Dan Lord's Blog, page 4

The Hobbit!

The Hobbit isn’t just “O.K.” It’s a masterpiece. There. I wrote it. I felt compelled to do so, considering all the humdrum, long-faced reviews I’ve been reading lately, whether in formal critiques or comboxes.  I’ve read how bored some people were, especially during that much-maligned first hour when apparently there was nothing going on and the movie screen was little more than a big blank, except for some chalk drawings of what appeared to be dwarves and a cold vacuum where there ought to have been meaning and character development.

I have no idea what these people were actually doing during that first hour. I personally was riveted for the entire film. Thankfully, I’m not alone in the universe. My two oldest sons were thrilled to bits; my younger brother and I had the longest, nerdiest phone conversation possible trading lauds back and forth…well, that was it, I guess, until I read these two great reviews, both of which capture my feelings nicely and toss a few well-deserved barbs at critics (so I don’t have to):

Fr. Dennis At the Movies

And, my favorite, this one by Seth Abramson. 

 Enjoy!

Pass me that rag, will you? Someone splashed negative criticism all over the side of my face!

Before You Read It, Read About It…

Thanks to all of you supportive readers, Choosing Joy is doing very well at whatever the equivalent of “the box office” is for books. Below are some really well-done reviews/interviews for you to chew on, if you like:

 

Jennifer Fulwiler, from Conversion Diary

Elizabeth Scalia, from The Anchoress

Tony Rossi, of The Christophers. This is Sirius XM’s The Catholic Channel  interview we did–good fun!

Cate Roberts , from Dainty Cate

 

 

 

There are also some shorter reviews here, for which I’m very grateful, and big thank you’s to Jen, Elizabeth, Tony and Cate for their thoughtful treatment of Choosing Joy. I’m honored!!

Frontman: Stories From Life in A Rock Band. Part III.

So, I beat up a man for—what? Being rude?—feeling I had every right to do so, and now I was in handcuffs and en route to the Hoosegow. The Big House. The Pen. The Cooler. The Belly of the Beast. Tuscaloosa County Jail.

And, I must say, it was everything you look for in a jail, assuming you love jail: ugly and harsh, filled with the sounds of buzzers and heavy sliding iron gates and a large, cold room with several dozen incarcerated men coughing and grumbling and absent-mindedly adjusting their private parts. On one half of the room there were two dozen thin white cots arranged in top and bottom metal racks. These were cots which I intended to avoid for one million, trillion years, if necessary.

There was a toilet, too. More than one, if I remember correctly. The exact number of them is irrelevant, since—like the cots—they would not be used by me at any point in this lifetime. I imagined some colossal, brick-jawed indignant fellow inmate asking me, “Why aren’t you using the bathroom like the rest of us?” I decided that I would lie and say: “I have dyschezia,” leaving him in the kind of impotent stupor that comes from being unable to define words like “dyschezia,” and within hours the word would get around that the new guy had some kind of unpronounceable infectious condition. This was the best plan I could come up with at the time.

I found a reasonably unoccupied niche towards the back of the holding cell. I leaned against the wall trying to look both imperturbably relaxed and violently dangerous at the same time, secretly on maximum red alert in case anybody attempted to make me use the bathroom.

In time I began to realize that the other prisoners were actually fairly benign. This wasn’t The Green Mile, after all—my room was just a big temporary holding tank and most everybody there was in for some minor offense and they knew that one way or the other they would be released in a relatively short amount of time, be it 24 hours or a couple of weeks. I had no clue how long I was going to be there.

I should probably just cut to the chase here and let you know now: this isn’t one of those “scared straight” stories. I don’t in any way end up so rattled by my experiences On The Inside that I declare gravely, “Boy, oh, boy, I’ll never beat up anybody again! It’s the straight and narrow for me from now on!” As uncomfortable as I surely was, I remained basically confident that Pose was at that very moment doing everything possible to spring me, at which point I would continue my impulsive wackiness as the frontman for a super rad rock ‘n’ roll band and Woody got just what he deserved, anyway, didn’t he?

But there was something bothering me, nonetheless. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but I knew it had something to do with God. I’m not talking “theophany” here, but theo-something, definitely. I stayed in my niche, watching my jail mates, and let my theo-something quietly develop in the back of my mind.

