A Short Ramble About Fear

In the book Dune there is an often repeated meditation called The Litany against Fear, and it goes like this:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Fear is one of the greatest enemies we have in our Christian faith and practice. It is what keeps us from reaching out towards God in faith. As Jedi Master Yoda once said, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” (Phantom Menace, 1999) When we fear to lose something, or when we fear to not have something that we think we need, this clouds the Path in front of us and makes us go astray.

The enemy provokes fear in us through the smallest of doubts that can grow ever larger and larger until they consume us and we begin down the spiral that Yoda spoke of. “But what if He doesn't provide?” “But what if....?” “You can't possibly believe something's going to materialize out of thin air?” That's really all it takes. These little whispers in our minds.

Fear is the opposite of faith. Where faith is fear cannot be, and vice-versa. Fear says “I don't trust,” or “I don't feel like I can trust.” Fear is the natural reaction of the mind and body to an external threat because the natural mind and body instinctively trusts only itself. But when we become members of Christ, fear conflicts with the new instinct of faith and trust in God. It doesn't understand it and tries to shout it down.

St. John says “perfect love casts out all fear.” God is perfect love. The closer we draw to Him, the less fear can get a grip on us. The closer we draw to Him, the more everything seems to be alright and makes sense. The world could be crashing down around our ears and we would not be afraid wrapped in His perfect love, if only we would move towards Him and not away from Him.

As followers of Jesus Christ, fear is truly a killing force. It can bring total obliteration to our walk with Christ and leave us helpless and paralyzed. We must turn and face it through faith, reminding ourselves of everything He's already done for us. Everything we've already experienced with Him. We must allow the fear to pass over us and through us until it is gone. And when it is gone, we will see that fear itself was the transitory shadow, and all that truly remains is Him.

A Ramble About Church Styles

I've been attending a non-denomination church now for about a month, and there are things about it which have gotten me thinking. Why am I attending a non-denom church? In short, because this is where God has led us for the moment. Why has God led us there? Haven't a clue yet, but they've been kind and welcoming to my family, and I've been as discreet and non-threatening as possible so that my background as a Catholic priest (Orthodox, Old, or otherwise) doesn't cause any issues or disruptions for anyone there. I haven't hidden it, but I haven't shouted it from the rooftops either, and I've been trying to help out where I can with the kids on Wednesday nights, and with setting up for Sunday nights.

So, as I was saying, it has gotten me thinking about the kinds of people which the different churches and their styles of service are meant to cater to. One obvious thing which I noticed right away is the position of the altar in the sanctuary. It's pushed off to the side of the stage and has an open Bible situated on top of it. In the center of the stage is a set of instruments for the worship band on Sunday mornings and evenings. During the Sunday morning and evening services, they play two worship and praise songs, and then the pastor speaks for forty-five minutes to an hour.

In a Catholic sanctuary, the setup is very different. The altar is front and center, raised up so that it is the focus of everyone in the sanctuary. Next to the altar stands the crucifix, a cross with a figure of Christ hanging on it. If there is a worship band, it is set up off to the side so as not to interfere with the focus on the altar and the liturgy. The priest who celebrates the liturgy of the word and the Mass primarily functions as the worship leader, and when it comes time for him to speak, he takes maybe twenty minutes at most so that the rest of the service may return to the focus on the worship of Jesus Christ.

What's interesting about the latter scenario is that the average layperson probably doesn't know why the sanctuary is set up the way it is. They probably don't know that every piece of furniture, every implement, and every article of clothing worn by the priest has significance which is intended to point back to Christ. Most Catholics, and especially most visitors to a Catholic church probably leave with a feeling of “what in the world is all this about?”

One thing I am coming to understand is that one of the real problems within the Church is when the Church became too open with its services. Now, before you tune me out, hear me out. In the ancient Church, at the very beginning, when someone wanted to join the Church (any local church as there was only one Church), they had to go through a period of discernment called the Catechumenate. This was the period of time when they learned what being a Christian was all about, and they had the time to work out their indecision, and to have their questions answered. The person would go through the Catechumenate for two years or until they were ready, and then they were baptized and confirmed in the faith as full members of the Church of Jesus Christ. By that point in time, they knew what they were getting into, they had a good grasp of the faith and practice of the Church, and they knew what it meant to let go of everything else and follow Christ. One important point of this is that Catechumens were only allowed to attend part of the Sunday service if any of it.

