what’s happened to satan?

Rouault's "Satan" from the series Fleurs du Mal I

We near that time in the year when Church and secular conflate with regard to the holidays and it becomes, at times, hard to distinguish them. As we near the close of October, I find myself thinking on evil, evil and what evil means. Or doesn’t. Is. Or isn’t.

One year at a local church’s Fall Festival—one of the valiant, though often unfortunate, attempts to reclaim All Saints Day and All Souls Day from Halloween—I was greeted by a boy dressed up as the devil. At least, his conception of him. Pitchfork in hand, horns on his head, red cape on his back, and a defiant look of satisfaction on his face.

“And what are you supposed to be?” I asked him, while at the same time encouraging yet another child to throw their fishing line—string with a clothespin affixed to a stick—over into the sea—a blue sheet with cutout fish taped to it—to see what they could catch—candy attached to a fish cutout that a very kind, very bored volunteer would time and again place into the expectant clothespin, then give a little tug and put up a playful fight before letting go to the victory shout of the child.

“I’m Satan!” declared the boy, sounding horrifically triumphant.

I was amused. “You are most obviously not.”

“I am!”

I persisted in reassuring him that he absolutely, most certainly, was not Satan. He demanded I explain. Surely, this is how Satan looks?

What stories had he been told?

“No,” I said to him, crouching down to look at him plainly. He was about eight with stunning blue eyes, deep, soul eyes. Within me I felt words bloom, push out. “Satan doesn’t carry around a pitchfork or wear little horns on his head. It seems in the Bible that Satan is very pretty and looks like an angel, because he was once one himself.”

There was a girl dressed up like an angel standing near us, throwing her fishing line over the sheet in eager anticipation. I gestured to her, “Satan most likely would look exactly like her costume. But do you know what the difference would be? How you could tell without a doubt that it was Satan?”

The boy thought. Blue eyes said he had taken every word carefully into himself. But this needed to be his answer, the answer that made the most sense to him as a child.

Children know the answer, inherently, but they don’t all say it the same way.

He said rather seriously, “Satan can’t be happy. Not happy like she is.”

The girl had been rewarded with a significant supply of cutout fish and candies. I imagine the poor volunteer behind the sheet had at last grown weary with the repetitive act and had decided to both bless a child with a proper bounty and bless herself with a depleted stock of candy, promising a swift close to the evening. It couldn’t have come at a better time. The girl erupted into the most genuine, true laughter, known only to a proper child—at any age of life—and the boy had indicated that it was this happiness that Satan could not have.

(We could nitpick here about the difference between happiness and joy, but he meant joy and it wasn’t the occasion to correct his word choice. He understood; that’s what mattered.)

“Yes.” I affirmed, quietly and keeping the serious tone that he had set for us in his response. “Satan likes to pretend that he’s better than he actually is. But you can always tell, if you look hard enough, if you listen to God, when Satan is lying to you.”

I realized then how sad it was that this little boy was trying to lie himself. He was trying to make himself worse than he was for the sake of recovering from the neglect in his family–I learned later his parents were going through a particularly nasty divorce–the dissolution of his childhood grasp of human certainty. I wanted to scoop him up into an embrace and nearly did, but he–or perhaps He–had a different plan in mind.

The boy removed his horns from his head and offered them and his pitchfork to me, stating simply and confidently, “I don’t want to be Satan anymore.”

I received them with the same look of earnest conviction that he had offered them to me. “Alright, what shall you be, then?”

“Nothing.”

This was not satisfactory. Rightly understanding evil was one thing, understanding evil and then letting evil win by disappointing a child’s imagination was another.

Satan loves to truncate good imagination, to shame it. He loves the literalists and hates all good metaphor.

The boy was still wearing his plain red cape; there was still a game to be had. I became suddenly very secretive and leaned forward, whispering, “Aren’t you a superhero–the superhero–here to investigate why all the candy has been taken into the sea?”

It was enough.

His claim to the liberated candy spoils and his triumph over the “wicked” volunteer, who had imprisoned the candy along with the fish, and who was then brought to honest repentance for her thievery and rewarded with some candy of her own, transpired quickly. He was a very effective superhero. I believe he gave himself a name, but I can’t remember it now.

I imagine he named himself well.

This was a defeat of Satan, but it was a defeat of Satan because he had been named rightly, acknowledged, and then laughed away through the triumph of love and good imagination, through the sincere trust that God has, indeed, already won.

What’s happened to Satan? Is he a he? Not in gendered terms, of course, but in being? Do we fight Evil? (I think not, I think we overcome evils through the power of Christ, but Evil has already been defeated.) Or is all this just metaphor? (I say “just” as if metaphors were small things.) Tell me, share with me from your storehouse of thought: what’s happened to Satan?