Is Satan For Real?

My readers will perhaps recall my post about my experience with an "evil presence". I'd like to say something more about this subject. (I would also like to list my posts under subject title, but I'm very stupid when it comes to computers and I don't know how to do it!). 

In my son’s eyes, the practice of exorcism is a medieval aberration. And yet, the contemporary psychiatrist Doc. Scott Peck made a distinction between demonic possession and schizophrenia. Of course he’s a Christian, therefore, in the atheist’s opinion, he believes in fairy tales. But what if his religious background allows him to perceive a hidden reality that the atheist, in his limited horizon, cannot see? When such serious problems are at stake, every possibility should be considered.

I’m watching my son walking back and forth like a tiger in a cage, condemning irrational beliefs and praising logic. Only yesterday he was a boy full of wonder who lived in a fantasy world. If I mentally put side by side my vivid memory of the boy and the young man of today, I don’t recognize them as the same person, but I love them both. This probably happen to a lot of parents, and it’s one of the mysteries of the world we live in. It’s hard to believe that our children, our loved ones, and even the young version of ourselves are gone forever.

My point is that if we look closer we can detect a supra-natural component in the context of our everyday lives. What’s wrong with exploring possibilities, even if fantastic? What’s wrong with giving credit to our feelings, even if they belong to a different level of perception? Are we putting our mental sanity at risk by doing that? I don’t think so. I think we are simply trying to look at reality from a broader perspective.

Satan can be a funny business if one doesn’t see him as a threat. When I was a little girl I dreamed of the devil twice. The first time he was hiding under a table. I lifted the table-cloth and there he was, nothing but a huge, red, grinning face complete with black horns. I think I screamed for quite some time after I woke up. My mother had to pick me up and carry me around the house to show me that there was no demon crouched under any piece of furniture.

In the second dream it didn’t look like the devil at all, but I knew it was him. It was hiding behind a curtain. I pulled it aside and I saw a rather funny creature entirely made of cobalt blue bones. Don't get me wrong, it wasn’t a skeleton. Those bones seemed to have been put together at random, as if to assemble a marionette. It was clumsy but in a terrifying way. There was no cranium, just a bouquet of small blue bones. I wonder, is that how one looks after having spent some time in the furnace?

Of course the Catholic Church believes in demonic possession. I think that there are both good and evil forces in our world. We should do our best to bring out the good, and one way to do it is to find meaning to our lives.                  

Msgr. Luigi  Giussani wrote in The Religious Sense that man responds to reason’s need for meaning. He said that if we didn’t take the world around us for granted, we would be amazed at its beauty and complexity. If we were to come out of our mother’s womb with an adult perception of the reality we would be in awe, not only of nature but also of human accomplishments. We would be astonished, incredulous, and we would know that this incredible world is not a meaningless place.

The human race can’t be headed nowhere. This statement doesn’t come out of fear, but out of  wonder. It is a reasonable response to our big questions. Acknowledging the reality of the  Mystery is reasonable, not irrational, because the very world we live in and our very selves are signs of this mystery. God is the most immediate implication of self- consciousness. Even the most passionate atheist must admit that we have an intuition of the Beyond. Whether we are afraid of death or not, we all perceive ourselves as part of something eternal. Chances are that we may be right.      

                                          

CHRISTIANITY

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• If the concept of God varies a lot in the history of humankind, so does the portrait of Jesus. I  think we can safely disregard the most hilarious one, namely that Jesus never existed and was the imaginary product of a cult whose followers got  high thanks to a sacred mushroom. Why shouldn’t we take this kind of claim seriously? I wouldn’t even get into this if it wasn’t for all the  nonsense that my son hears from his fellow atheists, nonsense that I feel I have to refute. We have as much historical evidence for Jesus as for all the accepted historical figures of the ancient world. Those who claim that the Gospels are not to be trusted because they were written a few decades after Jesus death, should take into consideration the fact that biographies of other historical characters such as, let’s say, Julius Caesar, were written two to three hundred years after his time, yet no one doubts his existence. 
  People who assert that the evangelists are not trustworthy because their aim was to promote Christianity are obviously ignorant of the configuration of the early Church, which was a very controversial movement that didn’t exactly need to be promoted, for the many martyrs who were accepting torture and death in the name of Jesus were already taking care of the public relations.
  
