Binding and Loosing

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.