EDITOR’S NOTE: What a delight it is to have Aaron back with HIH. This piece should give you a sense of where future discussions are headed. I’m excited to expand these conversations and bring more voices into the mix as we move forward. I’m heading back to court in Plymouth today, but I also have a tour of the Chappaquiddick bridge for you, along with a stacked recap of my trial experience.
Our family of six has generated a copious amount of laundry in its near twenty-five years of existence. Boys are particularly dirty. In our house, there are only two females. My wife and the dog. So laundry became a constant chore—one that never seemed to reach the end of the rainbow. In those hours of laundry that my wife graciously took ownership of, she found some kind of friendship with podcasts and offbeat shows. She loves the strange ones. A 600 Pound Life and Hoarders were constant companions. I would often come home to the sound of an East Indian-accented doctor scolding a patient who couldn’t control their eating, resonating from her iPhone in her apron. She said that the shows kept her company in those long days in the laundry room. She enjoys hearing how people who have mental blocks try to wrestle their way through things. She finds compassion for the grandmother who can’t find her way out of her bedroom because she’s being buried alive by Amazon deliveries, and she wants to know why people get stuck. Why does the mind fail to do normal operations?
These days, there is a little less laundry to do. One of our twins was married this summer and lives with his lovely bride in New England. Our youngest son was just dropped off at school in North Carolina. So my wife’s laundry duty has been slowly being replaced by other things she finds interesting. Creative outlets like making music or trying to assemble old photos for baby books long ago set aside for the tornado of young boy energy and homeschooling have started to make their way out to our kitchen table. But podcasts remain a constant companion. She’s branched out into shows about cults in Utah and near-death experiences, and even some true crime ones about people who flip and make atrocious decisions. Killing their own children after postpartum depression, or men who murder their wives so that they can be with another woman, freed of the sin of adultery.
It’s a strange landscape for me.
I have never found much interest in the pain of others. It seems voyeuristic and intrusive. The trend of watching people live their lives on reality TV was too much for me. When we had our four children in two and a half years, my mom would have us over for dinner, and we would watch Jon and Kate Plus 8. At first it was fun to see someone managing twice the number of children we had, but after a few episodes, I told my mom we weren’t interested in watching. Kate seemed awful to her husband. What had started out as a noble endeavor to birth all of the children that had survived their in vitro pregnancy turned into an on-air nightmare of a larping woman emasculating her husband. It wasn’t something I wanted to watch. But millions of people tuned in each week to find out what adventures the Gosselins were having. It wasn’t the first reality show, but it certainly became a cultural milestone in the genre. Watching people break in real time, I suppose, is fascinating in the most basic sense. But there is something tragic about what our culture has embraced about it. The thousands of episodes of people who, on some level, crave fame or money and decide to air their dirty laundry for those of us in the laundry room have created something I am not sure our minds are designed to handle.
I’ve been writing here at House InHabit about world affairs and politics, interspersed with my concepts of how the world functions, and why Jesus actually matters in all of it, for almost two years. Jessica has been incredibly kind to me by letting me write to all of you—the audience she earned through her work and writing. It’s beyond generous. Part of what’s happened through my engagement with HIH is watching Jessica’s fascination with the glamorous parts of politics at Mar-a-Lago and the Kennedys in Cape Cod. I also find her reporting on court cases to be some of the best available. There is no doubt her writing shines when she covers the drama and insider details of a criminal case. She’s as good as it gets. So I have followed along and been intrigued by the journalism side of it. It’s unique coverage that the glancing-blows media fails at. It’s interesting, and her photography and storytelling are better than those of organizations with triple the budget and staff.
