I don’t know if I am more sensitive to movies than others – I certainly am not that sensitive in many other ways – but I recently saw a documentary series that has haunted me for days. I guess I should have known, given the person who had recommended it.
 
            It was not from a personal conversation, but from a podcast of a radio show that Steve Deace gives on BlazeTV every weekday at 11:00 (Central). Deace is the script writer of the movie “Nefarious.” If you have not seen it but like horror movies without all the blood and guts, this is for you. It takes place primarily at a maximum security prison where a serial killer is about to be given the electric chair. A psychiatrist is called in to ascertain the man’s sanity as a last safety-check before the body of the man is purposefully fried. We quickly see that the man believes that he has been possessed by the devil. The psychiatrist is a typical materialist scientist and at first cannot believe him. In time, he becomes convinced.
 
            It is a show that immerses one in the kind of evil from which one cannot – or almost cannot – escape. The evil exposed is much worse on the emotions than are the typical teen blood and guts movies. One sees this and believes. It is intended to send people out to seek their salvation, and by golly it does a good job at it. To see that we all are potential victims of an evil force that is way beyond our abilities to control should send us all in search of a savior with sufficient empathy and power.
 
            And so it is with this documentary, although it by no means was made with the intention of compelling us to seek deliverance. Rather, it simply tells the facts about a man named Arthur Leigh Allen, primarily through the eyes of the children of a family in which this man served as a kind of reserve uncle.
 
            Allen is dead now, but he remains the prime suspect in the notorious Zodiac Killer murders that took place from the early 1960’s to about the mid ‘80’s in California. If you are like me, this documentary will make your skin crawl. It is not fiction and it exposes us to semi-miraculous artifacts that one can look at to this day as proof of this special kind of evil.
 
            First, like the possessed man in the fictional movie, the Zodiac Killer through his actions and letters showed that he was a man of astounding intellect and malicious humor. He once, for an instance of the humor, announced that he was going to kill all the “kiddies” as they “bounced out” of a school bus. He did not, but again and again he killed people, many times couples, leaving clues behind, but never quite enough to convict. Even after the police zoned in on Arthur, who was almost certainly the killer, he was able to evade prosecution. Even, we might add, after he was put away for several years for child molestation.
 
            For an instance of his genuinely supernatural intelligence, he left behind his infamous Zodiac messages, with codes so intricate that at least one has not been deciphered to this day, even with the help of sophisticated supercomputers.
 
            Some, however, have been decoded, and in them the killer tells us of his relish for the suffering and death of others. More, he announces that he is not afraid for his own death, as he bragged to the world that the people he killed would become his soul-slaves after his death. Even if he did not believe in what he wrote, such a statement was meant to make the survivors of his mostly youthful victims cry out in spiritual alarm. Is this man the devil? Can he enslave my (son or daughter) in the kingdom of Hell? What kind of monster would say such things besides a demon?
 
            There is more. Although we see him in the beginning as a somewhat pudgy schoolteacher in his late 30’s, we are then shown a brief clip from a home camera of his performance on a diving board. Here, the soft, aging man suddenly launches himself in the air, does a flip or two, lands back on the board to do another flip, and then dives into the water. Only a skilled acrobat or gymnast could pull off such a feat. Obviously, he had physical powers that he should not have had.
 
            He died a very sick man in the 1990’s while in his late 50’s, of a sudden blood clot. Somehow he knew he would die right then at his desk at home, as he was found clutching a final letter to the world in his cold hand. A death-bed confession? No: instead he denied he had anything to do with any of the killings and wished the world well except for the police who he claimed had unjustly hounded him, perhaps causing his sickness and death. He would not give to the world and the relatives of his victims’ closure. We might conclude from the evidence that he did it all, but without conviction or confession, he has ringed the popular verdict with nagging doubt.
 
            Such instances of pure supernatural evil are rare, but those few give us clear evidence that there really is demonic influence in the world. I find this so disturbing that if such evil were not important to understand, I would not write about it at all. Facing death as we all do is bad enough; but facing death with the possibility of being snatched into Hell for an eternity is almost unbearable. We who are Christians have been told our whole lives that this is a possibility, but we cannot -will not - really believe that this could be so. Christianity is not alone in posing a bleak afterlife for the unperfected, and it is apparent that those of other faiths prefer to ignore these warnings as well. How can we not, when each of us knows that we are not perfect? That we, the ‘normals,’ might be headed for a bad afterlife as well as the truly evil few?
 
            Fortunately, it seems that we are usually protected from outright demonic influence. This gives us clear evidence that God does care for us, which should give us hope. But now and then, the satanic is allowed to fully bloom. This we should take as a gift for wisdom. Being warned of the possibility that we could fall into the horrors of supernatural evil because of our imperfections should compel us to change for the better. Without such warnings, would we even try to change?
 
            We live in a bubble both individual and shared. We do not really believe in our death and we do not really believe in supernatural evil. We do not because both are too horrifying, especially when put together, to tolerate as we are. Such it is that our bubble both protects us from the truth and also makes us incapable of living with the truth. Instances of outright evil break the bubble and remind us of the great protection we usually are granted from a loving God. It is this side, the side of love and mercy, which is our ‘out.’ When the reality of the dark side becomes unavoidable, we are compelled to leave our bubble to find the other, the good, where our salvation lies.
 
            Imagine the fury of the demons when they find that their very evil makes us more holy? That we may write this as our parting message to the world.
 
