"Perverse Generation"

Faithless. We use this word to express treachery and disloyalty, as in a wife or husband who has not been faithful in "forsaking all others." But let us consider this word in a more general sense: that is, to go through life without religious faith. Who can conceive of such a thing? Do we not see God's imposing Presence all around us, certainly in the beauty of the Creation shimmering in the humblest leaf and blade of grass? Who cannot detect the vast difference between life and death?

As a former chaplain at a hospice, I can assure you, this is a night-and-difference. I always say when I happen to watch a film depicting someone who has died, "Look! The actor can possibly act dead ... because life so bountifully shines out of anyone who is still living!" And who, holding the lowly ant in his hand, is not filled with awe in the presence of animate, stirring life knowing that we shall never really understand it, much less kindle this holy spark ourselves?

Nonetheless, we encounter people who neglect, even discard, their religious faith. Indeed, there are some who are obsessed with ridiculing faith in God and have made this unholy obsession their vocation. They attempt to find explanations only in material terms. I was cornered by one of these men among our volunteers who came down to assist our ministry in Haiti. He was a pediatrician who had come down to express his ethical commitments. I had visited his office back home in the States and saw that he had covered his walls with pictures of Haitian children. He buttonholed me at the airport in Port au Prince as I escorted his party to their flight. Had I heard, he asked me, that science had "figured out God"?

"Please tell me more," I said.

"Yes," he continued enthusiastically. "Researchers have discovered the 'God spot' in the brain. When this brain tissue is stimulated, you have a religious experience. It's no more complicated than that. Don't you see?" he exclaimed. "There is no God, only a God spot in the brain!"

Following a brief silence I replied, "Doctor, have you heard about the 'apple pie spot' in the brain? It seems that when it is stimulated, you smell apple pie; you taste apple pie; you even see apple pie. But this does not constitute a proof that there is no apple pie."

He had fallen into the genetic fallacy (taught in Philosophy 101), which is this: just because you have located the origin or proximate function of a thing, does not mean that you have explained the thing. This confidence that you now understand what you have merely seen in a new way is a mirage.

As he was a medical doctor, I reminded him of Lewis Thomas' excellent book, The Youngest Science (1983). This dean of the Yale Medical School, himself an M.D., had written this book as a tribute to his parents, a general practioner and a registered nurse. In the book he wrote something I shall never forget. He wrote that modern medicine before the mid-twentieth-century (with the advent of penicillin) had more in common with Hippocrates and Galen than with the medicine he practiced in the 1980s. Medically speaking, there was a shorter distance back to Greece and Rome in Aniquity from his father's day than ahead to the vast differences that would happen with the advent of antibiotics.

At a dinner party many years ago, I asked physicians sitting round the table, "Of all the diseases and syndromes possible for the human body what percentage would you say we have detected, much less have a name and description for?" They agreed that the number must be below ten percent. Some time after this, following a severe head injury, a stint in the Neurological ICU, and a long and elaborate rehab, I asked the same question of neurologists who were probing me at the Harvard Medical School. This time, of course, the context was neurology. Several doctors told me the same thing: that if medicine is the youngest science, then neurology is the puking, muling newborn in the family. One man said that neurologists were venturing into a vast darkness feeling their way and failing to recognize what they were touching.

We humans, in general, are a curious race. We know so very little, yet we are apt to crow lustily over each new thing we discover as if we must certainly be in possession of all knowledge and the master of all that we survey. I like George F. Will's characterization:

May I humbly offer a corollary? The less one knows about anything in the sciences, the more likely one is to believe that the sciences have mastered practically everything.

Given this perspective, we must go slow in reading our brief Gospel lesson this morning. 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, especially the medical, mind is provoked: "Isn't belief in demon possession an artifact of a superstitious culture now long vanished? Hasn't medical science dismissed all of this nonsense?"

Our religious faith, however, teaches us that the material and spiritual domains are distinct. They also happen to be woven into each other in their discrete separateness as the soul is seamlessly woven into the body. 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 the 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 over the most royal property, the human person. This is the core meaning of real estate: "royal property." Humans, are the only thing made to be permanent and holy. They are the most royal among royal estates in the created order. Angels and demons fiercely battle over this territory.

How does possession actually work? When we choose for evil — and most of us have .... certainly I have in my life — we plant a seed within ourselves that drives angels and ultimately the Holy Spirit away (Ps 51:11). But all is not lost. As St. Basil the Great has written (On the Holy Spirit), a man may cover himself with mud and seek dark places where he might sin. Sooner or later, though, he must step out into the sunlight. When this happens, a little piece of mud breaks off of his skin, perhaps through some good thought. And the Holy Spirit's rays penetrate him, filling the body with light, if only through that little chink in his dark armor.

As demons require matter in order to function in the world, so spiritual phenomena in general require material components to find expression on the earth. 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 fail financially. All religious live in the edge. Then suddenly, one of our members receives a windfall through a distant relative's legacy. We have been delivered! Shall we then say that this deliverance was no miracle (because an uncle we never heard of died)? 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. In the classical example, He requires us. As we observed last Wednesday on the Feast of the Annunciation, He required the consent of a twelve-year-old girl to participate in the salvation of mankind.

