The Light in Every Thing
Deeper conversation on the mysteries of Christianity with Patrick Kennedy and Jonah Evans, directors of the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America.
In this podcast we engage the great questions of life and do this through a spiritual approach to Christianity made possible through contemplative inquiry and the science of the spirit known as Anthroposophy.
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The Light in Every Thing
Facing Evil, Ep. 1: Thrown into the Desert
In this first episode, Patrick and Jonah open the larger theme of the series: the confrontation with evil. They observe how this reality marks our contemporary age with particular force. They then turn to their own life experiences. Patrick asks Jonah to describe the first moment he truly knew he was encountering something he would call evil. Jonah recalls a core spiritual experience in which a snake-like being revealed itself within him as a young man. In turn, Jonah invites Patrick to share from his own life, and Patrick remembers both the presence of a “spirit of division” in his family and a terrible tragedy in his neighborhood.
From these stories, they draw out archetypal expressions of evil that begin to form a groundwork for discernment. The conversation then turns to Jesus’ encounter with the adversary in the wilderness, as described in Mark’s Gospel: “with the wild beasts and the angels.” Scripture tells us that this event—Jesus being driven into the wilderness to face the tempter—was brought about by the Spirit of God. But why would the Spirit lead a human being into such an encounter? And if Jesus himself had to undergo it, what does the Spirit intend for us to gain by facing the powers of evil? These are the questions Patrick and Jonah begin to unfold—questions that will guide the journey of this new series in the weeks and months ahead.
References:
· Mark 1:9–13 (ESV)– “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.' The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.” See also, Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13 (offering other accounts of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness).
· Augustine on evil:
o Confessions VII.12 – “Therefore, whatsoever is, is good. Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all; for if it were a substance, it would be good.”
o Confessions VII.16 – “And I asked what wickedness was, and I found that it was no substance, but a perversion of the will bent aside from thee, O God, the supreme substance, toward these lower things, casting away its inmost treasure and becoming bloated with external good.”
o Enchiridion XI – “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?”
The Light in Every Thing is a podcast of The Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. Learn more about the Seminary and its offerings at our website. This podcast is supported by our growing Patreon community. To learn more, go to www.patreon.com/ccseminary.
Thanks to Elliott Chamberlin who composed our theme music, “Seeking Together,” and the legacy of our original show-notes and patreon producer, Camilla Lake.
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Speaker 3:Good afternoon. Good morning Jonah. Good afternoon Patrick, that's right. Good morning.
Speaker 2:Chief, I know we're not going to be sharing the same space in our new life here on a video podcast, because I'm down here in Atlanta and you will be in Toronto, but right now we don't even share the same time. Where are you out there?
Speaker 3:Well, for a few days I'm here in Spain, in Barcelona, visiting an old friend, just before I go to the Lanker conference meeting in Berlin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is it? What's the language? Again, yeah, right.
Speaker 3:Right, what are we? A steering wheel no a handlebar. Yeah, well, kind of like a bishop, right Part of a region of priests. A region of priests, a region of congregations.
Speaker 2:And our task is to care for the priests of those congregations. Yeah, a worldwide group from our Movement for Religious Renewal in the Christian Community. And, in case you don't know, this is Delight in Everything. And we're taking our conversation, which we've been doing now for five years. This will be our sixth season, season six going into 2025, 2026. Our first little warm-up episode for a new big theme this year. Our first little warm-up episode for a new big theme this year. And, yeah, we are both priests in this Movement for Religious Renewal and fellow directors with Emma Herrmann of the Seminary of the Christian Community, and this is the podcast that emanates from that seminary. Amen.
