On the Ministry of Exorcism

I am in a seriously contemplative state regarding the ministry of exorcism this evening. It is a subject that very few people are willing to confront, much less address with any degree of the seriousness with which it is deserving.



I watched a show the other night called Taboo... It was about exorcisms around the world.
An Independent Catholic in Columbia, a minister in Arizona, and an Evangelical Preacher in Florida.
The Floridian preacher teaches that salvation is found through demonic exorcism, and claims to have performed thousands of exorcism, and as many as several hundred in one evening at one of her self proclaimed mass deliverances. The video showed as many stereotypes as one could reasonably expect to cram into a 15 minute segment. From big hair, to wailing, from smacking foreheads to fainting in the isles.

The minister in Arizona directed an"exorcism" performed by a team of five teenage virgins (one of whom being his own daughter) of a man possessed by an ancient hereditary demon of temple prostitution. A demon of unnatural sex and lust.

I had a very difficult time taking the first two examples very seriously. I guess you might have needed to see the episode, but it all seemed quite absurd. The Colombian priest was by far the more credible of the three (Although he may not have been deemed so in the eyes of the Holy Roman Church, as his approach owed a great deal to the cultures primitive religious roots), helping a man plagued by rage, depression and thoughts of suicide.

I myself have been intimately involved in two exorcisms in my life. One, in my teen years, when a close friend of mine was the victim a possession after playing with an Ouija board, which coincided with another, completely unrelated set of circumstances that I was involved with regarding occultists and a thought-to-be missing child's thought-to-be gravestone. The common denominators were the location and me. Anyway, the whole situation culminated in a police investigation (that tuned up the whereabouts of the thought-to-be missing child, and the reality of some very bizarre occult practices surrounding that location in recent times past (from the mid 1960's through the mid 1980's)), and a priest from the local Greek Orthodox Church coming to the girl in question's house, performing an exorcism on her, and cleansing the home. She came out of it okay, and her broken and burnt arm eventually healed (sorry about that K.P.)

My second event was much more recent. Just a couple of years ago in fact. I was asked to come and cleanse and bless the house of a friend of mine (who was a self-proclaimed witch) after she has been experiencing some very disturbing dreams and physical manifestations (both on the property, and bodily) after an evening of tromping about haunted down-town Roswell. We arranged to have the grandmother and child out of the house for a few hours and I geared up and headed over. Based on the case history, I suspected that this was not going to be a run of the mill cleansing. There is more to the case than I will elaborate on here, but suffice it to say, the evening produced more than either of us bargained for. By the end of the night, I had performed a very impromptu exorcism, bluffed my way out of a very tight spot, and realized that if this was an elaborate psychodrama that I had played a role in, then good had been done; if it was a really real thing that had just transpired, then I was either very lucky, or very blessed, because I could have been well and truly f***ed. In the end, I was eating my hard-boiled eggs and drinking my green Gator-Ade, and she was stepping into the light of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So here we are, a couple of years later (really more like 20+ years later), I have been doing a fair bit of reading on the subject, evaluating the events of my past, seeking to discern the path before me, and have come to the conclusion that there are indeed stranger thing 'tween heaven and earth than dreamed of by your philosophies Horatio.

So what then do I think of of all of this? I believe that there are spirits loose in this world that have not risen, or fallen, or "made the jump" as I put it (moved on to their next bodily host). Some of them are hostile or even malevolent, and some are just scared or lost. They tend to scare us, make us uncomfortable in our own homes (Hell, I experienced one even as I was (probably because I was) writing this.) They are the ones that usually go "bump" in the night.

Then there are demons. Demons demand our more serious attention. They are the ones to really worry about. They are the Fallen and the truly wicked souls of this Earth in their charge. Good news for us, they are much less common than lost souls. But they are also much harder to deal with. I do not believe that every troubled or crazy person is possessed by demons, but I also do not think that every troubled or crazy person is necessarily just troubled or crazy. Ever wonder about those "crazies" who say that God talks to them? Have you ever really... stopped... and thought about it... I mean, if God talked to YOU, and no one believed you, would it make you just a little upset? I know it did for me when it happened to me. Hell, it cost me my two best friendships and my wife at the time. Thank God, my now wife didn't think I was crazy.

So what about demons? Do they talk to us? Do they coerce us to do things out of our nature, do they *make* us act beyond our control? Did the Devil make us do it?

Sometimes... yes.

But only really sometimes. You see... there is a process of discernment that one has to go through in determining the possibility of a possession. I am not going to detail it here, but there is a process in place. The Roman Catholic Church has recently readdressed the reality of the problem. To my knowledge the Eastern Orthodox Church has never denied the problem, and more modern Evangelical sects have always had their own ways of dealing with the question of possession and exorcism. None of them is right or wrong in how they address the problem, the bigger question is in discernment. Is a crazy person really crazy? Is a sick person just sick? Or is there, after all other options have been exhausted, the possibility of actual demonic possession?

To be continued...