WHY WE FIGHT
(SPIRTUAL WARFARE PT.1)

"Don't you know there's a war on?" So went a popular saying in World War II, when we were being asked to conserve resources on the home front. The point of this exhortation was that we had to be jarred out of a sense of complacency by the demands of what was needed to win the war. Now fast forward 70, 80 years to today and the question can be asked again.

Granted there seem to be wars and rumors of wars raging all around us, particularly those rather dangerous powder kegs in Iran and Ukraine. But at the same time on the spiritual level, it seems like we're just catching up once again to the reality of the Spiritual War all around these days!

For a while it was more tempting to think that good and evil were in the eye or the mind of the beholder, that these were purely subjective concepts, as so many of us succumbed (and many still do!) to what Pope Benedict XVI described as the “Dictatorship of Relativism”. That involved the notion that truth itself could be subjective as in “I have my truth and you have yours”.

You might have heard the pernicious and self-contradictory statement that “there’s no such thing as absolute truth". In this line of thinking, what we value as truth becomes merely someone's opinion, which may or may not be right. Ironically, if there is no such thing as objective absolute truth then how can we take that statement itself as being true after all?

Making good and evil subjective rather than objective concepts dovetails well with the idea that belief in the devil is a rather quaint and well..somehow medieval notion, is it not? No it's not!

This badly mistaken idea is itself belied by the disconcertingly large numbers of tragically misguided people who think of Satan as somehow cool; or that he’s the one who can provide them money, power, fame or entrance into the most elite circles without realizing the terrible and tremendous cost for their souls.

This picture above is this famous rendition from the artist Gustave Doré depicting the spiritual descent of Lucifer into Satan. It also brings to mind Jesus' words in Luke's Gospel upon Lucifer's defeat in battle at the hands of St. Michael the Archangel "I saw I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven (Luke 10:18)."

The strings the devil attaches to his “aid” become more a leash, and, in a larger sense, even a noose leading not to an eternity of whatever power or good fortune they craved but rather an eternity of misery and powerlessness beyond anyone’s comprehension!

Not only does Satan exist, but he and his demonic minions are working constantly to drag as many souls down to Hell with them as possible! The famous priest the late Father Malachi Martin, described his encounter with an exorcist who gave him a chilling glimpse of a horrifying reality that he became aware of in his work, that Hell was a place where nothing is loving, beautiful, true, holy, pleasant, bright, warm, large, happy, or anything positive!

You could say that Satan and demons hate company, but they want yours anyway, out of pure hatred and spite for God, to snatch souls away from Him! Their destructive force should not be seen as something trendy as a force for true freedom, because the freedom they’re giving you is short-term at best.

Your Freedom to “do what thou wilt” rather than saying “Thy (that is to say God’s) will be done” can put you in slavery not only to sin in this life, but to Satan and all the demons for eternity in Hell. And that revolting realm gives you anything but freedom.That's the whole point!

It's all well and good for people like the late famed community activist Saul Alinsky to dedicate his book Rules for Radicals to, as he put it, “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer”.

But did he ever stop to consider that when his buddy Lucifer fell from heaven and became Satan, he became the ultimate architect of Auschwitz and a major catalyst for centuries upon centuries of human depravity, violence, hatred and every kind of atrocity one can imagine and then some?

As the great actor Len Cariou sang in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeny Todd “the cruelty of man is as wondrous as Peru.”

Admittedly, it's quite difficult to understand how a good God will nonetheless allow evil, demonic forces to subject us to a panoply of enticing but ultimately destructive temptations. God permits this so that we might resist evil and thus grow stronger in Holiness and Sanctity in choosing to love Him!

After all, God doesn't want us to feel coerced into giving Him our love and devotion. In the name of respecting our free will, God gives us the freedom to choose to love Him!

Sadly, far too many people have little or no idea about this being the case and are more likely to succumb to evil out of weakness, or out of anger that a good God would permit misfortunes in their lives and those of others.

Think in this regard in scripture of both Martha and Mary’s famous complaints to Jesus before He raised their brother Lazarus from the dead after he had passed away from an illness “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died” (John 11:21 and 32).

We all must do what we can to increase others’ awareness of how to help Him bring good out of evil as He did at Calvary; and to pray for them as Our Lord did then when He beseeched His Heavenly Father (and ours!) to forgive His persecutors for “they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

It is important to remember that in serving God with all our might, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves in a world saturated with wickedness and various shades of insanity and sin these days, we are ultimately on not just the winning side, but also on the loving side as well!!

There was this tendency in the past century among those who have what might be called “modernist” inclinations both in and out of our faith to downplay the supernatural aspects of not only Catholicism but of Jesus as well!

These people see our Lord in effect as just another wise teacher, the “golden rule” guy. But he never meant for us not to see him as “God from God, light from light, true God from true God” as we say in the Nicene Creed every Sunday at Mass.

And, on top of that, there is also this tendency from so many preachers in the pulpits and even with the higher-ups in the Vatican to talk as if we’re all on our way to heaven and need not worry about sin threatening our salvation.

