The Devil's Theology

(forgive the need for some editing; i pasted this straight from facebook)

The theology of the devil is really not theology but magic. "Faith" in this theology is really not the acceptance of a God Who reveals Himself as mercy. It is a kind of psychological "force" which applies a kind of violence to reality in order to change it according to one's own whims. Faith is a kind of supereffective wishinig: a mastery that comes from a special, mysteriously dynamic will power that is generated by "profound convictions." By virtue of this wonderful energy one can exert a persuasive force even on God Himself and bend His will to one's own will. By this astonishing new dynamic soul force of faith (which any quack can develop in you for an appropriate remuneration) you can turn God into a means of your own ends. We become civilized medicine men, and God becomes our servant. Though He is terrible in His own right, He respects our sorcery, He allows Himself to be tamed by it. He will appreciate our dynamism, and will reward it with success in everything we attempt. We will become popular because we have "faith." We will be rich because we have "faith." All our national enemies will come and lay down their arms at our feet because we have "faith." Business will boom all over the world, and we will be able to make money out of everything and everyone under the sun because of the charmed life we lead. We have faith.But there is a subtle dialectic in all this, too.We hear that faith does everything. So we close our eyes and strain a bit, to generate some "soul force." We believe. We believe.Nothing happens.We close our eyes again, and generate some more soul force. The devil likes us to generate soul force. He helps us to generate plenty of it. We are just gushing with soul force.But nothing happens.So we go on with this until we become disgusted with the whole business. We get tired of "generating soul force." We get tired of this "faith" that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is often quite effective).Having become disgusted with faith, and therefore with God, we are now ready for the Totalitarian Mass Movement that will pick us up on the rebound and make us happy with war, with the persecution of "inferior races" or of enemy classes, or generally speaking, with actively punishing someone who is different from ourselves.Another characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, patient understanding and love, and thus help one another find the truth. On the contrary, in the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. This does not exactly make for peace and unity among men, because it means that everyone wants to be absolutely right himself or to attach himself to another who is absolutely right. And in order to prove their rightness they have to punish and eliminate those who are wrong. Those who are wrong, in turn, convinced that they are right...etc.Finally, as might be expected, the moral theology of the devil grants an altogether unusual amount of importance to...the devil. Indeed one soon comes to find out that he is the very center of the whole system. That he is behind everything. That he is moving everybody in the world except ourselves. That he is out to get even with us. And that there is every chance of his doing so because, it now appears, his power is equal to that of God, or even perhaps superior to it...In one word, the theology of the devil is purely and simply that the devil is god.
--A selection from Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, ps.94-97--

My dearest friends,

I think this is remarkably profound. It is steeped in the ever-present context of nuclear war on the exterior, but for Merton, this is ever indicative of an internal war; he saw a direct line between our inner pride and illusions and the terrors of the nuclear age. But so much more than a social commentary is being made...In the moral theology of the devil according to Merton, we might see several things: the prosperity gospel, the ego-driven, self-obsessed slave, the self-righteous, the violent...in short, what is evil makes us turn in on ourselves, a wedge of deceit and self-hatred deep in our souls. What frees us turns us outward - that we might touch and bless everything, that we might heal as we have been healed......which brings us to the indelible mystery of grace. And the grace of God is the raw mercy shed on our behalf, the willing sacrifice of the Son that we might be gathered again, and loved, and called our true names. For the great deceit of the devil is to create factions that would render such grace "unnecessary;" as if we ought to earn it through the sound logic of self-righteous debate where we could plead our case, never grasping the inescapable truth that the argument is over... If only we could withdraw and create within ourselves room for the other, for the one who you were born to love, that is, for every person you see. We trust ourselves without the guidance of mercy and so cannot create room for each other in our hearts.Let us not be thwarted by the vain promises of our own moral law void of what is revealed to us. For the Lord is gracious and on the move...in Jesus we are transformed by the mercy of God and in the Spirit led to the banquet where we can share in the feast that everyone is invited to, where everyone belongs, nourished by serving one another, discovering our true identities in the love of God. Apart from such love, the notion of worship is cold and empty...it is false and disgusting...it kills all faith.And so let us wait on mercy. Let us be interrupted by the Presence of God, Who acts within us and all around us. Let God love your innermost being that you might find the eternal worth in Jesus and so love your sister and brother with a free heart. I love you, my friends. In the depths of the Spirit of Jesus, you are called and you belong.

