For most of my life I have been unable to believe in demon possession . Early in life I did, my religious roots in the Southern Baprist Church told me that if it was in the bible you must believe it and accept it as fact. So I did. I watched Amityville Horror and the Exorcist and was scared to death and I prayed to Jesus that nothing like that would ever happen to me. It all seemed so random and that combined with the power of visual images terrified me. To be completely out of control and to hurt others in that state truly scared me. As I was growing up the Manson murders were still in the news, the killers having been convicted a few months before I was born in 1971. Members of the Manson family were apprehended during the 1970’s and Charles Manson himself gave interviews throughout the 1980’s. This man and these people were, for me, real incarnations of the type of evil possession the bible talked about.
As the years went by and I went to college and law school I left behind this fear and belief in demons and took a much more rational and logical approach. For me it was too easy for someone to say, the devil made me do it, or that a spirit had influenced them in one way or another. I thought it was a cop out, and I was only interested in personal responsibility. I mean seriously what type of magical thinking would I need to have to accept that someone could rob, cheat, steal, or kill and it all be made ok because they had an unclean spirit. I must say that this view of the world helped me. I felt much more in control of my life and my actions. I felt like the world made more sense. Why, I would ask, would God create a world that allow demons to run free and inhabit people and cause them to hurt others. Where did our free will go if that was possible?
This rational approach had as many problems as accepting that demons existed without question. For one who we are as people is greatly influenced by our family and the society we grow up in. There is no way for any of us to say that we became who we are based solely by our own actions. The way we were treated and what we were taught and how we were loved or not loved helped to create us. That suggested that although we are responsible for our actions, we are not always aware of who we are and therefore may do something that seems completely reasonable to us, but that is shocking to others. I sat for a long time in this uncomfortable place between total responsibility and self reliance on the one hand, and acting out of unseen forces influencing us on the other.
So it was then I went to Namibia in 2008. I had heard stories about Africa and how the spiritual realm was closer to the real. It was a place that more accurately approximated the Palestine of Jesus than 21st century America. It was, and is, a place where prayers have magical powers and if prayer does not seem to work the traditional healer will create a potion and give you a spell to do the trick. It is a place where ancestor worship comes and stands side by side with the traditional liturgy of the church. This was the world I was entering into, and in late 2008 I experienced it first hard at the conference center in the rural northern village of Onekweya.
Since 2007 a group of religious sisters had been living at the center. They took care of daily chores and went out into the community to serve the sick and feed the children. They were led by a nun from South Africa named Sister Gertrude. Throughout her time several other young women had come to the center to join in her work. A young girl of about 20 had joined them named Anna. Anna lived with another young woman in a room in a block of small rooms, there were probably 10 rooms in all.
I would stay in one of the rooms towards the other end of the building when I went North to work. One night at the first clergy conference I attended I experienced something that I can still not explain, but it caused me to rethink my attitudes about spirits and demons all over again. Just after lying down to sleep and turning out the lights I heard what sounded like someone knocking on a door at the other end of the hall. The knocking would happen, the stop for a few moments, then get louder and louder. I turned on the light in my room and asked my roommate Katenda what was going on. He said, “I have heard about this. There is a spirit that has been harassing Sister Anna for months now. It comes and knocks at her door. Even if she moves to another room it still happens. She has not slept through the night for a long time.” Well, I thought, there must be a logical explanation for all of this because there is no such thing as spirits that knock on doors. So I got up and put on my clothes and proceeded to investigate for myself. Of course I was going to go and find the window open and a breeze blowing or someone banging the door from the inside trying to get attention. So as I stood near the door only about a foot away, I watched as it began opening and closing very quickly and banging over and over again. Finally it stopped and Katenda looked at me in disbelief. I reached down to the door and tried to open and close it but it was not easy. I looked back to him and he said to me “This is oshilulu” Until that moment I had never heard the word oshilulu and when I asked he said it meant, ghost or spirit. I went back to my room to try and figure out what was happening. Here I was about 20 miles from the Angolan border, 9 hours from my home, and probably 3 miles from the nearest paved road. I was seeing and experiencing what the local people were calling a spirit and I was not sure how I felt about that.
As this was a clergy conference and the bishops were in attendance we took the Anglican approach, we prayed, sprinkled holy water and salt and preformed all the rites we could to exorcise the building and specifically that door. We also prayed over Sister Anna and asked that any spirits that might be affecting her be released. It was a long strange night. At some point around 3am the door did stop knocking and we got some sleep. I was told the next morning that although the locals talk about this sort of thing most of them had never seen it, and I was the first white person that any of them had ever heard of seeing it.
The end of that story is that over many months we tried to sort out the oshilulu and in the end the only thing that stopped the banging was for Sister Anna to leave and go back to her home.
So now I sit with the scriptures of Jesus casting out a demon from a possessed man. I tell myself that although there is truth in this story and that this man could have been possessed by pain and suffering and that he could have been controlled by sprits that caused him to act in a certain way, I don’t want to see it as a factual story. This is not like a news story, where a journalist watched the events unfold then wrote about them. Interestingly Paul’s letters never mention healings or casting out of demons. I want to believe that this is what actually happened but I am transported back to that time as a child and those questions to God about how this type of world is possible.
So I sit at the edge of the liminal space, and the battle between my rational mind and own experience continues. I shift between trying to analyze this story from a psychological perspective or a spiritual perspective. Psychologically I think , maybe this man had had a terrible childhood and that with some talking and care he might have gotten better. Spiritually I think, this man was possessed by something that was hurting him and, most likely, causing him to hurt others. Maybe this is the difference between the pre and post enlightenment world. Before we knew better, we thought about things in a certain way, now we can interpret them properly. But then I remember that the Enlightenment started 400 years ago and I was in Onekweya 4 years ago. So I came to this, there are some things in this world that are mysterious in ways that I do not understand. It does not mean that I should not try to understand, it is just to say that our minds cannot capture all that there is to understand in the world and that sometimes experiences must be filtered through time to be understood, and that our understanding at one point in time is not our last or best understanding.
When it comes to Jesus casting out demons I believe that something very profound happened in that experience, that the man whom Jesus came into contact with was changed and healed and released from something that had bound him. Writing from the first century this was called casting out demons and healing. I don’t know what it would be called today. Movies and television shows try and portray something that will sell tickets and advertising. I do not believe in this view of demons or possession because it is too sensational. Being possessed, or having an unclean spirit does not have to be something that makes the news. It actually happens in many ways each and every day in the lives of people around us, but I still do not understand how it works. I guess the best I can do right now is have faith that I don’t have to know the answers and keep seeking understanding.
