On the Death Circle and Engaging the Enemy

When I started taking ninjitsu at UCLA, I didn't know anything about the philosophy of the art. I'd taken other martial arts classes before, and there was a lot of the same content across the board: being aware of your surroundings, reacting to your attacker, putting up a good defense, etc. I guess I figured that ninjitsu would probably involve something along those lines, maybe with some nunchucks incorporated in somehow.
So I was quite surprised when my instructor, Lance, began one of our first classes by teaching one of the main principles of ninjitsu.

"Alright, today we're going to learn about something called the Death Circle."

Excuse me, what?

The Death Circle, for those of you unaware, is the distance between your fingertips and your body when your arm is outstretched in front of you with your hand held flat, palm toward the earth. The concept is simply this: that should any person enter that radius with the express intent of seriously harming you, you must expect to fight to the death- and the person who dies will not be you. You need to be so continually aware of your surroundings that the enemy is never able to enter your Death Circle. However, even with the best decisions things can and do go wrong sometimes and if the enemy does come that close to you, you must be prepared to fully engage.
Lance went on to explain that this wasn't intended to be just some scary concept to sound bad-ass. Rather, the term is a reflection of the traditional roots of the art. Ninjitsu in this form evolved as a natural defense of commoners against the pillaging samurai who would violently raid villages during their final years of declining power. If you were a villager and some warrior was coming at you aiming to take your family, your livelihood and your very life, you had to be ready to fight to the death against him. You could not let the enemy into your Death Circle or you would die.

"Notice how I'm saying 'enemy,' not 'opponent,'" Lance continued. "'Opponent' implies a game, but we don't play games." He described how a ninja perceives the enemy, engages with the enemy if needed and gets the job done. No flashy moves. No admiring your work. Just do what you need to do to get home to your family.

Hm. Not quite what I'd heard in any other martial arts class.

I thought about that a lot after class. My main question was, now that I don't have to worry so much about rogue samurai raping and pillaging West LA, what does this no-nonsense recognition of/engaging with the enemy look like for me?

Enter the concept of spiritual warfare.

When I was a little girl, I was taught that spiritual warfare was happening on the earth. My parents taught me that there were things in the spiritual realm that humans can't see, both good and evil, and they were fighting for influence in this world. The message I got was that as Christians, we were to stay away from things that the Bible said was evil, and as long as we followed God we would be safe from spiritual evil. Now as a child I believed whatever I was taught about God and the concept of spiritual warfare was no exception. However, it wasn't something that I particularly wanted to dwell on. I mean, what was I supposed to do with that? Good and evil are having some sort of battle and I'm supposed to do something about it? It was a lot easier for me to just believe all of the nice, fluffy aspects of religion as opposed to trying to wrestle through some kind of spiritual contention that was happening in a realm I couldn't see.

As I got older, I started to appreciate the existence of the spiritual realm. I started to see more of the evil that I had been warned about, and not all of it could be explained through human actions and emotions. They were simple things, really. The look in a stranger's eye that inexplicably sent chills down my spine. An insidious little voice in my head telling me self-deprecating things that I knew weren't true. Hearing about horrible things that people did and trying to understand how one human being could possibly do things like that to another. These things added up and it got to the point where personally, I couldn't deny any longer that there truly was a presence of evil in this world, and there was a very good chance that part of that evil existed in the spiritual realm. But even then, I didn't see what all of this had to do with me. My physical, mental and spiritual health seemed alright to me, and I figured I'd satisfied whatever general requirements there were for "good" that those evil things were probably going to leave me alone.

As with so many other things in my life, learning the Gospel changed my entire perspective. I learned that God was the supreme source of good, and that he had created all things good originally. I learned that God had an enemy, Satan, who was very real and that this enemy's deception incited humans toward committing original sin. Sin was introduced into this world, with death being the ultimate consequence. Every ugly, torturous, mean thing that somebody ever said or did to somebody else was caused by this sin. I realized that rather than being a "good" person, I was a sinner just like everybody else and that I had acted very evilly toward other people and toward God. I saw that Jesus, through his death and resurrection, conquered death once and for all and that he took the punishment for all of the sins that anyone had ever committed- including me. And because I believe that is true, I will get to be with Jesus for eternity.  Satan knows that Jesus has the power to defeat all evil, and so it is the devil's desire that people not come to believe in Jesus as the Savior.

From the spiritual perspective, the Death Circle is still a relevant concept for today. We may not be villagers on guard from warriors, but whether we like it or not we are standing on a spiritual battlefield and good and evil will continue to contend in our lives regardless of our individual stance on the manner. The crux of the matter is this: evil exists. The devil exists. And if you are a Christian aiming to spread the Gospel and give God glory, the devil does not like what you are doing. As a matter of fact, he will do anything he can to make sure you are not doing those things. The devil is your enemy, and he will engage you with the intent to kill.

So imagine you have a real enemy who is actively trying to deceive and ultimately kill you, by any means necessary. How would you react to that? What kinds of things would you want to know in order to prepare? What are the implications of choosing not to believe that this enemy exists?

Once you recognize an enemy, how close do you let that enemy get to you? Are you letting them sit at a 'safe' distance or do you let them into your Death Circle, where the real damage can be done?

Finally, when the enemy does engage you, how do you react? Or do you react at all?

"Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." -1 Peter 5:8