Why is this important? Because the bishops and presbyters of the Church didn't have to worry about tailoring their homilies and liturgies for people who were new to the faith. They didn't have to take time every Sunday to explain the basics of the faith over and over again because they didn't know who would be listening to the homily. The Sunday liturgies in the Catholic tradition stem from this time period, when the only people attending them were those who were “in the know”. Further, the sacrament of confession originally took place in front of everyone during Mass as the members of the body confessed their sins openly to one another and received absolution as a congregation.

But some time later on, the Sunday services opened up to those who were not “in the know”. People came to the Mass and had no idea what was going on. Maybe they had attended some catechism or initiation classes, but hadn't actually been discipled appropriately. The catechumenates grew shorter, and the initiation training became more shallow and sporadic. General Confession in the Mass ceased in favor of private confession with the Priest or Bishop. Thus the situation in the Catholic Churches today where too many people attend and are confused about what any of it means, or even about what the Churches actually teach.

Thus we have the non-denominational churches that seek to pick up the pieces. They recognize that most people who attend the churches aren't “in the know” to begin with and they cater to it. They encourage members to bring non-members to their church so that they can be saved through their preaching.

It is a great example of seeing a problem and moving to fix it, and I applaud the attempt to do so; but, in my opinion, it leaves the churches stuck in first gear. The pastor is constantly going over initiatory material and is never able to focus on anything more than “milk” because there might be someone in his congregation (perhaps most of his congregation) who would have a serious, and potentially fatal spiritual misunderstanding if he did. But without the “meat”, the stuff that would actually assist in spiritual growth, being given to the congregation, the people won't mature in their faith. They'll be stunted spiritually and won't understand how to handle it when God takes them further so that they begin to experience the cross, the dark night, and the crucial turning away from the addictions and attachments of this world. Furthermore, since these congregations produce the next generations of pastors and church leaders, the “meat” becomes lost to all but a very few until no one really understands it and it has to be “rediscovered.”

People fear and distrust secrecy and mystery, and this was the reason why the Church opened its rites to the public. But in so doing, from my observation, it crippled itself and stunted the growth of its members when it did. The truth is that part of the reason why there became such a difference between the maturity of the ancient Church and the maturity of the Church today is because the Church allowed its rites to become public.

The truth is also that it isn't politic to close them off now so that we can focus on the spiritual growth of the body. Too many people become suspicious of what goes on during the meetings. Of course they were pretty suspicious of the churches in ancient Rome too. History bears out the brutality of the Roman suspicions.

I don't know how to rectify this issue. The Catholic Churches are designed to cater to spiritually mature people who are “in the know” but most of its adherents aren't. The Evangelical churches are designed to cater to those not “in the know”, but can never bring them past the beginning stages because of what they have to continuously focus on. The truth is that both could learn from each other if they would allow it, yet neither one will.

A Ramble About the Desert

Ever since we moved to Arizona I have been reminded of the epic masterpiece book series Dune by Frank Herbert. I have actually a big fan of the Dune series since I was a kid. Being a student of history and religious studies, and a sci-fi fan, how could I not be? I've read every book in the series at least twice, the Dune prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, and have seen both the 1984 film adaptation (in the theaters!) and the Sci-Fi channel miniseries of both the original novel and the miniseries Children of Dune adapting the next two books in the series several times. My geek cred on Dune is safely indisputable. Since I arrived here the lines from the book and the movie, “Arrakis, Dune, desert planet,” and “God created Arrakis to train the faithful; one cannot go against the word of God,” have been rolling through my mind. Sometimes it involuntarily inserts “Arizona” for Arrakis. It's a fun fact to know that the original Dune movie was filmed in southern Arizona and California because of the location's similarity to the descriptions of Arrakis.

