A few years ago, in the first few months of rediscovering my faith, a dear friend got herself into a really awful situation with a man who routinely beat and assaulted her, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to get herself out. She came to my apartment at around midnight one night in the midst of everything. I gave her some food, and then she and I stood by my fire escape, chain smoking cigarettes and just trying to figure things out and sit with it all.
“I don’t know, dude,” I said at around two in the morning. “I wish I did, but I don’t. I think we should pray about it.”
She agreed, and then said that we should pray for me, too, and asked what in my life I needed lifted up in prayer. I’d been struggling for a long time with a few things, some of which I’ve talked about in previous entries here. Truthfully, I felt sick, way down in my soul, and I needed help getting clearing everything that was in my way to God. I told her that, and we agreed to uphold these parts of one another as we asked for help.
We stubbed out our cigarettes and together, out loud, we prayed the Prayer to St. Michael five times. She didn’t know the words so I would say a line and she’d echo me. There was a pull between the two of us, a current between our voices, because we were both at extremely low points in different ways, and we each felt uniquely suited to steady the other, and it felt as if we were calling deep into one another’s spirits, hailing the darkness out.
This All Saints’ Day, I’m reminded of the history of Halloween, when people would don costumes to look like demons and thus ward off real demons in the streets, in order to make way for the Procession of Hallows the next day.1 In some ways, what we reenact in our neighborhoods on Halloween is the story of Jesus driving the legion of demons out of the Gadarene man. The version of the story in the Book of Mark says of him, “Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones.” When Christ finds him, he runs and prostrates himself before our Lord, saying, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” Christ says, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” and at His command even demons must obey.
The gorgeous paradox of this story is that demons, the antithesis of divinity, are in a unique position to provide unimpeachable testimony to the presence of the Lord. They cannot help but recoil at the Truth, and in that way even they cannot lie. Often, this story seems to imply, the places in our lives that most vehemently repel God are also the ones that most intensely indicate His presence, and our need for Him. The places in us that scream against His Will are, beneath our howling, the places where we most eagerly await Him and need Him to pursue and fight for us.
When you are able to peer into someone’s soul and gaze upon their pain, it is like watching them when they are caught up in the company of demons, all the things they suffer until they can live go newly on the other side of their agony. And of course, in this, we also see Christ in his passion and death. This is the genius of the Gospel: when we see Christ in His pained death and dying, we can turn our gaze back to His miracles of healing those afflicted with all manner of ill and see in them a restored coherence. When Christ saw the possessed man, He heard in the voices of the demons a sign that the man had something in him yet that could be saved; a soul being torn asunder by evil; Himself.
If God can look into us and see Himself even in as we allow sin to rule our hearts, it follows that in order to love Him better and be united to Him as He intends us to be—that is, in order to become saints—we must import Christ’s life into our own. The work of saints is to understand when and how we are called to see in others people who are aching for their need for God, even when they cry out violently against our testament. And, by extension, we are called to see in them Christ Himself as He walks to the Place of the Skull to suffer for sin, albeit sin that was not His. We are obligated to do so because that is how He looks at us: past that which makes us miserable, past that which pains us, understanding all of our sorrow as proof that He can bring us to and make us like Him.
When the Gadarene is exorcised of his demons and renewed to himself, he asks Jesus if he can accompany Him on His way to another town, but Jesus denies him: “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.” It reminds me of something a priest said on a retreat I went on recently that was healing in more ways than I can say. As our time in refuge came to a close, there was a feeling among the group that we dreaded returning to our routines. “God does not want you to stay here,” said the priest who preached the retreat, sensing our misgivings. “He wants you to go back into the world and apply these lessons to your daily lives.” The Gadarene man could not go with Christ because in the space our Lord cleared in his heart was now a mission, a call to action, a story to tell.
One of the reasons we can believe so firmly in the communion of saints is that each of us contains in ourselves a Christ, a possessed man, a woman at the well, and so on: our souls represent a Jerusalem, ready for the sacrifice of ourselves to save ourselves. And the worlds we inhabit are Jerusalems, too, where we can choose to find Christ and, in turn, be Christ.
As my friend and I stood there on my fire escape, we were both the Gadarene and God for one another, part in pain and part the beckoning we needed to emerge from our hiding places. She and I have, with His help, both made great strides out of our interior prisons. He cleared a path I could walk with greater resolve, trying—though of course often failing—to imitate Him more fully. God finds us where we’re wild and smothered for want of Him. He lends back to us our own voices, now filled with accounts of His works, the story of our sanctification. He gives us something new to say. Praise Him: I’m telling you now.
Yes, I know that the origins of Halloween are contested and that it may be residual pagan influence. No, I don’t care, because, you know, guess what, so are Christmas trees, and so is the May Procession, and so is incense. God stoops to conquer, and He will make everything His own. Have you even been reading my point? Anyway, fear not: footnotes aren’t going to become a permanent fixture of this newsletter.