I haven’t mentioned my regular interlocutor Trevor here for
a while, but I thought of him a couple of weeks ago when the diocese sent out a
paper reminding all the clergy that they are on no account to attempt to engage
in the business of exorcism themselves, but always bring in the diocesan
advisers on ‘the ministry of deliverance’. I sort of broke those rules lately,
and knew I was doing so, which I shouldn’t tell you, but then I tell you many
things I probably shouldn’t.
I’ve taken Trevor to see a couple of Diocesan Advisers on
Deliverance, and other Christian specialists, all of whom have told him that
they see no signs of diabolical activity beyond the sort of temptation and
bewilderment to which we are all subject, amplified and intensified by mental illness.
Every time we go through this, Trevor accepts the diagnosis at first, and then,
trying to make sense of the manifestations which beset him, he eventually
reverts to believing that he’s possessed, or at least under demonic attack.
Recently he took up with Adrian, a new friend who is a
Charismatic Christian and who offered to put him in touch with someone who had
experience in this area. It turned out that I knew this man, Martin, a gentleman
of some standing and charity who is known to other people I’m familiar with
too. He wanted to provide Trevor with what he referred to as ‘personal
ministry’ but was adamant that it would do no good unless Trevor started
engaging with the church, and so he wanted the sessions to take place in the parish church. What should I do?
I decided that I would facilitate Martin’s meetings with Trevor, under very
close monitoring by me, as I knew I could get into trouble if anything went
wrong. Only because Martin was already known to me as someone whose sincerity I
trusted did I even consider it. He thought Trevor might have ‘a lying spirit’.
OK, I deliberated, nobody has ever mentioned that before; perhaps he can
identify something none of the rest of us has. Perhaps my scepticism or
sinfulness prevents God getting through to me, which is why I haven't been able to help. I also don’t have a great deal
of confidence in some of the people whose authority I am supposed to rely on:
when I described some of the bizarre opinions of the last deliverance expert I dealt
with to S.D., he cried out ‘You’re joking! They’re mad!’ and told me to report
them to the Bishop (which I didn’t).
And so two sessions took place, for both of which I was on
hand. They amounted to a bit over four hours. Martin prayed over Trevor,
scrutinising his responses and answering his questions, while Adrian read Bible
passages and occasionally chuntered to himself in what I imagine was supposed
to be a spiritual Tongue but which sounded a bit like an annoyed dolphin (even Trevor said later, 'That's not really speaking in tongues'). For
quite some time Martin addressed the entity he seemed to think was inhabiting
Trevor, commanding it to leave. Nothing was hysterical or over the top: after
the first session was over everyone had sandwiches and tea. Yet when I spoke to
Martin outside the encounters he was much more equivocal. ‘I think there’s probably
something there’, he said in a musing tone, and fully recognised that Trevor’s
schizophrenia and suggestibility was an element in his symptoms. As so often
over the last seven years of dealing with Trevor, I wasn’t able to see anything
that had no natural explanation. At one point he spoke in a harsh, gruff voice
‘I won’t come out’, which was very clearly his own voice: I don't think he's 'putting it on' in any obvious sense, but that his awareness of the difference between what's real and what's not is so weak it leads him to manifest symptoms that have no real basis. I felt that we could
have kept going for a year and achieved nothing. A few days after the second
meeting, Trevor decided he didn’t want to carry on, mainly because he thought
that he was going to say something that might get him into trouble (a fear that
arises from his obsessional thoughts). I would have preferred him to persist for
a while, so we knew for sure, but there it was.
I can't be completely sceptical about these sorts of processes.
Years ago I had a close friend who was troubled with horrible manifestations
and hallucinations, on top of a range of other problems. This person went to see a
couple of pastoral workers at a big evangelical church locally, who prayed over
them and, apparently, both received a very strong and distinct mental
visual impression, a picture, something that had to do with my friend’s
spiritual oppression and that they were supposed to pray against. They never used
words like ‘possession’ or ‘demons’. So they prayed, and after few minutes
announced ‘it’s gone’. And the
hallucinations stopped. There were many other problems for my friend still to deal with, but
that psychotic trouble instantly and permanently disappeared, at that point. Nobody
quite understood what it was all about, but clearly something had happened. So I have to take it all seriously, don’t
I?
I had really wanted Trevor genuinely to find some help. I
wanted Martin to show some real discernment into what was going on with him, to
have some word or impression that might open the situation up, like the people
who worked with my friend did: but there was nothing. I have to say it seemed
as though he was flailing around in the unknown as much as I was. There should
have been something rather than the
utter silence there was, especially as Martin said he’d been praying about the
situation for a month before we all first got together.
As it happened, although Trevor’s symptoms haven’t exactly
lessened, he is showing a new scepticism towards them, able, at least
sometimes, to understand that his voices and hallucinations aren’t real, that
the things they tell him don’t make any sense, and that his fears are
groundless. So perhaps that’s a little bit achieved; we'll see how long it lasts. But the NHS website has
been more help with that than demon-busting, it must be said.
Fascinating - and admirably well-balanced, it seems to me. I love the "annoyed dolphin" and the tea and sadnwiches alongside the serious consideration of Trevor's difficulties - is there something specifically Anglican about this blend of open-minded spirituality and feet-on-the-groundness? In any case, it's invaluable in our strident and often dizzying world.
ReplyDeleteWell, neither of the gentlemen is an Anglican in any simple sense so there's no clear connection there. And I've come across some Anglicans whose feet are quite a long way from the ground!
ReplyDelete