[Editor’s Note: This is an unofficial English translation of Fr. Roberto Pasolini’s homily for Sunday, June 9, 2024. Fr. Pasolini was recently named Preacher of the Papal Household, replacing his fellow Capuchin Friar, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, who has retired at the age of 90 after holding the position for 44 years.]
From what we have heard in the readings and prayers, this liturgy is dominated by this uncomfortable character — Satan! The Devil! Serpent! Beelzebub! You see how many names we use to talk about the same reality? The opening prayer immediately had us asking God to free us from the power of Satan. This Sunday, we have to confront this figure who, in my opinion, is either mentioned too much or too little in the Church. In the scriptures, Satan is mentioned sparingly and appropriately, which is what we should strive to do. But what happens when we talk about him too much?
When we see the devil everywhere, as the saying goes, it’s the easiest way to avoid looking at our own responsibilities in life. Saying the devil is involved is always a way to offload our responsibility. Similarly, never talking about him is the most subtle form of pride because it means everything is in our hands.
We don’t realize there’s a virus around. This could be a provocation. We often spend time debating whether the devil exists or not, avoiding the healthiest thing: recognizing the effects of evil. Let me draw a parallel. Why did we take the dangers of the pandemic seriously a few years ago? We took measures, more or less wisely, because we saw the effects: people were sick, people were dying. Maybe we got a little bruised, but we are still alive. Think of the bites of the serpent, using the image from Genesis. Perhaps we no longer even realize we’ve been bitten; we are all half-dead and continue to live as if this evil doesn’t exist.
How is it possible that we have become so accustomed to the presence of evil that we don’t take it seriously anymore? This is the pressing question. We have become so used to it that we are all a bit possessed and don’t take adequate measures to respond. All of us have this disease, we all have little lies that we carry in our hearts and thus also in our lives.
Instead, we try to solve this serious pandemic, because this is the real pandemic that concerns God: the fact that we are all inhabited by a darkness, a lie that comes from the deceiver. We try to manage it like dying gods, attempting to get by with our own strength to the very limit.
Sometimes we resort to prayer alone or to psychotherapy alone. These are the two great solutions: all faith or all reason, always the two extremes. Let’s see what scripture says about this power of Satan to understand what it entails. The reading from Genesis brings us to the scene of the crime—the so-called original sin, the first transgression, when the serpent first bit someone.
And we are told the effects.
(Meanwhile, the rain that was forecast this morning has arrived. This was a well-executed choreography!)
Man succumbs to the serpent’s deception. God calls him and asks a very simple question: “Where are you?” because man has lost his way. Notice the man’s response: it would have been enough to say, “Here I am,” and the tragedy would have ended. God would have grabbed him and placed him back before Him, like a father with a child lost on the beach: “Don’t worry, daddy and mommy are here. Let’s start again.” Instead, the man responds, “I was afraid and hid.” He doesn’t answer the question — he is already centered on himself, on what he feels, on his fears — his whole reading of reality is distorted, not truly engaging with who is before him.
This is where our existential autism begins. We rarely truly speak to each other; we rarely respond to what the other says. We are talking with our ghosts in life. We almost never truly dialogue with the other. The other says something, and we understand something entirely different based on our fears, loneliness, and sadness. That’s why we argue, why we throw bombs at each other.
So, the issue Genesis speaks of is very serious: the incommunicability between God and us, and consequently, among ourselves. The big problem is beginning to absolutize what we perceive about ourselves, as if we suddenly lack the gaze that God had on us, and we have started looking at ourselves only with our own eyes. That’s where the nightmare of our lives began. I would compare it to those computer transmissions when the connection is a bit disturbed. Over the years, we’ve all become Zoom experts. You know when the line doesn’t work well, everything is jerky, you hear one word and miss two, then hear one again. This altered perception of reality began when we started to look at ourselves only with our own eyes, no longer with God’s eyes. That’s why we’re afraid. Imagine a child suddenly starting to see himself as a problematic adult like us—it would be immediate paranoia. Without the serene gaze of the parents looking after him, the child must do everything himself, worry about living and saving himself. It’s the end of childhood.
A while ago, there was a film about a woman who received the brain of an unborn child. It caused quite a stir. Now imagine the opposite: a child receiving the brain of an adult. What a day that child would have! This, you see, is the power of Satan—an interpretive power. We, unfortunately, always read reality incorrectly. When we make a mistake, the big problem is we start hiding, burying ourselves, because we are afraid. We identify with what we have done. There’s a judge inside us, an accuser who brings out the worst in us. We could more lightly go through failures, mistakes, and wounds in life. But since a voice inside us tortures us, that of Satan, we tend to hide. The hardest thing to do is to heal from this distorted mechanism.