For those not in the know, Arrakis is the principle setting of the story of Dune. It's a desert planet where water is so scarce and so precious the native peoples have developed technology to recycle it from everything in order to conserve it. They developed a garment called a “stillsuit” to collect sweat, urine, and feces and distill the pure water from these for the wearer so that he or she won't lose more than a thimble full of water per day through perspiration. They also developed a method of distilling the water from a recently deceased dead body so that that person's water won't be lost to the rest of their tribe. It's a harsh world with harsh realities of survival.

The reason why Arrakis is so important in the Dune universe is because it is only there that a substance called Spice Melange is found. To make a long story short, aside from it's health benefits at prolonging life and the mild narcotic effects it can have, it's also the only substance capable of enabling the navigators of space ships to travel safely through hyperspace by allowing them to see their course clearly. So, even though this world is a desert wasteland hostile to human life (I didn't mention the gargantuan sandworms, did I?), it is also the single most important world in the entire imperium.

The natives of Arrakis are called the “Fremen.” According to Brian Herbert's prequels, they are descended from religiously minded escaped slaves and, figuring anywhere was better than the slavery they left, without knowing where the ship they were on was headed they settled on Arrakis declaring themselves the “free men” of Arrakis. In the time of the Frank Herbert series, the fremen have not only adapted to Arrakis, they covertly rule and control it, living places and going places none other can imagine. They live all over Arrakis, going where they will by riding the monstrous sandworms that terrorize everyone else. They are terrifying fighters that can easily best the Emperor's feared elite special forces killers known as sardaukar. Thus has the environment of Arrakis shaped the fremen to either master it, or have the desert kill them outright.

The desert plays an important role in Biblical history as well. It is a well known forge that produced the Israeli nation, the prophets, and the Holy Scriptures. Many of the greatest holy men and spiritual authors are called “desert fathers” by the Church because they are monks who elect to live there so that there might be no distractions in their communion with God.

The desert has a habit of stripping away every distraction, and everything you don't actually need in order for you to learn what you do really need to survive. What good are gold and jewels if you have no water and will die of thirst, for example? Of what value are expensive clothes if they don't protect you from the heat of the day? The desert is a crucible that God has used again and again to train His people.

If you look, there is a tremendous peace and serenity in the desert. There is a beauty too that can be hidden from those who don't know how to see it. There is a quiet honesty that defies all attempts at pretense and questions your soul, “who are you really?” It is in the desert that we can be stripped down to real honesty between ourselves and God, and it is in the desert that God begins to really teach us how to survive and master it so that it doesn't kill us from thirst and exposure. When God trains us in the desert, He teaches us to conserve every drop and treasure it. He teaches us when to lie low and wait for the burning heat to pass, and when to move in the coolness of night. He teaches us to respect the sandworm that we draw with our own careless steps, and how to walk so that we don't attract it. When God draws us into the desert, at first it seems as though He has left us there to die and we are terrified. But if He doesn't draw us into the desert, we will never learn to survive there, and thus we cannot become the skilled fighters He wants us to be. Learn to appreciate and respect the desert if God has drawn you into it.

In the end, even though the Emperor, the Great Houses, the Spacing Guild, even the Bene Gesserit sisterhood believe they control Arrakis, it is the fremen who ride free over its surface and all the others hide cowering behind their walls in fear. And in the end, these others apprehend this fact at a great cost.

God uses the desert to train the faithful. Don't fight it, learn from it.

A Short Ramble About Unity and Division

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori Publications, 1994), authored and published by the Holy See in Rome (as opposed to a local catechism such as The Baltimore Catechism which is only authoritative in its home diocese) there is a passage which I think would blow the minds of Protestant Evangelicals.

In sections 1257 through 1261 it talks about the necessity of the Sacrament of Baptism. It reads:

“The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation. … God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments. The Church has always held firm the conviction that those who suffer death for the sake of the faith without having received Baptism are baptized by their death for and with Christ. This Baptism of blood, like the desire for Baptism, brings abut the fruits of Baptism without being a sacrament. For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentence for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.”

