Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  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 1960s, 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.”

  In effect, Jonathan made a fateful synthesis of Teilhardian evolutionary doctrines and Teilhard’s idea of Jesus. And he permeated it with a deep humanism and had a knowing eye for the yawning indifference now gripping traditional Christian believers.

  In Jonathan’s outlook, “religious” belief became easy again. At one pole, one could accept the currently pervasive idea that man evolved from inanimate matter. At the other, one had no need to aim at believing in an unimaginable “resurrection” of the b
ody. Instead, there was a return “to where we came from,” as Jonathan used to say: a going back to the oneness of nature and of this universe.

  All this allowed the clever use of the full range of vocabulary and concept about “salvation,” “divine love,” “hope,” “goodness,” “evil,” “honesty”—all terms and ideas that were already so comforting and familiar to his congregation. But all these terms were understood in a sense completely different from the traditional one: minus a supernatural god, minus a man-god called Jesus, and minus a supernatural condition called “personal afterlife.”

  Jonathan’s congregation was never very large—never more than about 150 people. But he drew deep satisfaction from it all; for in his mind, all this was a preparation for the glorious New Time which was just around the corner—at the Shrine of the Loft.

  But there were deep consequences for Jonathan. As time went on, and the spring of 1969 approached, he found more and more that, in the literal sense of the words, “he was not his own man” any longer. Outsiders—his flock, his friends—noticed no difference beyond that he had let his golden hair grow longer, that he wore exotic clothes, and that his language became very exalted.

  With the passage of time, however, Jonathan’s “movement” seemed to be in danger of petering out—before the New Time started! He was getting no new followers. His doctrine and outlook did not easily accommodate the more flamboyant upheavals of the 1960s. He was no revolutionary in the political sense. The Shrine of the Loft was clearly on the wane before it had really taken off. He needed something new.

  Meanwhile, Jonathan would wake up in the middle of the night and find his mind full of strange impulses coming from that “remote control,” He kept finding himself packing a bag and preparing for a journey. He spent long hours alone in his Shrine; and later he did not know what he had been doing there all that time. The “remote control” was inexorable in its domination. He had to wait until he was told what to do. While waiting for that order, he performed marriages and birth celebrations for his few followers. He held weekly services. He dreamed constantly of starting a new priesthood and a new church that would sweep the ranks of Catholics and Protestants.

  Toward the end of the summer of 1969, Jonathan’s “instructions” started to come in earnest. He was invited to spend three weeks in the Canadian wilds with a party of friends who annually went there to hunt and fish.

  Jonathan knew the moment he received the letter of invitation that this was it. Some inner voice kept telling him: “Go! Go! You will now find your mirror of eternity. Ordination to the supreme priesthood is at hand!” When asked if he heard an actual voice on this occasion, he denies this. It was an inner conviction coming with the same firmness of all his other “instructions” and exercising the same irresistible compulsion, far beyond the effect of mere words.

  With Jonathan, the hunting party numbered 12 people. They lodged at a base camp. Each day they split up into groups. Each group departed for two- to four-day treks in the wilderness.

  Apart from some fishing, Father Jonathan busied himself with painting and writing. But after the first week, he found himself venturing alone farther and farther from the base camp. He was looking for something or some place. When he came on it, he would recognize it, he knew. His walks always followed the course of a river on whose bank the base camp stood. He could easily find his way home by retracing his steps along the river.

  It was on one of these forays that he found his place—as he called it later. That name, “my place,” has now a grisly significance for Jonathan: there his final immersion in demonic possession was accomplished.

  One day after lunch, he had been walking for about three hours in a southerly direction along the river. For those hours, the course of the waters had run fairly straight. At a certain spot, however, Jonathan noticed that the river entered between two high ridges of ground and that within them it described an S-shape. When Jonathan reached the farther curve of the S-shape, his whole body and mind suddenly became electrified with a sense of discovery. He stood stock-still, one Latin word—sacerdos (priest)—ringing like a clear bell in his ears. Sacerdos!

  That was it! This was the place! Here he would be ordained truly as priest of the New Being and Bishop-Leader of the New Time. This was it! He felt full of gratitude.

  The place was beautiful. The water in that corner was not more than a few feet deep. The center of the riverbed was a soft, shifting carpet of sand as white as salt. On each side, like rows of attendant black-cowled monks, there were tiers of boulders and rocks, rounded and smoothed by the overflow of water during the yearly flooding of the river. In the corners of the S-shape, on each bank, there was a small, shelving beach of that pure white carpet of sand sloping up out of the water to a rim of blue and black pebbles, then ferns and grass, then the pines, alders, sycamores, chestnuts. Everything burned in the sun, and silent shadows gloomed over rock and sand and river to make a patchwork of green half-darkness in the yellow light.

