news!! But we must first of all be persons of the Book, persons who live from and for the good news of Jesus Christ, persons for whom Jesus is the image of the humanity and lord of the Kingdom we are called to represent. As I said in my post on maintaining hope, we must be persons of prayer, both to help immunize us from and sensitize us to the evil we will meet and, of course, to inspire us to lovingly work for the good of all in the face of such evil and the suffering it brings.

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Postscript: I use the term demonic rarely and cautiously; when I do, as in the title of this piece, it is usually in the sense that Paul Tillich used the term, namely, for the distortion of the sacred in the direction of evil or non-being. Human persons are sacred as is all of God's creation. When the telos (intention and goal) of that creation is raised to its highest potential, there we have the holy. When it is emptied of goodness and its potential (for life, truth, beauty, future, meaning, etc.) is otherwise distorted in the direction opposing its created or God-endowed nature, there we have the demonic. Any great gift of God can be perfected towards real holiness or distorted in the direction of the demonic. The same is certainly true of persons as a whole. When this happens, especially when it is accompanied by great power along with messianic trappings and delusions, we begin to see a reality some identify as antiChrist.

Hermits and Experiences of Satan?

[[Dear Sister, I wondered if you have any experience of the Devil?  I have never known what to do with the part of the faith that includes the Devil but I recently heard someone who claims the Devil messes with her all the time. She made it seem like the Devil picks on hermits and even uses them to "mess with" others. It sounded to me a lot like that old joke about "the devil made me do it" -- it's kind of an excuse for anything that goes wrong when the person doesn't want to own up to their role in it. I don't think you write about the Devil though I saw where recently you referred to Satan being called "the accuser". Do you believe in Satan or the Devil? Does he "mess with" hermits? Is that because they are more spiritual than most people?]]

Another first! Thanks for your questions, although I have to say they leave me kind of at a loss. You see, yes, I have experienced evil, but Satan? No, I have no experience with that at all. My own experience of evil was something I came (eventually) to regard as the person's illness, and I found that explaining what I had experienced made sense in terms of mental illness. What also helped me make sense of it around the same time was Paul Tillich's theology of the demonic. What Tillich does is to look at something sacred. When that is distorted, twisted, and diminished, it becomes what he calls the demonic. On the other hand, when it is raised to higher forms and even its highest form of perfection, there we have the holy. For something or someone to be raised in this way implies participation in God's life, love, goodness, and truth, that is, in the holiness of God. For them to be distorted and diminished in the way I have described means for them to move further from participation in God's life, love, truth, goodness, beauty, etc. 

Another way to think of this is how we are when we allow ourselves to be loved as opposed to who we become when we refuse to be loved and become self-centered and incapable of the truth. As human beings made in the image of God, we are capable of great good and, if that image is distorted, great evil. Tillich knew this very well and so he understood human beings as sacred and capable of great holiness in and through God. At the same time, he had watched human beings who had become seriously distorted and diminished; they were profoundly inhuman and inhumane, and Tillich identified this state as demonic. But this had nothing to do with a literal Devil or Satan. It occurred in complex ways through the influences upon and choices made by each person, just as sanctification occurs. 

Personally, I neither affirm nor deny the existence of Satan (though I do note that it is not part of the Church's creeds). I simply say Satan has little to do with my own faith which is centered on Christ and the One he called Abba in the power of the Spirit.At the same time, I don't see where human beings need a lot of help in becoming inhuman and setting genuine evil loose in our world. We are the source of systemic and institutionalized evil, and I don't think we need an external source beyond the harmful ways other human beings have treated us or encouraged and conditioned us to treat others (whether all these things occur directly or indirectly). I feel the same way you do about folks who carry on about how the Devil is messing with them, or how persecuted they are, etc. However, (though I too enjoyed the Flip Wilson sketch way back) it is not funny or entertaining to me; it is a tragedy because it involves a person who, it seems to me, has no real self-knowledge, no motivation to metanoia or change, and a limited capacity for honesty or love, including self-love and love of God.

Ironically, there is a side to this, that is even more tragic in a person who tends to blame the devil, and that is the tendency to attribute to God everything that can't be attributed to Satan. While it is true that everything good in our life ultimately comes from God and reveals God to us, it is not typical of God to speak directly to us as a rule of thumb, to come to us similarly in visions, or to will our suffering, much less to cause actual suffering. God does NOT cause suffering, nor does God will our pain. This approach to reality not only refuses to take appropriate responsibility for the things that happen to us and cause difficulties for us (which includes taking responsibility for getting appropriate help with the wounds caused by others), but it also tends to be a form of self-aggrandizement.

I know some psychologically healthy hermits whose lives are edifying, focused on, and filled with God. They are wonderfully happy. Some can occasionally reference the Devil as the power behind real suffering, but these hermits don't have a strong sense of the Devil's presence in their lives. Certainly, they don't see him lurking and ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity. Others rarely, if ever, think of Satan except as he perhaps comes up in lectio or discussions, though they are apt to be acutely aware of the reality of evil in our world. What I am saying is that it is not "normal" for hermits to be "taken" with the place of the Devil in their lives. It is not normal for hermits to deal with Satan, to want to understand Satan, (to desire to) spend time writing or speaking about Satan, etc. Hermits may certainly have experiences of real evil. They may have experienced occasions or periods of serious suffering, but blaming Satan (or God!) for these is simply not typical of these hermits. Their lives are full of the grace of God and a sense of wonder or awe at the way God has called them to Himself.

They recognize all the ways God has been at work in (and for!) them and are full of praise and love for this God. They also are well aware of their own failures and shortcomings in this and other relationships; Satan has nothing to do with these problems, though personal woundedness may well be at their heart. They work on these with their spiritual directors and others who are competent in doing this kind of work with them. They suffer, yes, as we all suffer, and they accept this suffering as a share in Christ's own suffering embraced for the sake of a new heaven and new earth where God will be all in all. What they do NOT do is blame Satan nor play Satan off against God with themselves as some sort of victim or pawn of either or both!! (Note, those who are also "victims" of God will frame their victimhood in pious categories of grace, or "mysticism", or they may even identify themselves as a "Victim Soul".) 

In either case, just as you recognize, such a person, for whom victimhood (whether Divine or demonic) is a defining category of their life, tends to disavow appropriate responsibility for their suffering and difficulties. This can include resisting or rejecting therapy or other forms of assistance for original or core woundedness, and sometimes rejecting getting help for an ongoing paranoia about being persecuted or harassed by everyone around them. From my perspective, such a person's relationship with God is distorted and becomes seriously disedifying. Whenever God is made the direct cause of suffering or the one who directly wills and brings pain, serious theological errors have occurred in the name of a significantly flawed "spirituality".  In any case, the hermits I know, though profoundly spiritual and usually experienced with an authentic sense of what the desert tradition calls struggling or doing battle with demons**, tend to see themselves as simply way too inconsequential for Satan (or, The Devil) to have any interest in. 

** Please see articles on battling or struggling with demons for the way I use these terms