Redeeming Satan

It appeared as a tiny biplane, making its slow way across my field of inner vision, towing a banner. Redeeming Satan. Twice it flew by, both times from left to right. I was familiar with Walter Wink's trilogy on The Powers, so I had a loosely woven basket in which to mull the concept until my next meeting with my spiritual director. When I brought it up with him, he suggested that I pay more attention to the redeeming than to the Satan. So I have. It's been more than twenty years.

Now it seems I am to write something, offering thoughts from the intervening time of jelling. Wink approached the development of Satan from the biblical book of Job. There Satan was presented as a loyal servant of the Most High. His purpose was to travel the earth noticing those whose faith, whose relationship with the Most High, might benefit from some challenging, some testing. To ascertain whether the faith was true, and sturdy, or simply the result of pleasant circumstances. His job was to tempt, to see whose faith was genuine. Not a popular job, but surely one that benefited the Most High's enterprise of developing the Kingdom, solid and true.

At some point, Wink posited, Satan “fell” in human consciousness. Rather than taking responsibility for not meeting the challenges squarely, in faith, we began to “blame” Satan for out failures. In the words of Flip Wilson, “the Devil made me do it.” It wasn't the “devil' or “Satan,” it was our own preference for the easy way, to cast blame on someone else. Avoiding responsibility, avoiding standing up and looking the Most High squarely in the eye, and admitting our part in the mess, whatever it was. So, as we do, projecting all the tawdry ugliness on someone else. And as we persisted in doing this, evil, which has its

own gravitational field, increasingly clustered around the figure of Satan, weighting him

down to sink into pure badness, pure evil.

It is time to offer a re-construction of this process. It is time to put some effort into shifting the human consciousness, and doing the work, digging and expanding, opening our eyes and hearts, letting our defenses and prejudices fall away, so we can acknowledge and admit the toll of our responsibility as individuals, as a society, and a species. Once we claim what is inherently our own the weight of our projections can fall away from this archetypal figure and it will be able to rise back to its original function: a tester, a tempter. Someone who provides the means for us to see who we truly are, and the incentive to heal, and let others be healed.

To grow up and take responsibility rather than blaming anyone, or crippling ourselves with

shame. Becoming grown-ups.