Hostage To The Devil Read online

  “You're the same as me, David! Father David!” David's young assistant, Thomas, drew near to David. The doctor and the psychiatrist fell back, overcome by surprise, looking incredulously from David to Jonathan and back to David. David shrugged off the offer of help from Father Thomas.

  “You have adopted the Lord of Light, like I have, you old fool!” shrieked Jonathan between his cackling laughter. He loosened his grip on David's hand and rose to his feet. “Physician, cure yourself!”

  Jonathan roared in amusement. His laughter filled the little room; he doubled over in merriment, slapping his knee, tears running down his face. “Ha-ha! David, you're a joke. You're a soul-fellow of mine. You don't believe one goddamn lousy thing of that childish hocus-pocus.” Each word hit David like a physical blow. “Hoc est corpus meum! You're as liberated as I am, man. You belong to the New Being and the New Time.”

  Suddenly Jonathan quieted down. “And you were trying to exorcise me?” The contempt that replaced the laughter was enormous. He leaned forward, thrusting his face close to David's. In a slow, deliberate tone, emphasizing every word: “Get out of here, you puny weakling! Get out of here with these scarecrows you brought with you. Go bind up your wounds. Go find if your sugary Jesus will cure you. G-e-t o-u-t!” The last two words were two slowly delivered, heavily loaded syllables of contempt and dismissal.

  David was now like a man trying to stand up after a heavy physical blow. “Come, Father David,” the younger priest said quietly but urgently, as he took in the look of superiority and command in Jonathan's face. “Let's go, David,” said the doctor.

  David turned for an instant and looked at Jonathan. The others saw no fear on David's face, only puzzlement and pain. Their look followed David's. There stood Jonathan watching their retreat. His whole appearance had changed. His head was uplifted. He was standing tall and erect. His golden hair fell around his shoulders like a halo catching the winking light of the candles. His blue eyes were shining with hazy light. His right hand was raised in such a way that his stiffened index finger was laid across his throat. His left hand hung by his side.

  “Go in darkness, you fool!” Jonathan screamed in a high falsetto. His right hand descended in a vicious gesture and swept the candlesticks off the table onto the floor. The candles went out and the room was in semidarkness. The young priest had the door open. All four men moved out quickly. “In darkness! Fools!” Jonathan's voice pursued them. As they emerged, they suddenly realized that the temperature of the day was already hot; inside, in the room, they had been cold.

  David literally stumbled into the lighted hallway and leaned against the wall. Beside the hatrack, Jonathan's mother was sitting in a straight-backed ornamental chair. Her hands held a rosary on her lap. Her head, eyes closed, was bowed. After a few moments, she raised her head and, without looking around at David, she spoke in a quiet voice full of resigned sorrow.

  “He's right. My son. The devil's slave. He is right, Father David. You need cleansing. God help you.” Then, as if she sensed some apprehension in David and the others for her sanity or her faith, she added: “I am his mother. No harm can come to me.” It was an instinctual thing she said, but David was certain she was correct.

  David stumbled past her. Nobody looked at her. His companions eased David into a car and drove him to the seminary. Once in his room, he sat wearily with the young priest for about half an hour.

  “What are we going to do, Father David?” Thomas finally asked. David made no reply. He was now wholly occupied with himself and with the black reality he had discovered inside himself. He looked at the young priest and felt strangely out of place. What had he in common with that fresh face, the black cassock, the white round collar, and—above all—that look in the young priest's eyes? What was that look, anyway? He screwed up his eyes staring at Thomas. What was that look? Had he ever had it himself? Was it all a joke? A mere charade or piece of imposed childishness? Young priests must believe—like young children. Then they grow up—as children do. And then they stop having that look. Stop “believing”?

  “You are surrounded by quotation marks, Thomas,” he said stupidly to the younger priest. Then he lapsed into silence still staring at his colleague. What in the hell was believing anyway? That inane look! What was that look! As if all was sugar and spice and goo and kindness and pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die and infantile trust. Why was that look so open and wide-eyed?

  “Stop looking like a fool!” David shot the words at Thomas. Then he realized what he had done. “Sorry, Thomas,” he mumbled lamely, seeing the young face pale. David began to cry in silence.

  “Father David,” Thomas drew in a breath. “I have no experience. But you need a rest. Let me phone your family.” David nodded helplessly.

  In the early afternoon David was driven up to Coos County, back to his home on the farm. His parents were delighted to see him. They now lived alone except for one sleep-in help and a gardener who stayed at the farm.

  That night David went to bed in the room he had occupied during his childhood and youth. But some time after midnight he woke up covered with perspiration and shaking like a leaf. He did not know why, but a deep sense of foreboding filled his mind. He got up, went down to the kitchen, and heated some milk. As he returned to his room, he stopped at the door of Old Edward's room. He stood there for a moment, sipping the milk and thinking in a vague, undirected way. As he describes it now, his mind was still clearing, like a jumbled TV picture slowly coming into focus. Then, with nothing particular in mind, but only by some blind impulse, he opened the door of the room, reached for the light switch, and stepped inside.

