To Make a Hell of Earth

Recently, I was rewatching (for the umpteenth time) one of my favorite horror franchises, The Conjuring Universe, specifically the second iteration to bear the Conjuring name. As usually happens upon multiple viewings of the same media, I had a realization I hadn’t quite had before. But before we get to that, I need to wax poetic on why I like the Conjuring franchise.

Place yourself in the shoes of the family in The Conjuring 2 for a second. Slowly, your house exhibits…strange behavior. Appliances inexplicably stop working with no clear reason why. Then the children. One of them in particular starts having trouble sleeping. She sleepwalks and winds up in different locations with no memory of moving there. More troubling still, bite marks start to appear. And they are left by a jaw that is too large for anyone in the house, with a pattern that shows missing teeth. Again, not matching anyone in the house. Finally, the voice of a man, old and harsh, saying awful things, starts to emit from the same daughter.

You have no choice but to send kids to the neighbors so they are safe. You think your only choice is to break apart your family in the short term in order to preserve them in the future. While other paranormal horror movies would leave it at that, or else go straight to the exorcism, the Conjuring movies do not do this. There is another step they take before confronting the evil entity.

They bring the family together.

This is of paramount importance to protagonists Ed and Lorraine Warren. In the first Conjuring outing, Ed works on their fixer-upper house. But the most obvious case of this is the second movie. Here, the mother says how the day her husband left was the day the music left the house. We quickly find she meant this literally, as he absconded with all of the Elvis records. Ed’s next move? Securing records. While the record player mysteriously doesn’t work, he spies a guitar and does his own rendition of an Elvis song, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The entire family gathers around for his living-room concert and even joins in on singing.

Music has entered the house again.

But of course it’s not just the music of Elvis that has returned but something else, something deeper and stronger: communion. Being together. And this communion is exactly why the demonic hates families.

St. John Paul II, writing about the family, said that “the family, which is founded and given life by love, is a community of persons.” He goes further. The family’s first task, he says, is “to live with fidelity the reality of communion.”

Communion.

It is an interesting word to use when talking about a family. Not merely cooperation. Not affection. Not even simply love. Communion.

Because the family, at its best, is not a collection of individuals who happen to share an address or the same roof. Husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister remain distinct persons, but their lives are no longer wholly their own. They are bound to one another by love, sacrifice, obligation, memory, forgiveness, and belonging. John Paul II elsewhere describes this family communion as something that gives rise to a true community, a “we.”

And that word—communion—ought to sound familiar to Christians.

Every Sunday we profess belief in the Communion of Saints.

The Catechism describes all the sons of God as forming “one family in Christ.” It speaks not only of Christians still living on Earth, but of the whole Mystical Body: the faithful here, the dead being purified, and the blessed already in Heaven, “all together forming one Church.”

Heaven, then, is not populated by a collection of isolated souls, each enjoying his own private experience of God.

Heaven is communion perfected.

Christ Himself prays for precisely this before His Passion: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you.”

Unity. Communion. Togetherness.

And if that is an image of Heaven, then perhaps we begin to understand why the demonic seems so hell-bent on destroying it.

Because Hell is its opposite.

We have a tendency to imagine Hell primarily through its punishments. Fire. Darkness. Wailing. Gnashing of teeth. Dante gave us circles and punishments. Medieval artists gave us demons and grotesque tortures. Horror movies give us contorted bodies crawling across ceilings.

And while those images have their place, beneath all of them lies something even more terrible.

Separation.

Separation from God. Separation from the blessed. Separation from every good that binds one person to another. And, perhaps most terrible of all, the eternal knowledge that the deepest longing of the human heart will never be fulfilled.

Suddenly St. Augustine’s famous words take on a terrifying character: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Imagine the restlessness without the rest.

Forever.

The demons know the horror of this separation. They once enjoyed communion with God and rejected it. They chose themselves over Him. They rejected the order of love and, in doing so, lost the very communion for which they had been made.

Hell, then, is not some fraternity of the damned where everyone who rejected God gets together and enjoys eternity in His absence. There is no real fellowship in Hell. No charity. No friendship in its fullest sense. No self-gift. No Communion of Saints.

Only separation.

Only the self turned inward.

Hell has only the discordance of the damned.

And so perhaps the demonic desire to divide families is not incidental to its hatred of humanity.

Perhaps that is the point.

The family is a small, imperfect earthly reflection of the communion for which we were created. The Church is a family. Heaven is a communion of saints. God draws together.

The demonic scatters.

Christ Himself uses precisely that language: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

That opposition is worth dwelling on.

Christ gathers.

The demonic scatters.

It separates husband from wife. It turns children against parents. It teaches siblings to resent one another. It takes wounds that should be healed and cultivates them into grievances. It whispers that obligation is oppression, that sacrifice is foolishness, that forgiveness makes you weak.

Most of all, it wants you alone.

And suddenly that little Elvis scene in The Conjuring 2 takes on a significance far greater than a pleasant interlude before the next jump scare.

The demon has spent the movie scattering this family.

Ed Warren gathers them.

He brings the children back into the same room. Their mother smiles. They sing. They laugh. For a few minutes, they cease to exist as isolated victims, each trapped inside his own fear, and become a family again.

The demon has not yet been exorcised.

But some part of its malicious work has already been undone.

The house has become a home again.

And perhaps this is why the demonic hates the family so much.

A family gathered around the dinner table, around a Christmas tree, around the bed of a dying grandparent, around a newborn child, or even around some guy badly playing Elvis on a guitar is participating, however imperfectly, in something the demons have forever lost.

Communion.

They cannot have it.

And so they would very much like us not to have it either.

If Heaven is the perfection of communion, then one way to make Earth resemble Hell is remarkably simple.

Separate everyone.

Convince husbands and wives they are happier without one another. Convince children their parents could never understand them. Convince parents their children are burdens. Convince neighbors they have no responsibility for one another. Convince friends that friendship is disposable. Convince every person that dependence is weakness and that needing another human being represents some failure of self-sufficiency.

Make every man his own little kingdom.

Make every home a collection of private rooms.

Make every person alone.

You do not need fire and brimstone to begin making a Hell of Earth.

You just need to scatter everyone.