It seems we mostly are choosing to ignore that Robert Westman, the young man who shot up a Catholic Church filled with children, drew a picture of a demon staring back at him in the mirror. Why? Because believing there’s more to the world than the physical realm, calls us to be more. And for some, that’s scarier than anything else.

So it’s being largely ignored.

We pretend we live in a world of fact. Where everything can be grasped, measured, and quantified. We look to the science. We point to smart people talking about the atom. The quark. The lepton. The bottom line. We have no time for phantoms. No patience for storybooks. Angels. Demons. The old man in the sky. The Spaghetti monster. It’s cute. It’s quaint. It’s a fairy tale for grown-ups.

We’ve dismissed it. The whole lot. With a wave of the hand. With a shrug. We call it “the Enlightenment.” It’s a flat world without shadows. A world without evil. Just… bad behavior. Bad parenting. Social ills. We dissect it. We diagnose it. We give it a name and a pill to remedy it. We make it small.

But look around. The facts. The hard, cold facts. The sheer, unmitigated evil that walks among us. Not the guy stealing bread but the cruelty that has no motive. The malice that defies explanation. The smile at other people’s pain. The senseless horror that slips the mask. The kind of evil that makes you want to lock your doors and look at the sky. What do you call that? ‘Complex socioeconomic factors’? ‘Psychological deviance’?

You call it what you want. Put it in a box and tie a ribbon around it. But the stain remains. It’s a tear in the fabric. A hole in the reality you’ve so carefully constructed. Because you’ve explained everything, right? The light. The sun. The stars. You’ve charted it all. But you can’t chart this. This… blackness. This thing that looks at us and hates us.

But you can’t see the shadow because if you admit the shadow, you must admit the light. We’re so eager to deny the demons. Why? Because then we can deny the angels. Angels have consequences. Love, salvation, faith, grace. These all have consequences that quarks, atoms, and leptons don’t. You can believe in them without changing your life. Without changing yourself. But love calls us out of ourselves, asks us to be loving and faithful. Love asks us to pick up our cross. So you can laugh it all off as myth. I get it. If you admit there’s more then you might have to be more.

So go ahead. Stick to your facts. Cling to your materialism. Call it science. Call it progress. But when you look into the eyes of true evil—the kind that makes the blood run cold—you’ll see something that doesn’t fit your spreadsheets. Something that can’t be explained away. And in that moment, in that sickening, soul-shaking instant, you might just find yourself looking at darkness so black you’ll pray for light. I pray that you’ll find it.