My First Exorcism. Harold Ristau

My First Exorcism - Harold Ristau


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project to an “After Action Report” with the purpose of learning lessons from the successes and errors of others. However, normally such debriefings are compiled immediately after a critical incident occurs. My stories, however, are not recent. Some of them are nearly a quarter-century old. Why bring them up now? Frankly, after an early episode with exorcism, I had convinced myself that no right-minded person would hear me without a suspension of disbelief. We are all biased. After being rewarded with a burst of laughter the first time around, I decided that I would only share my experiences amongst believers with whom I was guaranteed to escape judgment as gullible or jeered at as superstitious. Today, I care less.

      The Church Fathers help us understand why the world is, literally, so confused. One cannot safely set out on a journey without a reliable map. Such a map is based on an accurate reading of reality. Most unbelievers are materialists. By denying the existence of the spiritual realm as entirely different from the physical one, the way they reason follows a fallacious map of a fictional land which, in turn, informs their distorted worldview. In contrast, the Christian map incorporates both the visible and invisible planes of reality. St. Augustine, one of the most important Fathers of the Western Church, organized these spiritual and earthly realities under the respective categories of the “City of God” and the “Earthly City,” while investigating the implications of the overlap between them. This distinction between these two realms furnishes Christianity’s ability to interpret the human experience in accordance with a dual-lensed spectacle of the “two cities.” In contrast, the secular world filters phenomena through a single-lensed epistemological hermeneutic informed by a metaphysic of the “one city.” Reasoning through this “single-city” logic is inherently demonic because it collapses God-given distinctions. For instance, the ability to judge moral events by a higher or “heavenly” standard is diabolically perverted by the absence of a meaningful ethical grid. We encounter examples of this inability to critically evaluate cultural norms throughout any given day. For example, most traffic jams are caused by an endless line up of curious bystanders determined to observe the damage of a traffic accident. Is the rubbernecking altruistic? In other words, do drivers slow down in order to determine how they can be of some philanthropic assistance or do they do so because of a grotesque interest or even a sadistic desire—albeit subconscious? For the vast majority of our desensitized population, the unspoken feeling on the matter runs something like, “It’s a free show—what’s the problem?” Reality-TV stars are the new gladiators in the coliseum of our living rooms. The Romans catered no ethical dilemmas either. What compels an individual to prioritize videotaping their pending consumption by a hurricane or Tsunami over their own physical security? Television watching is indisputably harmless, right? Perhaps, unconsciously, we believe that placing a photo lens between the threat and our cornea provides the same protection. “How could my life possibly be endangered in the middle of a tweet!” the tourist protests as he is engulfed by an enormous wave. Not only do we blindly trust our media, but we unwarily depend on their mediums as our authorities—and so they become our gods. The objectification of the female and male form warps the ability to realistically evaluate the beauty of one’s spouse. We tithe an unsettling amount of our income to the image of a billboard in pathetic attempts at approximating our aesthetic qualities to a plastic prototype or a Hollywood star that has just undergone another series of futile face-lifts. Beauty is not in the eyes of the beholder but in the eyes of the culture. And yet the archetype is a fake and a lie. A critical approach to advertisements is driven by the awareness of our interaction with an artificial reality. The goal of most ads is to breed covetousness. They rarely fulfill our needs. Usually they stealthily create wants and then trick us into believing that we have always needed them.

      Navigating safely through this dangerous spiritual labyrinth of temptation, vanity and conflicting desires and intuitions is vital for Christians who claim to be counter-cultural disciples of the cross. Godly judgments require sharpening through prayer and study of God’s Word since the domineering single-city logic inhibits one’s ability to carefully distinguish between differing realities. For those who view the world along that single and simple plane, appellations, demons and spirits, if they exist at all, must be recordable on radiation detectors and other physical apparatus. For them, it is unfathomable to envision even spiritual bodies as belonging to some other sphere besides the earthly one with which we are all fully familiar. Given these presuppositions reincarnation makes some sense. Like our bodies, our souls remain trapped within the single-planed bubble of temporal reality. So, too, some Christians insist that souls have mass.

      One final example (I promise): on the one hand, spiritually-sensitive people today have heedlessly turned environmental sustainability into a pagan religion, paying homage to the pantheistic goddess “Mother Nature.” The well-meaning ecological principles of this animistic worldview operate within a one-planed


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