hw-s3-i

In your imagination walk through the basement of a family home. This space stores many of the things from the occupants of the house. Here we generally find the furnace and various supplies. We may also find a workshop with different tools. In another part things may be kept which are used only now and then either for heating, recycling or special occasions.

Particularly impressive for me was one time seeing an active, bubbling spring in the basement of a parsonage. Water flowed from this spring year in and year out independent of heat or drought.

Let us transfer the aspects of this symbolic picture of the "basement" to our life. Each person can pursue it further for themselves. There are hidden places in every human being that have specific importance but which are not shared with everyone.

When we speak of the "subconscious", usually one thing comes to mind, namely, the suppressed problems and guilt that we would rather not bring to light. That is only one aspect of our being and not even the most decisive. The unconscious areas in us are much more important. Though hidden they are the "storage rooms". For it is from these hidden areas we draw our life nurturing energy- indeed, it flows forth again and again. It is a fact that what is true and positive in life is nourished from this hidden area. In this connection Willi Lambert used the image of warm, fruitful soil from which vital energy is nourished. This is the mystery of the fruitful earth. The organic material in useless garbage is converted again into fruitful soil.

In the basement many things stand in close proximity to each other including "corners filled with trash". Experiences of suppressed pain and suffering and unprocessed guilt not yet converted "into fertile soil" are hidden here. That is why we fear letting even a little light into this part of our life. Are we not then yielding to what the darkness intended? Darkness does not want to be discovered, but remain hidden because in the hiddenness its power increases undetected.

Sin and guilt are always part of human failure. In the final analysis, pain and guilt have a deep, common root in that people have wandered away from their sense of direction and from the meaning, originally given and implanted in them. When we try to see things from the perspective of God's love we can no longer view guilt as a matter of morality - namely, as a transgression of an objective law, but always as a result of failed relationship. Each guilt and sorrow makes clear that we are members of the human race that has denied and continues to deny the love of God again and again.

When the monks speak of demons they describe a reality which they have experienced. There was a tool at their disposal, a language which was not yet divided into the visual or conceptual, but one which combined meaning and picture, word and symbol. If we understand their description as a picture for a genuine experience then they can be a real help in understanding and dealing with our own experiences. When we abandon the area of experience, however, and try to understand the demons scientifically, then everything becomes absurd. Then. . [we] create new beings and engender fear of them . We believe that these beings can be met everywhere just as the objects of our external world. Then we construct super beings, indeed, the more detestable the more interesting. With that, however, we have fundamentally misunderstood what the monks want to say in their teachings about demons...

The monastic teaching about demons describes and clarifies what happens in the human soul when it seeks after God but is threatened with multiple temptations which want to keep the soul from God and ultimately from its own health."

When we look at Jesus and his life then what is most important cannot escape us. Jesus seeks precisely those people who stand in the darkness of their life and realize it, because he has the most direct access to these people. He reaches out to people whose life is darkened by suffering, pain, sickness or death. And to those burdened with sin and guilt and who, thereby, are estranged from others, he offers the fellowship of the table. The Gospel does not exclude the experiences of affliction and guilt, but the "Good News" addresses these experiences directly. For me that means as a Christian I can be a person who also has my time of darkness. The critical question is how to appropriately handle this. I would like to suggest five possibilities.

„For the monks the battle with demons had to do with daily confrontation of evil regarding the handling of doubt and temptation. The demons are, therefore, images of the unconscious elements which assail people and seek to draw them under their spell. By projecting the negative content of the unconscious on to the demons the monks were able to create a way of dealing with them. They externalize the unconscious, name it and then are able, to fight against it. To this extent confrontation with the demons becomes a productive way of handling the unconscious especially its affect and emotions.“

In other nights it was the word: "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him [her]" (Rom... 8:28).

Another possibility I suggest with great caution (this is definitely not for everyone nor for every situation), is taking on the battle through voluntary offering. When we have been openly besieged by demonic powers, we can accept the loss which we have feared and voluntarily sacrifice it: "Lord, I offer you freely (the worst that I feared) if it is your will." We all know how much easier it is in personal relationships to give something voluntarily than it is to receive what is given! This is difficult, but often surprisingly liberating.

- Fifth, we must learn to accept ourselves. Finally, we can only withstand and overcome the battle of our darkness when we risk being completely genuine. We must therefore, resist playing any kind of role before God which offers the Tempter too great an area of attack. It is of utmost importance for our spiritual life that we grow steadily in our own truth through an ongoing process of development and nurture. We must allow ourselves to be who we truly are before God, before other people and before ourselves. Only when we are truly ourselves can we stand before God as a unique person and allow ourselves to be a recipient accepting the strength that God bestows on us in the battle against darkness. We will clarify that with several examples.

- Perhaps we live with the illusion that we are better than we really are. We can then slip into a role of our own choosing and which others re-enforce, but which gradually gains an excessive and uncontrollable power over us. We unconsciously "filter" everything that we encounter according to whether it fosters this role or not. If it does not, we avoid it. Or we project our suppressed failings on those people who encounter us differently than our role prefers. Then the other person becomes the "bad guy", who might say something to us that may indeed represent the truth, but it is not the version that corresponds to the image we have of ourselves. But this process goes even further. Using the role we have established for ourselves as the standard, we unconsciously filter all that approaches us as the Word and will of God. Here the tempter has an easy time in fortifying our misguided behavior. Against this background a meditation on the word of Jesus can be a helpful and healing process, "Make haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today" (Lk.19:5).

- Or the opposite may be the case that we over emphasize our failings. We live deeper and deeper into the role of the "great sinner" so that everything we encounter is experienced only in that role. We have always known the problem of the "over scrupulous" ones in the Church. There are efforts in the Catholic Church to dissuade people from confession who are in such an inner state. Confession for these people would be of no genuine help because their role does not allow them to experience the freedom of forgiveness. Here too the tempter's attack has a unique and choice target: an inner feeling that something is unhealthy and we must do even more!

- Even so we constantly slip into the role of what we once were or wanted to be ("Yes, then everything was better for me" - "Yes, later on when I have come further"). To be truthful means to be the way we are here and now as the only way we come to God; otherwise we are not being ourselves but only a figure of our own fantasy before God. Only in being aware of the truth of our condition can we experience help and healing.

- Finally, there is one further comment: simply glancing at other people whom we envy or consider superior to ourselves can blur the vision of our own truth. By wanting to be exactly like someone else or not at all like them, allows the most sensitive part of our inner life to be influenced by an attraction or a repulsion like the freely swinging needle of a compass. In this situation we are no longer living from our own truth.