by Неизвестный
Whenever he confronted Judas, his captors, Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, the Good Thief, the Women of Jerusalem, Peter, his mother, he was in command. His awareness was clear. His mission was firm.
It was only the black hand of death and the merciless coils of dying that frightened him. For he had to accomplish his mission in his identity as a man in order to break beyond the bonds of mere humanity. “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” This was no questioning complaint. It was merely a human exclamation at the sharp peak of his physical torture. For the first time, mists of numbness were blackening and dulling all his psychophysical acts. He could not see or hear very well anymore. His control of his imagination was slipping. His memory worked in quick snaps, then went blank.
Yet he passed through this dying and out of all physical existence, preserving his hope and trust: “Father! Into your hands I commend my spirit.” At that one moment all his psychic faculties-memory, imagination, feelings, sensations—were gathered into a hard ball of pain. He could not breathe anymore. His heart ached with effort, then stopped beating. His brain had no more blood. That quick dislocation we curtly name with an inert monosyllable, death, overtook him.
Jesus has not told us of the physical agony in that shuddering wrench, when he ceased to hear, see, and taste, and in a traumatic flash the human self he used to be was in a new dimension where all was clear, where there was no more doubt, where he could no longer be afflicted by material ills, and where his human soul existed in the undisturbable harmony of God. He had died. As all humans must. And he survived in spirit, as all humans may now do, because of Jesus' dying and death.
As the first human being to undergo dying and death perfectly, Jesus had to rise from the dead. He had to live again as a human being. His bodily death and his living again in the body are two phases of one integral act. Hence, what Christians have always called his Resurrection implies not only living again; but also dying, and surviving that physical death.
Jesus' message in the Resurrection accounts of the Gospels is clear: Do not simply accept that I survived death. For this is not a Christian idea. But it is: Believe I have transformed your dying and your death, making them a means of resurrection and ascension and an entrance into the Kingdom of God. For every man and woman.
This is why the witnesses to his Resurrection were not concerned with his bodily appearance or characteristics after death when he lived again, but with his person and his identity and his presence.
A real salvation from the pathos of being merely human, therefore, implies that not only does it become possible for us to live forever, but that we know and pursue this goal in a way that enables us to escape the confines of time and space. We must know with absolute surety. Such knowing is called belief.
Jesus effected that our act of believing give us knowledge of him and of our salvation; and, by that act of believing, we escape from the confines of our material world and of our own consciousness. And, after the first assent of belief, we have the quiet flow of certainty about each person as man, as woman, and about God as father, savior, and eternal joy.
Because Jesus completely fulfilled his humanness as regards helplessness, love, and dying, each one of us is capable of overcoming our helplessness; of achieving genuine love; and of living forever. This is the capacity Jesus won for us. It is a capacity that defines the largest outlines of what we experience as the potential humanness in each one of us. On this huge canvas are painted all the smaller details of what we may achieve in our individual humanness.
This capacity, our potential for humanness, puts all men and women into direct relationship with Jesus. It is not merely that our aspiring, our loving, and our dying is measured over against his. Nor that we receive from him parcels of strength, in order to be able to imitate him in these matters-much as we consciously or unconsciously imitate popular heroes, heroines, idols, and ideals, and so model our behavior on someone whom we esteem highly. Jesus does not help us merely in the same way as we assert from time to time that this or that great man or woman has helped us by their actions and their inspiring words.
The relationship is much more intimate. If our choice is to aspire, to love, and to die in the hope of living, then our aspiring and our loving and our dying in such a deathless hope is the aspiring and the loving and the dying Jesus performed so perfectly once for all time and for all humans. When we choose to achieve this humanness, then between our humanness and the humanness achieved by Jesus there is a paradigm of identity. Not a physical identity, but rather an assimilation in spirit. The limited capacity of each mortal becomes a minor and partial participation in the divine fullness and rich overflow of Jesus' divine spirit. Each individual is destined to become a “Jesus self” in some degree or grade: to be a self with the humanness of Jesus.
It was this primordial function of Jesus that Paul of Tarsus summarized when he drew on the ancient Jewish myth of Adam as the “first man” and as “head of the human race” in physical generation and biological derivation. Paul called Jesus the “Second Adam” and the “head of all men and women” in the being of spirit. In the language of classical Christian piety and religion, each one becomes an alter Christus, another Jesus. They become part of that fullness of good in our human universe that God has foreseen and permitted.
In the Christian view, all of this is so because Jesus was God made man. All his human acts belonged to him as God. Their value and meaning shared in the eternity and total perfection of God. Jesus has a priority in that eternity that ensures his ever-presence and priority within all the changing time-space frames of our human history. As a mortal human being, he lived in one place at one time. Yet in humanness he was and is coexistent with and present to all human beings as the source and guarantee of whatever humanness each of us attains.
