A matter of proper indwelling

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/012918.cfm
2 Samuel 15:13-14, 30; 16:5-13
Mark 5:1-20

Casting out demons rarely comes up in modern conversation. Jesus, however, had no problem with the subject, because he knew what was going on.

"What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
I adjure you by God, do not torment me!"
(Jesus had been saying to him, "Unclean spirit, come out of the man!")
Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"
The man possessed with demons replied, "Legion is my name. There are many of us."

At the Post Office the other day, the kind postal clerk (yes, many mail carrier employees portray kind hearts) remarked that a patron who had just left the building, a shuffling elderly woman wearing a shawl and early 20th Century shoes, complained that she had, “Bats in her belfry.” She referred to her noggin, not some preposterous bell tower sitting atop her house.

I mentioned that demons seem intent on parking themselves inside the heads of the elderly, “Don’t they?” 

He replied, “Yeah, for most of our lives they live rent free in our hearts and mouths and eyes, talking us into doing things we don’t want to do. When we enter the golden years they retire and move up to the brain and make us go out of our minds.”

I laughed at that. I wanted to ask what he thought about kicking demons out all together, and what difference that might make. He might have expected I was a psychiatrist. And then I’d explain that, “No, I’m not a shrink. I’m wondering if we should pray over her, invoke the power of Jesus Christ, and knock the demons into permanent retirement.” But, I didn’t. 

There is joking around, and then there is intrusion of the spiritual harassment category. So, what constitutes demonic possession as unique from a medical or psychiatric condition? 

At a dinner this past week someone brought up the rise in the number of exorcisms. I looked it up. An article in the National Catholic Register several months back followed a meeting of the Association of Exorcists in Rome, some 400 folks. The NCR quoted one of the attendees. “As the acceptance of sin has increased, so, too, has demonic activity.”

The inference, of course, says that sin invites personal relationships with the harbingers and carriers of sin. Demons deal in sin. We think of hawkers in front of casinos, and street walkers parading their wares, and pot shops, with their 21st Century mind-altering sales pitches, making liquor stores seem passe´. Demons surely enjoy the extreme vices. I imagine their more common employment, though, deals primarily with the distracting sinfulness that shoves God out of the way, like incessant work or laziness, depending on our affectations. Or, the goal-oriented, egalitarian stuff; like being the smartest person in the room, or viewing life through the lens of financial success. 

These more hidden vice-based and self-centered behaviors don’t result in the kind of demonic possession like the movies portray, because they are more results of demonic activity influencing our hearts (which includes our hands and eyes as the postal fella articulated). Demonic activity isn't always demonic possession.

In fact, the actual increase in demonic activity has been this “bats in the belfry” category rather than full on demonic possession. Possession cases have numbered the same year over year. The difference between the belfry perching and full body possession comes down to loitering rather than indwelling. The limited demonic activity of bothersome bats are listed as vexation, infestation, and obsession. They sound pretty horrible. Yet, they lack the climactic and hellion character of a full on “possession.” 

Interestingly, the demonic bat level attacks can be dealt with through prayer, and don’t require exorcist professionals, according to advice from a few of the exorcism members quoted in the NCR article. We can summon the saints and angels to assist us in calling upon the Holy Spirit to reject and inhibit the non-possession forms of Bats-in-the-Belfry demonic troubles. Possession, however, requires more fervent attention. 

Exorcisms, which look a lot like a hell-raising event to the onlooker, require Church anointed authorities, considered as the official representatives of the Body of Christ. They bring the instruments and language of Baptism and Confirmation, with sprinklings of other sacraments, and combine them into a full-throated onslaught against Satan and his minions. It’s still prayer, of course, but with a lot more hutzpah, ministerial involvement, and ritual.

A friend, who is a psychiatrist, remains open to the power of such holy exorcisms. He said his experience has taught him that spiritual realms likely exist, and, "who an I to rule out a therapy that shows evidence of working?" Medical treatment and psychiatric analysis are properly armed for the right diagnosis. In the territory of the possessed man in Mark, though, clearly something else is going on.

“In fact, he had frequently been bound with shackles and chains,
but the chains had been pulled apart by him and the shackles smashed,
and no one was strong enough to subdue him.” 

In Mark, chapter 3, Jesus’ scripturally recorded demon driving force mostly comes from his authority, which is surely enough. Jesus not only cures and heals in an instant, he also bans evil in all its forms. 

For the typical human, imagining that we must call on Jesus for eradicating demons might appear far-fetched, but many organizations, including Alcoholics Anonymous, have incorporated Jesus' authority with amazing results. Jesus, however, is not a therapy. He is a person and an intimate member of the Trinity; which means Father, Son and Spirit act in concert. The Christian has more than an 800 number to call. We have an indwelled Spirit, an eternal Father, and a divine brother. 

