A Nice Man

Discussing the 60's with Janett, I spoke of a young man I'd known at Notre Dame. His name was John Garvey and he was very bright and gentle. So I googled his name and I think I found him.

He's an ordained priest of the Orthodox Church of America. Here's a sample of his writing for "Commonweal"

I suspect that another source of discomfort with the notion of evil is that it introduces us to territory we seem to have left as a society, and even as Christians. That is, we have somehow lost the idea that life really does involve a struggle for light against darkness; a series of choices between good and evil; a sense that we must ultimately choose between life and death, and that there is something that draws us toward darkness and death.

There is something that does not love humankind, and it goes deep. All religious traditions have understood this. Satan in the book of Job is part of God's court, but the way he helps out is through destruction. The Buddha is tempted by Mara, in a way not unlike the temptation of Christ in the desert. We dilute our understanding of the darkest human possibilities by reducing them to a set of psychological problems. Henri Nouwen once told me, after he read the desert fathers, that Christians should avoid importing psychological concepts into those areas of Christian thought where the traditional vocabulary served perfectly well. And the traditional vocabulary, including that used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, was a lot more comfortable than most of us are with the idea of evil and hell. We have sentimentalized our understanding of God's relationship to humanity. It is curious that we should have begun doing this in such a blood-drenched century as the last one. So we try to explain the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the killing fields of Cambodia, My Lai, Jonestown, the Manson family, September 11, all without any reference to radical evil, or the power evil has to take us over, one by one, or as a society.

It goes without saying that the invocation of religion does not help us out of this dilemma, since the history of religion is so studded with evil events, done in God's name. But to deny that evil is real is to deny something we really do experience, out there--that is, in our suffering world--and in here, in our own hearts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and it is essential for us to keep this before us every time we use the word.

He's written several books. Maybe I'll get one,