by Неизвестный
For all the blandishments of success and happiness, for all the visions of special freedoms that may have led to this point, once control is yielded, virtually all personal freedom ceases from that point on. This is the most profound personal choice that can be made. Significantly, the option to relinquish all freedom of choice rests upon that very freedom guaranteed by God as long as the person chooses to be free. The choice can only be made by the person; it can never be made for him. If the fundamental option is made to relinquish that freedom of will, then possession has been accomplished in its most essential and conclusive step. The simultaneous decision is to reject God and Jesus and the humanness Jesus made possible. Divine light is no longer theirs. There is a vacuum of any such deep knowledge as contributes to that humanness. All luminosity for the soul is progressively snuffed out. Into that vacuum Evil Spirit pours its own light and knowledge.
When possession is achieved, expansion of diabolic control is dramatic and rapid. The light and knowledge of Evil Spirit has its own effects, striking, immediate, and self-protective. It puts the possessed on their guard against circumstances, people, places, and objects closely associated with God and Jesus. It will lead the possessed to avoid situations that constitute a threat to the possessing power of Evil Spirit. Ponto's injunction to Jamsie to keep away from women and alcoholic drink, and his influence on Jamsie's behavior that made it almost impossible for Jamsie to develop any normal human relationship with another person, not only furthered Jamsie's loneliness and increased his need for Ponto's companionship; it also kept him from any possible human love—because love is a positive good necessary to our humanness.
Some of the effects of this special diabolic light may help the possessed in their work. Ponto improved Jamsie's broadcasting style; Yves' charisma was heightened by Mister Natch; Carl's reputation in parapsychology soared with the help of Tortoise. Often the possessed are forewarned of physical threats of an ordinary kind (Marianne's repulsion of the mugger was the result of such protection); they are enlightened about opportunities to pursue their individual satisfaction or prosperity, are given additional weight, fresh information, mental energy, and added power with people.
But the most striking effect of the light and knowledge of Evil Spirit is the extraordinary and dramatic change it effects in the judgments, principles, and outlook of the possessed, together with an ever-growing sense of loss of self-control, even to the point of a loss of awareness of one's actions.
“I always knew, from that point on,” Carl recounts today, “that I had consented to a rigid control, and that I would think and say and do things without being able to say why and without any prior reason or motivation.”
And while Richard/Rita does recollect the scene with the dying girl in the snow, at the same time he remembers that he was totally beside himself. He was not in any common way aware of what he was doing. The most shocking incidents in this book, in fact, are in Richard/Rita's case, and they serve as tragic and dramatic counterpoint to the thing that Richard/Rita sought most earnestly from his consent to possession: to have tenderest love and to understand the meaning of maleness and femaleness, of masculinity and femininity.
Even though Richard/Rita's quest was genuine and sincere, for Richard/Rita femininity became odious. It became a baleful power to be conquered, even by necrophilia. His own body became a means of total defilement at the Black Mass.
Apparently that “control” changed all the judgments, principles, and outlook of Marianne. All the symbols of good and beauty became signs for panic and flight: the cross on the General Building, the Mass, sexuality, her own body, her parents. She chose to be wholly free and self-sufficient, but she ended a total slave-except for that pocket of resistance that allowed her to make use of help when it came through Peter.
For Yves the sacraments and his own priesthood came to mean merely material values with no referrent to God or Jesus or the supernatural. But apparently he, too, preserved a pocket of resistance on which he could rely when his friends initiated Exorcism.
If extended control continues unabated, if total consent is achieved, then total (or perfect) possession is achieved. Father Mark is certain he has met more than one such case—but only by chance, for no exorcism would be requested for such a person; and even if attempted, without at least the partial will of the possessed it probably could not succeed.
Though Mark had never met Jay Beedem, Mark was sure that Jay Beedem had played a part in such an odd, if small, way in Jamsie's troubles. Mark pursued his suspicion in the exorcism. But Multus, Ponto's “superior,” would tell Mark absolutely nothing. “No,” Multus responded peremptorily. “That Person has no authority over Jay Beedem. He is ours.”