Speaker 3:Welcome everyone, and we will begin, as we usually do, with the Gospel of John in Chapter 8. Again, jesus spoke to them saying I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is our word, this is the word that's been kind of the core thread through all of these seasons. An opening word to guide us in our conversation. You know we've tried to prepare a little, but it's always a live thing. Here you and I have been praying and talking and walking with the question of well, what do we want the focus to be for this next season? What feels like the next thing to turn our attention to? After an over year long focus on the letter to the Ephesians, which was a wonderful kind of single text that we could dig into sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, theme by theme, which was really really rich, and I know both of us were a little bit like how will it work? We're feeling really drawn to this new theme, but how will we navigate so many aspects that are involved, and that is a theme connected to our opening sentence those who follow me will not walk in darkness.
Speaker 2:So there is this one who is the light of life, and there is this core experience of being a human being that includes something other than light, something other than the true light, something other than the light that brings life and has something to do with this imagination and, from the physical world of darkness, being in the dark, or moral darkness, not just physical darkness at all and we felt really drawn by the Spirit to look at something that is so radically unique and new and important as an element within our movement for religious renewal, and that is a new and refined and deeper relationship to the nature of evil and our adversaries. Who is the enemy of our true humanity and how does that help us understand who Christ is and what he's doing in our time, what our identity is, how we build our identity and how we navigate our lives? Right now, it just it seems like it's going to be increasing in people's lives more and more. I'm seeing it, feeling it, meeting it in the people I'm encountering and, yeah, it just feels like a very important
Speaker 3:theme so facing evil facing evil, concerning, yeah, yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this opening conversation, Jonah, I thought we could try to zero in a little bit. We want to cover a lot of territory. We want to go into Scripture and see if we can figure out what it is that is revealed there in terms of who the enemy is and how scripture reveals this enemy's nature.
Speaker 2:But we very much also want to bring in the work of Rudolf Steiner, who was so essential in the help that we needed to found our movement for religious renewal, our Christian community, the renewal of the seven sacraments, the renewal of the priesthood, with women and men in equal work, working out of a part of themselves which is something other than whether they are a woman or a man, but very much aware that in our time, a special challenge is here, a different kind of meeting of Christ which is going to include more direct encounters, more intensified encounters with evil. So I thought I would really just first ask you is there like a moment or a particular the word I'm looking for, like time, in your own spiritual biography, in your own spiritual biography, where this theme and meeting encountering the enemy of our humanity or the enemies of our humanity strongly shines through? Could it even just like when, in your childhood did like the presence of evil show up.
Speaker 3:That's a wonderful question. Well, you know, what comes to mind immediately in this moment is actually, it was actually a kind of spiritual experience that I had when I was, I think, around 20, 21. I think around 20, 21. And of course by that time I had kind of understanding of evil and a kind of a little bit of an orientation to evil. I grew up with a father and a mother who were in spiritual movements that more or less said that evil is not a thing, it's not a reality in itself, it's just an absence of good. So that was kind of in the background of my upbringing. But in this moment, when I was about 20, I had a real kind of experience of a kind of snake-like being that made itself. That I experienced connected not only connected to me but connected to the place that I was in and that was shaking to me, it was disturbing, but it for me and my own evolving life was very much convincing that evil was a reality, connected to real entities.
Speaker 2:When you said the place you were in, did you mean, like the inner state of being, or did you mean the locality?
Speaker 3:I think it had something to do with the locality as well as well, but it was definitely also connected to me in my own person. Maybe it's too much to go into it fully, but it was definitely an encounter with something that I experienced at that moment as not a helpful being.
Speaker 2:So you're carefully walking around. That experience, I can tell, and these things are very intimate and sometimes tender to talk about. You know, I mean, I grew up just like you, I think, also exposed to cartoons and various kinds of cultural representations of evil, right, the classic one, of course, was a person in a moment of decision and then suddenly on their shoulders would appear these two figures, you know, the little red devil with red skin and like little horns and a pitchfork, and then this angel on the shoulder.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:You know, and the angel would say, like you know, do the kind thing, do something that's thoughtful. And the devil was, like you know, look out for number one. You know, like some basic, like very basic kind of duality of forces, very basic kind of duality of forces One was good, one was bad and the human being was in a tension between those two. So then you have this picture of like well, what is the encounter with evil? It looks like this funny little cute red demon on your shoulder, or, you know, there would be more dramatic versions of that that would be shown. And I think these encounters with beings, some people have visionary experiences where they see something and they have the experience it's outside themselves and they're really feeling that they're encountering in a, in a, in a state of vision that's different than our normal physical vision. Sometimes people have it in a kind of sense of a presence. Can you, can you give us a little bit of more of a feeling for how it? Yeah, what was the kind of experiential encounter?