So, why is this passage important? What it is essentially saying is that a person may be saved regardless of whether or not they have been baptized. In short, the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church has set their stamp on what Protestant Evangelicals have been saying all along, that when it comes down to it faith alone in Christ is enough for one's salvation. To be sure, they do not express it in these words, but this is the brass tacks of what they are saying. Where we run into arguments is the Catholic insistence that faith requires the actions of faith in order for it to truly be faith. If someone has the ability to be baptized, then faith in Christ demands that the person follow through with Baptism because this is the action that faith requires in order for it to really be faith. It has been my experience that most pastors in most Protestant Churches would also question the profession of faith in Christ by someone who then refuses to follow the Lord in Baptism.

Often, when I tell people that the Protestant Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church basically believe the same thing but explain it in different ways, they look at me funny and wonder what planet I'm from. But it is this passage above, and others like it in the Catechism and other writings from both sides which has convinced me of the truth of our agreement. Our main problem is the inability to see things through each others eyes and to understand what the other is saying. It doesn't help either when we have, on both sides, done a remarkably poor job in educating our congregations and laity what the Churches actually teach as opposed to what the majority of the laity believes they teach. We emphasize the differences of explanation rather than the unity of belief, and we allow minor teachings to come between the bonds of mutual love and compassion which Christ commanded us.

A Ramble About Walking Away

I just watched one of the saddest ends to a good series that I have ever seen. Star Wars: The Clone Wars has been a smart and fun series since the movie first premiered in theaters, and it has maintained itself well through the past five seasons. Now Lucasfilm has chosen to cancel the series so that it can focus on the next chapter in the Star Wars universe. So the season finale now is likely to be the end of the entire series, but what a way to end it.

In the finale and the episodes leading up to it, Asoka Tahno, the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, is cleverly and expertly framed for murder and sedition against the Galactic Republic. Those who know the movies know who's ultimately behind the crimes and the framing, but at this point in the timeline, the good guys don't and the Jedi Council sends out her Jedi Master and a squad of clone troopers to capture her and bring her back for judgment. They eventually accomplish this. Asoka is expelled from the Jedi Order so she can face trial in a Republic tribunal as a private citizen. At the last second, her Master finds the real criminal and gets her to confess, freeing Asoka. The Jedi Council extends the invitation to her to return to the Order as a full Jedi Knight.

But instead of the happy ending, and this is where the series tended to shine a little, Asoka walks away. The Council refused to believe her or believe in her innocence to begin with even though they knew her very well and this left her damaged, hurt, confused, and dealing with an anger she needed to work through on her own. From seeing her beginnings in the Clone Wars movie as a new Padawan apprentice to a nearly full Jedi Knight, this was a rough, bitter pill to take. We may want the happy ending, but Asoka's experience is often far closer to reality than we like to admit, especially for those in the Church.

Involuntary suffering puts us through trials as Christians that often make us stronger. But all too often, the organized churches, their councils and leadership, don't seem to understand this. When a woman, for example, begins to go through a painful divorce, all too often she may get ostracized for something she didn't do. When a pastor is accused of something horrendous like molestation, even if he is later proven innocent the damage to his reputation can be permanent. It is during these times that Christ can shine through us all the more, and yet our brothers and sisters can be blind to it.

I can't keep count of how many Christians I have met and known, friends all of them, who have walked away from their churches, or church in general because, rather than rally around them like the loving protective family they should be, they have contributed to their misery and ostracized them or expelled them. Oddly enough, these people when asked will tell you that they have stopped believing in the Church or Christianity even, but they will rarely ever say they've stopped believing in Jesus Christ. These are sheep that have run from abusive shepherds into the wild. What is even more painful is that, all too often these people are condemned even further for walking away from the Church by their pastors and fellow Christians.

Asoka Tahno was a firm believer in the Jedi Order and in the light side of the Force and she proved this again and again through five seasons of stories. Those who knew her knew she wasn't capable of what she was accused of, but they condemned her anyway. How many of our brothers and sisters have left the churches and the Church in general in pain and confusion because we wouldn't listen?

