THE DEVIL

One of the great comedic lines of all times was that from Flip Wilson who used to explain his failings and shortcomings by asserting “The devil made me do it.” It always, always got a laugh no matter how often we, the audience, had heard that line. Why? As with all humor, there is always a sense of truth. It is said that when we find something in another that makes us laugh, we are really laughing at ourselves.

Like Flip, there is not a one of us who has not done something for which we were later or even immediately chagrined. We wondered how we could have been so foolish, so stupid, so selfish. How could we have done such a thing, said such words? The pain for our foolishness could have been eliminated or at least alleviated if we could have blamed it all on the devil.

Like Flip, sometimes we did. In our imagination we pictured this evil-looking creature, fork in hand, fire blazing from his mouth, who forced us to do that which we now rue. Of course we knew better. Nevertheless, there was and is and always will be that need to try to pass the buck, or at least some part of the buck of blame onto someone else. The devil is always and easily that scapegoat.

Yet, no one and nothing, the devil included, can make us do that which we know we should not. The devil is not the cause of or reason for our sins and offenses. We are. However, the truth is that we need the devil. We need that figure in our imagination who prods and pushes us to say and do that which we know we should not. We need that reminder that sin, evil, selfishness is simply the absence of good.

And is not that what the devil is for us: a creature, however we imagine him to be, that personifies all that is bad, all that is wrong, evil incarnate? No good can possibly come from the devil and thus, we reason, all bad somehow must originate with the devil. Thus, whenever we take stock of our sins, we go back to whence they obviously began: the devil. Laying the blame for our sinfulness at the feet of the devil quickly follows.

It makes for a good laugh when we try, a good laugh all around. If we tried Flip’s line on another, they laughed. They didn’t even have to say, “Get serious!” If we tried that line on ourselves, we laughed even harder even as we truly wished we could blame someone, anyone, even the devil.

And yet we need the devil even if we don’t believe in the actual existence of a devil, of Satan. We need the reminder of how powerful the absence of good really is. Nazi Germany, Muslim fanatics, a crazy man with a Glock are examples of the devil at work, examples of what power the absence of good has and the evil that it can do.

There is evil in this world, lots of it. We are reminded of it every day, sadly. But the doer-of-evil, the devil, is not figment of our imagination or some outside force trying to control us. The devil is in each one of us yearning to get out and have his way with us. We are the devil whenever we do evil and we have no one else to blame but ourselves.