Evil

I recently assigned a class of college students to write an essay addressing the prompt What is Good? I told them to think about Good in terms of ethics, morals, ideals. We were beginning a survey course of world literature, and as a theme for the class I wanted to have them look at the ways literature deals with our perceptions of Good. We can take the same approach with Evil: What is it?

Is evil a thing that exists outside us or is it something within us or is it just what we call bad things that happen? What, exactly, are we asking God to deliver us from? (From what, exactly, are we asking God to deliver us? Is evil a preposition at the end of a sentence?) We talk about evil in much the same way we talk about love--that is, we use the word in many different contexts and with many different meanings. In Christianity, we know that Satan is evil incarnate; is everything that we call evil, then, Satan? Or is evil bigger than Satan?


Why do we have to separate these ideas? It seems to me that evil is all of this (and probably more). We tend to want to limit things. It helps us, I think, to put things into neat little boxes. We can label them and stack them on the shelves of our psyches. If you will indulge me yet another reference to teaching: in high school, we teach math or science or social studies or (if we are lucky) English/language arts; and, upon closer inspection, we don't just teach science, we teach biology or chemistry or physics. And our students go from Anatomy & Physiology to Pre-calculus to English III to American History. Everything is separate. Really good teachers (and schools) help students see connections among the disparate disciplines, so it is not like the kid who will not allow any of his foods to touch on his plate but more like having a pot of stew. Real life is like stew, and that means that the ideas are not always neatly separated and easy to identify.

Not that I am encouraging anyone to embrace Zen Buddhism, but the concept of the yin-yang serves as a good illustration of how evil exists within us. None of us is wholly evil, and none of us is completely good. We are, for the most part, good people with a touch of evil (an unintentional Orson Welles allusion). We all have some evil in us, and I am not falling back on the idea of Original Sin for this; I am not arguing against the idea of Original Sin, either--it is just that for our purposes here and now, the O.S. argument is not necessary. We all have evil within us--that is, we have experienced evil, done evil, been both the victim and the vehicle of evil--because we have free will. God gave us the ability to make choices, and because we are not perfect, we have sinned. Sin is evil.

So, where does Satan fit into all this? We commit evil because we make imperfect choices. We make imperfect choices because there is something out there providing the Other choice. Christ was able to choose wisely and well, even after forty days of fasting in the desert. We are not Christ--which is why we need Christ. Satan is the force which promotes wrong choices in our lives. All wrong choices are a distancing of ourselves from God.

The idea that evil is either completely inside or completely outside any individual is patently ridulous. In one direction it reeks of hubris; in the other, it screams blindness. To assume that evil is something lurking outside us and unable to actually enter into us is akin to believing that God is something completely outside us, that we are separate--which dismisses Christ and the Holy Spirit as any aspect of who we are. It suggests something like the Deist view of the cosmos: God is out there, we are in here, and never the twain shall meet, more or less. The God-is-out-there philosophy, aside from its X-Files mood, again places us all by ourselves, makes us the center. In an ironic way, this view is the Ptolemaic Universe of theologies. At first glance, it might seem that in this model, God can be at the center and we are adrift out on the periphery--which would be the case, I think, were the model at all valid. However, since the model is flawed at its heart, then it cannot be held to that standard. Since it is a faulty model, it cannot be expected that it would adhere to the proper logic. If we were to accept this model, we would be actually placing ourselves at the center of our own universe(s).


The idea that evil is limited to someplace within us, whether we call that place heart or mind or soul, suggests that we are in control, that there is no outside influence. I have asked my high school students, at various times, who (or what) influences their decisions most, and I always have the handful of kids who say that they influence themselves--they are not able to admit that anyone or anything outside themselves could supersede their autonomy.

So, in essence, relegating evil either to only outside or to only inside ourselves is tantamount to the same thing: we are dismissing the supernatural from our lives--and that applies both ways. We cannot have one without the other.

Evil is at once both outside and within us--and is also an entity. Satan is real. Many people, it would seem, want to believe in God without believing in Satan. They want to limit those forces that are beyond our comprehension (which is why we label them as supernatural to begin with) in an attempt to confine them and define them in a way that might allow us to more easily grasp them.

Looking at things from a medieval world view, we as humans are by nature impure. This does not necessarily require a belief in the concept of original sin; we are human, we have free will, we are not perfect, we will make mistakes. We cannot live without making wrong decisions--we are weak.

One of the problems with evil--which is much like saying one of the grains of sand on the beach--is that we do not always recognize it. The bad guy does not always wear a black hat, the devil does not necessarily have cloven hooves and a tail and horns. Like the stepmother in Snow White (or Enchanted, for those trying to stay current and trendy), evil can be disguised, can present itself as attractive or harmless. Too often we expect evil to appear as a monster, an overwhelming presence from which we cannot escape. Actually, evil is usually much more insidious. Evil often starts small and worms itself into our beings where it can take hold and begin to grow.

This should not come as a shock, but evil does not play fair.

Evil sometimes even appears in forms that seem separate, somehow, from the Good and Evil debate: complacency, ignorance, indifference--things we might not identify with evil, things that are not wholly evil in and of themselves, but things which can (and do) allow evil to flourish in our lives. There is a reason that Odysseus whipped his men back to the ship when he found them with the Lotus Eaters--they had succumbed to the Lotus and allowed it to take away their will. We, too, often succumb to the temptation of doing nothing, and that has a tendency to lead us into temptation--we get caught in the flow and we do not fight against the current.

