The tiny sparrow hopped ahead of me. (Before, it was a junco by the house.) She’d lift a bit and then trot along. This time while I was walking on the top of the hill towards Petersons. Where did she want to take me? She’d trot a bit. Then lift off. Trot a bit. Then she flew off. I was relieved she could fly. I kept walking. The walk as ordinary as they all are, well actually boring. Sometimes the sky is spectacular with long gray breakers in the clouds, that sometimes look splashed up like the edge of an ocean. Sometimes it’s plain blue. Where was the bird leading? Perhaps the following is the answer.
After I read over the first part of my essay collection, Baptisms of a Sorta Former Evangelical I thought I might need an exorcist. Especially since I read Rod Dreher’s “That Time a Demon Mauled Tucker Carlson” and listened to Jonathan Pageau’s podcast, “Did the Witches Win?”. Pageau’s podcast identified modern reproductive practices that are common in our society that were described as witches’ practices back in the day. I could only grieve for how anti-eros our culture has become and remember Jesus wondering if when he returns, would he find love in the world?
That was a lot about the powers of darkness in one week along with rereading prose poems that reach back to my toddler days. Funny too, that Martin Shaw in his class, Christian Wonder Tales, invited us to write our creation stories.
Dreher recounted how Tucker Carlson was clawed by demons in his sleep, and how Christians can be oppressed because of curses put on ancestors. He says, “In Living In Wonder, I tell the story of ‘Emma,’ a New Yorker who has long been a devout, churchgoing, orthodox Catholic — yet discovered a few years ago after a suicide attempt that she was, in fact, possessed. It emerged that her grandfather back in Europe had been a high-level occultist and had made a demonic pact that brought him wealth, though at the expense of his descendants.”
This is so alarming, the ground can feel like it’s shifting under your feet. Christians can be infected with demons? I thought there was no room with the Holy Spirit, “the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1: 14 ESV). Dreher says, “It’s not fair, that’s just the way it is.” He says too many Christians aren’t aware of spiritual warfare. Not sure I agree with him about people’s cluelessness. I have certainly done battle. There are some Christians who seem to find the powers of darkness under every bush. Dreher’s book, Living in Wonder, after introducing the dangers of disenchantment, has two long chapters on the occult and aliens before he gets to “Attention and Prayer,” “Learning how to See” and “Signs and Wonders.” Perhaps that’s more fascinating than the quiet work of turning our eyes to Jesus. As Paul says, “For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep as others do but let us keep awake and be sober” (I Thess. 5: 5 – 6, ESV).
Pretty close to the hours that my brother died, I dreamed the following, which I wrote into a poem: At the same house in the kitchen, I saw demons jumping into the sky. Gryphons , wings clacking, mechanical. A locust song, I ran outside, shook my fist. “You are dead.” The barns and woods smacked an echo: Dead. One circled back, laughed…” Then I dreamed, “At a barn, the trainer wanted me to work a black horse with a sculpted head, quiet eye, muscled and powerful. My thighs ached to cradle his heart, ribs, and hide; a little bit wild as when a man lies between them. But I had no boots. The first rule I learned—you ride with boots and hard hat. The trainer said my sneakers were fine. He tossed me up on the horse.” About a year later I bought a horse even though I lived in town. I fired my therapist. Perhaps Beau Ty was the middle horse in series of spiritual warhorses that began with Trigger and Whisper, mares that carried me out of the old house and away from the voices. This may be the beginning of those stories.
Later that week of my brother’s death, during a family lunch, I told my aunts and the others sitting there, “Two people have died in my family’s house. Bless it.” (My father died of a heart attack and then my brother.) I dreamed demons swarmed, my dog dead, death dead.”
Aunt Lois, skeptical and insightful, said, “Your grandmother went to seances until she saw a table put out a foot, one step on stairs. From then on, she put no stock in mystery except the time her best friend saw the Lord Jesus Christ standing at the foot of her bed.”
At that table, I saw the neat, well-built boxes constructed like a maze over generations. God like honey oozing out. I drew strength that week and weeks following from that dream about shaking my fist at demons, shaking my fist, shouting, “Death is dead.” It’s one of those knowings that came from deep as my bones.
Beholding the world as I can see it, aware that it is full of God’s glory and learning to love God and neighbor is enough supernatural for me. I heed the warnings of an early church father to “spit on Mary if she shows up in a vision.” Perhaps this desire to be grounded is a gift my grandmother gave me and not a curse. Though the careful slots her theology placed on God’s revelation weighed on me, were like dry lots, that began to stink the longer I stayed. The lack of mystery in my childhood faith made it hard to breathe. Though God opened the gates. I wasn’t long into college when I realized that I didn’t know much except: Christ is died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. I don’t even try to fit my theology into neat little boxes.
When I have bumped up against people with charismatic gifts and even this trend toward enchantment, towards how mysterious the world is, how we have lost the ability to see realities, I have wanted to be grounded. When the charismatic revival moved through our church during my teen years, I was uneasy with people’s speaking in tongues. Friends repeated “Praise you Jesus” so fast it sounded like a frenzy. Sometimes I think the images I see and words I write might be akin to that gift. Those years I thought about trees, how spectacular it is when trees fall and how miraculous it is when they grow slowly toward the sky and deeper in the earth. The righteous are like the trees, planted by streams of water, whose leaves do not wither. Those gifts were true and good gifts but not for me. They don’t have to be.