In the case of demonic activity the very demons are abominations of God's own creation. Consequently, the authority of God is known to demons. The casting off of demons does not fit well into institutional boundaries, or sacramental constructs. Most religious practices naturally build up both institutes and constructs over time. So, when lived out in spiritual and physical symbiosis, God's response to demons, whether loitering kind or those possessing us, becomes highly personal for him. When we cry out to God for help there are assuredly ripples in the space/time continuum. 

Rather than searching out any demons we may possess in our belfries or that may possess us, I suggest a different tack. By concentration on our relationship with God, focusing our attention more on his indwelling than a demon's proximity, we shift the gears of our conversations. We can't avoid evil with effective results, not for long. We also don't make much progress in arguing with sin's sales force, The constant and frustrating nature of sin’s increasing partners in crime (both demons and human soldiers signed up as mercenaries), ultimately, is exhausting to attend to. At our weakest points we’re simply hanging bait for the feasting. These folks and evil spirits take cleverness to an art form. 

We should call on Jesus, and wait for the Holy Spirit to speak to us in whichever manner that the Spirit knows we will hear. This will certainly go quite a ways toward repairing our lives. Plus, the spiritual realm of God has innumerable visitors to our physical realm. The angels and saints eat these opportunities up. When sent by God to assist us our suffering may not go away, but it will make sense. Do angels and saints play such roles in God's creation of heaven and earth? They must. They have in scripture. You probably have many unrecognized events that highlight their involvement. What else can be true?

Perhaps you may not believe in demons, much less angels and saints. Believing in God, however, necessarily opens the door to everything that God has spoken to us about. I believe most of our assistance against evil spirits takes place well before the demons even had an opportunity.

This past Sunday morning, Father Timothy made an announcement before Mass that he’d just been told that his sister, Tracy, had been killed in an auto accident. There he stood before us, a broken, weeping man. Unprepared for a service where his life had suffered a tragedy of such proportion, Timothy was ripe for attack. Instead he stood among us. He mourned and wept and led us through the Sunday service. He chose a sanctified path for his grief within a building full of sympathetic, horrified, and prayerful folks. This opportunity could in no way be considered his choice. Because of his assigned holy role, God rightly gave him no other choice that to be there with us, his friends in faith.

At the end of the Eucharist he blurted out the keen grasp of what had just transpired. “How do people go through things like this without Jesus?” he said. He thanked us for crying with him, and said it again. “I don’t know how they deal with it.”

Things may look horrible and unfair, but though we seem numbed and dismissive of the steady stream of bad news, we never get used to it. We’re used to our problems, sure, deep down we want the world to be righted, rejoined to the creator and his intentions. Turning to God, though, has been criticized more than applauded. When bad things happen we don't just doubt God's existence. We doubt his loving considerations. It's best not to consider God's involvement at all, say so many who have retreated into the secular world's sanitized view of life.

I was recently warned on a science and knowledge website about citing God and his delight that scientists are discovering how the universe works. “We will not be discussing gods or religious beliefs in this group.” Sin without God, science without God, and psychiatry without God cause us to hesitate in invoking God.

We want to fix brokenness, especially if the excise of demons from our everyday life will help. We want to enact justice when injustice prevails. Jesus’ restorative powers, when taken to completion, will eventually eliminate the need for such a desire, because the full management of justice will be the modus operandi in the next life.  

Not yet, though. The poor, the damaged, the illiterate, the powerless, and the destitute challenge human systems to their limit. Everything that exists in the human managed world comes out of crisis management. The monitors put in place to limit the effects and breadth of crisis become the framework for our society. 

Consequently, we often must invoke God on our own, with only a few like-minded folks who willingly allow God's holiness can take place amid the rising sewer in the pits of sin.

In a religious security system, too, we often try to apply the management of sin with secular means — either whack-a-mole, or a strictly hierarchical pecking order. From ugliness to criminality, and every egregious thing in between, proper religious lordship and authority operates by threats and behavior controls. Again, instituting God's presence in religious structures can have the opposite effect. We don't really allow God's presence.

What sin shows us, however, is that holiness is not backed up by a fine-tuned weaponry of clubs. Rather, the presence of Jesus, under the authority of the Father, is revealed to us by the gathering and whispering of the Holy Spirit. Calling upon Jesus invites the holy saints and angels to surround us, even as we experience, no, especially as we experience, the pains of this world and as we suffer the anguish of our human relationships.

That’s what we’re supposed to do. Witness his presence, and invoke his name. 

At the base of the question about the difference between therapy and excising our demons sits the friends, saints and angels we have called into our lives along with the choice to follow holiness instead of evil.

In essence, the bats in the belfry will find no comfort -- if our bodies, even as they are made to suffer, are visited by the holy ones, because our hearts belong to God.