  
  Christians were constantly in danger and they needed to be comforted, this much is true. So the job of the evangelists was merely to remind them of Jesus‘ life, death and resurrection, and they were not the only ones who embarked in this task. We have more than seventy documents that talk about Jesus, including the Gnostic Gospels, which are not included in the New Testament. We have two first century historians, the Roman Tacitus and the Jewish Josephus, who  confirm that he was crucified under Pilate. Josephus describes him as a wise man and a “doer of startling deeds” who attracted  the crowds. As proofs of Jesus’ existence we also have ancient Jewish sources, which did not deny that Jesus worked miracles but interpreted them as acts of  sorcery.
  
  
   If one doesn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, one should at least acknowledge that he was an exceptional human being. But if one can grasp his nature in all its magnitude, that person will call him Son of God. This could be the kind of derivative truth that resides beyond what we can  prove (according to the standard notion  of proof accepted by science).
  
  
  Jesus’ message, I believe, has survived across two millenniums not by fortuitous chance, but  because it’s the only one that will prevent the human race from annihilating itself. In Jesus’ name horrible things have taken place in the past, yet his message is as clear as a diamond: The culture of “otherness” must end. Too many of us still look at their fellow human beings as “others”, namely as strange,  inferior,  or hostile. This attitude becomes especially dangerous when the “other” is someone who belongs to a different religion. The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches that no religion posses exclusive access to the Kingdom of God. We all must look inside ourselves to find the spiritual path that leads to salvation.
  
  
  Why do we feel so much more complete and fulfilled when we add a spiritual dimension to our lives? We become not only happier, but more HUMAN. I think we feel that way because we have recaptured a part of ourselves that we had forgotten, or put aside. The materialist will say that it all originates in matter and there is no other dimension to investigate. He will say that our spirituality is a biological fact, but this is a very unsatisfactory explanation  for those who actually perceive this other dimension. It doesn’t make sense to maintain that,  since one can’t prove its existence, one shouldn’t address his thoughts towards it. This is simply not possible for the human nature.                                                                                          
  Some of us turn their backs to religion, but all of us ask themselves the big questions: What is  the meaning of our existence? Is it really contained in this earthly life? We are structurally made for asking, wanting, expecting something greater than what we already have. Ultimately, something that will not end. Love and success can end at any given moment, or never occur at all. But deep down we know there is more. What we look for is a mystery, and if we strive so much towards it, there must be a correspondence to it in reality.
  
  
  The grace experienced by the person of faith is unknown to the atheist, who explains it away with psychological paradigms. Yet grace is real, and it touches the entire personality and the entire life of the faithful. It doesn’t bring only comfort, but also patience, strength, love and a sense of stability. The devil could offer me all the wealth of the world, as he did with Jesus, but I wouldn’t give away my religious sense for it, because it’s the only thing that can bring true happiness.
  
  

Praying to a Human God

                                       

I don’t want to pretend that things have been going smoothly all the time since I converted. There was a moment when too much introspection made it difficult for me. I was standing as a sentinel to my own feelings, anxiously waiting for my faith to assert itself in the face of adversities. The result was, of course, an excessive attention to myself. Instead of praying for my problems to be solved, I was trying to get ready for a potential disaster. Was I going to remain steady in my faith if something bad should happen? Peace of mind was not welcome, for I felt it was synonymous with egoism: If my son and husband were going to suffer, I wanted to suffer too. In the midst of these conflicting thoughts I shut down my heart. Probably something like this went through my mind:  If loving Jesus means that I’m going to love my family less, then I won’t love Jesus. But in time my love for Jesus has grown to the point of no return. I know that only in him I can find peace. I keep thinking about what he said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you.”

What did he mean? Should we ask him to increase our faith or are we allowed to ask for what we need in our everyday life? In The Four Loves  C. S. Lewis wrote:

“It would be a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast ‘I’m no beggar, I love You disinterestedly…’. God addresses our Need-love: ‘Come unto me, all you that travail and are heavy-laden…’. Thus Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides or at least makes a main ingredient in man’s highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual conditions.”

But according to Jesus, asking is not enough. We need to believe that our request is going to be granted. He said:                                                                                                                                          

“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain,’ Move from here to there’, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

And yet, we can’t turn against God if He doesn’t answer our prayers. As St. Ignatius of Loyola said, we need to feel a “holy indifference” towards the things of the world. Therefore, we must firmly believe that what we desire is going to happen but at the same time we must not care if it doesn't. I struggled a lot with this paradox, but in the end I was able to overcome it through shear trust. I pray and I’m positive that Jesus will deliver, but deep down I’m aware that what I truly need is to be close to him. All the other things I ask for, no matter how necessary they might be, would be of no importance without his love. And, so, ultimately, I put my life into his hands.