Speaker 3:Well, it was almost like it was definitely I call it. I call it the inner outer. So it was. It was something that was not myself but it was an inner experience. That was not myself but it was an inner experience, so I could kind of sense it in the sheaths of my inner being, but I could also kind of see it. It had a snake-like form as an imagination.
Speaker 3:I guess, to go into it a little bit, it had to do with a kind of temptation, maybe similar to the cartoon pictures, because the little devil with the horns is tempting you to do the bad behavior and the little angel is saying, oh, no, no, you should be good, and it's usually behavior-orientated, right. But in a way I experienced this snake-like being as being connected to a pattern of behavior that I had also been living, that I didn't realize was taking my life, taking energy from me in a in an unhelpful way. So it's kind of like almost like an, like a parasite feeding on certain thoughts and feelings that I had been living with for a long time, thinking those were my thoughts and feelings and they were helpful, starting with that experience becoming able to start to discern of evil beings want to feed on thoughts and feelings that live in you, that are connected to behaviors, so that they can maintain their life like a parasite, and starting to perceive it was the first step in freeing myself from that.
Speaker 2:So that's a lot, but yeah, but there's some very powerful things in there. Part of what was revealed to you was you were entwined with this being because you had been identifying with a certain set of thoughts, so you didn't even see it, and the only way that you could see it was there was a disentanglement that happened Like oh, that's not, that was not the same as myself. That's a mind that's active. That's a certain kind of myself. That's a mind that's active. That's a certain kind of thinking that's right.
Speaker 2:And I see it now because I'm separate enough and I can see it active in this snake-like thing.
Speaker 3:That's how it appeared in imagination.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, and part of what then was revealed was it desires you to think that way and have those thoughts and and keep thinking and coming back to that kind of thinking, because it's getting strength, power, nourishment from that. So there's, there's some feeding mechanism that it's receiving from you, you giving your energies to its mind yeah, thinking that that's the best thing.
Speaker 2:Right, that's right yeah, so that the whole reason you were going in that direction in the first place is because you were under the impression this is a good way to go, good way to think, good way to approach life, good way to be, good way to be. And it was unmasked so to speak Right.
Speaker 3:So that's maybe a quality as we start to unveil different layers of evil. That's a very interesting quality, that evil very often can be first known as something that seems good, seems like light, but upon deeper revelation reveals itself as something dark.
Speaker 2:So this whole drama, for us in part, just first and foremost, is also connected to question knowledge Like can I discern? Can I recognize the mind of who's speaking? Can I see through? It's possible that we can succumb to illusions? So we have this. There's something in our ability to know which itself has darkness in it. It's like, infected with it, cannot immediately always discern the good and the true and the beautiful.
Speaker 3:exactly what interesting about this experience was that it became clear that at one point in my life, around 14 years old, it was a good thing.
Speaker 2:It was something you needed to take up.
Speaker 3:It was something I needed. It was a way of being connected to a relationship that I needed to be in and was good, but at 21, it was no longer helpful and so the attachment to it became dark, so that's also an interesting.
Speaker 2:So now you've introduced another key aspect that does seem to touch on a little bit with what you maybe encountered in your household, like is there really any such thing as evil or is it just an absence of good? That was one kind of idea of evil that's out there. It's also very connected to St Augustine, if people are familiar with his approach to evil, his question of evil. This thing you've mentioned is there was a way of approaching life and a thinking that when you were 14 was good and at 20 to 21 was showing itself. This is no longer helpful. Now it's actually an evil. Now it actually has a danger inside it to you and your path and your becoming. So that that would mean that there's a way in which something at an earlier point in time was good but through the fact and the story of development can become evil.
