Pope Francis re-emphasizes this, saying, "The Christian life is a constant battle. We need strength and courage to withstand the temptations of the devil and to proclaim the Gospel. The battle is sweet, for it allows us to rejoice each time the Lord triumphs in our lives." ("Gaudete Et Exsultate # 158.)
Most of the time, we are too distracted by the busyness of our life, its challenges, responsibilities, and pleasures, to pay full attention to the win-or-lose drama going on inside of us. That's why Lent is the perfect time to slow our lives down, (in Latin, Lent means "slowly") and to "fast" from some of the normal, healthy pleasures that distract us. Then, more alert and aware, we can enter the empty desert of our souls and face that battleground. Once we achieve some outer and inner quiet, we can get to know who our enemy is, and what good God-gifts and angels guard us.
Jesus' monumental temptations in the desert can guide us on how to recognize our inner enemies and friends. Jesus, after his Baptism, and in order to prepare for his public ministry, was driven by the Holy Spirit into the vast, rugged, solitude of the desert, where he fasted, and prayed. Hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, he was humanly vulnerable to his and all human beings' enemies. Divine, he kept his inner gaze continuously fastened to his Heavenly Father's Face so that he would not give in. In the desert, he was put to the test by Satan, was with the wild animals, and was cared for by the angels.
The painting "The Temptation in the Wilderness," (above) by artist Briton Riviere, emphasizes Jesus' solitude as he awaits the oncoming darkness of temptation. Each of us, like Jesus, is fundamentally alone as we face temptation; it is a lonely inner battle. But each of us also, like Jesus, has the ongoing loving support of our Heavenly Father to uphold us.
Spiritual writers like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross have identified the three traditional enemies of the soul as the world, the flesh, and the devil. Jesus faced all three in his temptations. So do we, as daily we prepare for our mission, our public ministry.
The world and our fragile, vulnerable flesh are inescapable, constantly inundating us with temptation. Pope Francis says,
Fr. Ronald Rolheiser speaks of the chaos inside us, the "wild animals" "that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face - our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to really pray, our faith doubts, and our moral secrets. The normal food that we eat, ("food" here is a word that represents our distracted ordinary life), works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives." He continues,
"Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up to the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us."
But, before we speak of the angels, we need to address the question of Satan, of the demons. Bishop Robert Barron tells us honestly,
"When I was coming of age in the '60s and '70s, it was common, even in seminaries, to dismiss such talk (of Satan) as primitive superstition - or perhaps to modernize it and make it a literary device, using symbolic language evocative of the struggle with evil in the abstract. But the problem with that approach is that it just does not do justice to the Bible."
Bishop Barron describes Jesus' sending out the Twelve, two by two, on mission. "The first thing he gave them...was 'authority over unclean spirits.' And the first pastoral act they performed was to 'drive out many demons.' Jesus rejoiced when his disciples made progress when preaching the Gospel and overcoming the opposition of the evil one: 'I saw Satan falling like lightning from Heaven.'" (Lk. 10:18)
Pope Francis says, "True enough, the Biblical authors had limited conceptual resources for expressing certain realities, and in Jesus' time epilepsy, for example, could easily be confused with demonic possession. Yet this should not lead us to an oversimplification that would conclude that all the cases related in the Gospel had to do with psychological disorders and hence that the devil does not exist or is not at work...Indeed, in leaving us the Our Father, Jesus wanted us to conclude by asking the Father to 'deliver us from evil.' That final word does not refer to evil in the abstract; a more exact translation would be 'the evil one.' It indicates a personal being who assails us. Jesus taught us to ask daily for deliverance from him, lest his power prevail over us.
"Hence we should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech, or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless, and grow more vulnerable. The devil does not need to possess us. He poisons us with the venom of hatred, desolation, envy, and vice. When we let down our guard, he takes advantage of it to destroy our lives, our families, and our communities."
Bishop Barron explains, "The biblical authors knew....about the world of fallen, or morally compromised spirits. Jesus indeed battled sin in individual hearts as well as the sin that dwells in institutional structures, but he also struggled with a dark power more fundamental and more dangerous than those.
"What, or better, who is this threatening spiritual force? it is a devil, a fallen or morally compromised angel. Imagine a truly wicked person who is also very smart, very talented, and very enterprising. Now raise that person to a far higher pitch of ontological perfection, and you will have some idea of what a devil is like. Very rarely, devils intervene in human affairs in vividly frightening and dramatic ways. But typically, devils act more indirectly and clandestinely through temptation, influence, and suggestion."
Bishop Barron teaches that the names Scripture gives these figures explain a devil's work.
The great Separator: "God is a great gathering force, for by his very nature he is love; but the devil's work is to sunder, to set one against the other. Whenever communities, families, nations, churches are divided, we sniff out the diabolic."
The Accuser: "...Gauge how often in the course of the day you accuse another person of something or find yourself accused. It's easy enough to notice how often dysfunctional families and societies finally collapse into an orgy of mutual blaming. That's satanic work."
The Father of Lies: "Because God is Truth, truthfulness - about oneself, about others, about the ways things really are - is the key to smooth human relations. But how often we suffer because of untruth! Perhaps many years ago, someone told you a lie about yourself, and you've been wounded by it ever since. Perhaps you've deliberately lied about another person and thereby ruined his character or reputation. Consider how many wars and genocides have been predicated upon pervasive misperceptions and fabrications."
The Murderer from the Beginning: "God IS life and thus the fosterer of human life. The devil - like an unhappy person who likes nothing better than to spread unhappiness around him - is the enemy of human flourishing, the killer of life. Does anyone really think that the massive slaughters that took place in the twentieth century - the piling up of tens of millions of corpses - can be adequately explained through political or psychological categories?"
Now that we have examined the sources of our temptations - the world, the flesh, and the devil - we ask ourselves: How do we battle these fearsome forces? How can we discern the "tip of the devil's tail"? What IS the armor of God? How do the good angels - the Army of God - help us? The Good News of Christianity is that Jesus is victorious over temptation and sin, and, through, with, and in him, we can be victorious too. In my next post, I'll describe how we can win the ongoing war, our own spiritual combat, on our own soul's battleground, with God's help.