Contemplation and Freedom (also, Am I Risking a Natural Theology?)

Some notes reacting to Luther's "The Bondage of the Will" and Erasmus' Diatribe...

We are incapable of good apart from the Spirit, yet the Spirit waits inside of us -- as if silenced, held captive by louder, shriller voices...refusing to produce in us good - or holiness - but while imprisoned waits silently, humbly for us to let it be resurrected in us - for us to die to ourselves so that we might awake to the God Who loves us, Who has waited for us, to live in such dreams...

I have to wonder if in our minds we must let Jesus truly die instead of contesting with our loud, shrill voices. This seems to me a way of portraying our bondage -- the refusal to let the tragedy ensue in our minds -- that it couldn't have happened, that I cannot be so awful as to merit this crucifixion...but the natural theology that I suppose I have left remnants of does not reject the Fall, nor does it accept any worthwhile or useful "good." It is, as always, a matter of poverty - not nothingness (an absurd statement) - in us that must reveal our deepest need for God.

And so the dear Thomas states:

“But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light -- then we find out whether or not we live by faith…

It is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when be seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.”

and

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us….

It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

…I have no program for seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

May the love of God find you and make you alive.

When Gethsemenai had finally agreed to amend the order by building a small cinderblock hermitage atop a hill for Merton to live in solitude, the saint was overjoyed, but slightly cautious, and even apprehensive that he might survive the danger of being alone.

And so one night he confessed to feelings of being swept away by the sea of solitude. He fell apart.

"I talk to myself, I dance around the hermitage, I sing. This is all very well, but it is not serious, it is a manifestation of weakness," he wrote.

But perhaps not. Or, if weakness, the right kind of weakness, the right king of "interruptability" and awareness...

Merton continues his confessions another day:

"I confess that I am sitting under a pine tree doing absolutely nothing. I have done nothing for one hour and firmly intend to continue to do nothing for an indefinite period...I have taken my shoes off. I confess that I have been listening to a mockingbird...I confess furthermore that there is a tanager around her somewhere..."

I love this (particularly the confession of having taken off his shoes). Here is a life set free, beyond the suspicions and words, the "manifestations of weakness," into the great delight of Being, the open fields of fun and adventure!

Reading this today gives me the urge to go and play, to find some friends and gather up some wiffle ball with time eternal, an indefinite period!

The "Issue" of Faith

A "faith" that merely confirms us in opinionatedness and self-complacency may well be an expression of theological doubt. True faith is never merely a source of spiritual comfort. It may indeed bring peace, but before it does so it must involve us in struggle. A "faith" that avoids this struggle is really a temptation against true faith.
-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, ps.105-106


I wonder what informs me. Churning over media reports, documentaries, books, voices of family, friends, so-called-experts, the whole crowd -- what fixes my convictions, my Truth worth dying for?

I'd have to confess that each voice, regardless of how erudite, fades into nothingness, is dissolved into forsaken memory at some point. The most passionate of causes it seems, always has a counter-argument.

Have I fallen prey to relativism? Have I been so perplexed by the gray matter that the vacuum has suck me in? Perhaps.

But I would make another conjecture: like you, my brothers and sisters, I seek truth, and I am composed by the need to survive and thus the need to know myself and thus the ultimate need to be honest with who that really is. And so, the best theological claim that I can make, that I can stand on, is also the most subject to doubt, to vacillation, to criticism...

I am made of love. I was created to nourish the pilgrim souls of you, my brothers and sisters, even as you hold me in the best of your hopes. The only cosmic law is not my burdensome opinion of justice and righteousness but the explosion of every man-made dam that clogs up the greater anticipation, the endless resources of love that have waited patiently for every eternal second to cascade into our hearts.

I know this deep in my bones, with all of my heart and intellect, because this is my song of innocence and my song of experience -- and the chorus is the same: you are loved.

eschatology?

Father Merton said, "The time of the end is the time of no room."

