BE-ELZEBUB AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Consider this:  Evil is something which people DO. NOT something that people ARE.

The terrible murder of the babies in hospital committed by the nurse Lucy Letby is still very much on our minds and hearts. These were shockingly evil acts. But I have to part company with the tabloid editors who went for the easy headlines calling Letby herself “pure evil”.

She is not “pure evil”, any more than Brady and Hindley (the Moors child  murderers), Hitler, Stalin, Osama Bin Laden or Putin.  Nobody is pure evil as a human being.

Every human being is different.

Some people commit more evil acts than others. That is to say worse evil or more of them.

But we are all capable of doing good and doing harm. How we turn out to behave is complicated. It depends on a number of factors, including genes, upbringing, influences and mental health factors.

So, to bite off far more than I can chew, I boldly ask WHAT DOES EVIL MEAN?

Religions, including Judaism and Christianity, like to personify “evil” as a creature – a nasty, scaly little dwarf with horns is the favourite depiction - whose purpose is simply to cause mayhem, to tempt people to do the morally wrong thing. “Satan” or “The Devil” or (my favourite name just for the way it sounds!) “Be-elzebub”.

Apparently Be-elzebub is specifically known as one of the kings of hell, the fallen angel of flies, pestilence and famine.

Well, all this cartoon imagery is certainly powerful and appealing. It’s also comforting. It obligingly gives us the idea of an alien force outside ourselves, some external enemy against whom we must, with God’s help, defend ourselves, whose temptations we must resist at all costs.

Sorry. I don’t buy it.

The possibility of doing evil acts is within the nature of every human being.

Within our “fallen” nature, if you want to use the language of the Book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden.

Oh dear but then that story doesn’t really make sense.

Why should Adam and Eve wish to stay sitting in a garden twiddling their thumbs in a state of total ignorance?

Why would they not want to satisfy their curiosity by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and be able to understand what evil is?

And why would God want to FORBID them to do so?

The more I think about it and the longer I practise as a priest,

the more convinced I am that God did not create us in order to keep us as ignorant puppets on a string;

the more I understand the fundamental necessity of the gift of FREEWILL so that, if we respond to God’s love for us by loving Him in return, we do so voluntarily and by our own choice.

That means as a matter of sheer logic that we must be able to “do the other thing”, to choose differently, not to love Him and obey His commandments and even to do the opposite – to do what we call evil.

And of course if we do deliberately cause harm to others, then we must expect to be restrained, and if necessary punished, by our human system of justice. That is a basic requirement of maintaining a stable, civilised society.

But we have to start from the recognition that we all have, each and every one of us, what is called these days a dark side. Yes, that’s you madam, and you sir, and most certainly me.

And the most dangerous thing for anybody is to hide, deny or repress their dark side. It should be acknowledged. It should be taken out and inspected. It should be given an outlet, a safety valve, some fairly innocuous release – like experiencing the fierce, sometimes anger-filled competitiveness of sport or watching a violent film to relieve vicariously our own occasional violent urges

Now go back to the idea of describing some criminals as “pure evil”.

Is that not another form of transference?

Could it not be what psychologists called PROJECTION of our own dark side on to another? On to a publicly despised evil-doer who thereby becomes a kind of scapegoat?

Let me explain.

Calling people like Lucy Letby “pure evil” is, as I said, inaccurate because it is deeds, actions, not people, which are evil.

But it’s not only inaccurate. It’s not very healthy for our own souls either.

Because what you are doing then is in fact creating your own two categories, making two boxes. Next you put the pure evil people in one box and yourself in the other box. What’s that second box exactly? A “GOOD” box?

That’s quite a leap. And quite a judgmental one.

Sliding ourselves comfortably into the “good” box, not even necessarily the “totally good” box but just the “good on the whole, most of the time” box, is kidding ourselves about the potential of our inner dark side to surface.

Even when we have brought it out into the light and are no longer suppressing it, we all remain in-betweenies ( ok, maybe some more in-between  than others!), muddling along, mostly doing the best we can. And the good news is: That is exactly what God wants. He does not expect or demand perfection.

Yes, doing the best we can. But then we backslide. We neglect God. We get sucked into worrying, fretting, doing our own thing, growing attached to houses and cars and things and are capable of being tetchy and spiteful and bearing grudges. Even doing positive harm.

And Jesus comes out with what sounds like a bombshell about the demands of discipleship. “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Wow Steady on!

He must know how overpowering the instinct is in human beings for self-preservation. Yes, of course he does

But you see He doesn’t mean the first step to salvation must always be literally to embrace death.

He’s not some deranged cult leader urging his brainwashed followers on to commit mass suicide.

For most of us most of the time ‘losing your life in order to find it’ is more likely to be a gradual spiritual dying to self. Trying to become little by little more Christ-like.

None of us is perfect, that is for sure. Not even the Saints.

But equally for sure is that none of us is beyond redemption.

God does not put the good the bad and the ugly into separate boxes. He alone knows the weaknesses (bad, badder and baddest)  of all his children and what He asks of each of us is to be honest about ourselves, to be aware of our potential capability of hurting others, and to just carry on faithfully trying to do the best we can.