  Jonathan could see a hundred summer suns mirrored in the green-gray water, and each of them gave off a fire that dazzled him. The river moved slowly, but not sluggishly, all the while singing a pervasive refrain of calm and constancy.

  The place was Jonathan’s “mirror of eternity,” an opening in nature through which he could glimpse the strength of eternity, its softness and cleansing power, and the boundless spaces of its being.

  Jonathan fell stunned and crying on the beach. Stretched out full length, face down, his hands digging into the sand, he kept shouting: “Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos!” His cries ricocheted off the rocks and the trees, each echo coming back fainter and fainter as if traveling away with his petitions and hopes, until he found himself listening silently.

  The wetness of the sand soaked into his clothes, and the sun warmed his back. He began to feel a buoyancy all through his body: some mighty hand held him on its palm. He heard himself saying almost plaintively: “Make me…make me, please…make me…priest…priest-make…” Every word was spoken into the white sand beneath his face.

  Now thoughts, emotions, imaginings, all seemed to be under the control of that hand. And he began to feel an emptying sensation. His past was being erased; his entire past, what he remembered and even what he had forgotten, all that had entered into the making of what he had been up to that moment, was being flushed from him. He was being emptied of every concept, every logical reasoning, every memory and image which his culture, his religion, his ambient, his reading had formed in him.

  Then, under some inner impulse which he questioned no longer, he rose and went slowly into the water. He stood in midstream looking at the sky for a moment. Obeying the inner voice, he bent down; his hands groped at the base of a rock and sought to reach to where its roots went deep in water. The river swirled caressingly over his shoulders and back. His chin now was almost level with the surface.

  “I was reaching for the veined heart of our world,” he told me in one of our conversations, “to where Jesus, the Omega Point, was evolving and evolving, and was on the threshold of emerging.”

  It seemed to him that “only this world was forgiving and cleansing,” it alone had “united elements.” He had the impression that now at last he had “broken through,” and that the revelation of all revelations had been granted him: the real truth, the real god, the real Jesus, the real holiness, the real sacrament, the real being, and the new time in which all this newness would inevitably take over.

  He lost count of ordinary time, of the sun and the wind, of the river and its banks. The wind was a great rushing bird whose wings dovetailed into the green and brown arms of the trees on either side of him. The rocks became living things, his brothers and sisters, his millennial cousins, witnessing his consecration with the reverence that only nature had. And the water around him winked with gleaming eyes as it sang the song it had learned millions of years ago, from the swirling atoms of space, before there was any world and man to hear it. It was an irresist
ible ecstasy for Jonathan.

  He began to chant to himself: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Then this became “Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!” Once again he had no control. Every fiber and sinew in his body and mind was flooded with a dusky power. Now he was chanting: “Lord of Light! Lord of Jesus and of all things! Your slave! Your servant! Your creature! Your priest!”

  He felt a soft relaxation throughout himself; he had now no trace of tension, no anticipation, no forward-looking thought or emotion. All was wrapped up and contained in the now, the here-present.

  He rose to his feet in the shallow water and faced the bank; his hands, bleeding from his efforts to dig for the bottom of that rock, hung by his sides. He looked at the scratches and tears in his fingers and palms, loving the gleam of blood in the sunshine on the background of his clean skin.

  Slowly he walked up the beach. For no reason his pace quickened. He started to trot. Once past the sand and on solid ground, he ran zigzagging through the trees, propelled by the force within him. The ground sloped upward. Still running, he was out of breath as he reached the top of the slope. He began to falter and stumble.

  He reached out for support. But on every side the tall, rough bodies of the pine trees, their branches many times his height off the ground, their heads lost in the sky, were the only things near to him; and they gave no help.

  Through the haze of his sweat and weariness he saw on the ridge he was approaching a small tree with branches near the ground. He stumbled, fell, got up, and labored until he fell against the tree trunk, his outstretched arms falling on the short branches sticking out on either side. He leaned there a while, his cheek against the tree, his armpits resting on the branches, catching his breath and sobbing half syllables, waiting for his strength to return.

  But he became aware that his face was lying against something smooth: this was no rough pine bark or knotty sycamore skin. He opened his eyes slowly, easing himself to a standing position and drew back from the tree wonderingly.