Edmund Burke said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." The context may have been different, but the meaning remains the same: evil happens and we have to do something. Being aware is one step toward doing something. We have to act.

Evil, then, is a separation from Good. Evil is a force outside us which can--and, because of our humanness, does--exist within us. Evil incarnate is Satan, and Satan has set himself up in opposition of God. To oppose Satan is to oppose evil. To align oneself with God is to oppose Satan. This opposition requires action, and inaction will allow evil to prevail.

We have been given free will, and we have not only a right but a responsibility to make choices. We choose Good and Evil. Sometimes we mess up. God forgives us, but He expects us to keep trying. In Greek mythology, Pandora was sent to earth to punish man, and she brought with her a container which held all the evil of the world--pestilence and disease and sorrow and the whole set--and after these had been released, the only thing left in the container was Hope, the thing that would allow man to survive. In the real world, the gifts that God has given us to allow us to survive are so much more amazing: Love and Grace and Mercy. Evil shouldn't stand a chance.

Deliver Us From

I have a friend who works for the company that brings people boxes in a big brown truck. He delivers. My wife's ob-gyn delivered our two children. The minister delivers a sermon, college students deliver pizzas, actors deliver their lines, and a big eagle delivered Prometheus every day. So why do we want to be delivered? I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with Prometheus. To deliver has several definitions, but they all have one thing in common: they all denote someone bringing something to another person. Delivering packages means that one person brings the package and hands it over to another. Delivering a lecture or a sermon means that one person brings ideas to another. Delivering a baby means that someone brings a child out into the world. In the context of the prayer, delivering us from evil means that Someone (God) brings someone else (us) out of the realm of evil. To be delivered, then, at its heart means to be carried. We want God to carry us.


Asking God to carry us is not a sign of giving up or of weakness. Asking God to carry us is an admission that we cannot do something without God's help--and that thing is to stand against evil. We could argue that we cannot do anything without God's help, but here, in this context, we need to limit ourselves to just this one thing.


When we ask someone to deliver something for us, we are putting trust into that person. We trust that the pizza guy will bring us the pizza we ordered (in a timely manner, if we are lucky, and with all the toppings we asked for). We trust that the professor will deliver information that is correct and that will help us in our studies. We trust that the doctor (or midwife) will deliver our babies safely. We trust that the minister will deliver a sermon that is true. Even when we might not completely trust the person, if we are asking for him (or her) to deliver something for us, then we are investing some amount of trust in that person.

As a teacher, I often ask students to deliver things. Sometimes the thing might be an actual thing, a paper or a parcel that I ask the student to carry to someone else. Sometimes the thing might be something abstract, as when I ask a student to deliver an idea on a test or in a paper. By asking the student to deliver this thing, whatever it is, I am investing my trust in this young person, I am putting faith in him that he will do his best--otherwise, my asking him is an empty gesture. If I enter into the contract--the understanding that he will deliver the thing--with the mindset that he will fail, then it does not mean anything. I have wasted our time. (Someone might argue that I could be teaching the student a lesson through such a contract, and I can see that this is possible; however, if that is my purpose, then the contract I am entering into is not the same as the one the student might perceive--my expectation defines the contract and makes the delivery a very different thing.)

Asking God to deliver us requires that we trust Him. It shows that we trust Him. Trust is essential to any relationship--that is in no way a revelation. We all know that trust is at the heart of relationships. But, why? Why is trust so important? First, of course, we have to understand what trust is: trust is a firm belief or assured reliance on the reliability or truth of someone or something. When we trust someone, we place our belief in that person, we rely on that person. In a relationship, we have to have trust because we have to believe that we can rely on the other person.


A relationship is like a contract: each person has expectations of the other, each has rights, each has responsibilities. When we are in different relationships, we have different expectations and rights and responsibilities. These things define our relationships, and so we know that our relationship with our friend is different than our relationship with our father or mother. (I could digress completely here and explore the errors that many of us make as parents when we do not see the differences between these two kinds of relationships, but I won't.) In our various relationships, we know what we should expect and, if we are paying attention, we know what we can and should do. Our relationship with God is not all that different.


Our relationship with God is very much a contract, whether we realize it or not--and by that, I mean whether we realize it is contract and also whether we realize that we are in a relationship. We do not have to acknowledge that we have a relationship with God for it to exist. The relationship is there regardless of whether we accept it or not. God does not believe in atheists. God is aware of us even when we are not aware of Him (thank goodness). In our relationship with God, we have rights and responsibilities, but there are also certain expectations--and usually these expectations are directly related to the rights and responsibilities. Our trust, then, is really the idea that our expectations will be met. We place trust in God that He will live up to His end of the bargain. We also expect that He will allow us the luxury of not always living up to His expectations of us. (To be fair, God has a rider in the contract that, in a way, releases us from having to be perfect--it has to do with giving His Son to die for our sins. God knows that we will fall short, and He provides for that.)

Our trust in God is essential to our relationship. We cannot say that we believe in God--whatever that means--but not put our trust in Him. We have to hand over everything, put it all in His hands, and then we are in a relationship. We cannot treat God like the person we speak to at the gym (or in church or at school or on the street), but whom we do not really interact with. If we want to have a real relationship, we have to open up completely and we have to place our trust--all of it--in Him.