Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  All such incidents taken individually were susceptible of perfectly rational explanations. But his visit to a boy dying of bone cancer was the final incident that led ultimately to his abandonment of his post.

  It was at the end of 1966. The boy, the fourteen-year-old red-haired son of Irish immigrant parents, was to be anointed: death was certain and imminent. Before the priest, Father Yves, arrived, the boy asked his mother to wash his face and hands and help him put on his favorite shirt and tie. He also asked his father to turn his bed toward the door, because, he said, there was a dark thing in the corner of the room. When Yves arrived, all went normally until Yves endeavored to straighten the bed, making the boy again face the “darkened” corner. The boy started to scream: “No! Father! No! Please! Mother!” Then as his mother ran in and Yves, having straightened the bed, stood over toward that particular corner, the boy started to weep uncontrollably. Yves does not remember all the boy said, but he does recall certain words and sentences: “darkness,” “they smile at each other,” “he hates Jesus,” “save me,” “I don't want to go with them.”

  Finally the boy's father apologetically requested Yves to leave and come back the next day. But his mother telephoned Yves' superior, the pastor of the parish. The pastor came an hour later, anointed the boy, and waited for the end, which came quickly.

  The incident was the last straw. And now everything known and remarked about Yves for the previous three years was put together. The pastor and his senior assistant said nothing to Yves, but they spent about three months gathering information and watching Yves closely. In addition to the peculiarities mentioned already, they received a puzzling report they could not make head or tail of. A man answering Yves' description periodically lived in a loft in Greenwich Village, New York. His appearances there always coincided with Yves' vacations and the free days when he was away from his home parish. They found out that the loft was known as the Shrine of the New Being; that the man was called Father Jonathan; that he held services for all and sundry: said Mass, performed marriages, heard confessions, ordained men and women as priests of the Shrine, baptized infants and adults, went on call to homes and hospitals where the dying lay; and that he had one other specific rite, which he called the Bearing of the Light. Its initiated members were called the Light-Bearers. But no details about either members or their rites were available.

  Just at the moment that a full written report was ready and about to be sent to the bishop, Yves seemed to have been alerted—however late—to the intentions of his colleagues. For about two months his behavior, as far as anyone could judge, was absolutely normal. He never went to Greenwich Village. He worked hard.

  Then, in mid-June 1967, when all concerned were just about to dismiss the whole affair as exaggerated and irrelevant, Yves had his first terrible seizure. Predictably, perhaps, it was at Mass.

  When he had stretched his hands out, palms downward over the chalice, he suddenly started to weep and groan and sway. One hand clamped down roughly over the chalice. The other fell resoundingly on the white wafer of bread. The servers called the pastor. He, together with the two other assistants, could not physically dislodge Yves' hands, or move the chalice, or stop Yves' weeping and groaning. He and the chalice and the bread were rooted physically to their place as if by rivets. He became incontinent on the altar.

  By that time, the pastor had emptied the church and locked the doors. They were about to call a doctor when Yves suddenly let go of the chalice and the bread. He seemed to be flung backward, tumbling down the three steps of the altar and falling heavily to the marble floor of the sanctuary. He was unconscious when they reached him.

  He awoke about an hour later. When the pastor spoke with him, Yves disclosed to him that his mother had been epileptic, and he pleaded with the pastor not to put him to shame publicly. He would go away in order to rest, follow a doctor's advice after a checkup, and all would be well.

  But now the pastor believed the worst. In his eyes, Father Yves must be possessed. The pastor's conclusion was no more than a deep conviction based on his personal reactions. But even so, it was a serious matter, and it would not be dropped or postponed again until the pastor was sure one way or the other. A discreet inquiry revealed that Sybil, Yves' mother, was not epileptic. In a long Sunday morning interview, the bishop was told the whole story, including the pastor's worst fears. That was in June at the seminary, where the bishop was ordaining the new young priests.