    
 
                       
 
           
 

 
          I am not a touchy-feely guy. In fact, I am glad that I am not a touchy-feely guy. If it weren’t for the hippies in San Francisco back in the day doing so much acid that they started the trend of guys hugging guys, I would never have hugged a guy in my life and been glad for that, too. You should only hug your mom when she gets old, your kids when they are young, and your wife on special days and that’s it. Otherwise you get what we have now, guys nervously going through the routine of mandatory hugs as they eye the exits wistfully, wishing that someone would pull the fire alarm so that they can make their escape. I know. I’m one of those guys.
 
            Our cultural prejudices, however, even as they might tell the truth of our social being, often do not tell the deeper truth. About love, for instance. As youth, we all heard the French expression (it must be French): “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” That sounds pretty, but if you have ever been through a major break-up, you might want to argue that point. A bad break-up can ruin your life for months, and maybe years. People leave jobs over this, leave the country, start a goat farm in Idaho, take up residence with a bottle in a paper bag, or whatever. It can become an obsession, and just like drug or alcohol addiction, this obsession can lead to the loss of friends and family and everything else because no one else can understand your pain and everyone is tired of hearing about it. ‘She’s just another (girl); not even that pretty; find someone new and better; one by every minute,’ and so on, and they are right. But they are not right for that time, not when you have just lost. Love is then a misery and a curse, and why the hell did we get away from parents selecting our mates anyway?
 
            Still, it is the truth: it is better to have loved and lost, and I have recently experienced that truth in spite of my near-complete allergic reaction to public displays of affection.
 
            This love has nothing to do with hormonal chemistry and young woman with delicious-smelling perfume. If I had to name a cause, it would have to be my increasing identification with Christ and Christianity, but it is not exclusive. Rather, it is based on the revelation, shocking and coming at unexpected moments, that others are just as completely human as I, and that others, at least at times, suffer from a loss of love. This love usually has nothing to do with Romeo or Juliet, but with a sense of isolation, an isolation that is more profoundly devastating in its way than the loss of romantic love.
 
            This is nothing new. I can in fact remember an episode of the original Star Trek where Captain Kirk (hardly a great philosopher) is taken over by an alien entity who says just that, that our species is “so (desperately) alone” within itself. The newness is with the fullness of the realization. In this fullness, we suffer right along with the other who is suffering. The result of this suffering, though, is not akin to the loss of a romantic love (which is really about the self) with all its misery, but rather returns to us a feeling of completeness that comes in spite of the shared suffering. In other words, through empathy and all its pain, we come to feel fulfilled; by suffering the pain of loneliness of others, we lose our own sense of loneliness and emptiness.
 
            This is the kind of love that it is better to have, even as it guarantees us suffering. It is, in a practical sense, obvious that by sharing others loneliness we decrease our own, even as this sharing is unspoken. But this has a far more profound side that is explicit in the suffering of Christ, something so profound that I struggle to put it into words or even to understand it internally. It is the startling realization that creation itself has willfully chosen to suffer along with us in our isolation, so that this most elemental of human problems can be solved - a problem which in one way or another is at the bottom of all man-made misery. And there is no reason for creation to do this other than for love.
 
            This means that love truly is at the bottom of everything. It also means that in suffering we are liberated, which is something the saints have always understood and that I really cannot. And yet, even so, even as suffering occurs, its liberating aspects become clear.
 
            We might say that this is true in sharing other’s loneliness, but what about physical suffering?
 
            God, I hate it, even as I get older and experience it more and more. We could get really metaphysical here by attaching physical pain to revelation, but we do not have to start there. Rather, we can begin by putting into words what many have experienced, even as it makes little apparent sense: that through physical suffering, we also learn about love and begin to solve the fundamental problem of loneliness.  It is simply true, and any reasoning must begin with the truth, no matter how unexpected.
 
            Perhaps it can be boiled down to this: when we are healthy and fit, we feel as if we are beyond the bounds of nature, a world unto ourselves that does not have to pass through the cycle of life and death. When we are not, when we are ill and weak or in pain, we are brought back into the true cycle in which all of nature is involved. We then are forced to realize our shared vulnerability with all living things, and in this, like prisoners of war, we share a bond that is deeper than common friendship and cordiality. We come to share something more like the bond of comrades in arms, a bond that can allow us – can even demand us – to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for others.
 
            This shared suffering is our reality, and the depth of our community is based on how open we are to this reality. If we were perfectly aware of our situation, we would naturally form a bond of love with humanity. Many already have this bond, although imperfect, with their family, and others with their tribe or nation, but to be truly aware is to have that bond with all of creation. It is what Christ has, and what all truly inspired spiritual leaders must have.
 
            Still, we don’t have to be gurus to experience this depth. It can be given to anyone through grace, which is often delivered to us through suffering. My personal experiences probably have something to do with the diminished capacities and infirmities of age, but it doesn’t matter. The central mystery of the universe still resolves around the same premise: that it is all apiece and desiring that everything understands this in its own way. So it is that the eternal heavens must understand the weakness and suffering of the finite, just as we must understand, through our bond of weakness, our attachment to the eternal. It all seems so complicated, but it is not; rather, it is sublime, like the precise spiral of a sea shell.
 
            This curve of the truth brings us around to the mystery of the sacrificial Christian God. In his eternal presence, he must fulfill the unity of his creation by experiencing finitude and pain. In this, he unites his eternal life and joy through his suffering with our suffering. And in his guise as a mortal, he insists that we unite with all humankind in sympathetic love so that we may realize eternal completeness, and in this, God’s eternal bliss. 
 
            It is so simple yet so difficult, as sleek and slippery as an eel. If we could put it onto a bumper sticker, we might just say that “It is better to have lost before we might love.”