Self Diagnosis

Trevor, my long-term hard case, sat in the chair in his flat opposite me as we listened to Derek Prince, the late conservative-evangelical preacher, talking about driving out demons in a recording Trevor had downloaded. ‘I won’t come out, I won’t come out!’ Trevor said in a ‘demonic’ voice. ‘I’ll kill Trevor! I’m going to kill his family!’ They were the very words Mr Prince had a few seconds before reported a demon using that he had cast out of a Baptist lady in the US. I don’t think Trevor even knew he was copying what he was hearing. ‘Those words I used’, he said a day or two later, ‘they prove I have a demon in me.’ I tentatively pointed out that they were exactly the same as in the recording. ‘Yes, so that proves it,’ Trevor insisted, innocently as far as I can tell.

I only went to listen to the teachings of Brother Prince because Trevor has been raising some genuine matters over the last couple of months which seem to have some bearing on his particular anxieties and at least the form his illness takes. I think we could be on the brink of making some progress if we can only deal openly with those things and the damage they’ve done to Trevor over the years: there is the prospect that he might be freed up, just a bit, from some of the terrible constraints that keep him shut down. Then into the middle of it he mentioned coming across the Derek Prince Ministries website and so I felt I had to listen to what he’s listening to. It might be, I thought, it just might be, that Mr Prince could be able to tell me something I didn’t know, to convince me I was wrong on this issue.

He didn’t. The first time Derek Prince was involved in casting out a demon, he was invited by a Baptist minister to take part in the deliverance of a woman he’d never met before; he witnessed ‘a sulphurous light in her eyes’ at one point, and the assembled church members (men, it’s worth noting) found her hard to stop her choking herself. This took place in the context of a five-hour deliverance event in which the Baptist minister took the approach of shouting at the spirits infesting the woman. Mr Prince disagreed with this approach, and was much quieter when he took over. That experience changed his view about demonic infestation being possible among believers, and he began to preach about it in his own congregation. At first nothing happened until he was, by his own admission, getting particularly carried away one morning when the church pianist began screaming and fell to the ground. After that his conservative Presbyterian flock took it all more seriously and began coming forward with their own diabolical problems.

More stories followed. With one exception – a woman who Mr Prince maintained showed supernatural knowledge of the languages and cultures of east Africa – what I heard was accounts of what I ended up calling the traumatic breakdown of cognitive dissonance. Very often the phenomena are produced by people who have been nursing a secret sin or negative experience (or sometimes just a doubt) for many years and never talking about it: in many authoritarian religious settings it’s impossible to talk about such things without shame and damage. There then comes a moment when the sufferer is given permission to speak in the specific context of being ‘delivered’. In this way the unspeakable truth and the tension associated with it is released, in a way which enables the sufferer to distance both themselves and the church community from it, denying it was really anything to do with them, and following a pattern which they, the communities they belong to, and the authority figures dealing with them, expect. It’s a sort of catastrophic act of confession. Once a Christian minister or practitioner begins misinterpreting what they’re seeing, they start the dubious but understandable process of trying to build it into a coherent structure, which usually (even for Mr Prince, it turned out) involves going well beyond the Bible. Other Christian traditions both expect sins and problems to take some winkling out over time, rather than be solved instantly when someone first converts, and, through the sacramental life, provide some means of doing it.

Still, I thought, Jesus does a lot of exorcising and so do the apostles when he sends them out. In fact he goes into the synagogues and demons just shoot out of people at his mere presence. What was different then, I wondered? Eventually I realised that what was different was the Church. Exorcisms of a minor and undramatic sort are regularly incorporated in the sacraments, and the sacraments – God’s means of dealing with sin and damage – are the means of entry into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Those who came to hear Jesus during his earthly ministry could not enter into his healing death and resurrection and appropriate it for themselves because it hadn’t happened. There is much more one could say about this (of course), but that seems like an important thought.

None of that helps Trevor much. I am trying to delay answering the question of whether he is actually infested until we’ve tackled some of the genuine issues; if I’m compelled to say No he won’t engage at all. I am telling myself, somehow, that I'm still keeping an open mind.