November 17 2021
A MESSENGER OF SATAN.
It’s not often that I discover something new while in church. It wasn’t the minister’s words either, although he listed the passage, but then left it unread and unexplained, but to me it was an eyeopener.
The reading was 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10, a passage where Paul reveals something about his state of mind. On previous occasions he had mentioned the dangers he had faced while traveling, by foot and on ship with considerable peril to his physical wellbeing, but he never touched on his emotional state until he had almost completed the second letter to the church in Corinth. There, without much of an introduction, he related how he suffered with a thorn in his flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment him. Years ago, I mentioned the same expression, thorn in the flesh, to a friend.
Still, this passage opened an avalanche of annotations in my mind. I suddenly remembered how months ago I had read an article in the Guardian, and, when back home, I searched “limerence in Guardian” and rediscovered that a psychologist Dorothy Tennov years ago, had coined that term in her book, “Love and Limerence: The experience of Being in Love”.
According to her, ‘limerence’ can be an obsession for another person, so intensive that it plays havoc with his or her emotional stability. Paul called it a ‘thorn in the flesh’, and ‘a messenger of Satan’. Pretty strong language!
The Guardian described it as “the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one’s feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.”
That’s what I spotted in Paul’s confession: his thorn in the flesh was a case of limerence. None of the bible commentators have ever connected Paul’s affliction with being infatuated with another person. That’s what I suspect Paul suffered from: obsessed by feelings for a woman, perhaps one married.
Since then, I have spotted several instances of this phenomenon. A rather public affair developed between South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and an Argentine Journalist who he met in 2001. Limerence can linger for years until it explodes. Suddenly from June 18 until June 24, 2009, 8 years later, the Governor disappeared, telling his staff that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail while he quickly and secretly had flown to Buenos Aires, to meet with the woman he had so admired for so long, leaving his wife and 4 sons. Even though none of the media mentioned Limerence, I see a striking resemblance to a similar case that happened within my field of observation. Often, when this takes place, the words of Euripides, a Greek playwright, 2400 years ago, are prophetic: “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make”. We see it all too often that lover’s hate turns deadly, when God’s grace is not present.
Back to Paul.
In my “Day Without End”, still available on the web, I relate how Paul meets up with his ‘love’ in the New Creation. Paul prayed three times to be released from this affliction, but the Lord in his wisdom said, “No Paul; I know that this bothers you, and I also know that Satan is involved in this, but you are strong enough to deal with it, and my grace will help you to combat this affliction”.
Another angle.
After following the procedures in Glasgow, at the COP26, I also see “Limerence” in the society, how we, as the Western World, have a collective affliction of Limerence, another messenger of Satan, who is alive and well.
We have a love/hate relationship with carbon-based energy, coal, natural gas, oil. We have created a society where we have become totally dependent on this relationship, truly a Satan-inspired situation: we know that this liaison with carbon will end in death, but we tend to ban this curse from our brain.