The Spiritual Force to Combat Evil
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It was six years into my time at a previous settlement that it happened. I’d fallen in love with the congregation, with its can-do attitude, its involvement in the community, its history of justice work and its music. The church had a choir full of talented, dedicated folks, and one couple in particular stood out.
He was a tall gentle man who played classical guitar. She was a petite spitfire of a person, active in environmental preservation, a photographer and writer with a gorgeous soprano voice. They sang together often, transporting all of us with beauty. Their dog, Riley, who they understood as their child, traveled with them just about everywhere. Married for nearly twenty years, they held hands in public and looked at each other with adoration.
And—I’m going to tell you some awful things now—one morning, Jeff strangled Alyssa in their suburban home, put her in the trunk of his car, and drove around all day and into the night, eventually settling on a hiking trail they had frequented together as a final resting place. Once arriving at the trail well after dark, Jeff took a rock and struck their beloved dog in the head over and over, trying to kill her. Drunk and exhausted, Jeff realized there was nothing else he could do. The car was stuck in the mud on the trail, the dog was dead, so he thought, and there he was, stranded. He called 911 and confessed, and is now in prison serving out his sentence for second-degree murder.
When news came to the congregation about Alyssa’s murder, everyone was in shock. They were the golden couple, handsome and beautiful in the most traditional of ways, artistic and talented, beloved by many. What in the world had happened? A family member described the situation well: this murder was never a whodunit, she said, it was a WHYdunit. For days and weeks and months and years so many of us tried to make sense of what happened, tried to square our understanding of this seemingly gentle man with this tragic twist. Shock, anger, horror, sadness, grief—for her and for him—flooded our hearts.
Sitting in the chapel for Alyssa’s memorial service, I overheard a church member whispering to another church member, “It’s too bad Jeff can’t be here,” he said. “He loved her so much.” This truth, this both/and, this disconnect between the violence that had occurred and the rest of the lives we knew, was beyond unsettling.
None of us saw Alyssa’s murder coming, and as more facts came out about their relationship and the case, it seemed that Alyssa didn’t either. There was no history of violence that could be discovered. Rather, the story that revealed itself could, perhaps, have happened to any of us. Jeff had been falling behind at work for years, he had secretly been accumulating debt to keep up their lifestyle, and after years of scrambling to hide his failures the curtains were about to be pulled back.
He couldn’t bear the idea of his wife finding out the truth, and he says that he planned to end it for all of them, killing first her, then their beloved dog, and finally, himself. The idea of murder and death was easier to swallow than being found out, revealed, for the imperfect—or the perfectly imperfect—human being he was.
Soon after the murder, I found myself in the pulpit charged with the task of talking about evil. We were confused and hurting—angry and sad. The questions before us then were similar to the ones we hear following other surprising tragedies of that sort. Why would somebody do such a thing? What could possess a person to kill someone who had done nothing to them? And how had we missed it? How was it that someone could be thinking and planning such a horrific act without anyone around them knowing it? How could evil have come to root right here, right next to us in our community?
It was a daunting task, not just because the topic was so close to home, but also because liberal religion and Unitarian Universalists have such a notoriously weak theology of evil. We hold tight to the part of Universalism that says that all are whole and holy and worthy, that everyone belongs inside the circle. And that feels good and easy until someone does something unkind, or scary, or downright evil that makes us really want to hold them outside the circle.
We hold tight to the part of Unitarianism that has always claimed that, given the right social conditions, all minds and hearts will grow toward the good, onward and upward forever and ever. And that works okay, until the truth about the perpetuation of social conditions that oppress and degrade others is revealed, until we see people choose bad over good even though they’ve had every opportunity and a circle of love surrounding them.
We push away the creation story at the heart of Christianity that roots us in original sin, that says that we are inherently fallen and sinful creatures tempted by the forces of evil, separated from heaven and from God by our desires and our actions, redeemable not through our own choices or turns of heart, but only by the physical sacrifice of another. There are plenty of good reasons to push away that story, and yet when we push it away entirely, for many people in liberal religion, we push away the idea of sin and evil all together, too.
