Do You Believe in Evil? Do You Believe in Satan? Do You Believe in Prayer? Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

Children wait outside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, after the shooting.
Reuters. Michelle McLoughlin. December 14, 2012

After I left my working class, Catholic, immigrant hometown and began mingling with ethnically and socioeconomically superior people, I rapidly realized that these better people were not better in every way.

For example, many of them would say some version of the following: "I don't believe in evil" or "I have eliminated the word 'evil' from my vocabulary."

Yes, they would actually stop conversations in which the word "evil" was used. "No. We can't have this conversation. You just used the word 'evil.' There is no such thing as 'evil.' Some people are hurt, are misunderstood. We can't judge them. Judgment is primitive and backward. I don't want to have any part of that judgmental mindset."

***

I believe in evil. I believe in Satan. In my book, "Save Send Delete," I retell the story of my yearlong debate, and love affair, with a prominent atheist I first saw on television. At one point in our debate, I tell him who Satan is to me. An excerpt:

 "Satan is not a mustachioed trickster with horns and tail in a tight, red, vinyl jumpsuit. My best conception of Satan is this: in a human being, a religious certainty of one's own personal importance, combined with a cultivated conviction of one's own unjust victimization, and a refusal to see God, and good, in one's fellow human beings. That recipe left to percolate in the human soul has been the justification for an infinite amount of pain.

I live a small potatoes life. My Satanic acts will never earn me a slew of tribute webpages like those fans dedicate to serial killers. But that I push on public transportation, or speak subtle, clever putdowns to my students, or snap impatiently at cashiers who have strived to smile at me while handing me my change, or blind myself to the good in the world, tells me that my rejection of God creates a vacuum, a vacuum that Satan is happy to fill."

***

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" is a riveting PBS documentary about the impact of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the spiritual lives of survivors and spiritual thinkers. I was deeply grateful for, and moved by, the program's overtly religious content. I value religion and I recognize its power. "Religion" has become almost a dirty word in our New Age. So often we can't talk about it except with the kind of nervous prohibitions that used to be reserved for pornography; Political Correctness vitiates our words and renders them insipid: Christmas trees become "holiday trees;" Islam becomes "the religion of peace."

Psychiatry and religion scholar Ann Ulanov said things about evil in "Faith and Doubt" that give me goose bumps. An excerpt:

"You can go to the place you've been hurt or threatened to be destroyed, or pieces of you have been destroyed, mangled, treated as if they are of no value. You can get to your outrage, your absolute determination to retaliate for vengeance, and you can understand how you feel that because of something done to you.

But deeper than that, it's like an undertow of the ocean. It's like an undertow current. There's something that you contact that's much bigger than what you did to me or what I'm going to do to you. And you get caught in that; you're in something that's outside yourself. The personal explanation is not enough. In the larger, psychological explanation -- archetypal pattern of energy, unconscious instincts of hate and cannibalism -- even that isn't enough. That's involved, too. It's as if one has a spell cast on one. But you feel you're caught in what the New Testament calls 'principalities and powers.' It's a power that catches you, and you are not enough by yourself to defeat it."
***

My friend Arno had been horribly abused, almost murdered, by his own father. His father was a survivor of Plaszow, the Nazi concentration camp depicted in the film "Schindler's List."

I had also been an abused kid.

Arno asked me how I survived the abuse.

I told him that Mary was a great help to me. When I was a kid, I could go into any Catholic church, preferably an empty one, and kneel before the statue of Mary. She was my loving, maternal presence.

Arno told me that he envied me Mary. He had grown up Jewish, in a tradition that did not include images of loving mothers or saints. 

My brother, Phil Goska, is at the far left of this picture. 

My brother, Phil Goska, was killed on my birthday. My sister told me a story recently of how out of it I was at Phil's funeral. She described a tear-streaked sleepwalker. I don't remember that. I remember busily making sandwiches for all the relatives who came to the funeral. This much is true: nothing anyone said reached me.

What did finally reach me, and I this was such a moving experience that I remember it to this day, was opening a condolence card and finding, inside, a picture of Mary cradling her dead son, Jesus.

And the thing is, even at the time, I remember thinking, Wow, this is an over-the-top, graphic, heavy-handed and even corny depiction of Mary cradling crucified Jesus. It is an aesthetically unworthy painting!

That's what made it work for me. The over-the-top-ness, the graphic depiction of a crucified corpse, the maudlin sentimentality of an obviously mourning woman.

That bloody, corny, heavy-handed painting of Mary and Jesus was the very first thing that reached me in my grief after my brother was killed.

Hail Holy Queen
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope!
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve!
To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears!
Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus!
O clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary!
Pray for us that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ!

Willaim-Adolphe Bouguereau "Pieta"