  The room was much the same as it had been the evening of Edward's death, except for one change: a large photograph of Edward, taken a few months before he had passed away, hung over the mantelpiece. It looked down at David. He sat for about an hour in that room. Then, under the same blind impulse, still unhurriedly, he went to his own room, transferred his bedclothes and personal effects to Edward's room, and then went to sleep there.

  David stayed almost four weeks on the farm. In the beginning, he went out every day for long walks and to do some manual work on the farm. Sometimes he passed by the copse at the west end of the house, but never entered it. He would stand a while ruminating and then go on his way. He looked up some old friends, and spent a good part of the evenings with his parents.

  Toward the end of the first week, this loose and varied schedule changed. He began to spend most of the day and night in his room, coming out for his meals, rarely going outside the house. Then about the third week, he did not emerge at all except to use the bathroom.

  He did not open the shutters in his room. He ate sparingly, and toward the end lived on milk and biscuits and some dried fruit which his mother left on a tray outside the door of his room.

  From the beginning of his stay he had warned his parents not to be alarmed by his living habits. On his first day there, he had gone to see Father Joseph, the local priest, whom he had taught in the seminary. During the last ten days of David's stay at the farm, that priest was the only human being who visited and spoke with David.

  David kept a minutely detailed diary during those four weeks; and, except for certain moments when he lost control of himself (of those moments he has no clear recollection), there is a more or less continuous chronology of events—the inner experience David went through and the external phenomena that marked this crucial period.

  During all this time, down in Manchester, Jonathan lived at home with his mother.

  Comparison of how David and Jonathan spent specific days and hours during those weeks has been difficult to achieve, but there is clear indication that certain states through which David passed coincided—sometimes to the hour—with strange moments and behavior in Jonathan's life. Our chief intent, however, is to trace David's experience, for, in the technical language of theology, Father David M. was deprived of all conscious belief. His religious faith was tested in an assault which nearly succee
ded in robbing him of it all. Mentally and emotionally, he found himself in the state of one without any religious belief whatever. To this extent, David, who still felt that his vocation as priest was valid, had handed over his mind and emotions to some form of possession.

  There would have been no struggle, much less any agony, if David's will had not remained stubbornly attached to his religious beliefs. Inch by inch, figuratively speaking, he had to fight for survival of his faith against a spirit to which he himself had granted entry and which now made a bid to take him over completely. Consciously he had been admitting ideas and persuasions for a long time. He had not realized until now that all such motivating ideas and persuasions, for all their guise of “objectivity,” had a moral dimension and a relation to spirit-good and evil. He had failed all along to realize that nothing is morally neutral. With these ideas, persuasions, and deficiencies as a most suitable vehicle, there had entered him some spirit, alien to him, but now claiming full control over him.

  During those four weeks on the Coos farm, David's entire life as a believer flashed by him continually and ever more intensely like photographs being flipped with the thumb—childhood, schooldays, seminary training, ordination, doctoral studies, anthropology trips, lectures, what he had written in articles and books, the conversations he had held, constantly changing panels. When he reached the end, they began all over again.

  Cameos. Little scenes. Faces long forgotten. Words and sentences echoing back in half-complete fashion. Vivid memories. Each one with an individual conclusion. The day he told Sister Antonio in the convent school that Jesus could not possibly fit into the communion wafer. David was eight years old. Sister had patted his head: “David, be a good boy. We know what is right.” They had given him no choice and no answer. No choice. No choice, rang the silent echo.

  His interview with the bishop for acceptance into the seminary: “If you become a priest, you are called to a perfection of spirit not granted to the majority of Christians.” Spirit is not elitist. Not elitist. Not elitist. Not elitist, went the echo.

  The echoes rang through the hall of years in David's brain, as the “photographs” continued to flash before him.

  He remembered the moment he became convinced that there were no reliable records about Jesus written during Jesus' own lifetime. In the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the letters of Paul, there was only what men and women believed and thought they knew 30, 40, 60 years after Jesus' death. Even if they believed they knew, how could David be sure that they knew? He was thinking and believing only what they thought and believed. “I have no records. It sounds like delusion.” Delusion. Delusion. Delusion. The word was a hammer blow in David's whorl of memories.

  Then another flash of memory, another change, another bit of evil. Eleven years before, David had gone on a tour through the places where Jesus had lived and died. Immediately afterward, he had visited Rome and spent long days viewing its monuments, basilicas, and treasures. He followed the ceremonies in St. Peter's Basilica. As he started home for America, one question dominated everything for him: What possible relationship could there be between Jesus' obscure life on that stark, poverty-stricken, barren land, and the panoply and glory of papal Rome? Perhaps he understood only now, but he had come to a covert conclusion on that home journey: there was no real relationship. Now his memory kept on repeating with little bursts of pain: no relationship, no relationship, no relationship.

  Four years before, he had opened up an ancient tomb in northeastern Turkey. Inside, he and the other archeologists had found a buried chieftain surrounded by the bones of men and animals slaughtered for his funeral. The bones, the weapons, the utensils, the dust, and the pathos of it all had gripped him. These had been men like himself. They had had no knowledge of Jesus. How could they be judged for not knowing anything about Jesus and Christianity? Surely what David had thought of Jesus was too small a concept? Surely the truth was greater than any dogma? Than any concept of Jesus as man or as God, or any form that Jesus took? It had to be so. Otherwise, there was no sense in anything. Greater than Jesus. Greater than Jesus. Greater than Jesus. Another jarring echo ringing in his memory.

