Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.

I find myself having more sympathy for the devil these days. Okay, not sympathy, but more comfort with naming the devil as a source of trouble and woe.

A few years ago, I would have been able to give you a pretty good talk about why the devil is just a mythic projection of certain needs to name evil – or some other way of dimissing the notion of an accuser and enemy of God and his people.

Well, a bit more than a year into my first pastorate, I find speaking of devils often the best way to understand the way harm and evil erupts into people’s lives.

Modernity tells us that “bad stuff just happens” and we should resist naming spiritual forces where empirical evidence can provide another explanation. But I find that advice poor counsel for a pastor.

I resist just as much as anyone talk of red men with tails and pitchforks, but there are spiritual presences that seek to do us harm, to draw us away from God, or to blind us to the truth. The “ruler of this world” that Jesus spoke of and Paul wrote about is not a socio-politico-economic arrangement.

The powers of death are real.

Speaking with care and wisdom about the diabolical is required. To not speak of them at all – it seems to me – is to rob our people of ways of making sense of their lives and experience.