Jesus Christ died and rose again for these brothers and sisters just as He did for those who plant themselves in a pew every Sunday. They have chosen to walk away because of the pain, hurt, and confusion caused by other Christians and the systems of Church government and belief which they had trusted in. Pain, hurt, and confusion that didn't have to be in the first place if we just pulled our heads out of our hind ends and actually followed what Jesus Christ taught: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

Another lesson which could be drawn from this episode is the further consequences to those around her. Everyone who knows the Star Wars series knows what happens to Anakin Skywalker and his fall from grace to become Darth Vader. Anakin cared deeply about his apprentice, and while not the final straw in his fall, it certainly contributed as he lost one more person he cared about.

When one Christian leaves the church because the church has abused them in some way, it is far more likely to cause those around them to leave as well, and possibly for these to truly fall away farther than the first person ever did. None of us in the body of Christ is truly separate from one another. Through Christ we are all connected. What happens to one of us affects all of us in some way. Positive things that happen to one member of the body affect all of us positively, negative things affect all of us negatively. This is not mere theory, but observable fact. How many Vaders do we create when we fail to love one another as He commanded us?

We have been given the ministry and the responsibility of reconciliation, not judgment or condemnation. We have been commanded to love one another, not to beat each other. And we have been warned by Him that it would be better to go swimming with a millstone tied around our necks than to cause one of the “least of these” to stumble. Whatever pain we cause to our brothers and sisters, rest assured He feels it too, and He remembers.

A Ramble About Speculative Theology

I've been struggling with writing this one, not because I don't know if it should be said, but because I'm not sure how to put all the pieces together to say it in a coherent fashion. Recently I posted a status update on Facebook which said this:

“There is something that I am becoming more and more convinced of. The source of our disunity within the Universal Church is speculative theology. As I was re-reading the letter of Clement of Rome to the Church at Corinth, and the letter of Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians recently, this seemed to be the focus of their attack. People within the church were getting too full of themselves, jealous of the established Bishop, and teaching something more than just the "simple truth of Jesus Christ." God is mystery. Salvation is mystery. It remains that way until you get to know Him personally and spend time with Him and He reveals Himself to you. But what He reveals to you, He reveals in a way that is meant primarily for you. While it may be helpful as a guide for others, it is meant primarily for you as it may be misunderstood by others. This is true theology, the study of God as He is in Himself and as He reveals Himself to you, not the speculation about Him which can arise from studying the experiences and revelations of others.”

What do I mean by “speculative theology”? I mean the kind of theology which is done by thinking about God, angels, salvation, and unseen things. The kind of theology which comes from pulling out your Bible, commentaries, spiritual writings, and dogmatic texts and trying to build an intellectual picture based on how all of these fit together. The problem is that this is how most modern Christians are taught to do theology even as a profession. We are taught to learn about God and how He works within us and within the world from these tools that we are handed. We are given a set of dogmas and told, “this is the truth!” But of course, each denomination and Church puts that truth together a little differently even if the pieces it uses come from the same sources.

The Fathers of the Church had a very different view of theology. You weren't considered a theologian until you had received a personal vision of God. In their mind, a person wasn't doing theology until He had put all the speculation aside and just spent time looking upon God Himself as He is and as He chose to reveal Himself through inward prayer. They strongly discouraged speculative theology, even if it was tracking along the right lines because the person really didn't know what he was talking about until He had the experience of God in prayer. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, this is still the view.

The writings of the early Fathers of the Church, as well as the desert Fathers, are all very instructive on this point. You don't find dissertations on soteriology. There is no debate on whether a person is justified by faith and the moment of belief or at baptism. With these Fathers, it was all about the practice of one's faith, and what someone who followed Christ looked like in their actions, and what it looked like when someone was not following Christ. They wrote about what kind of demonic attacks to expect and gave very frank and practical advice on how to counter them. They wrote about prayer, how to pray, and how to deal with distractions during prayer. When reading them, you get the impression that they really couldn't have cared less about what we now consider to be major dividing lines within the Church. They were all very practical men, and for them following Christ wasn't a theoretical exercise. It was more important than breathing.

