This is nonfiction. Every word of this account is true. Quoted dialogue is from my best recollection. I recount this not because I think it will persuade Modernists or Rationalists of anything, at all, but because @westernchauvinist asked me to. And if in so doing, ten men revile me and one man is strengthened in their faith, then the ridicule of the ten is a cheap price for the benefit received by the one.
In college, I was a homeless Christian. I had gone to Sunday school as a child on those weekends when I was staying with grandparents but stopped after disgracing myself. The subject turned to double predestination, and even though I had never heard the doctrine before, I (disgracefully) dismissed it with a profanity. I was scandalized that any adult could hold to a creed that made a mockery of the events of Eden, the ministry of John the Baptist, the Pentecost of Acts, and a great deal more. It did not shake my faith in Jesus one iota, but it left me with a sharp suspicion of churches and in the judgment of my elders as elders. A distrust also nurtured by exposure to televangelism and the eschatology of fundraisers.
Fast forward ten years, and I found myself attending a Catholic university where I met a psychology professor who had been a student of the younger priest who conducted the famous 1949 St. Louis exorcism, the event that inspired William Peter Blatty to write his novel, The Exorcist. The unit we were studying was parapsychology, and he shared what the exorcist had to say of such things. Having prepared myself for all manner of conflict to that point, as befits a young man, I hied myself to the university library where I found only two artifacts in the card catalogs under demon- or exorcism. The first was a folio on Pope Leo XIII’s vision of the Lord and Satan making a wager, his long prayer for exorcism, and his Saint Michael prayer. The second was a seminar collation edited by the venerable confessional Lutheran Dr. John Warwick Montgomery. The exorcism prayer was long (many pages) and baffling, and I despaired immediately of ever memorizing it for use when I encountered a devil in some dark basement or alley. Sort of like trying to carry a missile silo around in your back pocket. So I moved quickly on to fifty or so other topics as one does in college, and forgot the whole matter.
It was maybe a year later when I hopped in a friend’s car to go to our regular Wednesday night bridge game. I noticed at one point that we were headed in the wrong direction, and he said our host was sick, but we were invited to a seance by another friend of his. He knew that I was interested in the spiritual, my projects at the time included testing Edgar Cayce’s claims against archeology. Cayce did not stand up very well. But I wasn’t at all interested, a night of watching bored adults trying to spook each other out was not my idea of a good time. But he was running late so I went along and read in the living room around the corner while they seanced away in the dining room. My heart rose as, after twenty frustrating minutes of futile summoning, they broached the topic of giving up for the night.
Then I was suddenly frozen in a very physical, primal terror as if I had just noticed a lion in the room. I am a big guy, not easily given to terror. A name came to mind, it just popped into my head.
Seconds afterward, the medium announced the presence of a spirit. He mentioned the same name. This was a new contact for him. I was baffled by the fear, but the sequence of extraordinary events convinced me that I was in the presence of an actual spirit. A hostile one. And I did what any scion of Heinlein and Niven and Anderson and Pournelle, et al., would do. I began thinking of experiments I might try, given this opportunity.
What does one do with a demon in the room, I wondered. I had no bells, no candles, and just a book of Retief stories. But I tried silently commanding that the demon be bound. The terror did not stop, but then I did hear the medium say, “He is in distress.”
I knew nothing, but I did believe that if I had just bound a demon in my own name, I had made an invisible, immensely powerful enemy for eternity. An enemy older and more potent than humanity. This led me down lines of calling on help, arriving fretfully at a classic yet simple deliverance prayer:
“In the name of Jesus Christ, begone,” I silently commanded.
The effect was instantaneous. The terror was gone instantly. I was drained but relaxed.
The medium announced that the spirit had left.
In the car, my friend asked, “What did you do?”
I had said nothing in the house, afterward. These people were strangers whose evening entertainment I had just spoiled. They might not take that well if they knew.
“Didn’t you feel that thing?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied, shrugging.
“Your friends should stop doing this. It isn’t safe,” I told him.
Two months later, he mentioned that his friends and the medium had been unable to summon any spirits since that night, despite several tries.
“God is good,” I told him.
Did I become a saint? Did I find my way to an orthodox church and live a life of virtue and obedience? Hardly. It was over three decades before I settled on a church. But that, as they say, is a matter for another day.
Links:
Pope Leo XIII’s Vision and the Saint Michael Prayer
The Exorcism Prayer of Pope Leo XIII (do not pray this, the wording assumes the one praying is a priest authorized by his bishop to conduct exorcisms, praying it without the requisite authority opens one to demonic retaliation)
God is very, very good. May His peace be with you always.
Happy Lord’s Day.