Christ is King.
Satan is real.
Oddly enough, I'm grateful for both. Of course, I am not happy about the principalities and factions we are fighting in this fallen world. But I thank God for giving me the wisdom to understand them as they are.
“Wisdom is the recovery of purity at the end of experience.”
Satan is real.
This is a sentence that I would have been too embarrassed to say just a few years ago. Perhaps you know that famous bell curve meme?On the one hand there are simple people and on the other there are geniuses. The joke is that both extremes believe in a simple, unadorned truth. In this case, Satan is real.
In the middle is an educated modern man – a centrist. For him, it's not just a crude three-word fact. Hemming and hawing sentences and texts, entitlements and hedging, intellectual drivel. I spent most of my life there. It's the sweet spot for America's elite and those who aspire to it.
That worldview worked, but it didn't. The first step to gaining wisdom was realizing that you are not as smart as you think you are.
The Rubin Brothers' 1959 country gospel album cover “Satan is real” It regularly appears on clickbait lists for weird album covers. It's the kind of goofy kitsch that I loved with an affectionate sense of superiority.
It feels a little different now.
The brothers didn't hire an expert to design the cover for “Satan Is Real.'' This proves it. The image features a 12-foot-tall plywood devil built by Ira Rubin, backlit by burning kerosene-soaked tires, and is widely popular for its kitschy appeal. Shared. Still, the eerie power and urgency of songs like the title track and “The Drunkard's Doom” might make you think maybe they're right.
The Rubin Brothers' homemade hell cannot compete with the far more immersive depictions of the devil offered on today's screens. But few of these visions are born of true conviction.
We don't take evil seriously, especially supernatural evil. But we're all like obnoxious preteens, just past Halloween, walking through a haunted house and gleefully pointing out how “fake” everything is. Who exactly is he trying to convince?
I remember how easily I could dismiss the concept of supernatural evil.
The occult is not what it used to be. It would take firewood from 1,000 Burning Mans to dispatch all the witches casting spells on TikTok, but their “magic” is like yoga for people with purple hair and facial piercings. , they tend to focus on self-actualization and health.
Child sacrifice in the form of abortion continues to this day, but many of its practitioners are only dimly aware of the death cult they serve. Even the currently popular ayahuasca trips so grueling that they stain your pants don't seem to pose any permanent danger. All spirits we encounter are likely to have our best interests at heart.
Current popular entertainment tends to reflect this shallow and naive understanding of the invisible world. It's rare that an artist dares to remind us of what's really at stake in the lives we lead.
Irish director Liam Gavin's 2016 filmdark song” is very unfamiliar.
Two characters meet in a remote farmhouse in rural Wales. A desperate, grieving mother and a bitter alcoholic occultist she hires to get in touch with her recently murdered young son. They begin an arduous, months-long ritual, portrayed with painstaking realism by writer-director Liam Gavin.
By showing how boring and dirty the road to destruction can be, “A Dark Song” explores our own demons and the disturbing possibility that we're not as in control of them as we think. Makes me think about it. Someday, even as we reach to remove our masks, we may find that our deepest childhood instincts about what lurks in the darkness were right all along.
“Wisdom is the return to purity at the end of experience,'' says the orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. I am grateful every day for new opportunities to cultivate this wisdom. And I wish you all the same.
Happy Thanksgiving!
