Toxic Spirits

We think, generally, that if we are part of the socially serviced west with our HD TV’s and playstationed kids that we’re doing well as people – and can take it easy whilst being cosseted by popular culture. We can immerse ourselves in media and humor and visions of people in adverts with computers that actually work properly, whilst the uncomfortable visions of starving and abused children and animals, are sandwiched between the next Hollywood bloodbath.

With religious hypocrisy giving us no reason to embrace a spiritual rock in this flood, many of us have no compass to orientate our process of understanding and discernment of the uncompromising and desensitising brutality that is pounding our souls.

A case in point is an advert for a ‘humorous’ film – where a guy is driving some animals in the back of his convertible down a freeway.

One of the animals is a giraffe – and its head and neck soar many feet above the car.

Next we see the driver approach a very low bridge at speed.

Without seeing the collision we know what has happened but we are invited to think of this, to accept this as normal and funny. The decapitation of an animal is not however funny at all.

Or in some brutal film we are invited to embrace the murdering amoral unloving anti-hero or hope that the cool and greedy capitalist gets off without penalty and all of these issues attempt to encase us in moral degradation passing itself off as what is or alleged to be normal for our spirits to accept - normal to anticipate, even normal to aspire to.

I woke from a dream the other night where someone or something beside me deployed a destructive area effect and being my dream I survived but others didn’t. I was supposed to feel cool about that.

That my dreams and aspirations could be no more than a desolate B Movie, where my ego is made to prevail at the expense of others.

I awoke immediately with the artificial feel-good still sticking to my spirit and then I recognised why we need to pray at night.

I suddenly recognised that my dream had the same surreal moral and spiritual anaesthetic as any one of these dark Hollywood dramas.

People might be getting spiritually deadened by amoral junk – and their dreams become synonymous with the morality of the most base movies.

Christ invites us to be pro-active on our own behalf at the very least – and reading the living words of the New Testament especially last thing at night makes it very hard for this sort of spiritual attack to penetrate into our spirit and soul to infect us with soul-less and loveless outlooks.