"Perverse Generation"

Our Gospel lesson this morning, is brief. A man kneels before the Lord Jesus begging Him to heal his son of epilepsy. Jesus exorcises a formidable demon delivering the young man of his tormentor.

The modern, secular mind is provoked:

Scientism is apt to dismiss even the possibility of other domains. "Everything is rooted in matter," the self-assured scientist would say. So if everything is rooted in matter, then, let us consider matter's roots:

This is worrisome, for here is a closed system suggesting circular reasoning. And circular reasoning begs the question, "Do we really understand this, or are we locked into a kind of shimmer .... where the subject we are studying bends back on itself?

One of the landmark books of the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), makes a related point. Kuhn wrote that the history of science is one of self-enclosed systems, validating all within them .... though the bounded content may be erroneous. Advanced research goes forward, he wrote, on the back of high school science. Progress is made when established beliefs are blind-sided by revolutions from without.

The foremost researchers I met during my career at Bell Labs and MIT were, above all, open minds seeking possibility in conversation. Many were inclined toward spiritual faith. My boss's boss, Arno Penzias, who had shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with another Bell Labs scientist in 1978, told me that he read the opening verses of Genesis as a precise, though poetic, description of the Big Bang Theory. And while we are on this subject, we ought to remember that the Big Bang Theory was resisted at the highest levels of the scientific establishment because it held the Laws of Physics to be temporary and provisional.

Why should those doing basic research be open to spiritual mystery and God? Because researchers are acutely aware of how much we do not know. I like George F. Will's characterization:

While the material and spiritual domains are distinct, they are also woven into each other. Among God's creatures, angels do not have material bodies. They are spirit as God is Spirit (Jn 4:24). So are fallen angels, whom we call demons. In order to participate in world of flesh and blood, demons, like viruses, must invade human cells and bodies to make them their own.

Angels and demons compete for dominance within the human person. When we choose for evil, we plant a stench within that drives out angels and alienates ourselves from the Holy Spirit. Happily, as St. Basil the Great has written (On the Holy Spirit), if a man covers himself with mud but breaks off just a little chink through goodness, the Holy Spirit, like a powerful sun, fills his body with light. Sadly, sin is done in secret, which is to say, darkness, and life-in-secret encourages greater sinfulness.

As demons require matter, material wherewithal, in order to function in the mortal world, so spiritual phenomena in general require material components to find expression in our world. We do not say that a miracle ceases to be a miracle because it occurred in a material context. Let's say, for example, that the Hermitage should fall on hard times (beyond our normal poverty). Suddenly, one of our members experiences a windfall through a distant relative's legacy. Does this mean that our deliverance is no miracle? A Quaker minister I knew told me, "Everything's a miracle. It's the timing you want to pay attention to." Yes, even God requires material means to express His love in our world.

Conversely, all diseases or afflictions we may suffer do not necessarily accuse us of sinful living .... of course not! There are many cases when we suffer disease through no fault of our own. Yet, I would neglect my priestly duty not to add that all disease derives from the alienation of humankind from God brought on by the rebellion in Eden. That is, we as individuals may not have rebelled against God, but we as humankind undeniably have.

The domains of angels and demons also are not distinct from one another. Evil has no lifeworld of its own. Life proceeds alone from God. The demonic world is merely a disfigurement of wholesome life. Demons are artifacts of life's brokenness. They are partisans in a rebellion against God. They represent the furthest point of separation from God, whose locus classically is Hell. On earth, theirs is the culture of death, which is a subversion of life. As health is the ordinary state of life for humans, so eternal life with God is the ordinary destiny of all men and women. The alternative to Heaven is not insentient nothingness but rather a horrible disfigurement of eternal life.

The evil one, who is the father of lies (Jn 8:44), insinuates that we do not really lose God by sinning but rather have God on our own terms. As he told Eve, we become, really, more like God by entering those lands that He has set beyond our borders, for they belong to Him. Which man lost in sin believes that he has lost God? Why, he or she is just "coloring outside the lines. Surely, God will forgive them for that!" For who would choose to discard eternal life in exchange for eternal grotesquery?

In the modern era, the evil one and his demons have achieved the highest goal of the criminal mind, which is to be thought non-existent. People scoff at the idea that a man addicted to self-destructive opiates or a woman living an eternal nightmare of promiscuous sex are possessed. We tend to medicalize our moral failings. We tell ourselves, we are the victim, not the transgressor.

The truth is, our free and willing choice for vice marks our decision that the angels should depart. It is we who have taken down a very important sign that all demons once read: "No Vacancy." Once, we had been encouraged by St. Paul, who wrote that the body is a holy temple (1 Cor 6:19), or by St. Peter, who affirmed that we are living stones in a godly house (1 Peter 2:5). But we evicted the holy ones, who cannot abide the stench of low living. We have hung out a new sign for all, and especially demons, to see: "Moral Vacancy."