In Richard/Rita's case there must also be a question as to whether the psychiatrist, Dr. Hammond, was well on his way toward perfect possession. “He is ours! We needn't fight for him!” screamed Girl-Fixer. “You can't get him back. He is ours.”
In every case of possession that comes to the point of Exorcism, the subject has reached a crucial crossroads. Some small corner of reservation remains, some glimmer or recollection of the light of Jesus still shines. Some iota of control is withheld by the possessed against the ever-increasing encroachment of all his being by that first fallen creature of God. Some area of revolt arises against the control originally accepted. The possessed become revolters; and insofar as they do revolt, they are attacked with increasing ferocity by the invading spirit, who, in its turn, protests any attempt to dislodge it from its “home.”
Possessed people who have been successfully exorcised often recount how, at some point, they began to make an effort to control their thoughts, their wills, their memories.
It is that strange and terrible struggle between the rebelling victim and the evil spirit protesting the rebellion that, in a strange way, begins to produce the repulsive, disquieting, and frightening events so often associated with the possessed and which lead their families or friends to seek help on their behalf.
Many exorcists think that the majority of the partially possessed who rebel in this way never get priestly help. They are taken to doctors and psychiatrists, who never succeed in helping them. Through treatment with drugs, a temporary “remission”—a calming of the violence—may be achieved for a while, usually at the cost of some mental acuteness and physical energy. The subjects, these exorcists feel, may often spend time in mental institutions, and there they will become progressively worse as their awful battle goes on.
When the rebellion of the possessed person does lead to Exorcism, the bitter struggle is brought out into the open. The exorcist literally offers himself as hostage. He stands in for the possessed and fights for him the battle he cannot fight for himself-beyond his bizarre call for help.
The three principals, exorcist, exorcee, arid invading spirit, are placed in jeopardy. The possessed must withstand excruciating and exhausting wracking of his body, mind, and emotions; and what small will remains free must not waver.
The exorcist will suffer all the pains and unimaginable penalties we have already described, and that each exorcist in this book graphically brings home to us.
The possessing spirit's anguish can be traced in the thumping, screeching, discordant wail that so often holds the exorcist's mind in thrall, as spirit after spirit is forced painfully to leave the human “home.” This must truly be an echo of the eternal agony once and for all time experienced by Lucifer: the irremediable pain of sorrow undergone by that brightest of all created intelligences howling again in the voice of Smiler, Mister Natch, Ponto, Multus: “Where shall we go? Where shall we hide from God avenging?”
The End of an Exorcist
Michael Strong—Conclusion
They brought Father Michael back from Hong Kong to Ireland in early July 1948. For five months he stayed in a rest house with the Medical Sisters, in County Meath. By December he felt strong enough to make the trip to his hometown, Castleconnell, in County Tipperary. There he had flocks of married
nieces, nephews, and cousins. And there he lived until his death in October of the following year.
Michael was extremely uncommunicative about himself. But the townspeople gradually got to know his condition and some general facts of his recent past. They took him for granted, as one of themselves who had come home from the big, unknown world “outside” where, as they put it, “those haythen Chinks and Bolshies had given Father Michael a rough time of it.”
Michael never ventured out into the narrow streets of Castleconnell and rarely went into the garden surrounding his house. Morning and evening his housekeeper opened the French windows so that the old man could sit on the porch in the shadows and look out at the grass, the apple trees, and the trellised walls. Now and again he tended the Virginia creeper which he loved, or he puttered about the radishes, onions, and parsnips growing in the small vegetable patch that occupied a narrow space beneath the south wall. He slept lightly and very little at night, read only the Sunday editions of the newspapers, and seemed to be lost in thought and reverie most of the time.