Conversely, diseases in and of themselves do not accuse us of sinful living .... of course not! There are many cases when we suffer disease through no fault of our own. Nonetheless, all disease derives from the alienation of mankind from God brought on by human rebellion in Eden.

You see, if we were perfectly conformed to God, we could not suffer from disease, for God is Life. And, of course, the signature outcome of disease is death.

This is certain. Certain individuals among us may not have rebelled, but humanity as a whole undeniably has. Following the Fall from Grace, evil had no no lifeworld created for it. Life is good proceeding from God alone. The demonic world is a disfigurement of that wholesome life. Demons are artifacts of life's brokenness and mutation and grotesqueness. 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, rotting, hideous death, 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 hideous disfigurement of eternal life: eternal death.

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 He has set beyond our borders, for they belong to Him.

The evil one tells us, "Go ahead! You will not lose God." And which man in the history of world believes that he will lose God by continuing in his grave sin? Does he not develop the impression that God has permitted him this little fiefdom off to the side? After all, nothing seems to happening to him .... that he can see! His buddies tell him, "Lighten up!" Women who believe casual sex is simply part of dating have told themselves in their hearts, "God's okay with sex! Didn't He make me this way?! I simply have a normal, healthy appetite." But make no mistake about this: all casual sex is adultery, and when we enter this world, we surely fall into the grip of evil. And we have begun a progress, or should I say a regress, into demon possession. These are the plain facts.

This will sound outlandish to most people today. Are you telling me that all of these people who have fallen into a regular habit of casual sex are possessed by demons? Yes. But you don't need to take my word for it. Go to the local doctor, and he will give you a different word, which amounts to the same thing. He will call it, sexual addiction — compulsive pornography use, hook-ups with one person after another. It's not hard to do anymore. Just log on to "hookup.com." The lady down the street is interested in you. She doesn't even know you.

The success of evil is garden-variety crime except that the evil one and his demons have achieved the highest goal of the criminal mind: to be thought non-existent. People scoff at the idea that a man addicted to self-destructive opiates or a woman living out a never-ending nightmare of promiscuous sex are possessed. We medicalize our moral failings. People who love us say that we are "ill," victims really.

The truth is, our consent to evil equates to a willing rejection of God. We know this. We know that we are rejecting God and His angels. We don't like to admit that we are embracing demons. But I remember very clearly my first encounter with grave sin, as a teenager. I didn't enjoy it because I was overwhelmed with a sense of nausea. Afterwards, I couldn't take enough showers to make me feel clean as I once had felt. But I went back for more. I evicted holiness from my life. The Holy Spirit cannot abide the stench of low living. And the sign God had posted from my birth, warning demons — "No Vacancy," — had been replaced by a new sign: "Moral Vacancy."

The first step is curiosity. "Just once," we tell ourselves. But we go back a second time knowing it is wrong, and then a third until vice is established. Our thoughts become dominated by this evil. Eventually, our every daydream turns to compulsive fantasy. We cannot walk down the street without fantasizing. And we become immersed in a new spiritual formation: the spiritual exercises of Hell. What started as one "experience" becomes a habit, habituation, which then morphs into habitation — the habitation of demons. Years pass, many years, and we must admit that we are no longer in control, no longer behind the wheel, for now we are being driven by a dark force. A demon possesses us. But we cannot see it because we are fed a steady diet of lies and self-deceptions, by the father of lies.

Our well-meaning loved ones make themselves enablers of these demons searching for medical terms to explain this deplorable state of life. Anything might do to explain it. They search everywhere .... turning their back on one place. For it must not be .... what it plainly is: moral failure, calling for regret and contrition and, finally, a moral solution.

Surely, at this stage, medical assistance is most welcome. I will not debate with you on how people get here, for it is beyond debate. But I do understand that once one has arrived to the depths of contrition that medical assistance is welcome, say, in helping an opioid addict make her difficult journey back to bodily health. Who has not seen this? Oh, but the odds are long .... seven percent. Only seven percent recover.

Now the loved one can play a crucial role, becoming the face of understanding, of compassion and encouragement, but never condemnation or disgust. Disgust must be reserved for one thing: for a refusal to admit that they have hit bottom. Reaching the bottom .... of any evil .... must be the occasion for deep personal shame. This is the invaluable and high octane fuel that propels us up, up, and back to health. We cannot tell ourselves that what we have done is okay .... everyone's doing it. Is this not the role of our sacrament of reconciliation? True contrition. Real regret. Tears streaming down our face in the confessional.

A Harvard Professor of Psychiatry told me that most of what he sees in his practice is the outcome of bad moral choices. His patients can't sleep at night. They suffer from "anxiety." He told me, they need a priest and confessor more than a psychiatrist. Meantime, he went on, too many ministers and priests attempt to cure real, organic mental illness with moral nostrums. "Send me those!" he exclaimed! "And I'll send you the ones I can't do anything for. Yes, they want my help. No, they are not willing to live a new kind of life."

