FROM THE BOUNDARY

There was darkness… Part two

In Mark’s Gospel we’re told that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness, there to be tempted by Satan. Matthew’s says he was “led” there. Either way, he went and doubtless could do no other IF he was to find his true self, the god-ness in him refined by the divine fire, and with that the exorcism of all the temptations, doubts, fears and nightmares too, freeing him from the “wild beasts” which are part of all of us, all the temptations of our darker selves – vainglory, inordinate ambition, greed, envy, all our clinging and grasping and the rest. The Buddha under the Bodhi tree, battling with the nature and causes of suffering, likewise was confronted by the armies of Mara, the evil one, who seeks to annihilate all that’s good, true and beautiful in us.

Whether we want to conceive the evil Jesus and the Buddha knew as something within themselves or whether maliciously transmitted from an external reality, I don’t think matters too much. The ancients were not trained psychologists. Either way, we can speak equally of a ‘spirit of evil’ as a ‘spirit of good’, of truth and love. And we can bet, too, that should we ever embark on a journey to enlightenment, like Jesus or the Buddha, we shall have to accommodate both. We shall meet the forces of evil in all the temptations which enter the open doors of our lives, as also the angels who minister to us in our need, as God, in his time and his way, refines us from base metal to gold. But more than this: the reality is that we’re refined by these forces every day of our lives. There’s no escape. It’s an unavoidable process. We’re part of it when we drive the kids to school with all its frustrations. We’re part of the process too when we sit for hours in Elective Synod desperately searching for the Holy Spirit and fruitlessly fumbling to find a bishop.

The history of man might be explained as a cosmic struggle between good and evil; cosmic because in some way it transcends us all. With St Paul, the good we want to do we don’t, the evil we don’t want we do. Genesis explains it with a serpent, Jesus with the parable of the tares and the work of an “enemy”. We ask why God permits it. When no answer comes, we still cling to the thought, with the Psalmist, that God is ever in the midst of us, that his light shines both in the day when our hopes are high and all things seem possible, and in the night, most mysteriously by moonlight, when everything seems hopeless and we sink into despair. The light never leaves us entirely despite our desolation, the gift of those who despitefully use and exploit us.

Nonetheless, we have a kind of freedom, limited yes, but real enough. It’s the freedom to confront the world with our loving kindness, to exercise the courage to say ‘No. Begone!’ to all the injustice in the world. There will always be a Gandhi in our midst. So we say that God never sleeps – for he works through you, and you, and you, and me in all our noblest thoughts, in our search for truth and understanding, our compassion, mercy and love, and our encounters with injustice and loss.

Besides, history confirms that evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. If it derives from man, it’s man who vanquishes it. Surely, there’s ever something within us and in the perfume of our lives in the world which eventually will overcome all our weakness and the harm we cause. The angels of light will ever strike the fiends of darkness on the spiritual battlefield. Thus the Buddha, in his victory under the Bodhi tree, set out to proclaim the gospel of deliverance – infinite life, immeasurable light, boundless love. Thus Jesus strode to the synagogue at Nazareth and preached the good news for you and for me. Are we yet caught by the power of our own grasping? If so, our release is inexorably delayed. It’s ultimately down to us.

We may not even know what’s happening. The dividing line between good and evil may not be obvious. The process of dying to what we’ve so far been to be raised to a new quality of life, in which our hearts are filled with wisdom and mercy, may seem beyond us as we kid ourselves about our own righteousness and reason as we’ve habitually reasoned.

Yet the process, though incomplete, moves relentlessly on as night follows day, as spring displaces winter. The death and darkness we experience, our Good Friday moments, ever give way to the joy and light of resurrection. Yes, there will be casualties on the way. There may be sacrifices. Perhaps we won’t find the reward we deserve. Perhaps our victory will be of a different kind. Maybe it will be an understanding that in our way we’ve stopped the march of evil, that the darkness we see around us presages the joy of a Galilean morning – and all will be well.

Go safely, then – until the next time.

Companionship from the boundary: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever” (Martin Luther King Jr).

Barbados Advocate

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