At the same time, Jesus was also a mortal man, a Jew who lived a certain number of years in and around Palestine; who had certain mortal limits of mind, culture, life experience. During his mortal lifetime Jesus could not achieve the full extent of humanness possible in billions of individual humans diversified by climate, language, culture, gender, and civilization. For this goal, God chose to need the participation of men and women.
In the Christian view, therefore, Jesus is the key to the fullness of our humanness, because he achieved that fullness for us potentially. It must be achieved actually in each man and woman, and can be achieved only by each one's choice and personal actions in the reality of the good and the evil present and possible to us all, and whether or not we have ever even heard of Jesus.
And the key to the fullness of evil—that which negates and kills humanness and achieves the opposite of God's plan—is Lucifer, the shining angel who chose freely to separate himself from God, but as God's creature could not separate himself from the human universe.
The Process of Possession
We will never know in detail how evil spirits select a special target for possession or the details of how they set about their grim task in the earliest stages. “When did you start working on Jamsie?” Father Mark asked Ponto's superior. “He was chosen before he was born” was the chilling reply.
We can, nevertheless, trace the general lines along which possession proceeds, and sketch as well the broad stages of the development and success of possession in a victim.
From all five cases in this book, and from countless other cases, it is fair to say that usually before either the target of possession or those near him are aware of it, the actual process of possession has begun. In the cases reported here, the earliest lines of “invitation” can be followed back into childhood, except in the two priests, Yves and David. We find the first signs of diabolic attack only in their adult lives.
The beginnings of possession are generally traced only after the fact, in the memory of the one person—the possessed—who can tell us about those beginnings. Sometimes, during an actual exorcism, the exorcist can elicit from the possessing spirit some bare details about how entry of Evil Spiri
t was effected and possession became a fact. Father Mark, in particular among the exorcists in this book, believed strongly in pushing for such information. Perhaps as a consequence of that, Mark impresses one as having an extremely quick “feel” for the practicalities of dealing with evil spirits and exorcisms. It was clear that he understood Jamsie's predicament in considerable detail on the basis of a single long interview with Jamsie nearly two years before he was actually called upon to perform the exorcism in that case. Still, Father Conor, who taught Father Peter so well during his months in Rome, remains the exorcist of my acquaintance who seemed to have the broadest understanding of the stages and perils of the actual processes of possession and of Exorcism. Conor's general outlines of the process of possession ran as follows.
First, the actual entry point, the point at which Evil Spirit enters an individual and a decision, however tenuous, is made by the victim to allow that entry.
Then, a stage of erroneous judgments by the possessed in vital matters, as a direct result of the allowed presence of the possessing spirit and apparently in preparation for the next stage.
Third, the voluntary yielding of control by the possessed person to a force or presence he clearly feels is alien to himself and as a result of which the possessed loses control of his will, and so of his decisions and his actions.
Once the third stage is secure, extended control proceeds and may potentially reach the point of completion-perfect possession.
In any individual case, these four stages will dovetail and overlap differently. And, while the process may be swift, more often it seems to take years to accomplish. “We have the eternity of the Lord of Knowledge,” Tortoise told Hearty arrogantly.
At every new step, and during every moment of possession, the consent of the victim is necessary, or possession cannot be successful. The consent may be verbal, but always involves choice of action. Once initial consent has been given, its withdrawal becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. In Jamsie's case, he was subjected to intense physical pain when he thought of ejecting Ponto. When Carl hesitated, he was threatened with vivid images of his own extinction. But whatever the pain or threat, it is wielded to retain the consent of the possessed for the continuing presence and power of the preternatural spirit.
Rather than being signs of the great power of preternatural spirits, these threats are evidence of their limitations, for they cannot attack and seize control of the will directly. They can only work through the senses (Jamsie's pain) or the imagination (Carl's fear was produced through the attack on his imagination), in order to assure the continuance of that most basic element of all human possession: the consent of the victim by his own will.
The first stage, the actual entry of Evil Spirit and the beginning of its personal influence within a person, appears always to be made by means of the spirit's knowledge of a trait of character or of some special interest or of some avocation of the victim.
It was Marianne's stubbornness of character that seemed to lay her open to invitation. It was Richard/Rita's unusual appreciation of femininity, Jamsie's loneliness, Carl's psychic gifts, David's intellectu-alism, Yves' esthetic instincts, personal charisma, and priestly avocation. By knowledge of these special traits and interests-none of them either good or bad in and of itself—and by clever appeal in special relation to these traits and interests, entry was made in every case.
