Exorcism: Hunting Daemons in Lent: 1- Tests

by michael | Feb 24, 2023 | news

Important qualifications:

1. I use YHWH (YHWH) because it saves me from calling YHWH by any male/female pronoun.  I am also a cousin to YHWH’s people and so a better respect for YHWH is due.
2. This text, like the others, are works in progress.  If someone writes to let me know of a misspelled word etc or some other grammar-like possible correction necessary, i will change it.  I will do the same if I find or am told that there is a logical problem within the context of the argument.
3. There are footnotes to these texts, for further reading or from which direct quotes were derived.

Who are you?  What are you?  What kind of an animal are you?  It is questions such as these that lie at the heart of these forty days of Lent.

We could add certain things: give our time to a worthy cause, pray, go to worship, study the Bible and other literary sources that will enable us to address those questions. We could also give alms (money or food) to the poor. According to both the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) and the Nazorean Codicil(1) it is necessary and righteous to serve and help the poor (those in distress of any kind). However, in Lent we do them because they can remind us of the questions about who and what kind of thing we are. They are tools towards an end, not an end in themselves. We could subtract: food or drink once a week (fasting), some unhealthy habit (say smoking), or perhaps cut down on screen time.

These weeks in Lent

Over these weeks in Lent we will explore these questions. How we explore them comes out of the Gospel reading that is read the first Sunday in Lent every year; the famous story of Jesus’ temptations or testing through a devil or daemon in the desert after his baptism.

A word about stories or narratives. (2)  We create meaning out of, live, suffer sometimes, and change by stories; the stories of others that move us to both act and care but also our own stories. Unlike all other creatures on earth, we connect to our past and our future, to our families and strangers and to YHWH through stories, narratives; our own and those of others. The events that make up our stories shape us and we shape the stories of others through participation in them.

Jesus himself had a story. (And continues to have a story, but that is a reflection in forty days time). Those who followed him wrote his story down; they left some things out (one estimate is that what is in the Gospels about Jesus may cover three weeks of a thirty-plus lifetime), copied and changed others, some of it they invented, some of it goes back to Jesus himself. The critical thing to understand is that they told Jesus’ story because their own stories had intersected with his remarkably. Ever since that time, Christians have followed Jesus’ life story during the year both to make sense of their own and to re-shape their own stories.

The tale of Jesus being tempted or tested in the desert is one of the most important stories put together by three of the authors of the Gospels to help Jesus’ followers come to grips with (reconcile) their own stories, ask questions on their own journey. In short, we can use Jesus’ journey as a way of checking our own spiritual/emotional and physical pulse.

The desert and temptations.

There are three versions of the story. Mark’s is the shortest. Matthew and Luke’s expand Mark’s to include the temptations or testing of Jesus. In their expansion of the story these three tests mirror three dominant themes of human experience: bread, power and individualism or aloneness.

1) Bread. Are we simple animals that consume, who are born to buy?(3) Advertising assume that that is all we are, that we are temporary components of the market and that we have no other purpose or goal in existence but to serve the needs of the all-consuming market. The last sixty years seems to have pushed all contenders for a definition of ‘human’ aside except for that of human beings as buyers. But should we serve the needs of the market or should the market serve our needs?

2)  Power. We are animals. We often therefore act on instinct and sometimes that instinct is motivated by fear. Some of us control our fear and our instinct better than others. Some of us, therefore, seek power and control as we try to avoid being in situations where we will feel afraid or in which the fears that are buried deep within us confront us. However, we also have the ability to understand our fear; we can understand our environment better than other animals on earth. We can anticipate our fear and we can then act to manipulate events, people and the environment.  Is this all we are, a superior political animal?  Are we therefore doomed to react only through a Darwinian impulse-only the strong shall survive?

3)  Individualism, aloneness. The third test/temptation differs somewhat from the other two. Instead of a question about whether or not we are animals who are defined by certain acts, this test/temptation asks: are we mere individuals, alone in two universes, the physical one with stars, planets, gravity and science, as well as that of human and divine/spiritual interaction?

These questions will arise over the next three weeks. For the rest of this reflection the scene needs to be set: what about the desert and what about the devil or daemon that puts Jesus through these tests or temptations?  Like Jesus, we have all been to the desert and we have all known, and perhaps still know, daemons.

I believe in daemons. I am uncertain about a personal devil that wanders about the earth causing great evil or the temptation/testing of human beings, but I am certain about the reality of other very substantial daemons. There used to be a TV show, the name of which I forget, where one of the recurring lines was: “The Devil made me do it!”  The joke of course was that whoever said it was trying to get out of a sticky situation and did not want to be made accountable for his or her mistakes or outright sins (harm caused another person). For those who still believe in a real, physical devil, we often use ‘the devil’ as a diabolos ex machina that provides comfort in naming a horror that others do or for the evil that we ourselves do in order to get ourselves out of a sticky situation. We do this so that we can avoid the uncomfortable and difficult process of repentance and then reconciliation/forgiveness. The hard truth is that there are no daemons or devil than those which we ourselves have created or those which others have caused to take up a living inside us. It is those very real, personal daemons that meet us, visible, in the desert.

The desert.

