Evil cannot touch a person who knows his spirituality. Leo Tolstoy
Across his remarkable life, the author of War and Peace demonstrated exceptional insight into the nature of good and evil. Count Tolstoy kept a daily journal and in it he recorded not only his thoughts, but the wisdom of others.
Does knowledge of our spirituality really protect us from evil? Certainly, a knowledge of our spirituality can disarm one of evil's greatest weapons - its ability to frighten us.
We often conceive of evil as coming from without. But every sage says the greatest evil is typically self created. This truth is made evident in the most famous of all Pogo cartoons in which Pogo says, "We have met the enemy and it is us..."
We come to know evil in our lives mostly by examining our own reactions. Inside our spirituality lives the courage to face the most frightening forces in our lives.
What are you most afraid of right now? Is that thing also an evil?
For example, imagine that I am afraid of the results of a blood test. Will the test show I have cancer? Now comes the spiritual question. Is cancer the evil or is my fear of cancer the evil? Or is it neither?
So many people with cancer have told me how they no longer fear the disease. They have met what they thought was an enemy and that enemy has done hard things to them. At some point, cancer lost its power to terrify them. Cancer may have helped them discover, for the first time, the depth of their spirituality.
There are evils in the world that seem to exist outside us. Torture, starvation, war all seem to be incarnations of evil. But in every case, the worst evil may be that we tolerate the occurrence of these things rather than engaging our spirituality to conquer them. As Mother Theresa said, God doesn't cause starvation. Instead, God enables us to cure this plague if only we would.
At a personal level, imagine you are afraid of losing your job as a caregiver. What is the evil? Is it fear of losing the job, or is it personal insecurity? Can your spirituality defeat your insecurity, thus extinguishing the "evil"?
What about the fear of something happening to someone you love?
An essay like this will not make fear vanish. What drives evil to the sidelines seems to be our ability to find the spiritual courage to face whatever may come with grace and with the greatest power of all - Love.
-Erie Chapman
