What Are The Characteristics Of The Diabolic? Anything That Tears Asunder, Pits people against one another: Fulton Sheen Is

“I don’t always agree with myself.”

—Marshall MacLuhan

This morning I posted this piece, and I have since gotten an answer, or rejoinder to my own question; I’m writing it now even though I’ve got a bus to catch.

Thanks in part to a second listening to a Fulton Sheen sermon, posted below, I now see that “functional despair” is a state of being that may be fully understandable, but should still be avoided at all costs.

Why? Because our enemy wants us to despair.

It’s one of the many states of mind that becomes food for the devil.

All dark, low, despairing states of mind open portals to the demonic in us, although grief is an exception. (It has to be transient.) The important idea here is to hold a high frequency mood as an act not of denial but as an offering to overall morale, essentially, to the Holy Spirit. That we try to emulate the Holy Spirit.

“Witchcraft in its essence is the attempt to control people and make them do what you want by the use of any spirit which is not the Holy Spirit.”

—Derek Prince

Now to Fulton Sheen.

I’ve listened to this sermon by Fulton Sheen twice now. What he says about the voice of the devil vs the voice of the Lord, before and after sin, strikes me as absolutely true.

We all know how bad things are. Despairing doesn’t help, it weakens the fabric as a whole.

Joy, then, and even hope, are not in fact indulgent shimmery bubbles, as I claimed earlier. They’re not wrong, unconscious, oblivious, or anything of the kind; They are states of being that harmonize with God’s creation.

The graphics of this video does not make it clear that Sheen rejected Satan.

A wonderful, uplifting and bracing listening experience.