Kingdom Come

by Virginia Weir

  ‘How can you make the distinction?’

  ‘Because you’ve told me you repented after each episode.’

  ‘Repentance that doesn’t seem to bear any fruit,’ said Matilda as she hugged her knees. ‘That’s the most depressing thing about it. Whenever I repent, I always go back to the bottle.’

  ‘As you would if Satan were attacking you,’ Paul pointed out.

  ‘I worry that I’ve crossed the invisible line.’

  ‘What invisible line is that?’ asked Paul.

  ‘The invisible line that separates us from wilful, deliberate and persistent sin,’ she answered, using Alwyn’s exact words.

  ‘You’re a long way from that eventuality.’

  ‘Still, ever since I’ve been attacked by Satan, it’s been in my conscience, niggling away at me.’

  The meeting did bear some fruit: Paul managed to persuade Matilda that falling off the wagon, as he put it, was only an intermittent sin, rather than an act of wilful disobedience. At the back of Matilda’s mind was the place where intermittent left off and wilfulness began. Paul thought she was overly concerned about the issue and said so, while Matilda confessed that it had been on her mind an awful lot recently, ever since Alwyn’s sermon on unforgivable sins, in fact.

  They chatted amiably for about half an hour, as pastor and sheep, followed by a short time of prayer, during which Matilda prayed that the Lord would keep her from conscious and unforgivable sins.

  Her next visitor was Mandy. Mandy came in windcheater and sandals, despite the weather, and joined her for a cigarette and mug of coffee in the Smoke Room, which was also the Visitors’ Room. Neither Nigel nor Lizzie were present; this was a pity because Mandy was an effective evangelist, able to reach out to the most hardened of hearts.

  ‘You’re under attack from Satan,’ said Mandy as soon as they lit up. ‘You should use your Shield of Faith.’

  ‘It didn’t work last time,’ said Matilda.

  She wasn’t being flippant. The last time she had been advised to put on her spiritual armour – and the attack – had carried on regardless.

  ‘You didn’t put it on in time, that’s why,’ said Mandy, pausing to draw on her cigarette. ‘You should put it on every morning before you say your prayers and keep putting it on until the attacks cease.’

  ‘How do you put it on?’ asked Matilda.

  ‘You just pray it on, piece by piece, as if you’re putting it on in real life.’

  Matilda thought this sounded too superstitious for her Evangelical ears but did not say so. Instead she changed the subject.

  ‘How long are they going to keep you in here for?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘A few days, they said.’

  ‘When you’re out, you can come and stay with me for a fortnight or so. Until you find your own feet again, spiritually.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Matilda said. She had not slept since Easter Monday and felt very tired all of a sudden.

  ‘In the meantime, keep praying in tongues and petitioning Jesus.’

  That night, with the evening meds, the nurse on duty gave Matilda a sleeping pill. It made her sleep from early evening until eight o’clock the following morning, when a nurse came into her room and told her she would be seeing Dr Ransom that day.

  ‘He was supposed to see me yesterday,’ said Matilda.

  ‘He’s a very busy man,’ said the nurse.

  Dr Ransom was a slender man with a moustache. He asked her the same questions as the Senior House Officer on Wednesday morning. When it came out that she went to City Mission, he advised her to go somewhere less charismatic, more mainstream.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s just that charismatic churches tend to talk in terms of demon-possession and the demonic,’ Dr Ransom explained. ‘It’s not very helpful to vulnerable people.’

  The implications, she thought, were obvious. She wondered if Dr Ransom were an enemy of Christ. She hoped not.

  Mandy came to see her in the afternoon. It had snowed heavily overnight and now she was wearing a pair of hiking socks with her sandals, her only concession to the weather.

  ‘Are you putting on your spiritual armour?’ she asked.

  ‘I am but it’s not doing much good,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Of course it won’t if you take that attitude!’ said Mandy with a withering glare and in a manner that would brook no opposition. ‘You’ve got to believe!’