Many of us have been there, in a fierce landscape,(4) a desert. Many of us avoid the same. Because we have wandered by threat or coercion into such a place or because we have walked there with a set purpose, we have been in the desert. Deserts of course are inhospitable places. No one can survive for long in a place without food, without water, under a blazing sun. This description of a desert is accurate for either a real place or a place into which only our minds, our spirits, our souls, if you will, go.

Sometimes outside force has been used to push us into a desert; It happens when someone dies: a spouse, a parent, a child, or a friend. It happens when we lose a job. An abusive relationship, either physical or verbal or both, or when we feel betrayed can cause a desert experience. Sometimes we enter a desert after moments of great triumph, like Jesus in the story, right after his baptism and acclamation by God. Sometimes when we have landed a great new job, sometimes when we have find a way to reconcile with someone else or when we again remember a great hatred that holds us in a prison of our own choosing. Even at times like those, the desert experience is waiting for us.

However, sometimes when we accept a an invitation to go to the desert as a volunteer, such as during these next forty days. The desert experience can be a time of healing, a time of aloneness that can bring clarity rather than confusion. It is not a coincidence that in the noble traditions of the world fierce landscapes are places both of hell and of healing.

There are of course some critical differences between these two sorts of desert experiences. In the first we are unprepared. The daemons feast and we suffer. The baggage with which we have entered this dry and waterless place is heavy and almost impossible to carry around. In the other desert experience, the one into which we choose to enter, the baggage is not so heavy because we have become used to the weight and we are prepared to more ably deal with the experience. The daemons are there of course but they are not as fearsome, not as in control of the moment. And we can deal with them in a careful way.

In fact, in either kind of desert experience, we can find such moments to be healthy rather than destructive, a time of cleansing and consolation rather than a time of damnation. We can use such times to understand our baggage. After all, no one carries our baggage for us: we cart it around ourselves, dragging it behind us, grinding long ruts in the path we walk.

Some desert experiences are hell and, as C.S. Lewis once put it; we lock the door to hell from inside. The daemons that we meet in that place are the ones we carry with us. Our baggage is our own (cf. Matthew 7:17-23). The desert experience can be one in which we find a way to banish the daemons or at least chain them down and keep them under control. Our time of testing and temptation then becomes manageable and profitable.

Alone in the desert

One other point. Desert experiences are times when we are alone. The fact that we go in and come out alone creates the value of a desert experience, in part. Someone else can walk to the edge of the desert, can even sit and watch us from that vantage point on the edge, but cannot carry our baggage, cannot unpack it for us, cannot meet the tests or temptations or daemons that we meet. Only we can do that.

It is notable that when Jesus met his daemon or devil he did it alone. It was not until after his time of testing that angels came and ministered to him and he experienced consolation. During the experience YHWH  could not do more than watch and wait. Even YHWH cannot do more than walk with us to the edge and wait like an anxious, brooding, hovering parent watching a child step out and do something complicated for the first time. And when we come out we, like Jesus, can be more confident, more certain and whole and less controlled by our daemons.

Interestingly, if we are successful we find, once we have emerged, that God, or God’s representative somehow cheated the rules and was there with us all along. It is a peculiar thing, but it is a common experience. If we leave the desert without success, we leave blaming everyone else, especially God.

Part of the danger of the desert experience is of course that we leave the desert too soon or pack up the baggage and walk away without dealing with the daemons. When that happens, the desert experience becomes hell and being hunted by our daemons continues. And then we mete out hell on others. The daemons come back stronger and more evil than ever (cf. Mathew 12:43-45). And so we are at risk of being damned, not because  YHWH  damns us but because we do not choose the path of healing, or we find it impossible to do so.

The texts invite us during Lent to enter the desert. Seek self-knowledge. Unpack our baggage and struggle with our daemons. Allow  YHWH  a chance to bring peace, healing and comfort to us so that we, in turn, can walk with others to the edge of their deserts and be an angel of mercy to them, as others, if they are willing, can be so for us. In fact, if ‘God’ as defined earlier, is indeed part of the human experience, then when we do so we are YHWH  for them.

The traditional model of what these forty days of Lent are about is that it is a time of penitence. My question for the tradition is this: if we do not know our daemons, if we do not go into the desert to confront them, seek to either drive them out or chain them down, unpack our baggage and see ourselves as we are without the glittering image,(6) without the facade with which we cover ourselves day to day, how can we be penitential?  Penitence arises out of uncompromising self-understanding. The place to begin that search for understanding is in the desert with our baggage and our daemons.

***

(1) A Jewish view here: the Nazorean codicil: http://www.betemunah.org/merit.html; that is, an addendum to the Tanakh.

(2) R. Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, being the 1999 CBC Massey Lecture (Toronto: Anansi, 1999) and Thomas King, The Truth About Stories, being the 2003 CBC Massey Lecture (Toronto: Anansi, 2003). 

(3) George Bush in a speech after 9/11 said, shop, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxk9PW83VCY

(4) A wonderful volume that reflects upon such matters from physical landscapes and not those of mere mind is that of Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998)

(5) C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 63, 67. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4, 93, 2 “There would be no everlasting punishment of the souls of the damned if they were able to change their will for a better will.”

(6) The phrase comes from the title of Susan Howatch’s novel, Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).