Kirkepiscatoid

From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

Well...this is certainly a cheery one. NOT.

This being ancient language, from 1544, the devil as “dude with pitchfork and horns” doesn’t connect very well to me.

Really, in my mind, the devil lives between my two ears. Not that there isn’t evil in the world. Not that we shouldn’t be aware of evil, and its power to devour us. Since I’m not a Biblical literalist, the whole “Lucifer/Satan” stuff really doesn’t connect to me. I can’t deal with the fundamentalist notion that the devil is out there hiding behind every lamppost, waiting to ensnare me.

I am more in the mind of the ancient Jews, who believed in the “yetser ha’tov” (the incarnation of good in people) and the “yetser ha’ra” (the incarnation of evil in people), both living right inside ourselves. If you get right down to it, evil people are what proliferate evil in the world. Or good people who do nothing. Or apathetic or fearful people who don’t have the ability to fight evil. The “yetser ha’ra” has plenty of room to work in each of us.

I tend to have a “physicist’s notion” of God and what we call “the devil.” I view God as a unifying field of energy. I view “the devil” as a fractionating field of energy, a destructive one. We are part of both fields, and what we do in this world can connect to one or the other. We are probably mostly blissfully unaware of our connections to the fractionating one. We desire a connection with God. We don’t desire one with this evil force. But it probably hooks us in unawares or only partially aware of it.

Ascribing things to “the work of the devil”, the work of this unseen evil being, takes the monkey off our back to accept our own blame in evil...”the devil made me do it.” The converse of “corporate atonement” is to accept our individual roles as perpetrators, even unwitting or unwilling ones, in the exploitation and wrongdoing that exists in the world.