for September 2
Wednesday of the Twenty-Second Week of Ordinary Time

In the first reading, Paul makes a point that too often gets short shrift. He makes his usual distinction between spirit and flesh, but he puts it in terms that make it clear he is not referring to believers versus nonbelievers. The recipients of his letter, the church at Corinth, are all believers and practicing Christians. What keeps them “of the flesh” is their spiritual immaturity. Paul calls them “infants in Christ” and alludes to their need for milk, using the comparison of actual babies whose digestion cannot yet handle solid food. Sacramental initiation into the Church is not the end of our conversion into people of the spirit. Spiritual formation is a lifelong process. Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist confer graces for us to build upon as we seek to tame our instinctual desires to privilege ourselves and our group at the expense of others. In Corinth it was competing factions within the church, but we all have forces within us that work to undermine our efforts to live in a Christ-like way and be God’s co-workers in building the Kingdom.

These negative forces have traditionally been called evil spirits or demons. In today’s Gospel passage Jesus casts out demons. The Church does still perform exorcisms in extreme circumstances, but demons are mostly an ordinary part of our lives. If you’ve ever found yourself exclaiming, “Why did I do that?” or “What was I thinking!” you’ve encountered a pesky evil spirit within yourself. God created everything and he made it all good. Evil cannot create; it can only distort. The evil within us is in fact a distortion of the good. That’s why we experience it as in us but not of us. It’s not an authentic part of the person God created us to be, but it does a good job of stirring up trouble within us. And the reason it has some success is that it hooks into the good and subtly twists in to its own purposes. The English spiritual writer CS Lewis wrote a masterful and entertaining novel called The Screwtape Letters that insightfully tells the story of a demon’s attempt to lure someone away from God and into Satan’s fold. It’s set during the dramatic days of the German bombing of England during World War II, but the demon’s tactics are universally recognizable.

Jesus, being fully human and fully divine, had no demons within himself, but they did tempt him. The difference between Jesus and us is that h didn’t give in to temptation whereas we do. It’s understandable that we do because we are born into a world in which evil is intertwined with the good. We get mixed messages as we strive to figure out who we are and find our place in the world. Biased attitudes and behaviors, individual and social relational patterns, even old traumas, get passed down to us by those around us. Often antagonism toward another group helps a community maintain its cohesion. To recognize, acknowledge, and challenge the negative aspects of our self-understanding can be frightening. It requires building up a strong positive identity as a beloved and valued child of God with a unique personhood and purpose in life. A reason Jesus was able to give up his life for us was that he knew exactly who he was. The demons knew it too and they knew they had no power over him.

Spiritual formation strengthens our sense of self, nurtures our relationship with God, and develops the wisdom that enables us to see where the evil spirit is seeking to lead us astray. We start out gently, focusing on loving and being loved, learning to turn to God with our joys and sorrows and perplexities. As we mature, we can tackle more difficult aspects of our being in the world and work to root out individual sinfulness as well as social evils. We’ll never get to the end of this process in our lifetime, but we don’t need to. “He who fashioned the heart of each, he who knows all their works” knows what each of us is capable of and only asks us to do our best and to keep turning back to him—that’s what the word ‘conversion’ means—when we get tripped up.
—Christine Szczepanowski

The readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.