Bondage (Part I)
Some time ago, I was asked point blank, “Have you ever opened yourself up to demonic influence?” All I could say was, “Probably…” How do you respond to a question like that? I’ve had a pretty interesting life. I’ve experimented with different things. I’ve been in places where things were being experimented with. If it’s actually possible to open yourself to demonic influence, I suppose I must have done it.
Sometimes it can be much easier to attribute my struggles to an external source. I do sometimes refer to my demons as if they were real entities. I have met a couple of people who claimed to have actually seen demons. I am obviously skeptical of this, although these have been people that I actually know and consider to be generally rational, not just some random lunatic. Overall, as I have mentioned before, this is not something that I want to be true.
I actually just have trouble openly accepting the spiritual realm at all. Some of you may have noticed that I’ve had a spot of difficulty in accepting God as well. I remember going for a walk one time, this would have been in about May or so, thinking about how I see hope and joy in other people, but I just can’t seem to get there myself. I see issues and problems in my life and in myself but still I just feel like I’m being swept along on the river of life, unwilling or unable to take any action or make any change in my course. I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t know the nature of my bonds, didn’t know what was really holding me back.
I recognized that, all in all, I was doing pretty well in life. I didn’t need to worry about food or shelter or finances or security like so much of the rest of the world, and on top of that, I was doing pretty well in school through little effort of my own. Still I felt so utterly empty inside. I have known people in my life who cut themselves. For the first time, I understood that. I knew what it felt like to have such an unbearable emotional pain that you desperately want the physical pain to match.
I never did harm myself physically, but in my frustration, I became destructive in other ways. One time, when I first told someone that my grandfather was dying, he asked me if I was angry at God for that. My somewhat confused response was, “No… should I be?” It had not even occurred to me that God had anything to do with it. He may as well have asked if I was mad at the President because of my grandfather. God was in books and in sermons and theological debates and even sometimes in my personal interactions, but my grandfather was real. This was life and death we were talking about, not theology. My friend went on to say that God must be getting ready to use me in a big way to put me through the wringer like this. I thought about that statement when I got home. I appreciated his sentiment, but I felt that it actually displayed a complete lack of understanding of what I was going through. My whole problem is that no matter how much I’ve read or heard or talked about… I understand who people say God is, but He just isn’t present, isn’t real in my life. God must be getting ready to use me… NO HE ISN’T! I punctuated this thought by hurling the glass that I happened to be holding to the kitchen floor. I stared at that for a moment thinking, “I liked that glass…” This wasn’t the first time I had broken something while thinking about this kind of thing. Eventually, I swept the broken glass into a pile, but left it there for several weeks as a reminder that this is what happens when I think about God.
The most dramatic of these moments came a few weeks later, after my grandfather had died. I was in the bathroom, refilling a spray bottle of Clean Shower from a larger jug. I can’t remember what was going through my head, but at some point I just turned and hurled the spray bottle into the shower. It caught the curtain, pulling it down, rod and all. I was surprised that it had the mass to do that. But I didn’t stop. I followed it by throwing the empty jug, then a ceramic soap dish, the glass used to hold my toothbrush and razor, and finally the glass hand-towel bar after tearing it from the wall. Fortunately my house has two bathrooms, as there were broken shards of various things all over that one.
Also during this time, one of my “favorite” things to do was to lie on the floor, unable to move. Sometimes I felt as though I was literally being held down by a very heavy weight, and could not get up even if I wanted to. Sometimes I would be lying awake at night in Pomona and I would decide to just roll out of bed, and then under it. I honestly can not think of any possible advantage of being under the bed rather than on top of it, yet I did this more than once. And sometimes when I would lie on the floor, I would literally writhe. I felt like the “reality” that my eyes were seeing and other senses perceiving wasn’t real, that it was something like The Matrix where my head was being fed lies but my real body or maybe just my spirit, was actually somewhere else, trying to move, trying to see, but that I just couldn’t break free. And I would actually convulse in my efforts to escape from this world.
As I said, I don’t want to believe in literal demons. I like to think of them metaphorically, as personifications of personal struggles. But even I had to admit that there was something serious going on here.