Speaker 2:So that's also just so radically new because it was like the way, the kind of cartoony way and cultural way, that good and evil was presented to us, certainly also like even with comic books, like the early stages of comics. You know, it's like Superman for truth, justice and the American way. He's always good and he never does anything wrong. He doesn't have any dark crises. You know, you think about the superhero movies in our time. It's like every superhero is going through some kind of like wrestling and existential crises and facing the darkness within themselves and so forth and doubt, and this is the kind of character we need to see now. We don't want to see this pure good character and these, like then, purely evil characters and the evil characters in the movies.
Speaker 2:They'll often give now interesting backstories and maybe you can identify with them a little bit more. It's interesting, right? So there was this way in which it's like there are these bad guys and there are these good guys, you know the angels and the devils, and that seems to be coming from an era in the world, in human evolution, human history, that did not include the idea of evolution and of becoming in the spirituality, a spirituality without evolution. Then all of the in the spirituality, a spirituality without evolution, then all of the characters are fixed. So in this picture there could be a time when a certain mindset and a certain approach, a certain thing in our lives could be a good, but then in time the later phase of life could show itself to be evil, not good, destructive. That's just a big, powerful key.
Speaker 3:I think that's super radical, because so much of our, even our current picture, is so connected to a set of behaviors. So good is a set of loving behaviors, evil is a set of dark behaviors dark behaviors. But if we're ever going to deeply understand how actually most people who are doing dark things think they're doing good, we're going to have to get much more nuanced.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, like this yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in my experience, in that experience that I'm referring to, if we look at it at a superficial level, the thoughts and feelings and behaviors that I was trying to become more liberated from were actually good intentioned and good behaviors if you look at it in the kind of black and white way.
Speaker 3:But it was in the context of my development and the other person's development, it was unhelpful. Well, do we have enough time this morning, patrick, to ask to return the question to you? Sure, yeah, is your. If you look back, a kind of, maybe an example of an initial experience or thought or I mean there was.
Speaker 2:There was this key experience that I've shared at times before in the difficulties that emerged in my parents' relationship, in my parents' marriage, merged in my parents' relationship, in my parents' marriage, and experiencing them, trying to understand each other and communicate to each other and, in the process, increasing the feeling of misunderstanding and wounding each other in the way one was speaking, feeling of misunderstanding and wounding each other in the way one was speaking. And this like it was like um, here were two humans who were choosing to live together, choosing to be married, choosing to raise a family, meant to love one another, and there was, like this, I mean, if I feel into the imagination, it was just like a knife, just like cutting between them, separating them, causing this tear, and it was rooted in the fact that they actually could not let go of their perspective and just fully live in the perspective of the other. First, before I come back to my perspective and share that, first, I'm just going to try to disappear into you and try to hear what is the true thing that you're trying to share with me, regardless of my reactions to how you're delivering it or the way it's coming across, whatever I might feel about it at first, I'm going to say is not important. My first job is just to understand you and instead of that, just watching this feeling, the feeling of being attacked, the feeling of defensiveness, the attacking back in order to try to communicate, and just this driving a wedge between two souls. It was so, you know it's hard for me to describe it strongly enough, but being, you know, five, six years old and hearing those conversations, it was like.
Speaker 2:It was just like a searing blade through my soul Of like this leads to death. This tears the fabric of the universe apart. This isolates us in ourselves, in our pain, in our misunderstandings, and it's like there's no way to bridge. It was like this force of division, just like dividing beings from one another. And I remember the feeling I don't want to be on the earth, I don't want to be here. I do not want to be here where this stuff exists, and I said it out loud. I was like I wish I was never born. I wish I was never born, my poor mom. I don't want to be where this spirit of division is tearing people apart.