  13

  Matilda was released on Friday afternoon into Mandy’s care. Mandy came in a taxi to pick her up from the side entrance of the hospital. Matilda got into it and they sped towards Poppy Road.

  When they got to the house, Matilda went up to her room and threw some clothes into her sports bag and rucksack, then they went to Mandy’s second-floor maisonette, where Mandy handed her an old quilt and said she would be kipping on the sofa.

  Later, they went to the supermarket to get some food and chose an Indian carry-out meal for two, which they carried back to the flat. While Mandy was putting it in the oven to heat it up, Matilda dug out her discharge papers and read them. In the box marked “diagnosis”, Dr Ransom had written “no mental illness”. Matilda felt a spasm of relief. While it was not something she had ever heard voiced directly, she was of the opinion that no Christian worth their salt suffered from a severe mental illness and she was equally sure that most Christians would agree with her. If she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or severe depression, she would have felt all was lost.

  That evening, as they were eating their chicken korma and Bombay potatoes, Matilda said, ‘My thoughts have changed. Before it was a man’s voice speaking out these thoughts but now it’s now my own.’

  ‘It isn’t your voice,’ said Mandy as she speared a Bombay potato with her fork, ‘it only sounds like your voice. I’ve had the same thing happen to me.’

  ‘When?’ Matilda wanted to know.

  ‘When I was still drinking,’ said Mandy, her mouth full.

  ‘That’s odd because it’s only happening to me now that I’m sober.’

  ‘It’s the demon of alcohol.’

  Until Mandy mentioned it, Matilda had not considered the possibility that her thoughts might be the product of demon-possession but it made perfect sense: the heightened sense of fear, the anxiety and the nonstop blasphemy. She obviously wasn’t mentally ill, so demon-possession was the next box to tick.

  ‘How come it only attacks me when I’m sober?’ Matilda asked.

  ‘Because he wants to drive you back to drink,’ said Mandy. ‘When you drink, you’re in the demon’s power, so he’ll aim to drive you back to the bottle. Simple as.’

  Matilda’s appetite had shrunk because of the demon. Whereas before, it had been healthy, now she could only pick and nibble at her food. Because Mandy had gone to the trouble of paying for it, Matilda felt obliged to eat it, even though the thought of food made her feel a little queasy. Matilda ate as much as she could, then Mandy collected the plates and put them in the fridge, for tomorrow.

  The runaway blasphemy kept her up for most of the night and she fell into an exhausted sleep in the early hours of the morning. She did not rise until midday. The urge to drink was stronger than ever, though Matilda really did think that if her lips touched so much as a drop of alcohol, the heavens would part and she would be struck by lightning. Mandy had got her onto drinking Pepsi Max, which she drank by the can, and when this ran out, she drank mugs of strong coffee. And the cigarettes! – up to sixty a day. Mandy’s cat started to cough with all the smoke in the room so Matilda went outside into the covered walkway. After the wintry weather of the previous week, the weather was milder, more spring-like, so it was no great sacrifice.

  Just when things looked as though they couldn’t get much worse, the devil struck once more. On Sunday, as Matilda w
as reading her Bible, she kept hearing a voice declaring, ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’, as if she were rubbishing the scriptures. Inside her head was the infernal yapping of a small lapdog, which was even more galling. The loud music at church only exacerbated her condition. When they sang the words “Jesus is alive”, it sounded for all the world like “Jesus is a lie”. Similarly, when they sang of servants, Matilda thought of serpents, the devil’s familiar. Even the name of Jesus became the name of Judas, his betrayer. Truly, there was no end to the devil’s wiles. By the end of the service, Matilda was reduced to a shuddering, juddering wreck.

  She saw Alwyn afterwards. They went up to the office to pray and he told her, quite categorically, that what she was going through was not a mental illness but some form of demonic attack. She went downstairs to the sanctuary, where Paul and Brenda were waiting to pray for her.

  ‘Do you want to know what the thoughts are telling me?’ she asked Paul.

