We incarnate who and what we are, whether we mean to or not. Of course, being unfinished, changing creatures, the things we bring into being are not always what God would have liked for us to bring into being. And then there is the fact that we are always, to some extent, each other's creation -- and to the degree that we open ourselves to it (or are opened to it), sometimes we can be the devil's artwork. I used to hang around with friends who saw the demonic everywhere, and I got rather tired of it because it seemed like a distraction. In nine cases out of ten, the demonic is the all too human (human in the fallen sense) -- greed, lust for power, fear of being found out to be not as great as we've made ourselves out to be, fear of losing the good opinion of others, sloth, inertia. But yesterday I came across a picture of a musician I'd never heard of, and his style -- his art -- it was so obviously an aesthetic inspired by energies that aren't.... Well, I'll leave it at demonic as that's the only adjective my brain is offering. Maybe that's a way into the problem of evil? That we, being incomplete and not yet what God meant, give birth to realities that are very far from the likeness of God.
We incarnate who and what we are, whether we mean to or not. Of course, being unfinished, changing creatures, the things we bring into being are not always what God would have liked for us to bring into being. And then there is the fact that we are always, to some extent, each other's creation -- and to the degree that we open ourselves to it (or are opened to it), sometimes we can be the devil's artwork. I used to hang around with friends who saw the demonic everywhere, and I got rather tired of it because it seemed like a distraction. In nine cases out of ten, the demonic is the all too human (human in the fallen sense) -- greed, lust for power, fear of being found out to be not as great as we've made ourselves out to be, fear of losing the good opinion of others, sloth, inertia. But yesterday I came across a picture of a musician I'd never heard of, and his style -- his art -- it was so obviously an aesthetic inspired by energies that aren't.... Well, I'll leave it at demonic as that's the only adjective my brain is offering. Maybe that's a way into the problem of evil? That we, being incomplete and not yet what God meant, give birth to realities that are very far from the likeness of God.