Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
During a freezing, snowy Christmas week in 1973 me and a friend of mine made our way to a “premiere” of the film The Exorcist in Shaker Heights, a forty minute drive north from Youngstown. The book and now the movie both had taken the country by storm. It seemed at the time to be on the level with the Beatlemania & Batmania of the recent 1960s. It was all anyone was talking about. At some theaters the line stretched for ¼ of a mile. People got sick and some fainted with medical stations set up right next to the popcorn machine in theater lobbies.
In 1973 the notion of an “exorcism” was virtually unknown or at best seen as some weird relic of the Dark Ages. Science had no room for such nonsense, we thought. In the book by William Peter Blatty, based on a true story, the victim was a Lutheran boy, age 14. His minister told the family after countless tests and evaluations, “Go to the Catholics. They know more about these things.” In truth, the vast majority of Catholics didn’t know much about it at all. And the image most have of it, or of evil itself, is really distorted.
Since 1973, Hollywood has made exorcism movies into a cottage industry. But they hardly resemble reality. What made Blatty’s efforts so frightening is that the battle with evil personified was psychological and spiritual warfare. Evil resides not with horns and pitchforks but in the ordinary everyday of life. Now that’s unsettling (far more than pea green soup).
Where does evil reign today? American society 2024 is saturated with a malignant and narcissistic spirit. Sometimes it's blatant (like the possessed little girl in Acts in our reading or vile politicians using the tactics of fear and division) but it prefers the shadows. It is in the ordinary and the everyday that evil is most at home. Ordinary places. Ordinary people.
(For me personally M. Scott Peck, MD’s People of the Lie is a good resource as to how and where evil reigns today.)
In today’s reading from Acts, Paul’s exorcism of a girl (her name wasn’t Regan) landed him and Silas in a Philippian jail. Her fortune-telling was bread and butter for her handlers in a Roman society that encouraged and admired such divination. But the demon was no match for Paul.
Likewise today, Jesus assures the disciples in John to not fear “the ruler of this world.” God and the devil are not equals. Not even close. Satan is a gnat before God. Both Paul and his Lord Jesus Christ used the same all-powerful full-proof weapon to combat evil. It is a weapon readily available to us as well. It is the weapon of self-sacrificial love.
Because To love is one thing the Devil cannot do.
—Timothy J. Cronin