conflict
what we do not know…
What we do not know, or fear acknowledging, does in fact hurt us, and often others as well…so often the one who receives the Shadow projection of others-be it Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, the witches of Salem, the devils of Loudon, the Jews of Poland, gays, or a host of other martyrs to unconsciousness – will be vilified, crucified, marginalized, gassed, burned, or ignored. They are the carrier of our secret life, and for this we shall bate them, revile them, and destroy them, for they have committed the most heinous of offenses. They remind us of some aspect of ourselves we cannot bear to see. Sadly, the weaker the ego state, the more intolerable this summons, and the greater the potential for “categorical judgment” of others, which is to say bigotry and prejudice. – James Hollis
War
Old age in the towns. The heart without an owner. Love without any object. Grass, dust, crow. And the young ones?
In the coffins.
The tree alone and dry. Women like a stick of widowhood across the bed. Hatred there is no cure for.. And the young ones?
In the coffins.
MIGUEL HERNANDEZ
(translated by Hardie St. Martin)
the way of peace
Here is a statement of Gandhi that sums up clearly and concisely the whole doctrine of nonviolence: “The way of peace is the way of truth.” “Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He will perceive in the course of his research that he has no need to be violent, and he will further discover that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence in him, he will fail to find the truth he is searching.” Why can we not believe this immediately? Why do we doubt it? Why does it seem impossible? Simply because we are all, to some extent, liars.
We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.
Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error.
We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy- for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the “truth.” He has identified us with dishoneity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth.
– Thomas Merton
just one more war
I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, “after just one more war” it will dawn, the new era of love: but first everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love.
Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls “the enemy.” For man is concrete and alive, but “the enemy” is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of man with man, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion.
– Thomas Merton
get behind me…
Ronald Rolheiser –
When you read the lives of the saints, especially in some older books, you can get the impression that they lived in a different world. Many of them describe physical encounters with Satan within which they would, literally, get beaten up by him. Satan, it seemed, was forever lurking under a bed, in a basement, in a stairwell, or in some dark corner, just waiting to pounce on them and beat them up. They had to be careful not to venture naively into dark places; though, conversely, there were times when they readied themselves and went deliberately, to the desert, to openly do battle with him.
And, in that fight, they had a great weapon, simple one-line mantras: “Get behind me, Satan!” “Satan, leave this room!” “Satan, leave me alone!” That brought guaranteed results. He left them in peace for a while, though they emerged somewhat scraped and bruised from the encounter.
Such language sounds pretty esoteric and even superstitious to us. Not many of us have ever had Satan pop up from under our beds or from some dark place and begin to beat us up. Or have we?
Who or what is Satan? Believers today are split as to whether or not they believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for a venomous power that can overwhelm you, strip you of moral strength, and leave you precisely with the feeling of having been beaten up. Either way, whether we believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for malevolence, temptation, and lack of moral strength, the encounters that the saints describe happen to us too in our rational, agnostic lives just as surely as they happened to pious believers in former times.
Satan, scripture tells us, is the prince of jealousy, bitterness, paranoia, obsession, and lies. Few things in life torment us and beat us up as badly as these. They lurk in every dark corner, come out from under our beds at night, generally threaten us, darken our days, dampen our joys, and make us anxious as to what might lie around the corner. We just word things differently.
We speak of being “obsessed”, while the saints speak of being “possessed”. It’s just a difference of words.
Satan, however we choose to conceive of that power, is harassing us all the time and we, like the saints of old, need to learn the mantra: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Where are we harassed and beaten up by Satan? Here are some, everyday, examples:
Every time our minds and hearts begin bitterly replaying, like cassette tapes, old conversations, old wounds, old rejections, and old injustices, so that everything inside of us wants to scream: “This isn’t fair!” “How dare he say that!” “How can she do that, after all I did for her!” “I hate those people!” “Why do I always get cheated?”, we are being tormented by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!” There will be no joy, goodness, or moral strength in our lives until those obsessions leave us alone.
Every time we feel a deep emptiness inside and our world feels flat and empty of meaning because we are obsessed with someone or something we can’t have, we need to pray: “Get behind me, Satan!” Heartaches, especially over frustrated love, might well speak of romance, but they also bespeak satan in that they drain the joy out of life and deaden all of our manageable loves. Satan doesn’t come at us like a demon with a pitchfork, standing before fire and smoke, he torments us in a frustrated, pathologically-restless, romantic fantasy that has us in near-suicidal depression and comes upon us in dark stairwells, at parties, and right within our own beds.
