Posted by The WORD in other words (2022) by Fr Oliver Quilab SVD – Switzerland
Tuesday 22nd Week in Ordinary Time
The age-old belief that demons exist – and that they exist to harass, derange and strike human beings – is still widespread in the southern hemisphere and is gaining traction even in secularized countries like the USA.
I was once invited to attend an international seminar on exorcism held in a well-known Marian site, only to realize how worlds apart the North and the South are in understanding the phenomenon of demonic possession. I wish the talks were balanced by a more sober lecture on the psychopathology of religion.
Coming from a German background, I am more inclined to take demonic possession as standing for pathological compulsions, fixations, and neurotic complexes that heavily distort our understanding of God and our self-worth. Often enough, we harbor in us an image of God that obscures his true nature, for example, the image of an accountant god who keeps a ledger of our lives in terms of debits and credits, an arbitrary god who constantly throws a tantrum, a judge god who always assesses our actions harshly.
Such skewed notions of God cloud our self- image. Seeing ourselves as always wrong and insecure, we use him as a safeguard against all eventualities in life. We instrumentalize God to inflate our ego and put ourselves above others. We want to have God at our disposal and put him at our service.
People with such fixated images of God cannot hold back close to Jesus, who speaks with authority of a merciful Father in a refreshing and liberating manner, in an awe-inspiring and healing way. When Jesus speaks from his innermost being (the Greek exousia means both authority and inner substance), the listeners’ eyes are opened, and they suddenly realize who they are, how they have hidden behind their distorted notions of God, how they have concocted their own self-image that contradicts their true selves.
The inner demons, screaming away, have no chance in the face of Jesus who exposes their destructive and life-negating intent. Somebody has to come who possesses such power as Jesus to drive them out of the human soul. Only then can a human being find his inner core, stand up erect and be fully alive.
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