A young curate said Mass in his bedroom at 6:00 A.M. every morning. Once a month or so Father Michael himself said Mass; but it took him almost two hours. The effort was an obvious strain. Other visitors were rare and stayed briefly: a niece or nephew with their children each Sunday, an old seminary friend, or the bishop. Yet none of them ever got to know anything precise of what he had been through and what was the reason for the peculiar lull, the hush of waiting, in which Michael obviously spent his last years. He seemed to be waiting for something, expecting something.
My uncle was resident G.P. of Castleconnell. And as a young seminarian I heard about Father Michael Strong months before I finally saw him face to face and started to visit him from time to time. My memories of him are fresh some 25 years later; certain phrases and words of his remain indelibly with me, together with his tones and expressions. When I met him, he gave the impression of a great fragility. Big and raw-boned, he had obviously lost much weight.
But the fragility was not chiefly the effect of his thinness, his mop of gray hair, his bony hands or hollow cheeks. It was a general appearance of delicate survival, as of a hair's-breadth balance in him, between life and disappearance from life. There was a transparency about his face and person that clothed him in a quiet tension. Imagined or not, a silent dialogue seemed to be always in progress between Michael and a world I was too crass and physically flesh-bound to perceive. Only its aftertones registered somewhere within me, cautioning me against any abrupt movement or aggressive way of talking.
He talked willingly and easily of China and of the work he had done there. Those in his small circle of acquaintances knew the general profile of his story. But of Thomas Wu he spoke sparingly and with difficulty, rarely in any detail. At first, I thought this was due to some repugnance in his memories of those times. But then, when we did speak of his recent past, I began to discount that reason for his reticence. When I put questions about his exorcism of Wu, he started to recollect and to answer, but then he trailed off, as if still waiting for some explanation, some finale, some bottom line to be written to his story.
There was a soft silence for ten or fifteen minutes. He stirred in his chair finally: “Well. All in God's good time. . . The glass will clear. Must clear. . .” or some similar remark was all he would say.
And I learned that at such moments (not before) you rose and left Father Michael alone with his thoughts and his abiding presences. He had characteristic gestures: the palm of his right hand on his forehead; rubbing his chin with the back of his wrist; holding the fingers of his right hand in the left hand. All the while his eyes looked straight out, not dreamily, not awake-looking, not blank and wide in remembering, but filled with narrowing details or a present panorama invisible to all others. This was why the few townspeople who saw him reported: “Poor Father Michael. Shure, he's waitin' for the good Lord.”
Waiting was the keynote of his personality in those months, as if “waiting for the glass to clear. . .” When now and again he went as far as the gateway to say goodbye to a visitor, he had the same look on his face. He seemed to be scanning the road, the horizon, the sky, waiting for something or someone whom he would recognize the moment they came into view. An old acquaintance, I often thought in the beginning, a messenger. You never knew.
I got the same impression from his long vigils on the porch, and his hours spent sitting bolt upright in his study looking toward the door or the window.
The first breakthrough I had in gleaning some information about the Thomas Wu exorcism was in May 1949. A local farmer of Castleconnell, John Gallen, had killed his neighbor, Jim Cahill, with a billhook late one night. It had been just one more act in a long-standing family feud: either a Gallen or a Cahill died by violence in every generation.
Michael talked to me about Cain and Abel in a rambling fashion. Then he turned his head and asked me abruptly: “Has John Gallen got something on his chin?” Without waiting for my answer: “Anyway, what would you know about that? Thank God. For your sake.”
But he had revealed something, I felt, and it was worth pursuing even with a guess. “Had Thomas Wu something on his chin, Father Michael?”
He looked around slowly. His eyes normally a faded blue, were burning: “Young man, there are things better learned by you only when they happen to you.”
Then one of the long silences. I waited.
Finally, stirring, he said surprisingly: “Well. . . now that you've a little inkling, I suppose you'd better know something more. But not today. Some other day.” After a pause, the inevitable, “Please God.”