All the exorcees here mentioned admit in retrospect that they knew—whether they acknowledged it vaguely (as, say, Marianne) or explicitly (as Carl did)—that the source of the offered help was neither a human being nor any religious source. The source was always vague, always reassuring. It always alienated them from their surroundings and from those nearest to them. The general feeling was that “great things could happen” to them (Yves), or “new developments could take place” in them (Richard/Rita), vor that “special success” would be theirs (David) if they were to “listen” (Jamsie) or to “think along these lines” (Marianne) or “wait for more” (Carl). At this stage, there never appeared to be an overt suggestion against religion or religious faith, or against Jesus. At some point during this earliest stage there arrives a delicate moment when each person chooses to consider the particular offer made to him or her. The exorcees in this report agree individually that they made such a choice, and that they had a sense of violating their consciences when they made it, though at the time in some cases it seemed a fairly minor violation.
It also happens that places, objects, and even animals are used to arouse the attention and interest of the victim—in this book, Jamsie is a notable example; and, later in the process, Carl in another way, and Richard/Rita in still another way. But even when diabolic attack starts with some action or objects, places or animals, the aim is ultimately human beings: to impress them, frighten them, subdue them, fascinate them, to act upon their senses and imagination in order finally to elicit their consent.
Once the initial consent is given, there follows a period in which the victim makes a series of practical personal judgments that profoundly alter him and prepare him for the next critical stage, when he will yield control. This is the stage when erroneous judgments of a highly personal nature are made, generally beginning once again in the areas where the individual places the greatest value and enjoys the greatest sense of personal expertise and freedom. Through this process, the original strength, beauty, and idealism of the individual are slowly, piece by piece, turned upside down.
Thus Jonathan's original idea of a new priestly ministry to meet the new needs of the 19605 led him to adapt one after another of the traditional rites and teachings of his Church, until finally he had changed the supernatural meaning of sacrament to a social celebration.
Richard/Rita's initial erroneous judgment concerned his androgyny—he took it as real; and from that flowed a series of judgments about the sexual act, about woman, about marriage, and about the purpose of life that turned the meaning of each of these things into an Alice-in-Wonderland nightmare and led Richard/Rita to defile the very femininity he had so appreciated.
Marianne's judgments were primarily of an intellectual kind, but all of them had a concrete application. She made up her mind that freedom of thought meant you freed yourself of all moral obligations to God and to authority, and that you avoided those who would still inculcate those obligations. And, in quick succession: that others were fools; that freedom meant immunity to advice from those who disagreed; that immunity to advice meant finding herself; that finding herself meant being isolated; that being isolated meant retiring within herself; that retiring within herself meant total absence of initiative and of merely being oneself; that such a condition of “merely being” was the same as “not being at all”—just two facets of the same thing; that from this condition she would be open to an unheard-of secret which “the Man” would reveal; and so on.
We can trace a similar progress in David's judgments based on his anthropological studies and the methodology of his science. He was finally in a condition in which he was applying the norms of scientific method to the data of his religious faith.
Carl, in this respect, was the most disastrous and the most Lucifer-like. Each of his brilliant gifts became an avenue of a deception he refused to acknowledge. And, even to the end, he labored under the illusion that he, Carl, was about to “rediscover” the “true version of Christianity.”
If the victim, by now partially possessed, does not withdraw consent and succeed in freeing himself, with help or by dint of his own strength of will and resistance, he will arrive at one sure, critical moment. He will be presented with an increasing and finally unremitting pressure to allow an “inner control” by an alien force. This control will affect thoughts, emotions, acts of will, intentions, likes and dislikes.
Each of our exorcees had this experience. Each felt an eerie “pressure” to allow “someone else” to give them directives; and that “someone else” was “inside” them in some way or other. The pressure was not phys
ical, just as the presence inside them was not physical. There were physical results when they tried to resist that pressure, however.
Once they yielded, they started to receive “instructions”—ready-made judgments and attitudes arose in them, even words on their lips and actions in their limbs. Jamsie seems never to have passed as far as this point. He apparently refused to accept control in refusing Ponto's permanent presence within him.
In David the yielding was subtle, but he nevertheless did yield. There was in him some deep and covert lying to himself about his consent to be controlled. Yet, precisely because of this subtlety, which in turn indicates a wavering in his consent to be controlled, possession of him never progressed very far.
Yves yielded to the intensest pressure of “remote control,” even as he looked for relief from that pressure by driving out to visit with friends. Richard/Rita seemed to yield as a young boy when he spent his first night alone in the wilderness of a campsite. Marianne experienced the entry of control almost physically as she sat on a park bench opposite “the Man.” Carl's first moment of yielding may even be traced as far back as the moment when, as a teenager, he “agreed” to “wait”—with all its implications of future acceptance; but the intensest pressure on him came as he gazed at a sunset through his office window. Tortoise had prepared his victim well, for even as Carl thought of resisting, he knew he no longer had the means at his command; and he consented fully and with an unusual awareness.