Chateau Lloyd

With Halloween looming, I thought now would be a good time to look at some modern guides for spiritual warfare.  Over the past few years, Catholic media has gotten a lot more strident about All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, which is a good thing.  Yes, Halloween is generally a secular excuse to eat candy and dress up, but it also presents a unique opportunity for people who are already in the mood for tales of the supernatural to look at the reality of faith.

Halloween can therefore be a gateway for good, but also evil, since modern "goth" takes and overtly satanic themes and practices are becoming more common.  Witchcraft has never been more popular and naive young people are particularly vulnerable to being caught up in 'naughty' rituals or 'games' that purport to use magic (such as the vile Ouija board).

Two fairly recent books provide good advice on how to avoid these snares and a larger look at the reality of spiritual warfare.

Diary of an American Exorcist by Stephen Rossetti is a fascinating book that explains the modern practice of exorcisms, the difference between spiritual possession and oppression, and provides specific references from the Bible that help explain what is going on.  It's a quick, engaging read and not particularly scary because - as Rossetti points out - God wins in the end.

A Family Guide to Spiritual Warfare by Kathleen Beckman is a bit more detailed and includes some case studies.  I enjoyed it, but she does tend to repeat herself and I found myself skimming ahead a bit because yes, I get the value of prayer, etc.  I can't help but wonder if it was a series of essays that were brought together without sufficient editing, which would certainly explain the repetition.

What's interesting about both books is how mundane evil is. No need for head-spinning and pea soup eruptions - a lot of oppression and possession is just terrible life choices or cruelty that we write off as a personality quirk.

The books also highlight how people can be drawn into evil simply by assuming the spirit world doesn't exist, so cool goth tattoos or Santa Muerte decorations are just fashion statements.

Even after reading the books, I find myself still reflexively defaulting to the secular materialist explanation for things.  Intellectually, I'm well aware of the limitations of the view, but it pervades society and is arguably the greatest victory the devil has ever achieved.  The notion that an abstract principle of individual freedom supersedes God's written commandments is a monumental surrender to the forces of darkness.

The laws of men are supposed to reflect those of God, not the other way around.  It is no accident that having gained the commanding heights of government, nominally secular people now demand that people of faith violate their believes in the name of some abstract right that didn't exist until 20 minutes ago.  The drama regarding silent prayer in England is perhaps the perfect distillation of the wickedness dressed up as bureaucratic bungling.

I remember many years ago thinking that my true political home was "classical liberalism," which had somehow been perverted into socialism.  Thanks in part to reading G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, I now know that it was baked into the cake from the start.  Placing an abstraction like liberty as the highest good must inevitably force constraints on alternative sources of morality, which is why Catholic hospitals are constantly being sued to compel them to perform abortions and public prayer is being criminalized.

Both books provide insight into why these particular issues are being litigated, something unimaginable just a few years ago.

To put it another way, you may not be interested in the spirit world, but it's very interested in you!