By about sundown Adam Guthrie, Pain’s guitarist, showed up to deliver me from, if not the Belly, then at least the Esophagus of the Beast. He had been to a bail bondsman and paid to get me out. That, dear readers, is a true friend.

Now, six years later, beneath the multi-colored lights of City Stages, that same wonderful, hairy guy was hoping I would lead a West Side Story-style gang war with Train’s road crew. Smiling uncomfortably I shook my head and wandered off, knowing what a disappointment that must have been for all my pals. The whole initiative fizzled out and we trundled back to the van.

I never told any of them exactly why I decided to stand down that night. I never told them that after I got home from my day in jail in 1993 I made a secret promise to God to never get in a fight ever again.

I’m no pacifist—I’m a Just War theory guy, for one, and to this day I applaud the justice of whipping up on anybody who menaces old ladies, kids, mothers, the defenseless, or kittens. No, my promise was to avoid the endless, meaningless scraps with other guys which could otherwise continue under virtually any flimsy pretext: he looked at me funny, he tried to cheat me, he’s a butthole, et cetera. I didn’t want to fight for those kinds of things anymore.

The reason was not because I was in the process of developing a code of ethics. It was because I perceived that God was disappointed, and that was far worse to me than the sting of backing down from any conflict. So, I told God I wouldn’t do that again.

A seed was thereby plopped into a fresh furrow in my heart and swaddled with soil. Slowly, it began to send out tendrils meant to envelope the proud city I had made of my life and reduce it to crumbled ruins: the ne plus ultra of a life in Christ. My simple pledge was one tiny victorious step in that direction.

It wasn’t the content of the pledge that was the catalyst, though it is tempting to assume that. The catalyst was that I referred to God at all, that I took a part of my life and said without reserve: “This is yours—you can have it back. Sorry I broke it. I won’t screw with it again, I promise.”

So, Woody, wherever you are, if you’re reading this: I am truly sorry for attacking you that day. That was a lousy thing to do. Forgive me. And thanks for not pressing charges.

 If you missed Part 1, go here. If you missed Part 2, go here.

Frontman: Stories From Life in A Rock Band. Part II.

The pledge I had once made to God to not fight was at that moment feeling like a spiritual hair shirt chafing me raw; I just wanted to take it off. I was the frontman for Pain, after all—impulsive wackiness was supposed to be my stock-in-trade. For instance, at a show once in—was it Charlotte? Richmond? I don’t recall—I threw myself off the stage near the end of a song, accidentally opening a gash in my head, and then leaped back on stage and performed the rest of the song with a triumphant smile and blood rushing down my face. Impulsive wackiness. Surely it was time for more of that now that Train’s road crew had sabotaged our show? What kind of frontman makes a no-fighting pledge, anyway?! One of our songs was called “Fight,” for freak’s sake!

I had made the pledge secretly back in 1993, six years prior to the City Stages gig. Incidentally, it was the result of a fight, and it involved a little bar in Tuscaloosa.

The bar owner’s name was Woody. I don’t remember the name of his bar, though it may simply have been…wait for it…“Woody’s.” It was on the Strip, across from the University of Alabama, and it was where Pose (bass player and co-founder of Pain) and I planned to have Pain’s first gig. Contrary to our intentions, it ended up being the location where I gave a grown man a beatdown.

It should be clearly understood that Pain was not an angry band. That’s really saying something—it was 1993, after all. Angry was in. Thanks to Nirvana, grunge and all of the chic bitterness that went along with it had gone from subculture to zeitgeist like an arabian simoom. Go to any bar, club, coffee house or bowling alley where people under 25 were allowed to loiter and you would see anger, self-destruction, sullen apathy and existential dissipation.

This was decidedly not what Pose and I wanted to be a part of when we set out to start a band. The name, “Pain,” was an ironic joke, an oblique reference to the silly cartoon violence endured by the Three Stooges, by Daffy Duck, by Simpsons characters. Our songs were frenetic but always melodic, with lyrics that were self-deprecating and jam-packed with geeky literary references.

We firmly believed that Pain would be a refreshing change to a world that was neck-deep in the angst of grunge, so once we had the right people and had adequately rehearsed we scheduled Pain’s inaugural show at Woody’s bar. People in T-town were officially buzzing about this strange, new musical project and attendance at our first show was shaping up to be strong. I felt like Captain Kirk about to take the Enterprise out on her maiden voyage.