  The bishop called in Father David M. for consultation.

  After his consultation with the bishop, Father David had an interview with Yves. He came away completely baffled. Not only did Yves cooperate fully with him, but whatever Yves said seemed to strike a sympathetic chord in David. The only two peculiarities he could not explain satisfactorily were Yves' constant use of his new name, Jonathan, and the condition of Yves' right index finger.

  The name David could accept. After all, only ten years before, David had started to call himself, or at least to sign letters to his intimate friends, as “Pierre” (after Teilhard de Chardin); and he had taken a lot of leg-pulling from his colleagues about that. And the name “Bones” had stuck to David chiefly because David, once he heard the name, deliberately used it several times during his lectures; he liked it.

  The finger was another matter. According to the doctor who had X-rayed it, no bone was broken and no nerve was shattered. The problem could in no way be traced to the supposed epileptic history of Yves' mother. There was calcification in the finger; but the deformity could not be traced to a blow or injury; and no calcification could be found elsewhere in Yves' body. He was found not to be arthritic.

  For the rest of it, David could not find much to be alarmed about. He had checked out Yves' mother: she had, indeed, been subject to some sort of seizures, but the doctors who examined her always ruled out epilepsy. That much left David relieved. But he still came away baffled. He was convinced that he had missed something essential; and he felt foolish without knowing why. His discussion with Yves had covered both the doctrine Yves professed as a priest and Yves' own spirituality. As far as David could make out, both doctrine and spirituality coincided more or less with his own.

  “If Yves is in error,” David told the bishop later, “then so am I. Now what do I do?”

  The bishop eyed David speculatively for a while. Then he said softly: “I suppose if all this paleontology and de Chardin's teachings were to lead you to a point where you had to choose faith or de Chardin, you would choose faith, Father David.”

  It was a statement of fact, with an implied question. David glanced at the bishop, who was now looking out the window of his study with his back to David.

  The bishop continued. “Tell me, Father. Is evolution as much a fact as, say, the salvation of us all by Jesus?”

  David faced the question with its now distant echoes of the foreboding he had felt the day the bishop had named him to the post of exorcist. Today he says his first reaction to the question was surprise: “It's as if I had neglected something final, and the time was coming when I would have to face it.” Deep in his mind, he realized, he had spontaneously said, “Yes.”

  To the bishop he answered by rising and saying something to the effect that it was like comparing apples and oranges. And the bishop apparently wanted only to put the question. He was far too old and wise a man always to expect precise answers.

  After this interview with his bishop, David was not at peace. He made up his mind to see Yves the following day.

  What he proposed to Yves was quite simple. After much thought, it seemed to David that they should conduct a ceremony in which they would say special prayers for the sick and against disease, and in which they would also go through the main parts of the Exorcism ritual. He, David, would conduct a simple exorcism. The idea, he told Yves, was to satisfy the bishop and the pastor.

  Yves saw no difficulty. He would like that, he said. Only Yves' pastor would be present; no trouble was anticipated.

 
They performed the exorcism in the private oratory of the seminary, all three men kneeling in the pews normally occupied by the seminarians. Yves answered in a low murmur all the questions put to him by David as exorcist. “Do you believe in God?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, Our Lord?”—“Do you renounce the Devil and all his works and pomps?” and so on.

  Yves kissed the crucifix; and, jabbing his crooked index finger into the holy-water font, he blessed himself.

  David and the pastor rose to their feet at the end of the ceremony. Yves had not budged from his place where he knelt with his face in his hands. They both went out quietly, leaving him alone.

  “That's that,” said David with a sigh of relief.

  “I did not hear one clear word from him,” rejoined the pastor, “but I suppose I'd be as subdued as he was in the same circumstances.”