  There gradually emerged a fatal thread that stitched together all the echoing resentments, all the complaints of reason, all the arrogance of logic stripped to its own marrow. And the fabric of faith slipped away unnoticed as this new cloth draped his mind and soul. The thread was David's acceptance of Teilhard de Chardin's theories. Accepting them, he could no longer tolerate the break between the material nature of the world, on the one hand, and Jesus as savior, on the other hand. Materiality and divinity were one; the material world together with man's consciousness and will, both emerging from sheer materiality as automatically as a hen from an egg; and Jesus' divinity emerging from his human being as naturally as an oak tree from an acorn, as inevitably as water flowing downward.

  Jesus—so suddenly integral to the universe, so intimate with its being, so totally physical—was different from what religious dogma had said he was, greater than Christian belief had ever before understood. Jesus, each man, each woman, all were brothers to the boulders, sisters of the stars, “co-beings” with all animals and plants. All understanding became easy. It all came down to the atom; and it all came up from the atom as well. Everything fell into place.

  So much for Teilhard, David thought bitterly.

  With an anguish he could not assuage, David realized the consequences of all this only now in the lonely struggle and painful vigil for his soul. Any real reverence and awe had evaporated from his religious mentality. For the world around him he had only a sense of joyous kinship-mingled with a certain foreboding. For Jesus, only a satisfying feeling of triumph, just as for any ancient and beloved hero. For the Mass, an indulgent feeling akin to what he experienced when observing commemorative services on any July Fourth. The Crucifixion and the death of Jesus were glorious events in the past, ancient demonstrations of heroic love, not an ever-present source of personal forgiveness and not an unshakable hope for any future.

  Isolated with his thoughts and memories, David's question for himself was not where or how things had gone wrong, but how to retrieve his strength in faith. As the years passed continually by his view like so many panels from right to left, David seemed to be close up to them, scrutinizing each detail.

  As the days passed, those panels in the panorama moved faster and faster, on and on, repeating over and over. He could still read the details. Each phrase sounded and receded as its corresponding panel came and went. No choice. Not elitist. Delusion. No relationship. Greater than Jesus. Brothers to the boulders.

  Sometime after midnight at the beginning of the third week at the Coos farm, David seemed suddenly to be drawing away from his close-up scrutiny of the changing panels, or they were withdrawing from him, receding into some background darkness he had not noticed before. He realized he had not been looking at panels passing horizontally in front of him from right to left. He had been close to a revolving sphere that was now drawing away from him. Distancing itself from him and still revolving, it depicted all the phases of his life continuously and without interruption around the smooth convex surface of that brightly lit ball.

  From its dreamy depths came the sounds of all his yesteryears—words, voices, languages, music, crying, laughing. The sphere had a mesmeric quality of a carousel giving off a creamy light. David seemed to be looking at himself out there.

  Yet a tiny voice kept whispering within him: Why me? Why am I attacked? Why me? Where is Jesus? What is Jesus? And all around that revolving sphere lay the unfathomable velvet of a night he had never known.

  Staring at the sphere, he knew that in some mysterious way he was staring at the self he had become. Of the room around him, the feel of the chair in which he sat, the rub of his clothes against his skin, of such things finally he was not even indirectly conscious.

  Now, without either pause or abruptness, the light from that revolving sphere started to gro
w dim. More and more of the blackness around it started to patch its panels with shadows, crow's-feet of obscurity, little running lines of invisibility. The self he had been and known was being volatilized into blackness. David felt panic, but seemed to be incapable of doing anything about what was happening to him.

  Then he had the feeling that he was no longer looking out or up or at anything, but that he now was out there hanging in that blackness. Feeding his helplessness and panic was the conviction that he was the cause of this black void and that he needed it. Otherwise, it seemed to him, he would drop into nothingness.

  Then finally, all he had ever been or known of himself had disappeared. The self to which he was now reduced hung by an invisible thread—but only as long as he could maintain that blackness. David's panic was marinated in a tide of sullenness rising in him, sullenness at being deprived of light, of salvation, of grace, of beauty, of motives for holiness, of knowledge about physical symmetry, and all perception of God's eternity. His reaction to this sullenness: Why me? He was waiting, expecting, almost listening. Hours. Days. His waiting became so intense, so oppressive that he gradually realized he was not waiting of his own volition. The waiting was being evoked from him by someone or something outside him. Yet each time he tried to figure out or imagine who or what was evoking the waiting, his very effort at imagining clouded everything over. The only thing he could do was wait, be made to wait, to expect.

  And there set in on him a sadness he could not dispel. He no longer felt any confidence in himself or in anything he knew. For all seemed to be reduced to a situation without circumstances, a pattern without a background, a framework sodden with emptiness through which rushed gusts of an alien influence he could neither repel nor control. He was helpless. And eventually he would fall asleep, awakening only with the light of day streaming in through the bay window.