Then, two days before the show, Woody cancelled it.

Pose and I decided to stop in and discuss his decision with him.

Woody’s bar was nothing special: cheap dark carpeting across the walls and grimy pool tables. Sunlight the color of old malt liquor stabbed through a half shuttered window and warmed the random patches of beer residue on the floor to a soft, greasy consistency. When Pose and I walked in Woody was sitting at the bar filling out forms. He was an average-sized fellow, with thinning hair and beady eyes.

I gave Woody less than twenty seconds to give us an explanation, which was delivered in a monotone mumble and amounted to: “Oh well, that’s what I decided to do and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Then I punched Woody in the face.

Off his barstool he went. I moved in fast as he tumbled to the floor and I clonked him a few more times across the cheeks. His eyes stared back in utter disbelief. It was like he had been raised in a Tibetan monastery and had never conceived of the possibility that a man could punch another man. His hands began to flutter weakly in front of his head, but that was all he had in terms of self-defense techniques.

I backed off. He scrabbled to his feet and shot like a feathered dart behind the bar.

That was good enough for me. Retribution had been exacted. Pose and I walked calmly out of Woody’s bar. We didn’t run—we walked, at a very casual pace. As the sunlight hit our faces Pose said to me, with admiration, “That was cool, man.”

We got about halfway down the block when one of Woody’s henchmen came racing down the street shouting at us.

“Stop right there! Stop! I just called the cops—you’re going to jail!”

I sneered, but clearly it was time for some reasonable evasive action. Pose and I quickly agreed to split up and meet later. Off I went down the street, but I had not gone more than a few yards before a brown unmarked police car roared onto the curb behind me. Their doors flew open and a couple of large authority figures deplaned.

A few minutes later I was experiencing the taste of dirt at one end of a blind alley and having handcuffs attached to my wrists. Apparently, there is something somewhere in Tuscaloosa’s city statutes about it being illegal to attack people. Yes, kids, if you’re reading this: Daddy went to jail.

End Part 2.

  Part 3 here.

If you missed Part 1, go here

Frontman: Stories From Life in a Rock Band. Part I.

In 1999, the rock band known as Train was the entertainment world’s equivalent of a Greek god, a multi-platinum-selling sacred cash cow with videos and singles circling the heavens and bouncing back and forth from orbiting satellites to earthly receivers like billions of invisible rubber darts. They regularly headlined music festivals throughout the world.

Festivals like the now defunct City Stages, for instance, in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1999 Train was at the top of the City Stages bill along with other musical heavy-hitters like Iggy Pop and Ben Harper. But in the cool of that June evening, while the first stars winked in the sky, there was only a fraction of the expected crowd waiting in front of Train’s stage.

This sobering fact had begun to increase the collective blood pressure of Train’s entourage. Where was everybody? Train’s show was about to start! Why weren’t masses of people pressed against the front of the stage with eyes aglow and breasts heaving for Train favorites like “Drops of Jupiter”? What was the problem?

The problem was Pain. That was the band I was in. The rhyming band name thing is a coincidence, by the way, and the “a-i-n” was the only thing we had in common. Pain had no major label support, no platinum selling records, and no videos playing on MTV—we had two custom made videos (one of which had seen some action on MTV 2), lots of great underground press and strong ties to various independent labels and booking agents, and we had done a commercial for the Cartoon Network. Nothing within the same light year as Train’s ongoing media blitzkrieg, though. They had huge Top 40 hits like “Meet Virginia.” Plus, Train just looked famous. They wore the very best of edgy street fashion. Their veins ran clear with filtered spring water instead of blood.

Pain, by contrast, looked like a kennel of friendly, scruffy lost dogs, the kind that you can’t resist throwing a piece of old hamburger to but then shoo away before they rub the mange on your pants leg. My own attempts at self-expression via fashion were a haphazard failure. My hair was blue or green at the time (I don’t remember which), done by somebody’s friend’s friend who had lost her job at the salon for good reason. I had on the same dirty pair of shants (see illustration) that I’d been wearing for a week. Pose, the bass player and my best friend in all the world, was wearing a tee shirt and a pair of faded khaki shorts. The other six members of Pain were similarly bedraggled and odd. We were not rock star material.