I did not get out to see Father Michael again until the middle of July. It was one of those long summer evenings rare in that part of Ireland, beneath a cloudless sky after a long day of dry heat. By the time I arrived, all brightness had gone from the sky. There was only a soft light streaked here and there with tiny broken lines of bronze reflections from the Western ocean where the sun was setting. A light wind was beginning to freshen everything after the hot day.
Michael was down by the trellis picking some leaves off the Virginia creeper. They had reddened prematurely. He placed each one carefully between the pages of his Bible.
“I'm glad you stayed away so long,” he said. “Time is so necessary.” He closed the Bible on the last leaf. We walked back slowly to his chair on the porch.
We chatted for a few moments about local news. Then I asked him about the mark on Thomas Wu's chin. He was very insistent: it was a personal mark. “Like what a potter would put on the bottom of a vase he made. Or a painter on his picture. Satan me fecit sort of thing.” He added some details about Thomas Wu. Apparently Wu had spent some years in Japan in the early 19305. When he returned to Nanking, he had completely changed: rabidly anti-Japanese, rabidly anti-Kuomintang, constantly talking about the Communist leaders in North China; and something else in him, all his friends felt uneasily, was now totally alien to them.
Wu, Michael added, had given himself body and soul to that old, old force, the one which led Cain to murder his brother, Abel, in the fields, the one that tried to impede God's creation of man's world. The oldest. The strongest. For all of them. “Them,” in Michael's mouth, were the Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans. They all acted as if death were the final arbiter and the strongest ally in all the universe. Cain's father was a murderer from the beginning, as Jesus was the first to state in the Gospels.
I wanted to know something of Michael's condition in 1948 when they brought him home. But at the mention of “home,” he interrupted me saying he had not yet gone home. He couldn't, he said. Not before he finished the business he had begun at the exorcism in Puh-Chi. I noticed the tears at the back of his eyes, and looked away.
The wind was stronger now. We could hear the lowing of cows across the way and the barking of dogs as they herded them into the barn for the oncoming night. Michael called for a rug to wrap around his waist and knees.
There was another of his fifteen-minute lapses. It ended when the housekeeper brought out his supper on a tray. He ate in silence. When he had finished, the sun was below the trees, and the countryside lay in the half-light, half-darkness of dusk. Away to the northwest, a flight of wild geese was hurrying home to the fens and woodlands of Connemara. Michael pulled the rug tighter around him and filled his pipe.
“Home. Yes. . .” His voice died away into a mumbled hole of silence for another minute or two. Then, as if there had been no pause or interruption, he went on talking.
The tears I had seen earlier were not of regret or revolt, he said, just of homesickness. Since 1938, he had been alone and in the dark. Everybody else could go home, but he had to wait.
I looked at him. His gray hair and pale face were melting into the shadows. Only his eyes were clear, visible pools of light, looking toward the bottom of the garden.
“Believe me, once you mess with Exorcism, and above all if you don't pull it off, something departs from you. And the rest of you yearns to depart also.”
It did not seem a good moment to pursue his “waiting” to “depart.” So I asked him about the Confrontation with Evil Spirit in an exorcism. What was it like? What effects had it? It was a meeting, he said, a personal meeting. What the exorcist met in person was something that existed in a state where the all-important, the only, reality was a “living not.”
I wanted to stop and ponder that for a while, but he went on to talk of a reality that is not beautiful, not true, not holy, not pleasant, not bright, not warm, not large, not happy, not anything positive.
I started to say that all this sounded like Hell or how people used to describe Hell. “No,” he interjected distinctly and firmly. “That is Hell. Just to be utterly alone and immutably without love. Forever.” In the exorcism the exorcist knew that what he was up against existed in that state. He just knew it.
The effect of all this? I asked the question still very tentatively, not wishing to increase any pain he had. Did he feel he was in a box or a prison? Did it make him dispirited and lose initiative?