How does possession happen? We are curious about forbidden things, maybe introduced to them. "Just once," we tell ourselves. But we go back a second time and then a third until vice is established. Our thoughts keep straying back to our secret pastime. Eventually, we become defined by our vices as our daydreams minute by minute invariably become our formation and identity in the end, as St. Augustine has written. A habit has become habituation, and habituation has become habitation. New tenants have moved in. And we must admit after months and years pass that we are no longer in control. We cannot stop. Then, who is driving this vehicle I call my body and mind? We may be sure of this: there is no neutral gear. Either we are dominated by angelic influences guiding us to Heaven or by demonic influences putting us in reverse. Loss of control is a sure sign of possession. When you cannot stop, you are indisputably possessed whatever the medicalized rationalization may be.

Once we have opened our minds to this principle, we see how common it is .... something the demons fear above all else on earth: that we will wake up and see things as they really are. Our daily lives are filled with people who have, in some measure, consented to demonic possession. Of course, we also meet radiant people filled with the Holy Spirit bountifully inhabiting them. But tragically these luminous figures always seem to be a minority.

This morning we meet with a young man who is epileptic. We learn that he is possessed. (As we shall see, for some reason his case provokes disgust in the Lord Jesus.)

Moderns ridicule, for they are quite sure that they understand epilepsy medically. In fact, for all our neural imaging technologies, we do not have the slightest idea what epilepsy is, nor its causes. It is an effect, a disorder, something is wrong. The word epilepsy derives from an ancient Greek word, επιλα'μβανειν, (epilambanein) meaning "to seize, to afflict, to possess." And this continues to be the state of our knowledge today. It is an effect. That is, we have no theory explaining the etiology.

St. Matthew offers an apt image of possession, for the human is taken over by an unseen agency — we do not know what or why in material terms — forcing the body to do things that it otherwise would not. The young man's father says

The emphasis on fire and water inevitably points to the elements, for the first century understood the material world to be composed of only four elements: earth, wind, water, and fire corresponding to four basic humors of the human person. We see an oblique suggestion that the young man is too much preoccupied with elemental spirits, "falling into fire" in the sense of "falling into sin." "I went down, down, down into a burning ring of fire," Johnny Cash wrote. And we notice that Jesus does not simply rebuke the spirit. He rebukes the young man, and then he exorcises the spirit. As St. Paul has written,

We know that disease is often an expression of spiritual sickness. Is not venereal disease the outward expression of moral illness?

And may I pause to say that during the first three centuries of the Church (and undoubtedly longer than that), only three sins stood as being truly grievous: the three most heinous crimes against God. They are apostasy (the rejection of God), murder (the unjustified taking of a human life), and adultery (transgressions of the commandment governing sexuality). Astonishing! If murder were as common as offenses against God's law governing our sexual lives, we would be living in a scene of unremitting carnage.

If every boy or every girl had saved themselves for their future wife or husband, would we even know what an STD is today? Is it not also true that most of what afflicts the world today finds its origin in human selfishness and wickedness? Look at the leading causes of death. Many cancers derive from toxic environments or the dissipation of the ozone layer. Much heart disease, diabetes, stroke, senility are the needless outcome of gluttony: over-eating and over-drinking. Most of the world is malnourished by the few who have hoarded the most. And the earth itself ails from rapacious human greed and immoderation.

The list is a long one, and the demons rejoice. They had cut themselves off from God, Who is life. And their diseased existence and predatory selfishness have made a world, our world, in its own image. We call it, "the culture of death." It begins with curiosity and then an acquired taste for vice. It deepens as we become more selfish, more inward-looking, even narcissistic. And it ends with the failure to see the approach of God. As with the demons, God becomes our enemy. He's the One Who says, "No!" And at the furthest extreme, our God, Who should be eternally our most desired, our most wanted, morphs into a weird, inverted image: God on a poster at the post office, bearing a headline: "Most Wanted."

At this point of the absurd, the greatest absurdity of history is unveiled: a people seeking to murder their God. This is the meaning of our brief Gospel lesson this morning, which ends with these words:

"What is left?" we may ask. To love God and to have life. To embrace and live out His holy ways until we radiate with His wholesomeness and in His holiness.

The Father of Theology, Origen, wrote that the primary meaning of Sacred Scripture is its spiritual meaning. And as the Scriptures also relate historical meaning, the primary meaning of history, of our lives, is also spiritual, not material.

What finally is the meaning of life? If we express it in material terms, we see that our lives are spiritually empty. If we define it only in spiritual terms, we are aware of endless impracticalities. In fact, the spiritual world is interwoven into the material world as a Person of God is interwoven into the Son of man. We are left with a divine command, therefore: to discern spiritual significance in a material world, which, in the goodness of God, will be our liberation from mortal life and the demons who haunt it.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.