We were pouring our hearts out, though, all 8 of us, pouring them all over that side stage and into the eyes and ears of a captivated audience. We were about four songs into our set at this point, with horns blasting and guitar riffs raking the air. It had become clear at last to Train’s entourage why people were not gathering at the Train stage.

They were still at the Pain stage.

Train’s road crew was, apparently, in a state of enraged panic over this. They were frantically trying to bring about the end of Pain’s show, berating the crew responsible for our stage, threatening them with actual bodily harm if their demands were not met immediately.

I had no idea. At the time, I personally was looking out at a veritable ocean of some of the happiest, most enthusiastic faces I’d ever seen. There were something like a thousand people looking at me and my ragtag band, many of them shout-singing our lyrics, cheering for more. Behind me, Train’s Fan Management Patrol was literally threatening people with ass-beatings if the plug wasn’t pulled on our show.

So, the plug got pulled—if I remember correctly, it happened right in the middle of “Fight,” a likeable, popular song of ours. People went nuts. The crowd erupted into an earthquake of boos and howls.

Our drummer, George, was infuriated. His Irish blood turned to magma in situations like this. He had always been like that, ever since we met back in high school, and I loved him for it. Adam, the guitarist, was pissed, too. They both looked to me with the expectation that I would lead an assault on Train’s stage like it was an English fort and we were painted Scots. That’s the kind of thing that was expected of me, after all. I had beaten up people before—why not Train people, too?

I wanted to. I was reluctant. Why? Maybe, in part, it was the pseudoephedrine, which I was taking on a regular basis in those days. Then again, the whole reason I took pseudoephedrine was to fuel my pre-existing anti-social tendencies which would then cause me to rock the effing mike, or something along those lines. A guy like that would be expected to join a rumble—so what was going on with me?

I didn’t feel comfortable telling anybody the real reason for my sudden seizure of non-violence.

I couldn’t fight, because I had told God I wouldn’t.

End Part 1

 Part 2 here.

Protected: The Closest Devils. Part 3 of a 3 Part Series

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The Closest Devils. Part 3 of a 3 Part Series

The following events are true. The names have been changed for confidentiality’s sake.

I didn’t know that it was Exorcism Time, when it came. Father Cornelius was kind of sneaky about it. I was sitting obliviously in a chair, waiting for him to get back from what I had assumed was a visit to the toilet, when in he walked carrying a huge gold monstrance with a smooth round Host in it. He lit some candles and, as casually as he could, he dragged a gargantuan white binder full of exorcism rituals across the coffee table. There would be no snack break today.

To his credit, he put and kept me completely at ease. A hodgepodge of soft yellows and browns, his office was the comforting hobbit-hole I would have expected, filled with well-worn easy chairs and dog-eared books. A pleasing smell of cigarette smoke hovered around the drapes and the upholstery. His voice, as usual, was the auditory equivalent of warm tomato soup.

I officially confessed to all the horrible sinful activity on my Big Stupid List of Things No One Should Ever Do. After my absolution, I formally asked him to submit me to the Catholic Church’s rite of exorcism.

In some alternate universe, I’m sure, the sound of a bell signaled the start of Round 1.

Father began a long litany of prayers. One calm phrase after another, humbly asking God to purify me of every conceivable stain of evil. No aspect of my soul, mind or physiology was left unmentioned. I just sat in my chair and concentrated as well as I could while his warm soup voice rolled out each verse.  

Then something subtle but unmistakable happened to the room. The tone of the colors shifted from wholesome and agreeable to morbid and dirty. As Father C.’s prayers continued, I began to move my hands up to my face. To an observer, it was only the unthinking motion of any man sitting for too long in the same place, no different than stretching, scratching your arm, or popping your knuckles. But it was different. It was my first experience of what I had previously only read about in books or seen in movies, the experience of having your body controlled from the inside by a will other than your own. My hands slowly covered my face, and my eyes stared wildly out between the fingers. What was in me was terrified, like a feral cat trying to stay hidden.

Father C. reached the end of that phase of the ritual. My hands slid away from my face and I could hear him gently asking how I was feeling. I said something vague, like “good…pretty good…” but the words weren’t really representative of anything.

