Strong and stronger

This is an appreciation of the Enemy. Appreciation, not in the sense of “the recognition and enjoyment of the qualities of someone or something,” but in the sense of grudging “acknowledgement and understanding” of a prowess.

We often hear it said of a person passing into death, “She died so peacefully.” (Of course, it’s easy for the onlooker to say, but if the afflicted could speak, might they not cry “hogwash” to the bromides spouted over their beds.)

This was not my observation of my mother’s end. I found death solitary, brutish, violent, and demeaning, to sort of quote English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It was reminiscent of my sons’ wrestling matches, replete with joint locks, grappling holds, pins, and knockdowns over the years, and finally my mother sprawled unceremoniously on the mat after overtime rounds, her opponent raising a fist in victory.

The Enemy had been stalking since that first cerebral stroke in 2010, with the initial diminishments of vigor. Or you can push the onset way back to early hellish machinations of enticing her to smoke with high school friends, or further still to childhood footholds not resolved. There is a sense in which we can’t deny demonic victory in a deathbed: the fight for breath, followed by the so mechanical inhaling and exhaling of heroically struggling lungs on automatic as volition has failed and organs fight for life. The drowning in her own secretions. The furrow etched into her brow. The way death creeps up from the toes.

Death is indisputably the “Strong Man.”

Jesus is too honest than to say it isn’t so. In a conversation with Pharisees about Satan he said:

“… how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house” (Matthew 12:29, ESV).

This is Jesus’ clear-eyed appreciation for the Strong Man that Satan indisputably is. In the fictional version conjured by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, the devil muses delightedly about “costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them.” But in the hospital there was no amount of repetition of the mantra “comfort care” that made me see what was not there. Comfort? We do the best we can.

Still, it was also Lewis who reminded us in Narnia’s land that though the witch’s “deep magic” is undeniably a reality, there is a “deeper magic” behind that that Satan never seems to count on. For in the case of Mom and many others who have somehow, through the messiness of life, come round to reconciling with their God, the final coup that causes breath’s surcease becomes at once the gate to their escape into God’s arms. The arms of the Stronger

Man who has trounced the Strong Man and his minions and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15, NIV).