Every time we feel pangs of jealousy (not necessarily overtly directed against someone else’s good fortune) but in the disappointment that we feel because our bodies, marriages, careers, and even our morals haven’t turned out as perfectly as we’d have liked, whenever we find it hard to be grateful for our own lives, we are being beaten up by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Indeed, any time we have trouble falling asleep at night because some memory, some disappointment, some lost love, some wrong-turn taken, or some obsession won’t let go and give us enough calm to sleep, Satan is harassing us, right in own beds, and we need, like the saints of old, to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Satan is alive and well, still tormenting us in our beds, in basement rooms, in dark stairwells, and in broad daylight as we travel to work. We call his presence: obsessions, heartaches, restlessness, jealousy, emptiness, fear, paranoia, old hurts, insomnia, chaos, and other names. Like the saints of old, we need at times when we feel strong enough to wrestle with him openly in the desert, but we need too, whenever our fears and obsessions begin to beat us up, to say the ancient prayer: “Get behind me, Satan!”
removed from the rest of humanity
Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love: they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own hear the zealot tries to clear the world.
– Joseph Campbell, from The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Get behind me…
When you read the lives of the saints, especially in some older books, you can get the impression that they lived in a different world. Many of them describe physical encounters with Satan within which they would, literally, get beaten up by him. Satan, it seemed, was forever lurking under a bed, in a basement, in a stairwell, or in some dark corner, just waiting to pounce on them and beat them up. They had to be careful not to venture naively into dark places; though, conversely, there were times when they readied themselves and went deliberately, to the desert, to openly do battle with him.
And, in that fight, they had a great weapon, simple one-line mantras: “Get behind me, Satan!” “Satan, leave this room!” “Satan, leave me alone!” That brought guaranteed results. He left them in peace for a while, though they emerged somewhat scraped and bruised from the encounter.
Such language sounds pretty esoteric and even superstitious to us. Not many of us have ever had Satan pop up from under our beds or from some dark place and begin to beat us up. Or have we?
Who or what is Satan? Believers today are split as to whether or not they believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for a venomous power that can overwhelm you, strip you of moral strength, and leave you precisely with the feeling of having been beaten up. Either way, whether we believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for malevolence, temptation, and lack of moral strength, the encounters that the saints describe happen to us too in our rational, agnostic lives just as surely as they happened to pious believers in former times.
Satan, scripture tells us, is the prince of jealousy, bitterness, paranoia, obsession, and lies. Few things in life torment us and beat us up as badly as these. They lurk in every dark corner, come out from under our beds at night, generally threaten us, darken our days, dampen our joys, and make us anxious as to what might lie around the corner. We just word things differently.
We speak of being “obsessed”, while the saints speak of being “possessed”. It’s just a difference of words.
Satan, however we choose to conceive of that power, is harassing us all the time and we, like the saints of old, need to learn the mantra: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Where are we harassed and beaten up by Satan? Here are some, everyday, examples:
Every time our minds and hearts begin bitterly replaying, like cassette tapes, old conversations, old wounds, old rejections, and old injustices, so that everything inside of us wants to scream: “This isn’t fair!” “How dare he say that!” “How can she do that, after all I did for her!” “I hate those people!” “Why do I always get cheated?”, we are being tormented by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!” There will be no joy, goodness, or moral strength in our lives until those obsessions leave us alone.
Every time we feel a deep emptiness inside and our world feels flat and empty of meaning because we are obsessed with someone or something we can’t have, we need to pray: “Get behind me, Satan!” Heartaches, especially over frustrated love, might well speak of romance, but they also bespeak satan in that they drain the joy out of life and deaden all of our manageable loves. Satan doesn’t come at us like a demon with a pitchfork, standing before fire and smoke, he torments us in a frustrated, pathologically-restless, romantic fantasy that has us in near-suicidal depression and comes upon us in dark stairwells, at parties, and right within our own beds.
Every time we feel pangs of jealousy (not necessarily overtly directed against someone else’s good fortune) but in the disappointment that we feel because our bodies, marriages, careers, and even our morals haven’t turned out as perfectly as we’d have liked, whenever we find it hard to be grateful for our own lives, we are being beaten up by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Indeed, any time we have trouble falling asleep at night because some memory, some disappointment, some lost love, some wrong-turn taken, or some obsession won’t let go and give us enough calm to sleep, Satan is harassing us, right in own beds, and we need, like the saints of old, to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Satan is alive and well, still tormenting us in our beds, in basement rooms, in dark stairwells, and in broad daylight as we travel to work. We call his presence: obsessions, heartaches, restlessness, jealousy, emptiness, fear, paranoia, old hurts, insomnia, chaos, and other names. Like the saints of old, we need at times when we feel strong enough to wrestle with him openly in the desert, but we need too, whenever our fears and obsessions begin to beat us up, to say the ancient prayer: “Get behind me, Satan!
– Ronald Rolheiser
the real devil
The devil’s secret is camouflage. The devil’s job is to look very moral! It has to look like you are defending some great purpose or cause, like making the world safe for democ racy or keeping the bad people off the streets. Then you can do many evils without any guilt, without any shame or self-doubt, but actually with a sense of high-minded virtue. Thomas Aquinas writes that evil must disguise itself as good and, until Christians start understanding that, their capac ity for “discernment of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10) remains very minimal. They are easily duped and always misled by such devils.
– Richard Rohr
the essential question
(my granddaughter, Fin, posing the question)
Edge of Atlantic 