A Worthy Offering to Christ

The Task of Being Human in a World of Displaced Spirits

Taking up the task of living a fully human life involves a struggle for dominion against displaced spirits competing to grasp for a place in the world. This is a struggle to listen for the truth and the struggle to speak out what is right when it needs to be said. It is about the bold communication of free men and women in the public square. It is about boldness of heart against the demonic powers that would deafen the soul and silence it effort to strive for what is most meaningful and true in life.

What are these powers that would render blind, deaf and mute? The Scriptures know these as serpents, lions, dragons, and flies who argue a case against humanity, always testing, always accusing. Some might describe them in terms of an atmosphere, an ambiance of competitive grasping for position, power and prestige. This atmosphere, this “power” over the world, is more than a vague feeling or unintelligent impulse, even if it is often experienced as a nudge. Far more than some sociological or psychological projection, standing against human thriving are cosmically displaced, celestially fallen super-intelligences who tear down human dominion.

To call such spirits as fallen or displaced is to say that they prowl and envy the place of man in the world. So they roam like hungry lions devouring anyone who would submit himself to what is, as they have become, less than human, locked into the merely material, chained to the constant flux of the profane, prowling creatures enslaved to prowling spirits. Like flies, they gather where there is rot. Like lions, they hunt the weak. Like serpents, they trick the foolish.

Such spirits make their home in the very displacement they foment, and given all the displacement our society suffers from, they would seem to have great sway. Yet, the story about humanity really is not about their presence and they really do not enjoy the control that many suspect. They need to be reckoned with but they do not deserve to be the center of attention. The struggle to stand up and find our place in the world is against these genius alien powers who wish to overthrow and subject the human heart to their own displacement, but Someone greater than they are has implicated Himself in our plight and taken our side. They do not get the last word about humanity.

Silence and humility know that all adversaries and obstacles to a meaningful life deafen and silence the soul in noise and shame. There are malicious creatures who manipulate, intimidate, and overwhelm the heart with seductive force, brute treachery and sophisticated precision. Their purpose is to nudge, much as our technology attempts to do. They see human freedom to love as a threat. They want us limited to profane purpose, to never open the eyes of the heart beyond the walls of what can be measured, weighed and counted. They are deaf to what is in the heart for the noise of grasping for power. They cannot speak with sincerity because they only hear what is a nuisance, a threat or something to be appropriated for some selfish purpose. Such spirits want to filter our whole perception of reality until we are as deaf and dumb as they are. To live like this is slavery to the dragons of this age. A damned spirit knows well the frustrated despair of never rising to the task of what it means to be in the image and likeness of God, so he ensnares others in the prison of his knowledge - but human thriving is rooted in a much deeper wisdom than this.

This ancient struggle, the struggle for the sacred in human life, is one that the contemporary consumer prefers to deny or avoid. So those who accept being mere cogs in the wheel of social progress suffer an unconscious restlessness, an un-named anxiety, and all kinds of hidden resentments. New life, even that not yet born, is threatening. They might rage against death, and this rage is an important testimony against the hell that entraps them, but even so: this rage, by itself, is deaf to what is truly meaningful and mute, is unable to welcome the love that the heart is meant to know.

The ancient religious man sought to deal with this struggle rather than avoid it. He might have understood fragments of his plight only partially, but of what he did grasp, he had the common sense to know, far keener than any thinker after the Enlightenment (except perhaps certain souls thought not to be enlightened) that it was something he dared not ignore. For thousands of years, until very recent times, there was a profound sense of being made for the sacred even as one eked out a living in the profane.

The dragons of this age need us to forget these forefathers — or any father or mother at all. For parents, whether they know it or not, are the caretakers of the sacred for their children. Their job is to keep sacred the family hearth, to protect it from the world’s competitiveness, to build an Eden where children are safe to laugh and cry, and tell stories. They are divine instruments through which God first whispers his invitation to begin the journey home.

The Bible, in its very inspiration, was written by human authors who shared this very mentality. If man struggles in a world of sweat, toil, thorns and thistles, he was meant to live in Eden and walk with God. If, in the profane, brother can kill brother, if Cain could allowed himself to be trapped in such a world, God granted Abel another way of life. In rising above the profane through an acceptable sacrifice, displacement no longer limited Abel- he was given ground to stand on, raised upright in the presence of God who walks with him: deemed righteous before the Righteous One. Cain is the one who not stand before God but prowls the earth having allowed himself to be dominated by a prowling spirit.

So it is for the possessed blind mute in the Gospel of Matthew “offered up” to Jesus in Matthew 12:22. Jesus does not reject as unworthy the demoniac but accepts this loving oblation made by those who loved him enough to offer him to the Lord. In fact, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis explains that Jesus desires “to attract the impure and the unworthy to himself, those ravaged by sin and the demon’s malignity… [He] holds us close to the altar of his Heart and purifies us there of all blemish by the fire of his love, then to offer us, transformed along with himself to the Father” (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the World vol. II)

Christ is the High Priest who opens the door of spiritual freedom into the sacred. He is the temple to whom we bring our sacrifices. His loving heart is the altar on which we offer those we love, the demoniacs who live in our own homes and neighborhoods. He is the sacrifice that makes right and just every offering we join to it by the prayer of faith.

What does it mean to offer a soul to Him? To fast and pray, to plead with tears, to do penance, to bear with patiently, to tenderly carry by faith those who have lost their way. Among those subjected to displacement for whom our prayers become an acceptable sacrifice through faith in Christ are not only those who are closest to our hearts, but also those who have done us wrong. The very act of forgiving them involves praying for them, interceding on their behalf, offering them to the Lord that they might be consumed by His loved. For not to know this love is to live forever vulnerable to displacement and to be ignorant of a salvific love without which they will perish.

Who to we offer up to Jesus? These are those who cannot hear a word of wisdom. These are those who cannot see the goodness of the Father. These are those who cannot utter a cry for help. If we do not carry them, offer them to Jesus, they cannot come to them on their own. So we bring them in our hearts and prayers, fasting with hope and bearing hardships for them with all the love we can muster.

If He was not indifferent to the prayers of the demoniac’s friends, He is not indifferent to your prayers either - for He regards you as his own friend. The dragons of this age, for all their displaced power and usurped dominion, may rage against the Lord but only as they bow their heads and bend their knees. Christ’s deliverance from a demon who makes deaf and mute speaks to us of His power to transform those possessed by the deaf and mute spirit of our own administrative state. If materialism has diminished the greatness of a friend’s soul, if technocracy’s spiritual entropy has made the heart of a loved one the dwelling for something less than human, the prayer of Christ opens the ears of the heart and His praise of the Father causes closed lips to cry out. He brings order into the disorder of our times. Through a simple prayer of faith for a loved one - the offering of a friend or even of an enemy to Christ, obstacles are cleared away, a pathway made smooth, adversaries are silenced, and dragons flee until those flies can torment no more.