So last week, when the Clancy stuff started to heat up, her Instagram moved into full gear, and I found myself fascinated by what was going on. The staking out of “sides”, the conspiracy concoctions by the Scooby Doo gang over on X, and the unequivocal confidence of everyone who was following along seemed eerily similar to the reality television world that pervades every part of our culture. It seems everything these days requires dogmatic positions and bombastic pronouncements of “how it really is.” I have come to loathe that trend, as it has infiltrated our politics, our entertainment, and our religions. Our sideline watching and pronouncing is perhaps the worst manifestation of the dark side of gossip. Uninformed and only partially curious, we have watched an entire generation build platforms and wealth off of their ability to up the ante on their outlandishness. The wilder it is, the more the clicks roll in. Shrewd of those who have figured out the system — utterly destructive to the average American mind.
I found myself asking some new questions, however, about the Clancy trial. Why is this one so at the heart of interest for so many? Crime happens everywhere. Why is it that this case is so polarizing and filled with hard-line positions about who the victims are? This isn’t the first postpartum murder of children our culture has been exposed to. Dozens of these stories have been part of our media consumption over the years. Why is this one so intriguing? I know very little about the story. I have no theories or conspiracies about who-done-it. I’m fascinated by the world around it, with the people who feel so strongly that they must lionize and defend, and those who feel threatened by that lionization. Why are we here in this moment in America? Who have we become, and why does this trial seem to be at the heart of that change? Lots of questions, and fewer socially acceptable answers.
The Wizards of Smart
A Bible which does not assert its own independent meaning, as fairly interpreted by itself; a Bible which shall wait for distinct and changing human sciences to tell us what it shall be permitted to signify, is no sufficient rule of faith for an immortal soul. - Robert L. Dabney
In his 1871 sermon, “A Caution Against Anti-Christian Science,” Robert L. Dabney argued that the pressures of culture to adopt science, an ever-changing and evolving endeavor, as their God would result in a people unmoored from any anchor. Societies’ infatuation with “science” would ultimately result in an inability to explain the supernatural that interfaces with the earthly. We would, as mankind has since the Garden, replace the real Creator with ourselves. Science would finally allow us to be “like God.” The unexplainable could all be distilled down through the scientific method. New sciences would arrive to help form a narrative around what seemed impossible to understand. Psychology and medicine could help explain why people struggle with darkness and depression. Why alcohol has a death grip on some, and why somewhat normal people can somehow slip into the realm of crazy.
Before our modern craziness and self-indulgent belief in our own divinity, people relied on the supernatural to explain why these things happened. But through our smartness, science could help diminish the unexplainable and find plausible, non-God-connected reasons. It was a chemical imbalance. It was a psychosis. We now had answers through reason and could make our world manageable. After all, this God stuff was too fanciful. Demons? Evil? Inherent sin? Poppycock.
Why does a mother kill her children? Our culture will only allow the empirical version of events. There is a scientific explanation. The end. But what if our smartness can’t really explain what drives a mother to such an end? What if our hubris disallows us from seeing things for what they are? What if nearly 150 years of dismissing the supernatural has left behind an exoskeleton of a once divinely embossed people? What happens when our smarty-pantsness can’t explain atrocity?
Perhaps we end up with what we are seeing in the Clancy trial, and in our politics, and in our social structures. Fights and division and destruction are the only tools we have left to deal with one another, because there is no room in the inn for something like evil or the supernatural. We have forgotten how to live in a spiritual world. We ignore it because we fear what it might mean — that we are not the Gods we think we are. Maybe it was her meds that made her do it. Maybe it was her husband’s patriarchal methods of family rearing. Maybe it was a chemical imbalance. Anything to avoid the possibility that it might be a supernatural darkness, an evil from another realm. That is impossible.
Jesus
And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region. - Matthew 8:28-34
The gospels are filled with stories like this. Odd moments where Jesus confronts the evil realm that dwells among humanity. Our modern minds can hardly comprehend it. The main line protestant church has, for the most part, dismissed these stories. There’s no room for them in modernity. In the seats of our self-help-razamataz churches, demons and devils are for the cartoon world. Something that happened a long time ago, but went away sometime in the early twentieth century when we became “enlightened.” But what if these stories from scripture give us a view into how this world actually works? What if Jesus and his power over the evil of this world are as real as the nose on our own faces? Our dismissal of the supernatural and the forces of good and evil harms our ability to live within the tumult of creation.
