p/c Kristijan Arsov via unsplash
I remember as a child having a season in which I was terribly afraid of nighttime. And I wasn’t young child, I was a nine or eleven year old —old enough to read and have my own bedroom. The strange thing is that these fears were not the result of being exposed to terrifying images: I was not allowed to watch horror films, most tv shows that aired at night, play Dungeons and Dragons, or even read things like Harry Potter. I was, in some sense, sheltered, like a little hobbit child of the North Farthing (arguably the safest part of the Shire). Where then did these phantoms, terrors, nightmares, and hauntings come from if not from the subconscious recollection of images to which I had been introduced?
The answer is terrifyingly simple: evil.
For most of our waking lives we live today in the illusion of a nice cozy materialism: all that exists is matter, all that happens is motion, everything can be given a strictly empirical scientific accounting. We write the Spiritual out of our account of the Real.
But then, for your average person, something uncanny happens, something inexplicable occurs —something which defies the easy definitions offered by modernity. We get the creeps and all of the melatonin in the world cannot purchase for us a good night’s sleep. Increasingly I receive calls from people not even associated with our parish community asking for help in this area: bad dreams, hauntings, items moving of their own accord, etc. And when they call me, their voices are filled with two kinds of fear: (1) something scarry is happening to them; and (2) the lie of secular materialism has been exposed and their whole account of the way-the-world-is is collapsing. Real spiritual darkness has made itself known in some small way, it can no longer be ignored or smothered by contemporary business, and what is needed is real spiritual freedom.
Yesterday was Michaelmas, the feast of Michael the archangel and of all the angels, and it is a day in the Church’s calendar that breaks-upon the lame partitions we’ve set-up to mute the Spiritual part of our world. And that bin-breaking is hope for both of the fears of modern people who find themselves oppressed by real evil: (1) The God of the Angel armies of heaven, the Lord of the Spirits, the King of the Church Triumphant, has the power to vanquish evil and set the captives free; and (2) when the illusions of secular modernity collapse, it is only the falling-down of an empty lie that left us powerless and frightened, and God offers us a new way of living in the world, one filled with a wonderful order of angels and mortals.
When a parent arrives in the dark room to answer the cries of their child we are tempted to believe that the most comforting thing that parent has to offer their child is a kind of skepticism “Oh buddy there’s no monster under your bed…” This is a bad maneuver, I think. It is, at least, a misdiagnosis which leads to a dangerous mis-prescription: We are seeking to remedy the fear and the sense of evil with the deployment of doubt and suspicion. Here’s the thing: doubt is never going to answer fear. Doubt is a powerful tool, but it is unable to deal with fear. Things like Michaelmas offer us something better than doubt to give our terrified children (or fellow adults or adult selves for that matter). “Daddy!” my daughter may cry in the night, “there’s something scarry in my room!” “Well,” I can say, “be that as it may, God had St. Michael and his angels cast Satan out of deep heaven (Rev. 12:7-9) and God has promised to crush the head of the serpent under our feet (Rom. 16:20), let us pray now that this same Jesus would drive all evil from your sleep...”