Sadly, our culture has banned conversation along these lines. I am waiting for this to be called a hate crime: I am so uncompassionate to people who suffer from addictions. Let's get to the basics. All of us will agree that the human person is determined by genes, environment, and the random growth of cells. People will argue over which of these three has the upper hand. Mostly, they center on nurture vs. nature, environment vs. genes. But few people are willing even to acknowledge the fourth, and master, component: the human soul. In the arena of human health and general being, no determinant comes close to rivaling the minute-by-minute choices of the soul, which alone will bring us into harmony with God, Who is the source of all life and health.

This morning we meet with an epileptic. He is said to be possessed. His case provokes disgust in the Lord Jesus.

The idea that epilepsy should be connected to possession provokes incredulity in the modern mind, for we are sure we understand epilepsy. In point of 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. But we have no theory; we have no understand of ultimate etiology. And of course it is incurable.

The word epilepsy derives from an ancient Greek word, επιλα'μβανειν, (epilambanein) meaning "to seize, to afflict, to possess." And today that is all we know. That is what was known two thousand years ago; that is what is known this afternoon. whether two thousand years ago or today.

Epilepsy presents an apt image of possession: the human is taken over by an unseen agency. We have no material explanation. The body is compulsed to do things it otherwise would not. The young man's father says,

In the pre-modern country of Haiti, we heard these very words:

"He falls into the fire and into the water." And these patients would present at the clinic covered in third-degree burns.

But why? Why does he fall into the fire? We understand what is meant at the level of empirical description. And we know empirically that gazing into fire or at the shimmer of light on water can produce a certain effect on the brain. We cannot say why. We do not know.

In first century Palestine, the emphasis on fire and water points to the four elements, which were said to constitute all things: earth, wind, water, and fire, corresponding to the four basic humors of the human person. We see an oblique suggestion, speaking in first-century terms, that the young man is too much preoccupied with elemental spirits, "falling into fire" in the sense of "falling into sin." 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,

I suppose that most men in adolescence have become slaves. Whatever the case may be with this young man, his case provokes disgust in the Lord Jesus provoking Him to say,

Let us be clear. Epilepsy does not instantly point to moral defect, much less to demonic possession. It is a material event that in this case seems to have a spiritual meaning. Conversely, a diagnosis of epilepsy does not rule out demonic influence, not then, not now. In fact, no set of material data ever rule out the presence of spiritual phenomena any more than the presence of our bodies rules out the existence of our souls.

Both things are always true. You know if the Scriptures, which describe historical events, have both a literal and spiritual meaning, then our history, and our world today, have both a literal and spiritual meaning. Does not venereal disease have a spiritual meaning? Is not venereal disease an organic pathology which is also an expression of moral illness? These diseases, many of them incurable, are epidemic in our time as God's morality is banished.

Sexual sin is no small matter in the witness of the Church. During the Apostolic age and following, only three sins stood as heinous crimes against God: apostasy (the rejection of God), murder (the unjustified taking of a human life), and adultery (sex outside of marriage). Astonishing! If murder were as common as casual sex, our streets would be an unremitting scene of carnage.

If everyone were faithful, saving the treasure of sexual intimacy for marriage, would we even know what an STD is? Would one even exist? And how much heart disease, diabetes, stroke, senility are the needless outcomes of gluttony? Most of the world is malnourished even as obesity has become epidemic worldwide. Can we really isolate these phenomena as being morally indifferent? And God, the only physician who matters in the end, endures perhaps a permanent exile from public life in the United States.

God, rather than being longed for, the desire of the everlasting hills .... is wanted only in the sense of a "Most Wanted" poster hanging among other public enemies. People go to prison for their devotion to God. At this point of the absurd, the greatest absurdity of history is unveiled: a people seeking to murder their God, hanging Him on a Cross, yes, among other criminals. And this helps us to understand why this Gospel lesson should conclude with the following words:

Not merely the man Jesus .... but God. The Holy Fathers are crystal clear on this point. For Jesus sees an adulterous and perverse world around Him that has missed God — God Who stands right before them! The tragic end of this tale is inevitable. For this world will never square with the Kingdom of Heaven.

Look around us ..... in our own world. Can we honestly say that it is not adulterous and perverse? Can we not see how many people are possessed? Can we not see how their end will be .... and what the end will be for all of us in this culture? .... this "American culture of death," Mother Theresa said.

The Christian pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer martyred by the Nazis wrote that

This idea of his was not a novelty of the mid-twentieth century. Roughly 2,700 years before Bonhoffer, we find this in the Holy Scriptures:

Beware the spirit of our age which has discarded moral responsibility with facile medical diagnoses. Jesus says that resistance to evil begins with fasting and prayer. But it must end up by standing up on your feet and speaking clearly. For the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ taught,

Who has ears let him hear!

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