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t want to get them.’

  ‘They’re getting worse,’ said Matilda.

  Nonetheless, Paul and Brenda started praying for her in tongues and, gradually, Matilda felt the warm, infilling presence of the Holy Spirit. So rightfully restored to her position in the Kingdom did she feel, she thought the attack was at an end. After Paul and Brenda prayed for her, she thanked them and repaired to the wine bar across the road from the church, where she ordered a glass of white wine. But as soon as she lifted the glass, she remembered where she was and felt ashamed. She took a couple of face-saving sips, then left. Walking back to Mandy’s, she felt herself wobble on her feet, as if she was drunk, but she knew this was the Holy Spirit. A couple of lads made fun of her stumbling gait but she cried after them, ‘I’m not drunk – it’s the Holy Spirit, honest!’

  Back at Mandy’s, she phoned work to say she would be reporting for work the next day and spent the rest of the evening talking to Robert, Mandy’s brother, in a manner that was at once relaxed and familiar, gushing good fellowship.

  But in the morning, the thoughts were as bad as ever and there was no sign of the Holy Spirit-induced elation, either. Lying there on Mandy’s sofa, she felt at once depressed and anxious and started praying in tongues.

  The thoughts got a hold of her. She could put up with the yapping of the dog and the rubbishing voice but the thoughts telling her Jesus was demonic were too much. How they depressed and vexed her! And now they had got a grip, she had another thing to worry about, namely the Unforgivable Sin. She prayed that God would keep her from that one especially. For the most of that morning, she prayed in tongues. It was tiring but she was too frightened not to. She was tempted to pick up the phone and call in sick but she needed her job and was already on a Stage One absence report. She couldn’t afford to lose her job now.

  She prayed all through her shift. She thought if she could demonstrate the fact that she was committed to prayer, the thoughts would melt away. But the more she prayed, the more she was aware that they were not improving in any way. If anything, they were worse, because sandwiched in the middle of the Jesus-is-demonic thoughts were thoughts telling her the Holy Spirit was demonic. She didn’t have her Bible to hand to look up the passages on the Unforgivable Sin but she felt sure the Holy-Spirit-is-demonic thought was worse than those about Jesus. Didn’t it say that those who spoke a word against the Holy Spirit would never be forgiven? A shudder ran through her. Despite picking up her work pace, she couldn’t escape the thought if she said either – even inadvertently – she would be risotto. The thought about the Holy Spirit kept taunting her after this and she was especially fearful of it. The realisation that it would lead to the pit of hell if she spoke it out made guarding her tongue an even more onerous task – it begged for utterance, particularly when Satan was taunting her as he was now. She knew if the thoughts persisted, they would end up poisoning her mind against the Lord.

  While on Forward Roads, she saw the gargantuan nature of her task. To be forced to think such rubbish was one thing but to be harassed and goaded into speaking it out was quite another. She wondered if God was happy with this test, this cruel and senseless test of her faith.

  Because she was aware that to speak out these thoughts – to give utterance to the rebellion inside her mind – meant certain damnation, Matilda began to hate God. How could he do this to her? Indeed, she made no distinction between what he willed to come to pass and what he allowed to happen. It was all one and the same to her. Now Satan was laughing her to scorn and there was no sign of the Holy Spirit after his bravura appearance of the night before.

  On the way back to Mandy’s, she stopped at the convenience store and bought a four-pack of cider – she would rather be drunk than listen to this constant dripping all night. As she was walking along the main road, she was so worn down by the Jesus-is-demonic thought, she agreed with it. She walked along the busy roadside thinking, ‘Jesus is not demonised! Jesus is not demonised! Oh, ____, if you say so – Jesus is demonised. I’m sick of this farrago.’

  As soon as she got to Mandy’s, she confessed her sin to Mandy and asked if this was not the unforgivable blasphemy Jesus had spoken of.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mandy, clearly annoyed that Matilda had brought booze into the house, ‘you’ll have to put it before the Lord.’

