“Hear me all of you and try to understand. Nothing that enters
a man from outside can make him impure;
that which comes out of him, and only that, constitutes impurity.
Let everyone heed what he hears!” Jesus of Nazareth, from Mark 7:14-16
What people have done with scripture to excuse themselves - and I am not immune.
Back in the 1990’s, homosexuals were justifying themselves through a musical (I forget the name) where they quote food prohibitions from Leviticus, focusing on shrimp. I believe they used shrimp because non-orthodox Jews still avoid pork, but not shrimp. They used this to say (sing, really), that, yes, homosexuality is prohibited, but so is shrimp. Yet the holier-than-thou still eat shrimp. Hypocrites! If they can avoid this law and see themselves as pure, they crooned, then why can’t we participate in homosexual behavior and be just as pure?
I am no expert on the Old Testament, but the New Testament clearly states what the Old Testament was probably setting up with its food prohibitions: a change in heart, from the inside out. Starting with Abraham, rules had to be made and followed before the meaning and depths of the rules could be explained, as one does with children. As we can see in the quote from Mark above, Jesus enables us to plunge deeper into the meaning of the old dietary rules. It is not the stuff of the non-human world that defiles a man, we are told, but man himself, with his thoughts and deeds. Christ is telling his Jewish brethren that, now that they have gotten the hang of following God’s rules, it is time to know the meaning behind them and advance to the next stage.
Lust and desire, for instance -although perhaps sparked by things in the outside world - originate from the inside. The new and greater understanding is that one must follow the rules that direct us to control our inner desires, and sex is (of course) a great part of our urges. From this more mature perspective, eating shrimp is fine, but control of the primal urges is paramount. Before this deeper understanding, the homosexual argument disappears like the morning dew after an all-night kegger.
But homosexual behavior is not the only sin, and I have used the same sort of argument against the “silly” rules of Leviticus to justify the many ways I have broken the rules under which I was raised. These include the usual wash of pleasure-seeking inanities that often lead to disaster: drugs and sex, and a little too much rock ‘n roll. I have repented, but often repeat. Still, the question remains: just what is this “inside” from which our sinful thoughts and behavior are hatched?
There are many ways to approach this. Nowadays, we would probably go to one school of psychology or another to look for the Id and Ego or to behavioral training and the like, but our interior is deeper and more mysterious than that. I look to two episodes from my own life, along with spiritual traditions, to guide my understanding of the great darkness within.
`The first occurred when I was in 1st grade. I had a brutal teacher who still used corporeal punishment and we all feared her, and yet one day I boldly defied her as well as another authority figure without even understanding why. It was in gym class, outside on a beautiful day. We were told by our pretty and nice gym teacher to hold each other’s hands to form a circle, but then NOT to pull at the circle to break it. Of course I did. I did not feel pleasure in it or anything at all, and why I did it puzzled me even at the time.
The second occurred decades later, about 25 years ago, not long after we had moved to Wisconsin. I had not liked the move and had found myself without employment and was pretty unhappy about it. With this, I was often drinking too much at night. On one such evening when I had had my fill and was about to go to bed, my very troubled alcoholic cousin called. She did this now and then when she was plastered, and I often didn’t answer, but with a great sigh, this time I did. As she slurred on, I decided, well, maybe I’ll have just one more. But as we then still had cord phones, I could not go downstairs to the beer fridge. With no other alternative for alcohol, I stretched the chord to the max and made it to the cupboard where the liquor was kept and poured a single shot of bourbon over ice.
What happened next was astonishing. After just a few sips, something powerful seemed to rush into me like a hot wind. I was suddenly altered and began criticizing my cousin for her slurred inanities. She had no understanding of what was happening and after repeating herself several times, the conversation ended. Still, that odd sensation stayed. It stayed as if it were another entity – a demon – existing within myself. I came to understand that it had jumped from my troubled cousin into me, and it made me miserable. It turned everything in life into something dark and mean and made me feel like a captive prisoner in my own head. Such was my misery that I quit drinking for nearly a year in an attempt to keep the beast at bay. Just as oddly, even after the beast lost its power, my heavy drinking came to an end.
Rejection of it, of this entity, also opened the door to Christianity, much to my great relief. On the other end, my cousin continued with her problems and died of alcoholism some fifteen years later while still in her fifties.
The long story of her tragedy would take more than a single essay to relate, but what of the urges that make us or try to make us do things we know we should not do? As a child, the urge that made me break the circle was simply a “beast” that was teaching me to say “no.” The rule was without consequences except for the fact that I had broken the rule. This is akin to a Jew from ancient times eating shrimp. The prohibition itself was inconsequential, but the following of authority – in the case of shrimp, the authority of God – was crucial.
In the second example, I was fully mature and I knew that excessive drinking was unhealthy. I did it anyway because I had learned well the lesson of “no” from my childhood. The consequences were well beyond what I had expected, as is often the case with our actions. Alcohol had opened me up to demonic influences which could have ruined me, as they did my cousin. Instead, I was given the grace to remain apart from the demonic power even as this made for a long, miserable internal struggle. The result was the realization that I could not live a good life on my own; that I needed a superior and good – even holy – power to restore the internal balance of what I came to understand as my soul.
So where do the demons come from? Are they ego-driven voices of “no” formed in our childhood that have matured to affect our adult life? Yes, but why? As social animals, what good is it to have an egotistic will of such strength that it can separate us from the herd, and from life itself?
The book of Genesis explains this ‘will’ in the ability of Eve to be persuaded to eat from the tree of good and evil. The snake tells her that the fruit will not make her die, as God said, but will instead make her equal to God. God, says the snake, lied to her because he jealously wished to monopolize his power. In this, the snake understood human will. Of course Eve, and then Adam (the dolt) fell for it – for free will does make temporary gods of us.
Free will, however, is the only god-like power that we do have. All else, from our math to our technology, is limited by the rules of physics that the creator, not us, has made. He has also made the non-physical rules, from the prohibition of shrimp to adultery, knowing as he does the outcomes of our behavior. So it is that we cannot flap our arms and fly, although we can make machines that give us the effect of flying; and so it is that we cannot rule our lives with our every desire without eventually calling in the demons.
The demons that prey upon us feed from our free will. We can keep them at bay by following the laws planted in our hearts, laws that tell us to say “no” to the childish ego within. While this demands great humility, in the end it all comes out the same: we can either choose to humble ourselves, or be humbled by the consequences of our own ego-driven choices.
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