On the popular level, Christians who are outspoken concerning the end-times are often times less inclined to consider that the apocalypse is most accurately the end of the human heart.

It's about an "inner-space war," not an outer-space drama. It isn't about Middle Eastern warfare or political prophecies. It isn't even about the atomic bomb, necessarily, although it certainly is a sign of things to come. That is, it is a sign of the folding of the human heart.

It is a sign that we might give up on each other.

The Life that abides in us is the love of Christ. It is the human heart on fire, alive, beaming with incredible light. It is also the reservoir of peace, it is satyagraha, it is the force that keeps the whole world together in its work of humble loving and adoration.

I write this brief note because just before falling asleep last night I read this in Merton's biography, part of a lesson he taught to his students:
"Biblical eschatology must not be confused with the vague and anxious eschatology of human foreboding."

Let us make room for our souls to be given life in Jesus. Let us be guided by the Truth, the mystical experience of love for our fellow woman and man.

a morning poem

Jesus
will you come to me? into
murky silences,
masquerades, the calamities.

will you comfort this unfinished sentence

we don't need words to
fill in our blanks --
but dreadfully sweet
silences.

not prayer to pray
but prayer to be

Jesus
will you come to me? within
the cloud of unknowing
to trust in falling.

and so you've come
though I'd known the door
closed behind you.

in the secret of your silence
I will be.

Humility? (And, Happy Birthday to my brother Andy!)

You can't get closer to God if you are always trying to figure out who it is that you yourself are supposed to be -- at least in any conventional sense -- if it means 'what must I do differently?,' or 'how should I speak?' or anything half-hearted and ultimately self-effacing in the insincere false humility that plagues us all. Or at least it plagues me...

Must I fix my mind on high and lofty theological things so that I can grasp one tiny grain of sand? When I do this, I begin to engage with others as if I've got something figured out.

Must I be kind and gentle? When I do this, soon enough I become a contrived version of my "self," a Mr. Rogers wanna-be. (Never thought that would go in style...)

Must I be firm and solid in my convictions? Alas, I lack the backbone of ultimate certainty, and even someone as secretly proud as me cannot stomach the self-righteousness in boasting outside of Christ. Still, Christian men are to have fortitude, says John MacArthur...

Must I add all things in order that my integrity be unsurpassed? Ridiculous! Heresy!

I must dive into the endless spiral of true self-denial, that is, I must fall in love with God. In this deep and penetrating relationship there can be no written end (except in the Mind of God) but in losing ourselves we can indeed find who we really are in Christ. I long for this.

Perhaps the secret has something to do with a paradoxical integrity. When we have stripped away every impostor, Christ adds all things to us in our recognition of our own poverty. When we have no ultimate reliance on our own faculties, but a supreme confidence in Him to use them, then we can at last be free.

The major hindrance is figuring out that balance. It is my inclination to surgically remove my ego. The dilemma is that the only tool I have in operating is my ego -- and the "doctor" here is paying lip-service to the "treatment" he is offering himself, the "patient." This is what it seems Merton says in another incisive observation:

"False humility and the illusory ideal of self-annihilation. I distinguish this quite clearly from the real annihilation of the mystics, which is another matter. But a contrived "annihilation" simply sets up one figment against another and has them cancel each other out. The "self" sits by, smugly watching the operation and indeed directing it, and is not annihilated at all. On the contrary, this is a sure way of avoiding annihilation. Such "humility" becomes a last refuge in which the self remains impregnable."
--Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p.281 (The Madman Runs to the East)

Some people seem to be less obsessed with themselves than others, and unfortunately I feel as though I may be on the of the most self-obsessed people out there. Still, it is ours to let God conquer the false self within, the vomit out the demon in the desert, to become humble servants to the Lord.

I pray that you and I can lay our hearts down as a sacrifice to the God of love, that He might give us new hearts and minds, souls bursting at the opportunity to serve and adore, to worship, and to give wholly of themselves.

"Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body?
(St. Paul to the Romans, Ch.7 v.24)

The Irresistible Goodness and Compellingness of God

What else is it? in words, conversation and dialogue, community, peace -- deeper still, communion and integration, souls immersed in one another, a reclamation after all the calamities.