  In the oratory, Yves raised his face from his hands a few minutes later and looked around; he was alone; and he could not remember much. He remembered coming in with David and the pastor, kneeling down, and opening the ritual book. But that was all. For the 15 minutes of the exorcism ceremony he had completely blacked out. When he knelt down, it was as if a powerful sedative had been injected into him. He remembered nothing except a sudden compulsion forcing his lips to speak and his limbs to move.

  He waited a moment now, then looked toward the altar. All was normal on the altar; but between him and it a bulky, formless shadow hung in the air blotting out all sight of the crucifix over the altar and of the stained-glass windows behind the altar. Then, abruptly but calmly, like a man remembering a decision he had made or some instructions from a superior, Yves rose and left the oratory. A seminarian he met at the door caught sight of Yves' face: it was glowing and laughing.

  That evening, as David sat in his study, he could not concentrate on the work in hand. He was supposed to finish a paper for a conference on de Chardin's work at Choukoutien, China, where the Jesuit had unearthed the fossil of Sinanthropos. But David's mind kept going back again and again to the bishop's question: “Is evolution as much a fact as the salvation of us all by Jesus?” A foolish question, he told himself. No meaning to it at all. The bishop was of the old school. But still it kept bothering him.

  He looked up at the glass cases where all his beloved fossils and paleontological treasures were exhibited. His eyes traveled over a chipped skull casing, the collection of anklebones, the pieces of ancient rock in which flora and fauna fossils were embedded, and the series of reconstructed busts: Solo Man, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man. His mind was playing tricks with him: not only were the plaster busts looking at him, he thought, but these dead and broken human bones seemed to be speaking without sound.

  Then his head cleared. He got angry with himself. Had a choice to be made between evolution and Jesus? Must it be made? If Jesus were the culmination of it all, there was no such choice to be made. Jesus and evolution were one in some deep way or other.

  He hung along the edge of these considerations for a while. Then on a sudden impulse he went over to the house phone and called to the guest room where Yves was spending the night.

  “Hello, Yves-eh-Jonathan,” he stumbled.

  “Hello, Father,” Yves answered in a calm and pleasant tone.

  “I just had an idea, Jonathan. About evolution and all that, I mean. Supposing Teilhard was wrong all the time and his whole theory and evolution itself was irreconcilable with the divinity of Jesus, what would you say?”

  There was a short pause. Then in a level voice with a certain note of hidden triumph, Yves said: “You seem to be asking this to yourself and for the first time, Father David!”

  “But what do you say, Yves-Jonathan, excuse me,” David insisted. “I am now asking you.”

  “There can never be any such conflict, Father David”—David began to feel some relief—“for the simple reason that evolution makes Jesus possible. And only evolution can do that.” Yves remembers the conversation very well. The “remote control” was on him again with a strong compulsion; he waited until the thoughts and words came to him. Then he continued quietly, but with the emphasis of one in possession of some superior or additional knowledge. “Father David, all I have become, you made me. My spirituality and my beliefs and my explanations all come from you. You also know that evolution makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus; it makes Jesus possible for us as rational men. Don't you, Father David?”

  At the other end of the telephone, David caught his breath sharply. As Yves' words hit his ears, the thoughts and images they conveyed pushed past all his mental safeguards like rough visitors. He felt an invasion of himself such as he had never known before. He struggled for a moment: “Do you really think. . .”

  “Father David, you have the testimony of your own conscience and your conscious mind.” Then, with terrible deliberateness and a hard note in his voice that completely destroyed David's self-confidence: “After all, if I had to be exorcised, you also need it. Perhaps it is both of us who needed it. Or, perhaps—and this is a better idea—we are both beyond exorcism.” The telephone clicked and went dead.

  David was stunned. Within a few hours, he decided to telephone the bishop. Before he could say a word, he was given the latest news: Yves had gone to the bishop that evening, resigned from the diocese, and left with some friends for New York.

  From that time onward until the marriage by the sea, David did not see much of Yves, though he heard about him constantly as Father Jonathan.