Speaker 2:I want to be here. Yeah, and it was then reached a kind of crazy, scary culmination because my neighbor crossed the street. It was then reached a kind of crazy, scary culmination because my neighbor crossed the street. We woke up one morning and there were TV crews on our lawn. You know, we were in Sacramento at the time, fair Oaks, california little suburb, and there was, you know, the van, kcra 3 or whatever it was, you know, with their little what's it called, the satellite dish on the top or whatever, and there were multiple vans out there and I was like what is going on, what's happening? And I was shielded to a degree from what was going on by my parents.
Speaker 2:But you know, eventually it got clear what had happened was this was a younger family. They had like a I want to. They were very young kids. They were, I think they were kindergarten age, not even school age, maybe, like you know, six and three or four or something like that, a boy and a girl. That's my memory. They were young, they were I think they were younger than me, yeah, three and five, something like that and mom and her dad, and he was a vet, he was a Vietnam vet and in the middle of the night he had a PTSD episode that put him back in the war and he had guns in the house.
Speaker 2:He was just, you know, he shot his own children, he shot his own children. I think she survived. She ended up being in a wheelchair. So it was a level of kind of the horror of evil opened up at a very young age. How could it be of evil opened up at a very young age? How could it be and the wounds of that horror right Like?
Speaker 2:This is a war that took place halfway around the world, but it suddenly erupted inside this home, in this quiet neighborhood. The effects of that war broke him open and he was out of his right mind. He was not in himself, but a will awoke within him, causing him to see the world in a false way, filling him with a mind and a perspective on the world that was totally illusory, but so completely that it was now the operating system in his being and he looked at. He saw his own children as an enemy, he saw his own wife as an enemy and he was suddenly on the battlefield. So he was so affected by a trauma and the trauma became a doorway to a spirit that was not his own mind, and he was occupied by that spirit and then did things that were not from his own ego. It was what scripture would call possession. He was possessed by something that was not his right sovereign self.
Speaker 3:That's powerful. That's powerful, yeah, so that's a different nuance, another layer, where there's a destructive quality to the possession experience of the horrors that can take place, that take place every day. Each day, I mean it. It brings to mind what just happened with those children in Minnesota, I think, where they were at church and there was a man who came in and just shot some children praying. Yes, it has that same quality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting in telling it too. It's like the first one I shared, right, you see, like what is the food feeding the being of division, being in division? And there's a way in which you could see like it in sowing division and seeing things tear apart. There are certain energies released when you tear something and there are a lot of energies in the room. I remember as a kid when these arguments would happen. It would be like a really strong, potent energy in the space. You know you feel like you can't breathe as well. It's so intensified and then the anger and then the attack and just this whole kind of thing that psychically would start to grow in that room. Who is nourished? What being feeds off that? And then what kind of a being feeds off really, actually the destruction of humans, what kinds of?
Speaker 2:I think this is such a key piece coming from your very first sharing, that if we had to think about the beings of the higher hierarchies, who are good and evil, one of the ways that we can understand them is what do they feed off of? What fills them? What are the offerings they look to receive? The sacrifices on the altar, sacrifices on the altar, and what is it that is the Christ offering. Yeah, because our union with the gods whatever gods we serve right always has involved that throughout the millennia. What are you sacrificing on the altar to whom?
Speaker 3:And what are they interested in consuming? Every being needs to consume nourishment.
Speaker 2:Be in an energy exchange with us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think it's also just so interesting. It's hitting my soul in a different way today, just in living into your experience with your parents Also now knowing you, now seeing how important that wound was to wake up to, the need for really learning to die into hearing another being speak first, really trying to understand the other and then bringing your own self in and, and I mean you're so gifted with that, but it's been also something you've worked at so for so long yeah and fail that right like so many times right, but gone all in to try it and myself having to notice, oh guess what that that being is also in me.
Speaker 3:All my best intentions, I still fail yeah, it's, it's, it's another quality of like, and yet this particular expression of evil is also useful in the long run.