These kinds of speculative theology didn't start getting talked about until people within the Church started rising up against their Church leaders out of jealousy. They began accusing their bishops and priests of not teaching the whole truth, or not teaching the truth correctly, and so started causing dissensions. The union of love within the churches was coming under threat because of that envy as people began seeing their version of the truth as more important than the tolerance and compassion which love demanded. And so, bishops had to respond to defend the orthodox versions of the truth rather than focus on what was really important, loving one another as Christ loved us.

When we place more importance on our own speculative versions of the truth than we do on loving one another in mutual tolerance and understanding then we are committing heresy. When we get more worked up about what someone believes as to when justification occurs, or whether or not someone can lose their salvation, or what the proper church government looks like, or who can baptize than we do about caring for the other person then we are committing heresy.

All too often I hear today that the ancient church was primitive. That they didn't really have a full grasp of the Gospel or of theological truth. The truth is that only a fool would believe that a divided Universal Church was somehow more enlightened than a united Universal Church. They understood the Gospel so well that they gave up everything for it and died defending it.

The path to restoring the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church isn't through theological gymnastics and clever philosophy. The path to restoring the unity of what was broken is through mutual love, tolerance, kindness and understanding through Jesus Christ.

A Ramble About Rising

Among other things, I am also a superhero fan. Those who know me better know that I'm a little more obsessive than normal when it comes to Superman stories and movies, for example. I own all of the Superman movies on DVD including the lesser known Richard Donner cut of Superman II, and I keep a copy of the fan film Superman: Requiem on my laptop just because it brought a little tear to my eye. But I am also a fan of Batman, and have been for as long as I've been a Superman fan. I grew up watching reruns of the old Batman series with Adam West, and saw most of the late eighties early nineties Batman movies either in the theater or on DVD several times. I was a little unsure of Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight, but he pulled it off amazingly.

So, as I've been able to, I also made it a point to see Christian Bales incarnation of Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy, which I now own on DVD. Something lately told me to watch the last film, The Dark Knight Rises again, so I put it on today.

In the film, our hero Bruce Wayne is seriously injured and thrown into a prison that exists at the bottom of a deep dark pit. The only escape is through a huge hole in the ceiling which has to be climbed up. At the top is a ledge, and the only way to continue your ascent up and out is to jump from that ledge onto an adjacent ledge. The people who run the prison enter and leave by way of climbing up and down ropes lowered through the hole. The most torturous thing about this prison is that the prisoners can see the daylight, but no one can make the full ascent to get out because every time they try to make the jump, they fall. They don't always die from the fall because they have a sort of safety line tied around them to keep them from hitting the ground. But only one person is known in a prison legend to have made it to the top and made the jump, and that person was a child.

So, in true hero fashion, Bruce recovers from his injuries, rebuilds his body and strength, and then proceeds to make the climb, safety rope around his waist. He gets to the ledge and jumps... and thn he falls painfully. He does this three or four times, each time it makes him more frustrated and determined to get out of the pit, and each time he falls in defeat and is forced to watch the city and people he loves being abused and terrorized on a television.

As he continues to work out and condition his body, another prisoner tells him it's not about strength. It's about spirit. He goes on to explain that in order to reach the top, you need to make the jump in the same way that the child did, without the safety rope. This safety rope is the only thing allowing Bruce to try again, because without it any fall from the ledge is fatal. You have to make a leap of faith without anything there to catch you.

During the first part of the movie, I was trying to understand why I needed to see it again. Then it came to this part, the leap of faith. I would like to think I know all about leaps of faith, but the truth is that I like a good safety rope the same as anyone else. I don't like it when the safety net has been taken away, and watching this again reminded me of a very powerful truth.

God works with us where we are at, but He asks us to trust Him. As we get to know Him better and better, He asks us to trust Him with more and more. At first, He allows safety nets because of our weakness. But He doesn't allow them forever. His objective is that we learn to trust Him as a child, implicitly and with everything. When a child trusts a parent, the parent is that child's safety net. In the same way, we need to come to understand that when God asks us to trust Him, we need to understand that He is our safety net, and eventually we will be asked to let the rope we trusted to catch us go. God eventually asks us to jump without the rope, and only when we do this can we ascend to where He wants to take us.

