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Perhaps the spiritual counterpart (in its ultimate manifestation) to the one who manifests “malignant narcissism” is the one who is “perfectly possessed” by the devil. This concept is briefly treated in Malachi Martin’s harrowing collection of accounts of actual exorcisms, Hostage to the Devil. Unlike most of those who are possessed, and who retain some control of their own will, even if only sporadically—they can still cry out for help—the perfectly possessed have wholly given their wills over to evil and hence are under total control of the devil. They are beyond violent or dramatic reactions to holy things or prayers of exorcism. You can throw holy water on them or bless them with a crucifix and they will give you a cold, blank stare, or perhaps a contemptuous sneer. They cannot repent. They will not repent. Only an extraordinary and direct divine intervention can save them. They are “people of the lie” in its complete and total expression.
After this little excursus into psychology and demonology, let us return to the rank and file sinner, who has perhaps lost the sense of sin or at least the fear of any real consequence of sin. “Deep in his heart the sinner hears the whispering of evil, and loses sight of the fear of God; flatters himself with the thought that his misdoings go undiscovered, earn no reproof” (Psalm 35/36:2-3). The first half of that quote is a concise expression of the essence of the dynamic of temptation and sin. Unfortunately, the lack of good catechesis over the past few decades, along with the reluctance of many priests to hear confessions or to give the straight truth about sin and its consequences, have contributed greatly to this loss of the awareness of sin and hence of the practice of repentance.
I’m focusing a lot on sin and repentance here, and traditional Christians tend to be accused of focusing too much on these “negative” aspects of life (sometimes rightly). The focus on sin should be brief and to the point, so it can be quickly rid of for the sake of enjoying the life of grace and peace that Christ died to give us. But if you don’t deal seriously and effectively with sin, then all the rest becomes corrupt or superficial or distorted. We cannot serve two masters; if we do not repent of sin, we cannot be accepted as servants of the Lord.
We have first to train ourselves to recognize and admit—humbly, clearly, and without excuses—our sins, and then walk away liberated! The process of self-deception, of finger-pointing, of avoiding the issues, of making excuses, of creating a righteous persona while not dealing with the “dead men’s bones” within us (see Mt. 23:27-28), will only turn us into “people of the lie,” and if this becomes habitual, we will have a very difficult time ever returning to the light of truth and grace and love. The attention to sin can be brief and precise, but the practice of repentance is ongoing, for it is a way of life—the Christian way, the way that consists of continually turning more completely, more faithfully, more permanently to God.
So the program is simple: recognize your sin, then simply admit it (to yourself and to God), confess it in the presence of a priest and receive absolution, enter into the freedom of the children of God, and then do whatever it takes to maintain your standing in his grace and peace.
The liturgical texts of the Byzantine Churches help us shear away all hypocrisy, self-justification, and beating around the bush—by simply getting right to the point without making excuses. For example, this text from Vespers: “O my God, I now confess before You all the sins which I have committed against You in thought, word, and deed! For I have wasted all the time of this whole day and, filled with sin, I have come to the beginning of this night. Thus I bow down before You, crying out: ‘O my Lord and Savior, I have sinned against You! Grant me forgiveness and save me!” That is the kind of prayer God readily hears, the kind of person He readily forgives, for this prayer is from the heart and filled with true compunction. It’s an honest admission and a sincere cry for help. As for the “I’m OK, you’re OK” approach to morality, no mercy is forthcoming for that.
God has so much to give us, such rich grace to lavish upon us, such joy and peace to impart to us, but He must withhold it because of our lack of repentance and efforts to return to Him. The fatted calf was ready for the prodigal son’s return, but if he never came to his senses and repented of his sin before God and his father, the celebration never would have happened. The lost would not have been found; the dead would not have come back to life.
So God says to the sinners who still refuse to repent: “Hear, O my people, while I admonish you… if you would but listen to me! …I am the Lord your God… open your mouth wide and I will fill it. But my people did not listen to my voice… O that my people would listen to me [and] walk in my ways! …I would feed you with the finest of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (Ps. 80/81:9-17). The Lord wants to do good to us. In one of our liturgical texts He is described as the One “whose delight it is to bestow gifts upon us.” But we have to be capable of receiving his gifts, and we will not have this capacity without repentance. God will do everything short of removing our freedom, but He cannot do that without at the same time destroying his image in us, and that He will not do.
The sweetness and the fire of divine love await us. The riches of the Kingdom of Heaven stand ready to be granted to us. The divine indwelling is one act of repentance and absolution away. What are you waiting for? Do not deceive yourself. If you do not take repentance seriously you are not living in the Holy Spirit, even if you fancy that you are, due to some vague spiritual feelings or to being deceived by “enlightened” teachers who tell you that sin is an outdated concept and that God would never send anyone to Hell. Well, they may be right about that last part, but God may have to stand by as you send yourself to Hell, when you at last see what your soul looks like in the pure, searching Light of divine truth. At that moment you’re quite clear on where you have to go, and you’ll need no one to send you there! You’ll fly there yourself as fast as you possibly can, to escape “the face of Him who is seated on the throne” (Rev. 6:15-17), whose infinitely tender love you have scorned through perseverance in sin, and whom you now cannot bear to look upon for a moment, because of the dreadful anguish and shame which all eternity will be insufficient to erase. Then you’ll have endless ages to say: “If only I had just admitted my sin! I could have been happy forever!”
I hope for better things for you and for me, but Heaven doesn’t come automatically. We have to have the capacity to receive it. We all have sinned. Just admit it. Turn to Him who is always turned toward you and whose delight it is to bestow gifts upon you. Then there will be rejoicing among the angels and saints in Heaven, and the object of their rejoicing will be you! So much blessing and bliss await us, if only we will abandon our ignorance, pride, or that bitter satisfaction of holding on to our grudges or pet vices just to assert our narcissistic autonomy. Autonomy from God is slavery to the devil. Choose repentance and choose eternal life!
