idle thoughts

It is definately the dog days of summer at the farm. Not much to do in terms of field work except watch the weeds grow and wait for the berries to size up and colour. This is the season for cleaning ditches with our EX60 and spraying dike weeds and, of course, dreaming about the harvest. I always remember, After Apple Picking, at this time of year.

Summer at church has been slow, as is usual. Lots of folks go away on vacation and some, with Sunday school on hiatus for the summer, just don't come. Another couple of weeks and we'll be back to our regular attendance.

I came across two wonderful quotes this week. The first was W.B. Yeates who said that he takes full credit for all interpretations of his poetry. The second was Wilfred Owen who wrote, during the first world war, that on the battlefield there was often no distinction between blasphemy and prayer.

the evil one

Yesterday, in the absence of our minister, who is on vacation, we had a Service of the Word at St. George. During the course of the Homily, given by our postulant to the Diaconate, reference was made to, 'the evil one.'

By other names, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Old Scratch, the devil and so on.

One of the stranger cultural artifacts that the writers of the books that make up the New Testament have left us is that they refer to this entity more often than they refer to the Holy Spirit.

In portraying this creature those authors depart from the image in the Hebrew Scriptures of Satan and craft a new and troubling image of a creature with godlike powers, holding dominion over the earth and it's inhabitants.

Much of modern North American Christianity has seized on this image and regularly uses it as a tool to encourage correct behaviour/belief, or to condemn those who do not share 'right belief', as agents of the devil. The great western church, the Roman Catholics, have also given cult-like status to the devil.

The devil, a curious malignancy that has flourished, been nourished by the church, and that is, in many ways, crippling the body of Christ here on earth.

St. Augustine took the view that God created the world and saw that all things were good. For him, God certainly did not create evil, nor did he create a lesser order of gods who include the devil and demons.

It is troubling that the absence of good in a moment, in a thing, should be characterized as the work of an outside agency. Especially troubling in that by crafting or acknowledging such an entity we are so easily prepared to surrender the monotheistic underpinnings of our faith.

At the heart of our humanity is the ability to choose to do right, and on the flip side, our ability to choose to do wrong. God has built into us the gift of discernment and given us the right of choosing. There is little need to look to an outside agent as the cause of our choices, we must look to ourselves.

When John characterized Jesus as, 'the Way,' he was personifying in Him the choice that lies in each of us.

Flip Wilson's cry, 'the devil made me do it,' was a joke, not a theological statement.

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn said it best when he wrote, 'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.'

Or, as Walt Kelly, a truly great American said, 'I have seen the enemy and he is me.'