Jesus Christ – Sisyphus

Bridge Night

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.

For a Flickering Moment

It was Sunday and He rode an unbroken colt in procession through the gates of Jerusalem, heir to the Davidic line and the doer of signs and wonders prophesied to mark the Anointed One, the Messiah, of the Lord who would free the children of Israel. Sweet hosannas were sung by the crowds and palm branches were gathered and waved in celebration as Jesus passed. In this brief moment it appeared that Heaven and Earth were reconciled and the enemies of Israel would be routed, heralding a golden age like none before it. David had also ridden a donkey, signifying to his people that he came to work, not on a horse that would signify a conqueror.

Of course, the optics were deceptive. I won’t share any spoilers, but that mundane golden age thing did not shape up to the expectations of Judah. For today, Jesus is the triumphant Messiah come to free His people and they celebrate. For a flickering moment.

Blessings to you all this beautiful Palm Sunday.

Who Are the Canceled?

The Cancel Culture is amusing in an ironic sense. The canceler knows not what he does. And here I am not addressing the troll who gets blocked for name calling or profanity or sexual content. No one has a right to afflict others in that way. I’m thinking of the one that collects triggers like trading cards. He mentioned the governor’s ignominious conduct in blackface, canceled. She defended the governor’s ban on church services and restaurants while the casinos are running wild, canceled. We find ourselves in a world where there are fewer and fewer who believe that reasonable men of good conscious can disagree. Our institutions, even our Constitution, are under assault. Refuse to sit and be viciously slandered by a venomous, racist “anti-racist” whose entire philosophy revolves around perpetuating racism in every facet of life and you can pack up your things and hit the bricks. And Washington is eager to make it worse.

So let’s look at what happens when someone is canceled, to the canceler as well as the canceled. Taking the simplest case first, social media person one rises up to denounce Christians as responsible for every bad thing that happened in the last 2000 years and social media person two crushes that block widget to consign one to non-existence (in a totally solipsistic, post-modern, subjective, by which we mean false, way). I get it, I really do. We are not always tanned, rested, and ready to engage the endless stream of haters. But the possibility of finding common ground is lost. For the one issue the canceler surrenders any possibility of discovering an ally on other issues. Or even that rarest of treasure, a friend. Or even a savior.

Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez denounced Father Damien as a part of “white supremacist culture.” Ocasio-Cortez trades freely on her Catholicism, for example, here in an article she wrote for America, the Jesuit Review. Father Damien, a Catholic, came to a place where the lepers lay like rubbish in the streets, ignored and shunned by one and all, living the most debased existence while their disease progressed. As the Christians who came before him to establish the first hospitals and care for the ill at great personal risk, Father Damien conceived and led a ministry tending to these souls with selfless dedication and, on a nearly inevitable day at the age of 45, addressed his charges saying, “my fellow lepers.” White supremacist? Jesus sees all people One can fairly debate the merits of replacing a statue of Father Damien with a statue of Queen Lili’uokalani. Some might even argue that the spirit of Father Damien is an alien intrusion into the “sacred” halls of Congress. Saint Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Father Damien lived that creed to his own destruction, in service to the very lepers that everyone else walked past or banished to Molokai, a living witness to his Savior’s true and selfless love of neighbor. His detractors, not. Ocasio-Cortez later addressed the issue with Catholic News Agency, and then her staff tried to characterize her remarks in awkward fashion. By demeaning and canceling Father Damien, she has placed a stumbling block between herself and the image of Jesus revealed through Damien.

Jesus’ career is a long chain of cancellations. Herod the Great slew the Innocents of Bethlehem to assassinate this King of the Jews. Herod developed kidney issues and gangrenous genitals, dying an ugly, itchy, painful death soon after. The scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees sought mightily to cancel the rabbi that preached to large crowds in the Temple and scattered the moneychangers who paid the Temple priests to occupy the Porch of the Gentiles, the space reserved for gentiles to stand and hear the sermons and the Word of the Lord. Three of the brightest lights among the Pharisees would come to defect to this troublesome rabbi and claim a place in history and among the saints. The Sanhedrin, the high Jewish council of Jerusalem, plotted against Jesus, tried him, convicted him of blasphemy. Surely, convicting the Lord of being a blasphemer is a huge milestone in the chronicles of the Cancelers. A generation later Titus crushed Jerusalem and destroyed Herod’s Temple. Judas Iscariot plotted to cancel Jesus, whether to immanentize the revolution or hide his thieving or something else altogether is lost to history, but it is revealed in Luke 22:3 that Judas falls under the control of Satan after the Last Supper as he goes to put the conspiracy to arrest Jesus into motion. With Judas’ suicide, hanging himself from a tree, a most grievous and dishonorable fate in Jewish eyes, Judas has also canceled himself. Pontius Pilate comes across as indifferent at the trial, finding no fault, contriving an excuse to release either Jesus or Barabbas, but once that verdict comes down he shows our Lord the fullest cruelty available to Roman law. The scourging, the mocking, the procession, and, finally, the crucifixion. Pilate disappears into history soon after, and his beloved Rome will ultimately fall to this Jewish rabbi and see its great buildings picked apart to provide materials for other, lesser buildings. And then there is Satan, the accuser himself, the tempter in the desert, the possessor of demoniacs, and finally the possessor of the Lord’s own Apostle. His tireless work to effect this cancelation is fully realized at the cross. Satan has prevented Jesus’ Davidic reign on Earth and stands a colossus over the fallen world.

And then there was Sunday, and the canceler was canceled. The battle continues, but the war is over. He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Happy Sunday.