Seductions (revised)

"'You are locked in daily battle with the Devil. What do you see as Satan's greatest success?'
AMORTH: 'The fact that he has managed to convince people that he does not exist. He has almost managed it, even within the Church. We have a clergy and an Episcopate who no longer believe in the Devil, in exorcism, in the exceptional evil the Devil can instill, or even in the power that Jesus bestowed to cast out demons. '

'How does the Devil go about seducing men and women?'
AMORTH: 'He convinces people that there is no hell, that there is no sin, just one more experience to live. Lust, success and power are the three great passions on which the Devil insists.' "

These excerpts are from a recent interview with Rome's leading exorcist priest. In our modern, rationalistic society, the entire discussion seems a bit quaint and superstitious. How brilliant of our Adversary to convince us of the vast superiority of our supposedly advanced culture. We think we can explain all evil without the need to personalize it, and that belief in a malevolent being somehow reduces our personal responsibility for the wrong we commit. How perilous it is for us to fall for this deception!

As for Fr. Amorth's point about our seduction, I was struck by how well it matches what I heard from Chuck Swindoll last week concerning the three areas by which the world judges us. If we're rich, successful, or powerful, only then are we to be admired. Only then are we worthy of attention or emulation.

Each of these three passions represents a perversion of a gift of God, and each drives us unhealthily when we pursue it inordinately. Matthew Kelly says we can never get enough of what we don't really need, but I'd amend that just a bit. I'd suggest that there is no good thing which God has provided, to meet our true needs and to help us grow, which will not consume us if we become enamored of it and pursue it, for its own sake, beyond necessity. (Maybe that's really the same thing.)

Lust is a perversion of our need for intimacy. We need to be close to others, and particularly to God, but we get this need out of whack. Even married people are called to a chaste (that is, appropriately holy) life in the area of our sexuality rather than making an idol of sexual experiences. Conversely, even the celibate among us have a sexual element of their personhood that they must recognize and acknowledge in the context of their chastity.

The drive for success can be a perversion of both our basic physical needs - sustenance, shelter, etc. - but also of our need for self-esteem. Rather than finding our self-worth in God's love for us, in the gift of our personhood in Christ, we too often esteem ourselves only in comparison with others. This plays out in many ways beyond having the latest technological gadgets and the most impressive home. We see it in people who are more concerned over whether their spouses or their children embarrass them than in truly nurturing and loving them in the context of their relationships.

The pursuit of power is a perversion of our need for control and security. A healthy person controls their choices and their behaviors. An unhealthy one strives to control all of their circumstances in an ever-expanding sphere of influence, often for fear of vulnerability.

It seems to me that there's a lot of overlap between these areas, that the boundaries between them are not cut so clearly. We could probably expand on each one of them at length. Yet the transformation of each of these gifts into a passion represents a fundamental failure to trust God for what we truly need, to believe and take action on the knowledge that God's desires for us are more trustworthy than our own desires for ourselves.