It’s an unimaginable and incomprehensible story for a people unfamiliar with the traditions and explanations of religion. How a battle of good and evil rages on behind a thin, unbreakable veil, where demons and devils invade unlucky humans and cause them to torment their fellow humans, seems like a fairy tale. But no one reads Paradise Lost any longer. Our culture has no connection to the words of Jesus when he says in Luke: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” We no longer know Origen, Tertullian, or Augustine. They are dead, long-forgotten men, whose dusty books have no pull on the intellect of the modern person of Western Civilization. But they all believed in Jesus’s explanations about the brokenness of this world. They understood that Ezekiel 28:12–19 described a being who was “the anointed cherub who covers,” perfect in beauty and wisdom, present in Eden on the holy mountain of God, until pride and iniquity were found in him and he was cast down. The church fathers called him Lucifer from the passage in Isaiah. They described how this fallen angel Lucifer, heaven’s most beautiful and highest-ranking angel and worship leader, rebelled out of pride, took a third of the angels with him, and was cast out by the Father. This synthesis of several passages from the Bible sounds utterly crazy to the ears of our time. Nothing like this is possible. No war in another realm is happening. No demons roam the earth tormenting people. There is no Satan or God or third-day risen Jesus. All things are explainable through our own minds. Or, as Thomas Edison described, “What man’s mind can create, man’s character can control.”
But then a mother stands accused of murdering her children.
Our minds can hardly comprehend how such darkness comes to our world. How could she do it? What do we do when all explanations offered fail to pinpoint the harsh reality of three dead children and a family and community destroyed? Jesus knew these tragedies too, and did not dismiss them as happenstance or medical deficiencies. He called them for what he saw them to be.
They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
“Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.
The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits, and they obey him.” News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee. — Mark 1:21-28
Jesus knew that this man was overrun by something dark, and he called the spirit out of him. Even for non-believers and people outside of the Jewish people, Jesus understood that there were powers at work upon the souls of his creation.
Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. —Mark 7:24-30
No Longer Dismissible
What we are witnessing in our world is impossible to ignore. A turning point is happening all around us, and our own wisdom has proven woefully inept at explaining the trials and troubles of our world. We medicate our children for their confusion, and drink ourselves to numbness in order to avoid the real pains that are ever-present. We refuse the Jesus reality over and over again because it seems too unbelievable. We want to refuse the truth that the world is not just an empirical data set. We can’t hold our tidy worlds together if we concede that the spiritual realm is real and dangerous. But as we watch things collapse around us, structures we have relied upon and trusted for centuries fail to keep order; our small scientific answers crumble under the weight of the unexplainable. We are being forced to look into the spiritual world, into the world of Jesus.
I am desperate for our world to know Him. Not the pablum served up in the self-help shows we call church in the strip-mall-pseudo-Starbucks, but the real, authentic Jesus who has the power to tame the demons. I long for our world to know of that power. That the medicine cabinets filled with prescriptions that chase the last prescriptions could be emptied by the transformative power of the One who can cast out evil. The Jesus who has power over darkness, who can tame the sea, who can stop the sun in its tracks— that Jesus who can make a difference in a world that is crumbling.
I don’t know if what is happening in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is something from the other realm. Perhaps it is. Regardless of what has caused this tragedy, I want a world where the possibility remains that our ability to explain the unexplainable could be overwhelmed by the realities of Jesus. Until we are willing to have that conversation, wars will rage, and division will dominate. There’s more happening than we want to admit, but circumstances will eventually overwhelm our ability to control the small worlds we have built and the illusion that we can manage them.
This is a brilliant piece. We truly have forgotten how to live in a spiritual world. People expect everything to be explained by science, but as believers, we know that there is a whole other realm. We cannot give evil an out with a scientific explanation no matter how much better it makes us feel.
I have never longed for Jesus to come back like I do now.