Surprisingly, none of my pleas is as deeply felt as the one for my husband and my son to find faith. I’ve actually been moved to tears more than once while I was praying for Jesus to reveal himself to them. I want this to happen because a life lived in the awareness of the divine is a life worth living, but also because I feel they are the ones who truly need comfort.

My husband is inclined to acknowledge that there is a reality beyond the one we know, which may or may not include what we call God. As I said before, people have the most dissimilar notions of God. There is the personal God, who listens to our prayers and may intervene in our lives. Or the Aristotelian First Principle who, after creating the universe, sat back and didn’t care anymore. There is the biblical God, who made the world in a few days and chose the Jews as His people. Or the omniscient and omnipresent Primordial Energy that is contained in every atom. And I know of people who believe in a superhuman alien race that occasionally attempts to put us inhabitants of the Earth on the right track. 

But Christians don’t have to be at loss for words to speak about God. For them God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, through the mystery of the Incarnation. He became a PERSON, someone we can feel close to our hearth, mind and even our to body. Someone who is easy to love.

Who is God?

The last comment kindly left by my most faithful reader seems to imply that atheists enjoy the same degree of serenity of the people of faith. But I have achieved  peace of mind only after my conversion. 

My inner transformation didn’t happen because I thought that Jesus was a great moral teacher and that I should have conformed my behavior to his message. Rather, his love gradually permeated my being and took over, independently from my will. I believe that he was fully man when he lived on this earth and is fully divine now, powerfully touching the lives of each and every person who opens his or her hearth to him.

 If we open our minds to the Gospels we find a monumental figure of never heard wisdom and courage, who definitely doesn’t sound deluded (as some atheists like to affirm). When he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane he was connecting with a higher power, so I have been trying to come up with my idea of it. 

In fact, my belief in God is still very raw, but perhaps that's how it should be. After all, we can't figure out God, can we? 

When my son wasn’t around trying to convince me that I was wasting my time, I tried to read St. Augustine and St. Thomas, but it didn’t help, because their faith generated their philosophy and shaped their thoughts. For someone like me, who didn’t feel the presence of God but only the presence of Jesus (if we want to forget about the Trinity for a moment), their certitude about His existence was incomprehensible.                                

I tried meditation, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I can shut down my mind, at least up to the point where my thoughts become very silly,  stare at the sky and marvel at its beauty. I can feel  very peaceful, but nothing more than that.

                                                                                                        

Strangely enough, I was able to take a glimpse into a possible idea of God when I watched a video about the universe on the Internet. Later I learned that I was not alone in thinking of God as revealed by modern physics. One of the most fascinating implications of Einstein’s special relativity is that time as we conceive it is a creation of our mind. Apparently, our universe originated from the great explosion known as the Big Bang and was initially smaller than an atom. Space and time as we know them belong to our universe, so if God is not in our space He’s also not in our time. This makes a lot of sense to me, for it means that we can stop wondering, for example, why He allowed Nazism to go on for twelve years.

 As Brian Leftow writes in Time and Eternity, God’s time is simply not equivalent to ours: “If God is timeless, then everything he does, he does all at once, in a single act…But that one act might have effects at different times. He might in one volition will that the sun rise today and the sun rise tomorrow, and this has effects today and tomorrow…”

Just as well, He might will that good wins over evil, and this has effects in time, but not in time as we know it. Twelve years is a long time for us, but imagine a timeless Being…twelve years might be a meaningless quantification for Him.

 If God is outside of our space-time, then He can’t act in time according to our perception of it. My husband thinks this is a contradiction: If God is omnipotent, He should be able to intervene in our time. If He’s good, He should want to intervene. I don’t agree. We can’t humanize God applying to Him our own measures of judgment. Our son’s opinion is that if we can’t understand this hypothetical God, then we also can’t talk about it. Again, I don’t agree. If we are looking for God, we must inevitably wonder about Him. Doesn’t matter how close we get to the truth, it’s enough to try.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

 I realize that my attempt to make sense of God stems from my need for coherence, and that I  shouldn't demand of myself to pin down the ineffable. Nevertheless, I know that I will try again and again, just like I did with Jesus.