The bread of life
When I was about 15 or 16, I remember the kind Church of England clergyman who taught me to meditate telling me that I should expect to be interrupted when I was meditating.
"Old Nick doesn't like to see us meditating", he explained, "and so he devises ways to stop us."
And it was only afterwards that I realised he was talking about the devil; and that for him the devil was literally true, and absolutely present in our daily lives, and a very real threat to our well-being and happiness.
I can't say I really believed him at the time; but I've noticed a certain obsession with the devil in my work.
I remember in my PLAYING WITH FIRE (Traverse 1987) when Justina asks him what he needs he says:
“DEVIL
Your soul. Just a little thing. Of no consequence. You'll never know it's gone.
JUSTINA
My soul?
DEVIL
And what's a soul? A bag of air. A little wind. Sign here.”
And she understands he’s the Devil, and evil, and she should have nothing to do with him, and he says:
“You know nothing. You and your petty little crimes.
Shall I tell you what I know of evil? Shall I show you its true face?
That makes you feel afraid. As if it came from me.
People give me many names. Prince of Evil. Lord of Darkness. Its origin and source. They know nothing.
If it were true this earth would be my home. I'd be a citizen of the world. Close kin to you. I'd be the marrow of your bones. A citizen of France. With all you other citizens. Living in this grubby little city. This scabby dunghill. Huddled on the banks of a muddy little river, filthy and polluted with your dirt, on the far northern fringes of the civilised world.
You clutch your pitiful rags to cover your nakedness and build your wretched little hovels of stone. Your god is an instrument of torture that night and day you meditate upon to devise new means of tormenting each other. Your people are starving. In every alley, every street, every square and every hedgerow you can hear the cries of your hungry children. And they could be fed. They could be. But you choose otherwise.
Life lies all around you, Nature would welcome you with open arms, if you would but let her.
But you choose death. And you honour most of all those butchers most adept at lies, those whose only art is to perfect the instruments of war.
And your king sits in his tower and he sees it all. But thinks instead of the cut of his robe. And your constable looks nowhere but over her shoulder at the rivals she fears will attack her. She fortifies her castle. She sharpens her sword.
And you call me the Prince of Darkness. What gall. What pitiful presumption. Where is the darkness? Not in me.
It is in yourselves.”
In those days I was using the distant past as a mirror in which we could see the present. And the picture he paints of the world is still very similar to the grubby, evil world we are forced to inhabit.
This world in which we are so unhappy and so often wish to project the evil, the source of our unhappiness, onto other people.
Whether we see that evil in trans women like myself; or immigrants, like those people behind the riots in Northern Ireland.
It is very hard and very painful to acknowledge that the evil is also in ourselves.
And I remember when I was still a child at boarding school when I heard this story read aloud to me in chapel I was told that the devil was a separate entity, entirely separate from us; and that Jesus defeated him in these temptations, so that we didn't really need to.
Reading the story again today, I understand that these are temptations for us, too. That in fact the desire to get rich at the expense almost everything else is one of the dominant characteristics of our society.
I know the devil is always with us, just as he was always with Jesus, and Jesus had to overcome these temptations every day of his life.
And reading the story again, and thinking about it this evening, I realise that Jesus doesn't actually refuse to turn the stones into bread.
He just says that is not enough…