By REY FLORES
Immortal Combat: Confronting the Heart of Darkness by Fr. Dwight Longenecker (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, N.H., 2020), 122 pages. To order, visit www.SophisInstitute.com or call 800-888-9344.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s latest book is titled Immortal Combat: Confronting the Heart of Darkness. It is an aptly titled book given that Fr. Longenecker literally takes the reader into the dark, frightening labyrinth of our own hearts and minds.
The better part of it is that Fr. Longenecker also helps provide the necessary weaponry and tools for us to fend off the attackers, the monsters who lurk about this book and our lives, whose only mission is to cause us to sin and turn our backs on God.
It is the timeless battle between good and evil. Eternal salvation is a hard-fought war but is well worth it, considering that what we do in our lives has eternal consequences. I’m not entirely certain just how many people go about their lives ignoring the fact that Satan does truly exist and so do his minions, but just in case you’re one of those doubting Thomases, this book will change your mind forever.
Fr. Longenecker addresses the poor catechization of many Catholics who barely know their own faith. Instead of many of our shepherds warning us about eternal damnation, many concern themselves with tepid, lukewarm “Kumbaya” feel-good sermons about the environment and immigration.
If you enjoy reading about mythological demons, monsters, witches, and other evil entities, you’ll surely appreciate how the author sees these dastardly creatures in our own sins and sinful habits. For example, Fr. Longenecker reintroduces us to the Minotaur and how it lurks in the dark labyrinth within our own hearts. Therefore, this book invites us to dwell in these dark places within ourselves to better understand the true evil which causes us to sin and jeopardize our eternal souls.
And it’s not just us sinners who tend to hide our shameful secret sins, locking away the evil creatures of the night. We are also doing the same within our own families, as a Church and as a society.
After tangling with the Minotaur, we revisit the Garden of Eden where the Dragon in the Garden duped first Eve, then Adam as he encouraged them to question why God did not want them to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As God has given us all free will, Adam and Eve had that free will before any of us, but they screwed it up right from the beginning. As Fr. Longenecker writes, “The freedom to choose may seem simple and elementary, but it is also terrifying because its implications are eternal.”
Scared yet? You should be. And this ride is far from over. The next creature we are confronted with is the hideous beast known as Cerberus, the three-headed hound from Hell. Each of the heads represents certain aspects which we embrace because of our fallen nature.
The first head represents power and how it is a basic human instinct for us to feel powerful, or empowered, when we do whatever we want. If it feels good, do it — or so the world tells us, consequences be damned.
The second head represents pride, one of the deadly sins. When we exercise our own power, or what we perceive to be our own power, we are stroking our own self-righteous egos and pride. This is an extremely dangerous terrain where the more we tread on it, the deeper into perdition we will fall.
The third head of Cerberus represents prejudice. Here we learn about how prejudice is intertwined with power and pride. To have a prejudice is to prejudge, meaning that our perceptions are biased. They are our preexisting assumptions that we are right in our choices and opinions, be they about everything from society, relationships, religion, morals, politics, money — just about everything. A slippery slope indeed.
Before getting further into it, I can assure you that this book gets even better with the turn of every page. This is the kind of book which should be required reading for every Catholic and other God-fearing Christians who will discover a great deal about themselves and how the netherworld is always working fervently to rob our souls away from God.
I highly recommend it to everyone from middle school on up. A great read written in simple laymen’s terms without any fluff, just incisive and frightening truth.
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