1,
Here is a paradox worth pondering.
The root term in Greek from which daemonic may have evolved is eudaimonia – happiness! It means, good fortune, your share of the Goodness of Eros predestined for you. Everyone has a share of the good fortune.. A Greek friend confirms that “eudaimonia means blessed with a good fortune or genius. It does indeed have the spiritual sense of providence – and sometimes the material sense of wealth.”
Over time, the ‘eu’ – meaning ‘good’ – got dropped, and Daemonic remained more as Fate which befalls us, and we do not choose. ‘What is meted out to each of us..’ None the less, it is still, in a sense, our share or our portion of suffering.. Yes, some people seem to get more than their fair share of wounding by Fate, existential and divine, yet the connotation of the term still suggests ‘you get a share, your share [of what you can bear? – though it may well feel unbearable], of the common fate of human suffering, and human tragedy.’
Christ on the Cross took on all of it.. But we each get our share of it, our portion of it, and it is up to us to use this fated suffering, this blow and wound of the Daemonic, for learning redemption.
Suffering, in short, is not punishment for sin – sometimes it is, in the sense that what we do has consequences, and so we bring harm onto our own head – but rather, suffering is the route to learning the mystery of redemption.
In Christ, we encounter a suffering God, and this is the deepening that can change our suffering into radical love for all humanity.
2,
This is why passion begins as acceptance= ‘to suffer it’ in Old English means ‘to accept it.’ It is so= so be it. This acceptance ‘takes to heart’ the ‘suffering position’ in which we are primordially existentially placed by God.
This is why the ‘Daemonic’ also refers to the evil God does to us, but for our good. In the Jewish Bible there is no pussy footing around the fact that God does good and God does evil; God announces himself as the author of both. However, since creation is a deed of pure generosity, of gratuitous goodness, it follows that whether God metes out our share of goodness or metes out our share of evil, it is for some more ultimate good we cannot fathom, and are not privy to. It is a matter of faith.
It is our suffering position which evokes, inspires, kindles, our true passion, and becomes the generator of our sacrifice, and also our creative genius.
This is why passion encompasses both the extremity of what is done to us that we cannot escape or alter, and the extremity of what we ‘do’ in reply that shakes the foundations.
Passion is marked, then, by the theme of not being able to do anything and doing the most crucial thing of all.
Passion is the source for the heroism of love.
God is a mystery of passion.
Passion= our fated suffering in the suffering of all humanity. It is our dignity, our worthiness, to carry this.
It is like the man who helped Christ carry the Cross up the hill. He was told to do it. He had not come to do it, as far as he was concerned. Yet Fate brought him, and events conspired to tell him, now, and here, do this!
God gives a different ‘share’ to each of us. We carry a different weight.
If you refuse your ‘share’ of suffering as a Christian, you refuse not only your own redemption, but also your calling to redeem the patch of time, the patch of the world, that has made you suffer.
This redemptive deed of yours, or mine, is unrepeatable – no one else can step into the breach for you, or for me.
If you do not step into the breach awaiting you, as your Fate, out of which you have the opportunity to carve out your destiny, then no one else can fill up the gap your absence opens up in the fabric of lives.
It is the same for me.
It is the same for each and every one of us.
Hence, the Daemonic is our providential suffering. We have a destiny, but we will not find it, or advance it, or complete it, if we avoid the Fate that brings it. We have possibilities aplenty, but they are all built out of the one and only Fate that awaits us in this world, as it did Christ.
To find our destiny is easy enough= look where our Fate bites, is pained and burdensome.
We do not need to be broken to come to the Light.
We need to be broken to come to the Fire.
There is nothing more Anti-Christ than refusing our ‘share’ of the fate of suffering humanity.
The demand for happiness without suffering= the Anti-Christ.