A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“When an unclean spirit goes out of someone,
it roams through arid regions searching for rest
but, finding none, it says,
‘I shall return to my home from which I came.’
But upon returning, it finds it swept clean and put in order.
Then it goes and brings back seven other spirits
more wicked than itself who move in and dwell there,
and the last condition of that man is worse than the first.” (Lk 11: 24-26)
Psychotherapy means never having to say the “devil made me do it.” We’re all modern and sophisticated enough to know it is our own buried trauma, inchoate desires and moral weaknesses that are the forces at work messing up our lives and maybe the lives of the people who love us—surely not the devil! Demons aren’t real. Satan isn’t a, what, fallen angel?—lurking in my psyche or just beyond the darkest part of that spooky shadow in that poorly lit alley behind the garage, waiting for an opportunity to do me harm.
Um, maybe. My kids yawned through The Exorcist. I still end up pulling the covers above my nose when I watch it. Should I be worried that they seem to have no fear of, well, Satan?
The idea that there is a living personification of evil in the world may to some seem a quaint, pre-Freudian superstition. But plenty of other folks have no doubt that Satan is a real and furious presence, even if the person of Lucifer has better grounding in Restoration literature than liturgical readings.
The funny thing is that even in a thoroughly enlightened age the question remains radioactive enough to be the cause of heated disagreement. (Satan, divide us!)
A few years back, Jesuit superior general Arturo Sosa, S.J., got in hot water when he seemed to diminish the idea of Satan as a real being, working his diabolical wiles on the weaknesses of humankind. In an interview with Italian media in August 2019, he said the devil “is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life.”
“Good and evil,” he said, “are in a permanent war in the human conscience and we have ways to point them out. We recognize God as good, fully good. Symbols are part of reality, and the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”
Defenders of the Catholic Catechism across the interwebs stormed social media battlements to condemn Father Sosa, and a few months later he revisited his statements on Satan. Reflecting on the anniversary of the 1989 martyrdom of Jesuits and their housekeepers in El Salvador, he told reporters in December 2019, “the power of the devil...obviously still exists as a force that tries to ruin our efforts.”
Satan “is the one who stands between God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ,” Father Sosa said, “because he has made this irreversible and free decision, and he wants to drag others to reject the merciful God, who prefers to give his life to save instead of to condemn.”
Is the devil sowing doubts about his reality to ensnare more sinners? Is Father Sosa contradicting himself?
Jesuits have a reputation for being worldly and sophisticated interpreters of our times. But anyone who has heard them speak of the moral and psychological traps offered up by the dark spirit can’t help but notice something—this force of desolation they so earnestly and gravely describe seems to them a real and determined presence as a barrier to grace.
“Evil,” is a series on CBS/Paramount+ that, like Satan, refuses to retire quietly into the cultural mist, its rabid fan base demanding that the series carry on so they can finally get a solid resolution to the show’s taunting propositions. “Evil” has kept viewers in a purgatory of suspense about the physical reality of evil for four years.
A reviewer for The New York Times tried to break down the show’s continuing appeal. Its central characters, he wrote, “remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations. Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.”
And perhaps that is where I will punt on the idea of Satan, God’s subtle, sinister accountant, throwing temptation and error my way to see how hard I lurch for the wrong thing. When I hold out against sinning, is that a result of a successful tussle with my own psychological demons or a win over a dark spirit striving to bring about my spiritual fall?
I can feel something like evil sometimes working in my heart and twisting my better nature, and I have felt the escape of a hard breath in relief after breaking through that moment. What is that surging spirit of light and consolation?
That part surely is real.