Yet, living in this world with eyes wide open, we cannot with integrity dismiss the existence of evil as a force that lives and breathes in this world, tempting and luring us into great harm. Evil, as defined by Paul Rasor, Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian, is an impersonal spiritual force that separates us from the good we seek.
Racism, Rasor explains, is an excellent example of evil. Racism is a cultural construct, a made-up system based on the made-up category of race, put in place to take resources and power away from people of color and indigenous people and give them to white people. This evil has been built into the white supremacy culture that dominates America; it’s been built into our structures and institutions. It has become an impersonal force that separates us from the good we seek.
I understand Rasor to say that racism has come to have a power and a life of its own. It cannot be defeated by programs and policies alone because it has become a force that perpetuates itself, shifting shape and finding new ways to take root in our hearts, in our societal structures and institutions. So racism, like any evil, Rasor asserts, must be pushed back against not only with education and policies and programs, but also with spiritual force.
How do we push back with spiritual force? What can prepare and sustain us for the long-haul commitment to social change, to self-examination, to the resistance and re-creation that the rooting out of racism and evil requires?
Community, Rasor says, is essential to our resistance. Racism has created a fragmented society, a fragmented way of being in the world, and, ultimately, fragmented selves. Evil—whether it comes in the form of racism, or as physical violence or the lived experience of being treated as less than, year after year—evil in all of its forms creates fragmented selves and fragmented societies. It is in community that our fragmented, fractured selves can be healed. It is in community that our healing selves can heal the world.
We gain the spiritual force to combat evil when we remember that we ourselves are never disconnected from either the best or the worst. Whatever it is, I’m that, too. In true community, when we really speak and listen to each other’s deepest truths, the successes and failures and near misses, we understand that we hold both our best and our worst in common. We are not alone. And if we can forgive someone else, maybe we can forgive ourselves and be forgiven by others.
What is true at the personal level is true at the national level as well. The US is founded in a search for religious freedom, and we are founded in genocide. We live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the wealth of this country is based on stolen land and built on the backs of slaves.
The last twenty years have seen a rise in mass shootings, and it is also true that violence has always been a part of who we are. The shooting in Las Vegas was the deadliest shooting in our history—if you don’t count black and brown and indigenous people. A country can be a place of freedom and opportunity, and it can be a place of oppression, violence, and denial of reality.
The question, I believe, comes down to which direction we lean in. Will we lean into consciousness, into awareness and acceptance of all of who we are: the good and the bad, the racist and the anti-racist, the deep knowledge that I’m this truth and that truth? Or will we try to compartmentalize the pieces of who we are, denying the wholeness of our existence, and in doing so, hand over the power we might have had to push against the forces of evil?
We may not be able to eliminate evil. We may not be able to put an end to racism in our life. But we can, as UU theologian Sharon Welch says, “prevent our own capitulation to structured evil.” We do this by participating in an extensive community comprised of both sameness and difference, a community where we tell the truth about who we are and what we’ve done and are doing, trusting in a circle of love that holds no one outside, that will not let us go, no matter what.
Jen is a graduate of Meadville Lombard Theological School and of Smith College, and like many others, has been forever shaped for the better by her time as the Hallman Ministerial Intern at Unity Church - Unitarian with the Revs. Janne and Rob Eller-Isaacs. President of the Prairie Star chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministerial Association, a Regional Transitions Coach for search committees in the MidAmerica Region, and a mentor to many in preliminary fellowship, Jen values collegial connections and is grateful to be a part of our larger association. Most of all though, Jen loves being a mom and a partner, and spends her free time volunteering at her kids' school and walking the dog.
- The Spiritual Force to Combat Evil - March 1, 2018
- Waiting as an Act of Faith - December 1, 2012
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