But Jesus Himself said "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt 7:13-14); and in another excerpt from Matthew’s Gospel Our Lord noted that “many are called but few are chosen” (Matt 22:14).

But lest we despair of God’s mercy, remember that as long as we have an awareness of our sinful proclivities and fight against them by repentance and confession as needed when we fall, we can take comfort in these words from Jesus as well “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." (Matt 11: 28-30).

And as we read in the Baltimore Catechism, God made us "to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever [in heaven] in the next."

In the meantime when we’ve tried to bring “heaven on earth” on our own human planning by worshipping men who act as if they were Gods like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, instead of the God-man, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the results have been hellish.

Did we not see that with communism and fascism in the 1920s through the 1940s, and beyond with Communism? It was a ruthless attempt to impose a distorted version of utopia on society, to pigeonhole it into standards which really only wind up serving the interests and desires of a privileged few!

If anything, not only did communism and fascism fail to bring about heaven on earth, it was more like hell for so many who faced deprivation, imprisonment, and even death. It is estimated that over 100 million people perished last century from Communism alone, along with some 10 to 20 million more from Hitler’s reign.

It’s most ironic, to say the least, that those last century who tried to perfect humanity wound up killing so many people along their dead end road, treating them as if they were just so much clutter that had to be done away with for their poisonous plans to work, which of course they didn’t.

As Jesus was lifted up to heaven in His Ascension He left us with the hope that we could one day join Him there, depending on how we’d lived and shared His love by following His will.

But His heaven is real. It’s not the kind of false utopia where you wind up basically bowing down to some kind of modern-day Moloch demanding the worship that is due God alone following the laws of real love for God and neighbor contained in the Ten Commandments.

In the end waging Spiritual Warfare means fighting for salvation, for ourselves and other sinners, including those we might not even know mainly through lives devoted to serving God and each other through prayer and living a grace-filled, sacramental life.

It also entails not falling into the trap of thinking this life we have is all there is, so get whatever you can now! You might have heard the fallacious saying “He who dies with the most toys wins”. Not only is this not true, one can say that he who has spent his entire life ruthlessly collecting and discarding people, places, and things risks being the one who dies losing his soul, winding up in Hell forever.

Each of us was born with a soul to spend eternity full of love, light, happiness, and peace beyond our wildest dreams; or one filled with dread, hatred, pain beyond all imagining, and regret for how badly we mismanaged our lives here during our earthly pilgrimage.

And remember that our time here is actually, when compared to eternity, very short. Think of it as being maybe one chapter in a book that has an infinite number of pages!

How many people spend so much time, effort, and money seeking to get high from various addictive substances looking for a heaven on earth that is transitory at best and can have nasty side effects when reality intrudes on their pipe dreams?

In the real heaven there is true peace, love, joy, and beauty in God’s presence and in His many mansions beyond our wildest imaginations!

On the other hand, in Satan's Hellish domain, everything is horrifyingly miserable, both physically and emotionally beyond our wildest imaginations and that's the most important thing to keep in mind. Again, do you want the cursed eternity or the Blessed one?

Many of those who have had near-death experiences, have reported experiencing both heaven and hell with certain evidentiary patterns that go beyond being merely conjectural. Many have felt Jesus’ overwhelmingly beautiful love and light directly in an environment filled with peace, wonder and beauty again beyond our earthly comprehension!

Likewise, those who have seen Hell found themselves in a place of overwhelming darkness, with all the ambience of a furnace and a sewer facing demonic hostility and souls wailing and gnashing teeth in unrelenting despair from which they felt themselves rescued by that same carpenter from Nazareth, Jesus, showing HIs intense love for them as for those shown heaven. And to my knowledge, no one has returned from a hellish “NDE” saying “it wasn’t that bad, that’s just an exaggeration to scare us”.

There have been saints who have seen glimpses of the afterlife, such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. Faustina, and St. Francis of Rome, as well as other religious and laity alike who have attested about how miserable, ghastly, and horrible Hell is as well as how, well, heavenly heaven is. St. Catherine of Genoa, has left us valuable insights about Purgatory as well.

Can any of us fully comprehend eternity? No, but we should want the good one and not the bad one. Basically, the thing is, God is commanding us to live in his laws of love, which are his ten commandments as citizens-in-training to be saints in heaven.

Satan is the one that we’re all basically worthless after all. But just remember that this comes in no small part from his intense hatred and envy for human beings because we have a God-given dignity, and a supernatural calling, what the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes as God’s invitation in and through His Son Jesus Christ “to become, in the Holy Spirit, His adopted children, and thus heirs of His Blessed life” (CCC 1).

We must pray for each other, and pray to God, Our Blessed Mother, your Guardian Angel, and for the saints speak to you best for their essential assistance in helping you to enter heaven.

Let them help you resist evil in the world, the flesh, and the devil. And pray for as many souls as possible among your fellow sinners to be able to achieve salvation as well!

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