What else is it? the suchness of freedom, in freedom to take joy in life, to take flight, to breathe deep and feel your chest rise with each pulse.

What else is it? we have several necessary conjectures about what it is to be human in relation to one another. It is within this arena that I have searched for the Divine and found some clues. But alas, it is within this arena that I have starved for lack, need, and ultimate desperation for God.

To the One Who knows not sin, I know too little of to come in fear and trembling. I come in awe from the secrets, the whispers and comfort of mercy upon mercy still within mercy - to the Father Who wears a knowing smile while our night-terrors shake us.

In the solitude that is our greatest need, there is the abundance of God.

To gather and soak in the pardon of God, the mercy and forgiveness we long to experience at our inner core, is to be set free of burdens unnumbered...
the burden and opinion and guesswork about who it is that you must be to fulfill the expectations of your fellow woman and man. [the lie about the one that for all intense and purposes you had believed was yourself]
the burden of being hindered...until tragically separated from the love and commune of your fellow woman and man anchored in the paper fictions of society and culture.
to curse of being enslaved to sin and guilt, to the suffocation of self-loathing.
the burden of being preoccupied with the material world and all its machinations.
the fascination with lust, and all the illusions that will keep promising to satisfy...let them crumble into the brittle dust that composes them.
the brittle self-reliance of any national pride in exchange for a deeper and more meaningful satisfaction with the self - that which is unified with God.
all of the other deceptions...

to be set free unto the vast expanse of a sky - to stories yet untold of a merciful love that inundates your waiting heart.

And what else is it - what else could it be - to be found waiting in the wings? the surprising love of a God Who knows us, even as we begin to suspect how little we really know of Him.

May we come in humility before the God Who awakens deep within us what it means to be truly alive and dead to sin, to sing out in full audio with the rest of creation in proclaiming the irresistible goodness of our God.

The Beginning of a Journey

"We are called upon to live Christ's life. We are called into the desert to meet the demon within. We are called to face God alone in the night of our own solitude. We are called to die with Jesus, in order to live with him. We are asked to lose all, to be emptied out, in order to be filled with the very fullness of God."

from James Finley's book on Thomas Merton,
Merton's Palace of Nowhere, p.17



I begin this journal with much tension in my mind and heart. The past several months have been haunted by spiritual sickness, delusion, and bouts of prayerlessness. It is a season of longing even as it is a season of distance and loneliness from God. I need confess these things to you so that you know as well as I do how destitute we are --- pointing fingers at the moon and marveling...but it is this simple task that I must constantly return to, I must repent toward, a place of awe and honesty, integrity and relationship to the One Who hides his face. I hope that you could take these feeble steps with me.

Someone recently said that the whole of "spiritual life" is re-discovering Jesus for the first time over and again. It brought me great comfort because I often feel this way as a result of my waywardness and apathy, my deeper cynicisms and overbearing ego. I have been trying to keep my mind on God because I seem to remember what it was like to rest in the goodness of love, of being embraced by more than the idea of being alive, by meeting each breath with the sense of its gift, its secret, its promise. God sweeps me back to Him, gathering the fractures of me like a pile of wretched leaves...He breathes life and scatters me about in the great dance, to love and cherish the smiling faces of trees with proud and deep voices. He brings me back to the source of this.

In a flash we can remember these things. For me, it is imperative that I curse competition with other men, that I forget theology and the masquerades of my ego that play out a slide-show of grim thoughts of self-importance, self-righteousness and intelligence. The false self is the one who hides beneath this slide-show and pretends to be active within it. The truth is, the bastard is terrified to touch anything of this life, for the Reality and power of honest love and sexuality would consume him, expose him, speak of his deceit.

My great wish is to desire a true indigence, a poverty of the self that is fixated entirely upon the beauty and truth in Jesus. I ask God to teach me contemplation and how to stay with Him.

There is nothing more to write this evening, so I leave you with a poem by the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, from which this website gets its address.

"Faith is a Blush"

God
is unwilling to be alone
and man
cannot forever remain impervious
to what He longs to show.
Those of us who cannot keep their striving back
find themselves at times
within the sight of the unseen
and become aglow with its rays
Some of us blush,
others wear a mask.
Faith is a blush in the presence of God.