Louis J. Camelli - The Devil You Dont Know: Recognizing and Resisting Evil in Everyday Life

R ev. Louis J. Cameli is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago who was ordained in 1969. He served on the faculty of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake / Mundelein Seminary in a number of roles, including professor of spiritual theology, director of spiritual life, and president of the ecclesiastical faculty of theology. Cameli was the founding director of the Office for Ongoing Formation of Priests of the Archdiocese and served as pastor of Divine Savior Parish in Norridge, Illinois. Appointed by Cardinal Francis George as the Archbishop's Delegate for Formation and Mission, Cameli serves as a resource theologian to the agencies of the Archdiocese. He holds a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

The Devil among Us

Fright, Fun, Foreboding

Frightening people makes for goodor, at least, profitableentertainment. The devil and his cohorts scare people in movies about possession or mysterious forces that can annihilate humanity. Our most primitive fearsbeing taken over by an alien force, facing our imminent destruction, struggling mightily with negative forces and impulses that well up within usfind expression in evil personified.

Strangely, the very image of the demonic that can be such an effective vehicle for frightening us can also assume a comic form. You can be sure that among the costumed revelers at a Mardi Gras celebration or a Halloween party there will be plenty of devils fully vested with horns, tails, and pitchforks.

Fright and fun, however, sometimes give way to a more menacing and truly sad use of the devil in our world. Satanist cults and the invocation of dark powers among some, often young, people provide a launching pad for rebellion and mayhem. I do not know if anyone has a clear sense of where this odd and sometimes tragically destructive behavior comes from. Think Charles Manson. Think Columbine. Is it rooted in deep anger and resentment that can be expressed only in negative and destructive energy? Is it connected with a sense of powerlessness that struggles to acquire some control and even mastery in this world? Whatever their psychological or sociological origins, the foreboding Satanist cults use a set of inherited images and symbols to claim power and leave a mark in this world, often a blemish but sometimes a very deep scar. In this sense, so-called Satanist groups use the devil to further their particular cause, not necessarily the devil's.

Whether the devil is employed to entertain us by fright or by clownishness or, more menacingly, to threaten us by his self-designated emissaries, the common thread is drama. The spectacle of diabolical presence and action fascinates us, draws us in, and makes us want to look. That is the dramatic hook of all this devil stuff. It is not, however, the whole story, nor is it the most important part of the story.

There is the ordinary work of the devil and the ordinary presence of the devil. On a daily basis, whether we are conscious or not, we face a formidable adversary who rarely claims a dramatic role in our lives but who, nevertheless, intrudes regularly in ways that are harmful or even destructive. It is worth our while to pay attention.

A Sense of Struggle

We all struggle. I may have a difficult time in getting going on a project or bringing it to completion. I may find a co-worker difficult to work with. Perhaps, a long-time friend becomes tiresome for whatever reason, and it is difficult just to pay attention to ordinary conversation. At times, I feel that I must fight to make myself clear. I strain to get at some elusive truth. I exert every bit of energy within me to calm a troubled situation. I shock myself when I discover inclinations within me toward hostility or even violence, or some form of lust and maybe even a ripe desire to exploit someone for my own satisfaction.

There are a thousand manifestations of struggle, and we know so many of them on a daily basis. Some of these struggles are local, that is, they belong to me and represent a struggle with myself. The moral dilemma that Saint Paul describes in his letter to the Romans (7:14-21) is a good example: I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do (Romans 7:18b-19).

Struggles, however, are not limited to struggles with myself. Outside forces or agents can conspire to thwart me. The economic system may seem to work against my financial well-being. A mischievous colleague puts out a false report about my job performance. I can be acutely aware that my struggle is with something or someone outside of myself.

More complicated than struggles internal or external are the struggles that lead us to wrestle with what seems to be a mixture of interior and exterior tensions. It is, for example, painfully difficult to know high ideals and great aspirations and, at the same time, to be jarringly aware of the miserable underside of life. To glimpse the true, the beautiful, and the good and then to juxtapose it with the false, the discordant, and the venalthat is a painful struggle to bear, especially for a sensitive heart. No doubt, that is a special struggle for noble souls who have a grand vision for humanity and have daily contact with profound human suffering. I think of people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. and many others like them, although less well-known.

Now, one of the most curious elements of human struggle is how surprising it is. Oddly, although struggle in its various forms belongs to such a wide swath of human experience, its presence still surprises us. Why, we think, do I have to go through this, when I am battling illness or negative impulses or nasty neighbors or oppressive and repressive measures of government? It would seem self-evident that we have to go through this just because it is a part of life to struggle, to fight against whatever, and to wrestle with forces within us or outside of us. In other words, we experience what seems to be a natural part of life, struggle, as something that is quite out of place. The fact and experience of struggle jolts us.

At some level of awareness, the adversarial or struggle dimension of life does not make sense. It does not fit our understanding of how life ought to be. The variance between what we experience and what we expect provides a clue for our understanding. We feel that something is amiss. And that feeling finds its roots in a deeper intuition that, indeed, something is wrong. This universal human experience receives a name and some explanation in Christian faith.

What is wrong and should not be wrong, what is wrong and needs to be righted is, in the Christian vision, a good world and a good humanity that early on was marked by sin, a move away from God's original design and destiny for the world and humanity. That is the doctrine of original sin. The original protagonists of original sin are, as the Book of Genesis portrays them, the parents of the human family, Adam and Eve. Their free decision to move away from God's plan for humanity had many consequences. Most notably, it landed us in a state of fractured or split existence. Homo in seipso divisus est, says the Second Vatican Council: human beings are divided within themselves. So, the struggle and the roots of the struggle are within us and within the human story.

Now, an important qualification is in order. It might seem that the Christian vision lays all the blame for what went wrong or what is wrong on human beings. If there is evil, it is all our doing. Interestingly, two of the major modern interpretative frameworks for human life and societyFreudian and Marxist theorydo seem to lay all that is bad on the back of either the psyche's self-assertive and self-centered id (Freud) or the inevitable social conflicts and inequities of economic systems that set people against each other (Marx). The Christian vision, however, does not see the origin of all evil in humanity.