  But now David had a problem of his own: had he in some way or other been contaminated? Had he yielded to the Evil One? Had he voluntarily, although under the veil of goodness and wisdom, admitted the influence of the Devil into his own personal life?

  He thought back over the exorcism. Come to think of it now, Yves was not the only one who had mumbled the Latin words. He himself had mumbled them, his mind had been absent half the time thinking of other problems.

  David did not realize it then, but he would not enjoy any peace until the exorcism of Yves had been accomplished some two years later.

  When Father Jonathan, as Yves now called himself, came to stay in Greenwich Village, he chose at first to work among its inhabitants, seeking neophytes and converts for his cause. He hung around the popular discotheques and bars, joined the clubs, took part in several of the “happenings” organized by the various Village groups of the time. He became known for what he claimed to be: the founder of a new religion.

  But after a year of this apostolate, Jonathan's emphasis changed. He no longer consorted with the ordinary denizens of the Village. He had a different mission: to create a new religious movement among the well-heeled families of upper Manhattan. Initially he became good friends with a few people he met by chance. As time went on, he enlarged his circle. Soon he had enough voluntary contributions to enlarge and decorate his Shrine of the Loft, as he called it. And there, every Wednesday evening, he held services, administered the new “Sacraments,” and counseled the members of his “parish.”

  By the autumn of 1968, he had attracted a solid congregation who found that Jonathan, far from being an iconoclast or a preacher of strange doctrines, seemed to revive in them a new sense of religious belief and a trust in the future. His message was simple. He couched it in beautiful language. He strewed his addresses with a genuine knowledge of art and poetry. And, most especially, he had a knack of suffusing everything with esthetic values. He could preach on the Missing Link, for example, or a picture of Neanderthal Man, and make the entire idea of evolution from inanimate matter appear a glorious beginning. For the future, Jonathan had a still more glorious outlook. There was a new being in process now, he told his congregations; and it would live in a new time. “New Being” and “New Time” became his watchwords.

  Jonathan's outlook and his intuition of the rather sinister “New Being” came just in time to fill a vacuum felt by many people. The vacuum had begun to appear many years before Jonathan's arrival; its effects in theater
, poetry, and art had been felt far and wide during preceding decades. All—poetry, theater, and art—had constantly lamented the fact that man's world had increasingly sacrificed meaning for usefulness. And without any further meaning, without the possibility of some transcendence, that world, however “useful,” ceases to nourish the spirit of men and women and children. Without that nourishment, the spirit of man must die.

  In the area of religion and especially of Roman Catholicism, the vacuum became widely visible and tangible in the late 19605, when the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council had taken effect. The new changes did away with much of the ancient symbolism—its mystery and its immemorial associations. The changes might have evolved into something worthwhile, except for the strange vacuum that now seized Roman Catholics and religious people in general.

  Its effect seemed sudden. And it was numbing. For it was a vacuum of indifference: to the external rites-words, actions, objects-proper to religion; to the concepts of religious thought and theology; and to the functions and character of religious people—priests, rabbis, ministers, bishops, popes—to all of these was now applied the norm of “usefulness”: form equals function; but, beyond practical use, there is meaning. The externals of religion no longer seemed to have any compelling significance. Increasing numbers of people laid them aside, or ignored them, or used them as mere social conveniences and conventional signposts.

  Jonathan's message was simple and geared to this new situation. All the beauty of being human had, he said, been obscured by religious theorizing and institutional churches. But now is a new time, he preached: all is and always was really natural. Good meant natural. We did not need such artificial supports as organized religions had supplied. We must just rediscover the perfectly natural. Everywhere in the world around us there were natural sacraments, natural shrines, natural holiness, natural immortality, natural deity. There was a natural grace and overwhelming natural beauty. Furthermore, in spite of the chasm that institutional religion had dug between humans and the nature of the world, the world and all humans were one in some naturally mystical union. We came from that union and by death we went back into it. Jonathan called that natural union “Abba Father.”