I’ve had a lot to say about repentance in the past, and ‘tis the season to say a little more. Since repentance is one of the essential elements of the Christian life, it’s hard to exhaust all that can be said about it. We already know that repentance is more than just feeling sorry for our sins, and more than just words of remorse or confession. We also know that it is about changing one’s way of thinking and living, embracing a new direction that is more perfectly focused on God, his commandments, his invitation to holiness, his loving-kindness and mercy.
But there is more still. Repentance is not just about us, our sins, and the direction of our inner lives. Repentance is about God, too, and about his response to our response to his invitation! We perhaps aren’t sufficiently aware of what it means to God that we repent of our sins and change our lives. Perhaps we also aren’t aware of how impatiently (if I can use that term in God’s case) He waits for us simply to recognize our guilt, admit it, and enter into the joy of our Lord.
You have probably read in the Gospels that there is great joy in Heaven over the repentance of a single sinner. We aren’t given an indication as to just how God rejoices over a repentant sinner (except perhaps for the image of the banquet celebrated by the Father of the prodigal son). But how about this: “Rejoice and exult with all your heart… The Lord has taken away the judgments against you… The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear evil no more… the Lord your God is in your midst… He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will renew you in his love; He will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival. ‘I will remove disaster from you [says the Lord], so that you will not bear reproach for it… I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown… when I restore your fortunes before your eyes,’ says the Lord” (Zephaniah 3:14-20). That is how the Lord feels about your repentance; that is how glad it will make Him to make you glad! He rejoices over us with “loud singing” when we return to Him. Did you ever think of God’s joyful voice echoing throughout the universe and commanding the stars to dance just because you repented of your sins?
Before we get too ecstatic, however, we need a little sober reflection. We have to realize that sin is the one and only obstacle to our eternal happiness. And it is a major obstacle, the obstacle, the one that can forever plunge an immortal soul into the suffocating pit of black fire and endless howls of hatred, where all joy has fled and where the bitterest of sorrow and pain flood every soul with the sickening awareness that all is now irrevocably lost. Christ descended into netherworld of the dead when He bore all our sins upon Himself, so that we wouldn’t inevitably have to reap the bitter harvest of our wrongdoing. He bore the weight of sin and death and thus disarmed them, so that we would find the way out of our wickedness and all its consequences and be safely delivered into the Kingdom of light and joy.
Between the endless rejoicing and jubilant celebrations of the citizens of Heaven, and the crushing, painful despair of the damned in Hell, stands repentance. That is what decides which will be our everlasting abode. Therefore it is critical that we embrace it without delay, and the Lord anxiously sends us his grace and his angels to help us see what we desperately need to see. For He deeply desires that we end up on the side of joy.I have occasionally noticed a curious phenomenon in the confessional: people refuse to admit their sins even there! There is the fairly common avoidance technique of confessing other people’s sins, I suppose as the justification for their negative reactions to them, but the confession ends up being a kind of protracted self-defense. I’m not surprised at all if nothing subsequently changes in their lives, because they haven’t really repented and opened themselves up to the grace needed for humility and the necessary practical changes. Others seem to have such a poorly developed conscience that they are unable to recognize their sins. If they haven’t committed murder or grand larceny, they think all is fine. Sometimes I’ve asked people if they regularly go to confession, and I’ve occasionally heard this: “But why should I? I don’t do anything wrong!” Yet the saints have gone to confession weekly or daily. Imagine, practically everyone today is holier than the saints!
With others the problem seems to go deeper. Sometimes people have some sort of inner blockage as far as recognizing and admitting their own sins. They make excuses for themselves; they say (in effect) that the devil made them do it, and they end up giving this impression: some unfortunate things happened, but it wasn’t their fault. Sometimes I’ve really had to wrestle with them (if I would give them absolution), to enable them to admit they were personally guilty of something and not just the innocent victims of endless circumstances beyond their control. But alas, they would sometimes still walk away untouched by grace, for they had not repented of their sins. It seems that perhaps there is some deep-rooted psychological fear that prevents them from explicitly admitting that they have committed sin.
The psychological dimension of sin has been treated in some detail in M. Scott Peck’s fascinating study, People of the Lie. He is a Christian psychiatrist, and he conducted a study of the mystery of evil from a psychological perspective. It is clear that such a study cannot exhaust the universal and complex reality of human sin, but it does offer some helpful insights. I will quote a bit from the book here, describing a few essential elements of a profile of the “people of the lie.” They are usually highly egocentric and will go to great lengths to protect their polished external self-image, yet they live in terror of being exposed for who they really are. But little by little, lie by lie, they begin to believe their own deceptions until it becomes a complete self-deception from which only a miracle can liberate them. They are (unfortunately) often found among religious people, because religion provides a façade of respectability, and they will strike out viciously at anyone who dares pierce the veneer of their sham righteousness.
You will see from the following quotes why it is very difficult (and tragically so) for such people to repent:
“The central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it… As life often threatens their image of self-perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life—usually in the name of righteousness… [their] behavior is totally dictated by an extreme form of self-protectiveness which invariably sacrifices others rather than themselves… The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness… they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness… We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves… Evil may be recognized by its very disguise… We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury… The disguise is usually impenetrable… they are likely to exert themselves more than most in their continuing effort to obtain and maintain an image of high respectability…
“Malignant narcissism [that is how the author describes sin] is characterized by an unsubmitted will… In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win…They are men…of obviously strong will, determined to have their own way. There is a remarkable power in the manner in which they attempt to control others… The highly narcissistic (evil) individual will strike out to destroy whoever challenges his or her self-image of perfection…”
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