Round 2. Father explained that the next part of the ritual would involve an invocation of each Person of the Holy Trinity. I was now expected to participate. I assumed a kneeling position, and Father moved the huge binder near me so I could read the prayers. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like: “I love the Father, the First Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and I desire to be with Him forever. I love the Son, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and I desire to be with Him forever. I love the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and I desire to be with Him forever.” Again: that isn’t the exact formulation, so to all you professional exorcists out there I apologize if I’m off script a little. The point is: it was a short profession of love and devotion to God, so easy a child could say it, right?

Father said the first verse, and I repeated it. No problem.

Father read the second verse, and I repeated it. Man, this was easy! Exorcisms aren’t so bad, after all!

Father read the third verse: “I love the Holy Spirit, Third Person of the Holy Trinity…” Now my turn, right? O.K. no problem, here we go: “I lo..I..I lll…lllll…” I paused; took a breath. “I love the H..the H….”

The knuckles of my clasped fingers had gone white.

“Father,” I murmured, almost with embarrassment, “I can’t read that.”

Father reassured me. “It’s O.K. You can read it.”

I turned away from the binder.

“Just try,” said Father. He read the line again, and I tried to repeat it, but couldn’t. Father kept up his gentle encouragements, and I continued trying to say the words of the ritual. I was suddenly aware that my stomach had knotted up, not like nausea, but like a fist was pushing into my gut.

Somehow, at some point, I said that third prayer of love to the Holy Spirit. I got it out. I was in a state of anxiety now, because there was no doubt that there were creatures in me who were absolutely opposed to my intentions.

Round 3. Father moved on to the next phase, but I had blanked out a little. He had to tell me to get back in the chair. I did, but the fist was still crushing my stomach. Father asked how I was feeling, but I was distracted and all I could say was “hot…burning hot…” That was true. It had come upon me all of a sudden, and I pulled off my jacket and dropped it on the floor.  I felt sick and feverish.

Father was not strictly following the pages in the binder anymore, but adjusting his methods to fit the behavior of the evil spirits at that moment. I won’t pretend to understand it all. There was plenty of extemporaneous prayer to Christ, and some archaic-sounding Hebrew recitations, some Latin, too…I was a little out of it, so I could only dimly appreciate it all at the time. In retrospect it was spiritual Mortal Combat.

Things came back into focus when Father turned to me with a crucifix. It was larger than average, like something from a school room or…hey!…a priest’s office. Father’s voice was still warm soup, and he said, “O.K. now Dan, what I would like you to do now is just kiss the Holy Cross, alright?”

Well, Dan Lord has no problem kissing the Holy Cross. In fact, I keep a small pewter crucifix on my desk and I was in the habit of kissing the little silvery feet of the Corpus every day. Just the day before I had kissed that crucifix. But now, as Father presented the Holy Cross to me I turned away and said bluntly: “It’s not working.”

Father asked me to kiss the crucifix again.

“It’s not working.”

It was my voice, people—there was no demonic howling, no trippy vocal effects. My voice. But not me.

Father firmly, but calmly, in the name of Christ, demanded to know the identity of this spirit.

“It’s quiet.”

Father asked again, perhaps thinking this answer was an evasion, but he got the same answer: “It’s quiet.”

Ladies and gentleman, I simply cannot adequately explain just how colossally wacko it is to hear words coming out of your mouth that you yourself did not formulate or intend. Father now realized that this particular spirit was obeying Christ with its answer—it’s basic nature was quiet—like the quiet of a black widow, or of a serial killer in a dark cell. I had invited him in years before by taking an Oath of Silence in jest. It was an absurd, anarchical act that I thought was frightfully clever at the time, intended to piss off people around me. I made a solemn show of it, took the Oath, and refused to say a word for about two weeks, then got bored and gave up on it. But the spirit didn’t leave, see?

Don’t take oaths casually, my friends. Remember in A Man For All Seasons when St.  Thomas More’s beloved daughter, Margaret, is trying to convince him to take the king’s fiendish new oath of allegiance? “Say the words of the oath,” she pleads, “and in your heart think otherwise.”

Her dad knew better, though. “An oath is made of words!” he tells her. “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his hands.” Actions have consequences, whether you mean for them to or not. Be careful what you swear to.

In Christ’s name, the Spirit of Quiet was cast out. I could hear Father Cornelius making strained sounds, and I learned later that the exorcism caused him bodily pain—not uncommon, I’m told.

