This is the evil we love to hate: violence, corruption, abuse, injustice. It’s the news cycle that leaves us exhausted. It’s the tyrant, the trafficker, the liar. We want deliverance from them . And rightly so. This evil is real, and it breaks the world.
Deliver us from evil.
This is the one we refuse to look at. The capacity for cruelty inside your own heart. The grudge you nourish like a garden. The addiction you defend. The pride that masquerades as virtue. This is the evil Jesus pointed to when he said, “It’s not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out.” Libranos del Mal
Li-bra-nos del mal.
You are not asking for a comfortable life. You are asking for a free one. You are admitting that you are in over your head, that the darkness is real, and that you cannot pull yourself out by your own bootstraps. This is the evil we love to hate:
And then, after the prayer, do the hard part: look at the person in the mirror. Look at the person you’ve been avoiding. Look at the quiet, ordinary evil of your own small cruelties.
We want to be protected from liars, but not from our own self-deception. We want deliverance from them
There is a moment in the night—usually around 3:00 AM—when the silence feels heavy. Not empty, but occupied . The house settles, the wind hums, and suddenly, the fears you managed to silence with daylight come roaring back. It might be a memory of something you did. It might be a dread of something coming. Or it might be a nameless weight, a feeling that something is simply... wrong .
It’s a phrase so familiar to those raised in the Christian tradition (the final line of the Our Father ) that we often recite it on autopilot. But if we stop—if we really sit with those three Spanish words—they reveal something profound. Because mal (evil) is not just a villain in a movie. It is not just the monster under the bed.