Speaking of trees, Kenneth Tanner, in a recent Addressing the Letters of Paul class showed pictures how the rings of a tree and our fingerprints look remarkably the same. He said this maybe an image of the tree of life. I know I look to an oak across the field, every day, that stands like a sky scraper, drawing my eyes. Oh the light that it catches. Oh how I see bits of heaven. And post pictures to show them because words escape me.
This quote from Fr Alexander Schmemann talks about what I’m trying for in my pictures and words. “I constantly think about death. The horror, the terror of death is one of the strongest existing feelings: regret about leaving this world, ‘the gentle kingdom of this earth.’ (G. Bernanos). But what if this ‘gentle kingdom,’ this open sky, these hills and woods flooded with the sun, this silent praise of colors, of beauty, of light, what if all this is finally nothing other than the revelation of what is behind death: a window of eternity? Yes, but this unique, grayish day, the lights suddenly coming on at dusk, all that the heart remembers so acutely – they are not anymore, they cannot be brought back… But the heart remembers, precisely because this gray day has shown us eternity. I will not remember that particular day in eternity, but that day was a breakthrough into eternity, a sort of remembrance of the eternity of God, of life everlasting.”
After reading Dreher, I wondered I needed an exorcist because people with occultish gifts were drawn to me. In graduate school, I visited with a young man in a laundromat, who flew between dimensions hearing buzzing like so many bees and a high-tension line combined. Here’s the poem I wrote: “I could see in his eyes where he’d been. He said he’d uttered a phrase in Hebrew, each letter a number he typed in his mind, all systems bent to blast him out of his skin to the place where creatures are parallelograms, triangles, squares. They use circular logic, speak in chords and jostle non geometries pricking shapes that don’t fit their dimension. He said he had to be brave as a math student who couldn’t add in class. He said no one could add up their sums. In that world there’d always be a red mark. Even Jesus came back with five” (Andraski, When the Plow Cuts, 30). I think we made a date, but he never showed up. There were others like a childhood friend who saw gremlins and the spirits of trees and eventually learned to talk to Seth, a spirit who knew things.
While I sat on my cat urine-soaked couch, the odor pungent but also comforting, I called poet, Robert Siegel, who said, “Don’t be afraid. They are drawn to the light in you. Why don’t you read Agnes Sanford’s The Healing Light which says look to, speak to the light in people.”
As a young girl, I heard voices inside my head. They sounded like garbage and I figured that “becoming a woman” and all those hormones, and that old hag of a house, had something to do with it. I take comfort in Jesus saying about how weeds grow up in the wheat and at the end he will come and winnow that wheat, separating the chaff, throwing it into the fire. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s quote “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart” makes sense and acts as a double-edged sword when I wonder about some thoughts that are a cue to pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
As a very young girl images flew through my mind, that no toddler should imagine. The only way I made sense of them was the doctrine of original sin a doctrine that saved my sanity. Now I think they came from overly graphic sermons at Bible camp. My parents brought me and my brother to Word of Life, a camp that encouraged and taught and gave me space to work out my spirituality until the gates opened and I walked out, towards freer fields. I was three years old, my feet not even reaching the floor. The asphalt floor sparkled. The place was both harshly lit and dark as if darkness and light were swirled together. The preacher talked about Abraham being a friend of God and asked if we want to be God’s friend. “Oh yes Lord, please, I want to be your friend.” I heard men honk, “Amen. Praise the Lord. Preach it.”
Another night that week, a movie flickered with an airplane’s skin being stripped off, the metal ribs left. I felt sorry for the plane, that magical creature that lifts people into the air. Naked, brown skinned men ran around faster than a man could run because the camera speeded things up. The film flickered with white spots. The story crackled. A tall, handsome woman, Elizabeth Elliot, stood up, and spoke her love story and her grief. Her husband, Jim, and his friend, Nate had been killed by the people. They had tried to tell them the good news of Jesus. She returned to the tribe, who she said turned to Jesus. Later I learned what her husband said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” That was a saying I tried to follow, along with the question: Would you follow Jesus, even if the KGB came to your door with a deal: Reject Jesus and live. Stay loyal to him and be tortured?
What’s ironic is that her daughter lived in the same dorm, the same floor as I did in college. I walked hills in England, I don’t remember where, with Elizabeth Elliot. Funny how the connections rise through our lives.
“Oh yes Lord, please. I want to be your friend.”
My therapist said, “You have all the signs of being ritually abused.” She didn’t want to pay $500 to edit her book. I agreed to edit it for less. And yes it did get published, while I was struggling to write mine and get help for the stories therein. It’s like she hurt me in the same place where I sought help. A friend’s friend wrote and published a story about this. I said,”Huh.” And imagined the very worst thing I could think of that might have happened. What I got was no memory rising from my past but an ugly image that named the betrayal I felt from my family those years and maybe also by her. I also found the title of my novel, The River Caught Sunlight. Having imagined that very worse thing that could happen, I was no longer afraid of what my imagination might bring, which brings us back to how rereading Baptisms of a Sorta Former Evangelical and Rod Dreher’s essay stirred the above musings. Writing this has eased that fear. Maybe just maybe I will let you on these stories. It’s too hard writing without readers and you all have proven to be very kind and supportive. I can’t thank you enough.
But I hate to say it, my pup, Omalola keyed in on a blood spot on the road, with a tiny feather next to it. A cat or someone speeding caught the little junco, the first bird I followed hopping ahead of me. I’d hoped she’d survive the winter because she could fly enough to reach our bird feeder.
“Oh yes Lord, please. I want to be your friend.”
“Don’t be afraid. They are drawn to the light in you.”
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