 Mr. Quiet was not alone, though. Turns out I had a little poker table full of evil spirits. Father identified the next one as Wild Man Spirit—I had been accompanied by it since high school. It was a fierce, chaotic devil that helped me to gain the status of Craziest Guy At the Party, and, boy, was he present in my antics as frontman for my band, Pain–for instance, I used to hurl my body to the stage floor repeatedly during the last measures of one of our songs. People loved that, but even without the cheering the blood and bruises gave me a thrill.

Wild Man still wasn’t the worst, though. As I sat in a kind of upright paralyzed position in my chair I could hear Father relentlessly praying. He was also seeing things—don’t ask me to explain it; I don’t know if he was having interior visions or if he saw horned ghouls swirling around the office. I just don’t know. But right then he “saw” another member of my infernal poker club. He said its name: “Pan.”

You’re thinking the same thing I was, right? Pan? The cute little goat-legged guy from Fantasia? I don’t get it, either. All I know is that there was an utter pall of evil over the room now, and Father said: “I’m looking at it right now.” He was staring over my shoulder at the time, and I was not ABOUT to turn around. Father chanted intensely in Hebrew, and then in Christ’s name he cast Pan out. Asmodeus was next–he was from my days with the hip pseudo intellectual pagan girl. Baal was cast out after that. There were others, too, but I don’t remember their names.

The whole thing took a total of about four hours. My temperature dropped back to normal, my stomach unclenched, and the room once again became a snug, pleasant hobbit’s office. Though, to be fair, if we’re going to stick with the Tolkien metaphors, Father Cornelius strikes me a little less as a hobbit now and more like the White Wizard himself.

I drove home, sporadically breaking into tears. Do you know what I felt? I felt free. That’s what I kept saying to myself: I’m free. And I was. I am. That doesn’t mean I am now a living, walking saint, of course—the great battle of Christian discipleship goes right on until death. At last, though, that feeling of trying to do bench presses with invisible weights on my arms is now totally gone. I’m free!

 But some caution is in order here. Father Cornelius himself repeated the warning to me more than once. Although the spirits are out, I have to be careful for the rest of my life not to get mixed up in any activity that would effectively invite them back in, because if they come back and find their previous home “swept clean and put in order” it will be much, much worse for me than before. Check out Luke 11:24-26 to see what I mean.

Anyway, I’m free. For the first few weeks after my liberation my wife stayed in a state of delighted shock over the changes she could see in me. I am no longer hectored by shadowy chimeras at night; I used to respond to things with ridiculous over-the-top explosions of Incredible Hulk-style wrath, but not anymore; I sleep peacefully at night. I can say with genuine humility that I can finally see myself advancing in Christian virtue.

“Too long have you sat in shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings,” said Gandalf to Theoden in The Two Towers. “Breathe the free air again!”

If you missed Part 1, go here.

If you missed Part 2, go here.

Protected: The Closest Devils. Part 2 of a 3 Part Series.

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The Closest Devils. Part 2 of a 3 Part Series.

The following events are true. The names have been changed for confidentiality’s sake.

Well, I couldn’t deny it anymore. There was an actual evil presence attached to me.

I had several reactions. Revulsion was an initial one.

I was also indignant: how did I end up with demons? Some guys get poison oak; some guys get crabs. Not me, though. Nope. I got demons.

The answer lay in that list of all my occult-related activities, fastidiously compiled by Father Cornelius and me. It was still just a single piece of paper, but now it was completely covered back and front with Father C.’s rather unattractive scrawl. Ominous phrases twisted around the margins and coiled in the corners.

I was exhausted, in a way that was different than normal fatigue; a spiritual exhaustion. I had trudged a long, painful way in revealing to Father C. all the junk that made up the items on that list. I saved the worst for last…in fact, I honestly didn’t remember the worst until later in the interview process.

I won’t curl your hair with the details, but I do want to stress one thing, in particular: none of the activities were conscious, purposeful appeals to evil spirits. And guess what? They don’t have to be! Boing! “I was just playing around” didn’t get me off the hook. Evil actions produce evil consequences regardless of how I feel about it. Isn’t it insidious how relativism has sunk into our modern brains so deeply that we don’t even realize it? I just unconsciously figured that evil actions were only evil if I assigned an evil value to them. As long as I didn’t don a black hooded robe and pin a dead housepet to a pentagram at the stroke of midnight then everything else was pretty much up for grabs.