Speaker 2:Yes, sorry, yes, that's where you were headed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's where I was at. It's like, oh, that's another, as we start to do the ecology of evil. Yeah do the ecology of evil? Yeah, it has this. Some of the qualities of it can become useful, depending on how we work with it.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's a super good transition, at least to the first, for me, core signposts, icons for our series, and that is from the Gospels, the moment when the Spirit of God descends and enters Jesus in the baptism at the Jordan. What does the Spirit do with Jesus? What's the next step? What is the thing that the Spirit of God does? And this is, of course, the scene of the temptation in the Gospels. It's the first kind of act that happens in Jesus' life. In the Synoptic Gospels, matthew, mark and Luke, after the Spirit descends into Jesus, he is and this is so. You know, what do we imagine Like? People think, oh, he went out into the desert. Jesus would like, he'd like to go meditate and do some fasting. And the language of the gospel is so striking. Here. And the oldest, the oldest of the gospels is the gospel of Mark, and it's just so the way it describes it, right. The Spirit descends upon him like a dove, in chapter 1 of the Gospel of Mark, verse 10, and verse 11, and a voice came from heaven you are my beloved son. With you, I am well pleased, or in you, I am in harmony. I am in harmony with you or in you, I am in harmony, I am in harmony with you Like great. All right, go do your stuff, jesus. No, what's the next thing? Verse 12, the Spirit.
Speaker 2:So we've just heard about the Spirit entered in, the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. This drove him out is this Greek word, ek balen. It's like thrown out to. The balen is throw, and ek is like he's just, he's like cast out into the wilderness. And it says and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted or tested by Satan. So the Spirit enters the human being, the incarnation takes place in Jesus and the Spirit thinks it's a good thing, it's an important thing, it's a thing that should happen. It's an important thing, it's a thing that should happen that the wilderness and the loneliness of the desert should be experienced, where you will be tested and tempted.
Speaker 2:This is this word that's hard to translate. It's tempted, tested, something where who you are will face a kind of force that will reveal and draw out your character, your nature. And then it says and he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him. So first Jesus, guided by the Spirit, into the desert, the lonely place, to be tempted to face evil and in that facing. Then the last icon is given and there's Jesus there between the wild beasts and the angels, and that's all Mark says.
Speaker 2:He doesn't go into the three temptations that we know from Matthew and Luke, but just that that is the first act that the spirit wants to do. You are to be sent out into the desert to face Satan, and so that has to be, I think, what we have to ask ourselves. Are we fighting the fact that there is evil in the world, maybe even the sense that there is an increasing presence of evil in the world, or can we start to recognize that the Spirit of God might believe? It is time for us to move closer to being images of God, which is following our Lord.
Speaker 3:Right, which comes with a radical acceptance of a radical foundation, which is this is meant. This is meant. The authentic human life as we see in the archetype of Jesus Christ is actually meant by God to encounter and work with and discern evil. The Spirit itself is guiding.
Speaker 2:It's so deep, it's so profound.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that challenges us to. Then, when we look around and see God, why is this such so much darkness? We can be guided by the scripture and the Holy Spirit and comforted that, oh, this is actually meant to be, and not fight against the fundamental assumption that this shouldn't be against the fundamental assumption that this shouldn't be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have to say, for me that's just the first immediate comfort, Like a different kind of rest can come into us, a different kind of acceptance and yes to our lives, to this moment. This is a part of the wise guidance of the Spirit to be thrown into a situation where we're going to have to face our enemy and maybe that's a good you could say transition for our next step in the next conversation and as a little bit of a bell ring, a transition for our next step in the next conversation, and as a little bit of a bell ring, certainly had intensities there. For me today, To go into these topics is no small thing and we ask our listeners to go in with care and always turn again and again to the one who withstood the test, to the one who really cleansed himself so completely that God looks at him and can say this is my son, this is the expression of my being.
Speaker 3:Amen.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Jonah. Thank you, Jonah, Thank you Patrick. ©. Bf-watch TV 2021 ¶¶. © transcript Emily Beynon.