The only way to ascend up at out of the pit is to make the jump as the child did, without the rope. Jesus said that unless we humbled ourselves and became as little children we would never see the kingdom of God. The reason why no one else had ever escaped the pit is because they were all trying to do it the safe way like grown-ups. The only way to truly mature as we follow Christ is to leave the safety rope behind and trust Him.

A Ramble About Villains

I have recently become infatuated with the television series Once Upon a Time. The truth is that I'm a bit of a sucker for this kind of thing to begin with. I love the concept of taking the old fairy tales and bringing them into the real world and mixing the two up. As a result, I'm also partial to the movie Enchanted and the older TV miniseries The 10^th Kingdom. I never watched it on the TV when it was broadcast, because we rarely had our TV channels come in clear enough, but I was always curious. I burned through the entire series in a matter of three or four days watching the DVDs, now I find myself looking up sneak peak clips on Youtube to get the gist of what's happening this season. Yes, I'm sorry to say, my macho credentials (if there ever were any) have now been completely flushed down the toilet.

What fascinates me most about the series is the backstory it gives the familiar storybook characters, especially the villains. The evil queen is evil because she's been hurt and emotionally, and physically abused by her overbearing and well... abusive mother. Rumpelstiltskin lost his son and now everything he does is to try and find him again, but competing with a father's love is his terrible fear of losing the security his enormous power gives him. These characters started out as essentially good people but “fell” because of the enormous pain which they suffered and the choices they made in response to that pain.

As human beings, we have a disorder which theologians call sin. We got it when our first ancestors also fell and we live with the inherited consequences of their choices. Part of this disorder is the psychological drive to judge things or people as good or evil, right or wrong, black or white. There is generally little rhyme or reason to the way this drive gets programmed except for the values given to it by environment, upbringing, and our own choices. The common denominator underneath it usually turns out to be “I am good, and anything not like me is bad.” Don't believe me? Check Genesis 3 and the fall of man, by what real logic is nudity somehow bad? Every other creature on the planet is and was naked, yet this is the first thing pronounced as bad by our newly fallen first parents.

We especially like to label people as either good or evil and see them only through that lens. Thus the storybook villains that do bad for the sake of doing bad. But reality isn't like that. Every human being does what they think is the best decision, the “good” decision, in the moment. But what happens is that what we think is the “good” decision often turns out the be the one which causes the most harm. We then have to come to terms with the fact that we did or said something harmful, which most people might agree was “bad”. This causes a problem for the disordered (or sinful) human psyche something like the “fatal error” that a computer will sometimes give you when the processor receives a series of calculations which give it answers which can't possibly exist according to its own internal logic (maybe I'm showing my age here because this happens much less frequently with modern computing devices than it used to).

The psyche then has to resolve this fatal error according to it's own internal rules. Often, but not always, it refuses to acknowledge that it did something “bad”, or if it did then it begins to rewrite its rules so that “bad” is somehow now “good” and therefore it didn't do anything “bad” in the first place. With these kinds of continual rewrites, the psyche can maintain its sanity (in the computing sense of the word). This is how evil queens and Rumpelstiltskins are made, and it is a very easy slippery slope to walk into. More often than not, the people who find themselves in this position are suffering horrendously because there's still some part of their internal programming telling them that they've done “bad” and the thing they want most, even if they don't realize it, is to go back and not start down the slippery slope at all. It is my observation that everyone I have ever met has gone through this themselves at least a little. I know I have.

When you learn of Rumpel's and the queen's backstories (at least according to the show), you begin to have compassion for characters for which you would never before have thought of having compassion and empathy. You want to see them go down, but there's a part of you that also wants to see them redeemed because of the hurt and pain they themselves are suffering.

There are people in our lives, with all of us (let's be honest), that we tend to view as villains like the queen and Rumpel with hearts as black as can be. When we look at those people we need to ask the question, why are they that way? We also need to ask, what would it take to bring me to that point, or am I already there? And then the final question, what would it take to redeem that person, and how can I help bring it about? Before you decide the last question is too hard, remember God's answer to it concerning you.