For instance: why not acquiesce to my hip, pseudo intellectual girlfriend’s pagan ritual dabblings involving human blood? I’m so into new experiences, and there’s just heaps of exotic, viscerally appealing elements to a pagan blood ritual. Consequences? Shmonsequences! After all, I am not really participating—not like that. What am I, some druid who seriously wants to invoke the power of spiritual entities? Hah! And if a guy like me does not accept that there will be those kinds of consequences then there won’t be any, right? Right?

Hello?

My God, my God, how many idiots like me have tripped through life in this twisted age of ours thinking this way, unwittingly inviting every stinking shade from the bottom-most drawers of Hell to come put their clawed feet up on the couches of their souls and make themselves at home? I had come back to the Church, thank God, but all of those loathsome spirits for which I had thrown open my doors had just as much a legal right to be where they were as they had before my conversion. (And please don’t be put off by my use of the word ‘legal’ here—it is quite applicable. Giving consent to a thing is binding on the spiritual plane as well as the terrestrial plane.) My actions had spiritual consequences, and those consequences were not just going to politely leave. They had to be dealt with.

It explained so much. My wife was well acquainted with the demonic attacks I had been enduring for as long as she had known me. Sleepless nights; waking up swiping at shadowy spiders and bats, seeing dark figures in the room with me; uncontrollable rages.  

It should have been an immense relief knowing the cause of all of this weirdness—and there was some. But there was also a huge weight of demoralization. It felt as if everything I’ve been trying to do with my life for the past decade—getting back on track, going to Mass, developing virtue, embracing fatherhood—it all seemed like a big sham now. I was a failure.

Truth to tell, it was peeling back the cover of a psycho-spiritual disease which I had been carrying around a long time, which I shall now dub the Epic Loser Syndrome.

Let me explain. There is a reason that the Devil is sometimes called “the Accuser.” It is kind of like his self-appointed job to stand over you and insistently shout (and, for some reason, I see Satan played by Will Ferrell when I picture this): “Heaven? You want to go to Heaven?!? Who do you think you are? You’re a Sinner! Your sins are HUGE…GIGANTIC…you’re the worst, most unworthy screw-up since Judas! I got news for you, chief: you can hang up your gloves now ‘cuz this fight is OVER…” And so on.

And, without fully realizing it, I had embraced this accusation. I had become convinced a long time before that my sins and I were completely synonymous, and that I was unlovable as a result. I believed that God was indeed the merciful God of the Gospels—I just didn’t really accept that his mercy applied to me. It is as if I was a murderer on death row who was being offered a full pardon by the President, a pardon which I refused to accept. I got my children to Mass, I was raising them to love Jesus and Mary, I faithfully served my wife and my family…I owed them that, you see, and I owed Jesus that, and it was the right, noble thing for a man to do. But inside I would always remain an unworthy heap of excrement, a man-shaped pile of sins.

Thank God for Father Cornelius. He somehow picked up on my self-loathing and he gently chided me for it all.

“You are not your sin,” he said, to which I responded by staring down at the ground.

“Look at me, Dan. You are not your sin. You are a child of God, made in His Image!”

Father kept drilling that into my head: I am, in essence, good. As a baptized Christian I am an adopted Son of God. It is an essential reality which no amount of filth and lousy behavior can change, and therefore a destiny, if I may use that term. It was time for me to stand up and take hold of that destiny. It was mine, after all—God gave it to me, and all of Hell couldn’t take it away. Accepting this fact was the psychological antidote to the Epic Loser Syndrome.

But this wasn’t therapy. As I noted before, the evil spirits had a valid legal spiritual claim on me. I had invited them. The only way to kick them out was to call upon the One Person who had the power to shred all such claims and pay the fees out of His own immeasurable pocket. That meant carrying this dispute into an ancient spiritual coliseum for a Throw Down of major proportions—not major because there was any concern about who, between Jesus and the Devil, was the stronger, but because I was still not sure about me. It was going to get worse before it would get better, after all, plus Father Cornelius could not really be sure how powerful or how deeply embedded my satanic stowaways were until we got into the thick of things. Would I have the guts to see it through?

 End Part 2.      

 If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, go here.

Go here for Part 3

Protected: The Closest Devils. Part 1 of a 3 Part Series

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