  ‘It’s not as if he’s going to say to me, “Mattie, I must have a word with you – you’ve blasphemed the Holy Spirit”, is he?’

  ‘You’ll have to take that drink outside!’ said Mandy, her voice rising in unaccustomed sharpness.

  Matilda drank her cans of cider as she chain-smoked in the covered walkway. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself in two or three years’ time, on her death bed perhaps, physically ruined by the blasphemies and Satan’s chronic attacks but unbowed and triumphant, having not repeated any. In her reverie, she imagined others saying of her, ‘She heard constant blasphemies and injurious phrases uttered about the Lord but didn’t repeat a single one of them!’

  After two or three cans, she had become quite inebriated, savouring the pleasant drunkenness when the body and soul felt at ease with the world. If she couldn’t say she felt at ease with herself, at least she could agree that her mind had called a truce on itself. Befuddled with alcohol, the thoughts had slowed and lessened considerably. She went inside to tell Mandy.

  ‘Oh,’ was all Mandy could say as she sipped her coffee and turned her face towards the TV screen.

  14

  More than anything, Matilda feared God’s certain judgement. She was worried that God was waiting for an opportune moment to crush her with his foot – crump! She was sure that just as God rewarded the faithful with an extra big mansion in heaven, so he was digging an especially deep pit in hell just for her. She saw countless pastors and vicars, going from church to church and from manse to manse. They all assured her she had not committed this sin, this blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (even if their understanding of this sin was not the same as hers) but she could not get away from what it said in the Bible.

  She spoke to Alwyn almost every day while staying at Mandy’s. One afternoon, he drove her to his house and told her to renounce these thoughts in Jesus’ name, which was fine and dandy. She duly renounced them and then they popped up again!

  ‘Keep on renouncing them until they’ve gone,’ Alwyn advised.

  Matilda went off to work, renouncing the blasphemy, and thought she had at last found the right formula until the Jesus-is-demonic thought started up again.

  Her hope was that God would speak to her above the tumult. She figured if she was on the cusp of committing such a grave and irrevocable sin, God would want to let her know, so she implored him to warn her before he lowered the boom in judgement. All that happened, however, was that she got the phrases “Matthew twelve, verse twenty-four”, “Luke twelve, verse ten,” and “Mark three, verse twenty-nine,” rattling around in her mind, which sh
e took to be a warning of sorts but wasn’t entirely sure (she already knew all the Biblical references to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, so Satan was obviously just trying to rile her).

  She decided to test Alwyn. ‘I’m starting to speak these blasphemies out,’ she said. ‘Does it concern you?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ he answered.

  ‘Would it be unforgivable of me to repeat these thoughts, even accidentally?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Alwyn asked.

  ‘Somebody told me I would be alright so long as I didn’t speak them out aloud, that if I did, it might be unforgivable.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  It had been Sally who served tea and coffee after the morning service but Matilda suspected that if she bubbled her like this, she would get into trouble, so she said, ‘I don’t want to say anything for fear it might repeat on me.’

  ‘In what way were you thinking of repeating them?’ asked Alwyn.

  ‘I might be tempted beyond endurance and decide to speak them out,’ she explained. ‘I’d like to know if I did end up giving utterance to them, whether I could be forgiven or not.’

  Matilda’s grandmother always said she would have made a good canon lawyer.

  ‘You mean, like pre-forgiveness?’

  ‘I’d like to know, if I’m provoked, whether forgiveness would be possible.’

  ‘Of course it would be possible.’

  ‘It’s a relief to know because I’ve already started speaking them out. Not deliberately but accidentally.’

  ‘I think we have to think in terms of demonic possession,’ said Alwyn.

  ‘You mean, it’s a demon that’s causing the thoughts?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. This kind only comes out through fasting and prayer.’

  They arranged a time to meet the next day. That night, as she went to bed, Matilda started praying, ‘O God, if it’s a demon that’s causing me to think these thoughts, let it be cast out of me.’