Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

I . . . wonder about evil. It would be easy to say the devil made me do it!

 
Evil is simply the refusal to serve God. This is what caused the fall of Lucifer along with all the angels who followed him. Unwilling to submit to God’s authority, evil makes self-interest, at the expense of others, into its own god.

Therefore, you are vulnerable to the influence of Satan—once called Lucifer, the angel of light, and now known as the devil—in proportion to the extent that you are influenced by unconscious psychological defenses. These defenses serve essentially to protect your pride and ego in the face of family dysfunction and hypocrisy and, commonly because of your anger at the failures of your father, these defenses often seek the unconscious satisfaction of undermining all paternal authority—including the Church and, ultimately, God Himself.

The easiest opening the devil can follow into your heart is the path opened by your desire to get revenge for injuries inflicted on you. Because this desire is often unconscious, rather than conscious, especially in regard to childhood traumas, you might even say that you are certain that you don’t want revenge on anyone. But unconsciously you do desire revenge—and any of those behaviors that “the devil made me do” are the evidence.

So, do you need an exorcism? Well, actually, you can “exorcise” yourself simply by creating an environment within your “house” that is boring to the devil. It’s like when a neighbor always comes to your house and helps himself to the soda or beer in your refrigerator. You can put an end to the mooching just by not keeping soda or beer in the fridge.

Therefore, in regard to the devil, don’t keep “revenge” in your house. That is, purge from your house anything that breeds on revenge: sports, television, politics, newpapers, video games, and so on. Even though these things are accepted hook, line, and sinker by our secular culture—and even by those who claim to be Christian—they have no spiritual value and are just breeding grounds for the desire to get revenge on others. The same for addictions (smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling, eroticism); these things breed revenge because by hurting yourself you hurt your parents (and God).

So, on the one hand, if you are carrying in your heart all sorts of bitterness about past injuries and injustices, then, when new trials afflict you, all that unconscious bitterness in your heart will gush forth in anger—along with envy, and rivalry, and pride, and on and on—and you will fall right into all the snares of self-sabotage, disobedience, and sin the devil has laid out for you.

On the other hand, if you live a chaste lifestyle, if you have detached yourself from the worldly need to defend your pride, if you respect yourself and your body, if you are free from self-punishment and believe that God desires your salvation, if you can face everything with patience and humility, and if you pray constantly for those who hurt you—in short, if you have really died to the world as the early Church (and the Catholic mystics through the ages) understood the term—then you truly are serving God from the depths of your heart and the devil’s influence will not cause you to sin.

Do not let the sun go down on your wrath; do not give the devil a chance to work on you.

—Ephesians 4:27

 

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