We see the same problem of interpretation in the Gospel. What is Jesus doing? He is trying to heal humanity by speaking well of God, speaking well of us. People feel better around Him—the paralyzed walk, the blind see, the sad regain joy. Because that’s what the presence, the voice, the image of God does when correct: it restores us to hope and truth. Yet, wrong interpretations about Jesus begin to spread. Doubts arise—His relatives think He’s out of His mind. His mother and His cousins come to take Him away, thinking He’s lost it. Why? Because humanly speaking, Jesus lives entirely for others. The religious people can’t believe that God can heal our humanity, so they suspect: “This can’t be God.” In their view, God holds people under His power, not heals them.
This famous sin against the Holy Spirit is Jesus trying to tell us: “If you don’t accept that God can heal you, what can God do?” If you don’t let Him heal you from your monsters, your nightmares, He can do nothing. We need to read all this, you understand, in the perspective of healing our hearts, our ability to read reality because it is wounded and damaged.
From here, all our problems arise from interpreting things based on a false word. Try to pause for a moment this week and give yourself this hypothesis: what if all the struggles I’m facing in life originally stem from a problem of interpretation? The anger I have toward this person, the endless sadness about this unfulfilled segment of life—all of it, all the things that are causing me some suffering, arise because I am misinterpreting my humanity, my story, my failures.
I’ve put myself down too much. I started thinking too little and too poorly of myself. Do this, and this means praying. Praying means taking the interpretation we give to ourselves and life, crumpling it up, and saying to God, “You give the grade. You write the marks on my report card because if it were up to me, I’d fail. But if you write something else, I’ll try to live again. If you, who see me with your eyes, see potential in me, I’ll start investing in the things I’m doing again. I’ll regain trust in others, in myself, in reality.”
Look, if in the second reading, Saint Paul isn’t trying to do exactly this, Saint Paul says, “We do not lose heart, but though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” Already think about this interpretation of our life. We are heading towards decay. Have you noticed? It’s not just a problem for some; it’s a problem for everyone, a general problem. The more years pass, the more a piece falls off until the end, right?
How do we interpret this while our body disintegrates? Do we think that soon it will be game over, or while this happens, is there something else happening? Our inner self is being renewed. We are mortgaging eternity. This is an interpretation. There’s no evident scientific proof. We have to say in which direction our life goes: towards nothingness or towards everything. Because if it goes towards nothingness, sooner or later, I’ll pull out a gun from the closet, because I’m so scared and worried that soon there will be nothing left, and I’ll take out the first enemy, the first competitor. But if I see a garden, a hope, a horizon ahead of me, I don’t get so upset over someone overtaking me. Who cares? We are all heading towards something beautiful.
And Paul continues, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” Did you hear that? The light momentary affliction. It takes some courage to call the things that are making our liver rot light momentary afflictions. If we put all the pains, the sufferings of life in front of eternity, they are a mustard seed, says Paul. However much we may have suffered and however much we might suffer in the future, in front of us there is an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
Do you understand? This is the vision we’ve lost. Imagine being people who have lost this fundamental detail: eternity, eternal glory. Clearly, everything becomes a huge burden. Clearly, everything that doesn’t work needs to be fixed. Clearly, if I’m not perfect, I’m nothing anymore. But this is the power of Satan. The power of Satan is what prevents us from living peacefully even now, in this world, as brothers and sisters capable of love, capable of sharing, capable of attention and mutual respect. This is the power of Satan, which spoils our life even now. What can we do in front of this power? A lot—accept the power of Christ. We are convinced that he who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us, taking the resurrection of Christ seriously. The fact that in His eyes we are already His brothers, sisters, and mothers, because that’s what Jesus said that day in front of those who didn’t believe in Him, who couldn’t read His person as something good.
Jesus looked around and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” If we believed this, what problems would remain in our lives? If we suddenly discover on our ID card that we belong to God’s family even now, but Satan’s voice makes us forget this. This is why, you see, one good prayer a day would already be a lot. I hear many people say, “I can’t pray, I don’t have time.” I challenge them. Usually, when people tell me this, I look at them and say, “You can’t find the time? Just a minute, say an Our Father. Calmly, if you can believe even three of the words in that prayer, you’re saved for the whole day.” It would be enough to say, “Our Father who art in heaven.” Saint Francis is said to have gone into ecstasy while saying the Our Father because he thought about what he was saying. We say it so mechanically. But why? Because we don’t realize we are bitten by the serpent, that we are already dying—not because we are bad, but because we have forgotten eternity. We no longer see ourselves with God’s eyes.
And so, prayer, you see, is this daily vaccine that instead reactivates the panorama, the perspective, the horizon in which our life is a battle. But I think it’s beautiful to remind ourselves that our life is also a battlefield. There is a power, that of Satan, which can greatly disturb our lives, but there is a much greater power, that of the children of God, which we can exercise together, helping each other in this. Because although prayer is done alone, but it is also necessary to do it together, as we do every Sunday evening, trying to believe that what we celebrate, the words and gestures we make, are our greatest truth.
Image: Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel – https://en.artsdot.com/@@/8BWMPJ-Alexandre%20Cabanel-Fallen%20Angel, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83462411
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