The Ghost, the Witch, and the Curse
The haunts of the church.
Peter Rollins talks about how haunted houses play host to two types of ghosts. The first, a poltergeist, is a ghost you try to repress and pretend is not there. Only to have it emerge and haunt in the most unlikely and unfortunate of times. The second, a Holy Ghost, are the ghosts you name, look at head on, in hopes to transform.
Poltergeists have the potential to become Holy Ghosts. But first, we have to name them.
Every Halloween, or thereabouts, I host a Halloween service at the spiritual community I pastor. Over the years, there is one that stands out to me most. I want to share it with you in written form here.
By candlelight in an old church, I shared the three stories below. I wrote each with the intent of portraying types of haunts the church has caused over the years. It was a night to give name to the poltergeists.
Halloween is about bringing that which has been hidden to the surface. A trait the church often has a difficult time with.
This has caused great harm.
We must name what has been locked away.
I give you,
The Ghost, the Witch, and the Curse.
The Ghost
There was a small town in the south of France many hundreds of years ago. In that town was a chapel. Everyone flocked to it each Sunday and its presence was felt in the lives of the people of the town. The church gave everyone their direction, their purpose.
One such townsperson was Thomas Von Slin. Thomas was a young man. Having grown up in the town, he knew the roles of everyone well. The baker and the blacksmith. The town cryer, the priest. His father was the locksmith. And as such, Thomas was destined to be the same.
But this never sat well with Thomas. He had always had desires to leave the village. He had heard about explorations to new worlds. Whimsy, wonder. Everything in him from a young age longed to branch out past the place of his birth.
Years went by and Thomas the child slowly became Thomas the young man. And with that transition came more feelings from within telling him that he didn’t belong. That he wasn’t normal by the standard of the town. When kids would sword fight with branches, he’d lay in the field looking for four leaf clovers. When the other boys would go to work to learn under their fathers, in his fathers locksmith shop, Thomas would draw pictures of what he thought the new world might look like.
His father took notice of this. And he grew increasingly agitated by his sons antics. He went to the one source in the town that he knew could get Thomas in line — the priest.
Father Roldin was an old man. And he had no room for anything outside the lines. He was by the book and made a point to ensure his parishioners were too. He came to the Von Slin household one evening. Thomas had missed the last few church services. Opting instead to wander the fields in search of bugs. Father Roldin and Thomas’s father, Pierre, had spoken before this meeting, and they had a plan. The Von Slin family had just finished their dinner when there was a knock on the door.
Pierre knew it to be the priest. He pulled his son aside and told him to go to the chamber. He would be there soon. Thomas walked down into the candlelit shadowy space. It was empty but for 6 candles around the paremeter and one in the middle of the room. Each on their own candle stick. A chair was in the center of the candle lit space.
Thomas heard footsteps heading down the steps. Father Roldin and his father entered.
“Sit down, boy,” the priest said sternly. Thomas obliged, making his way to the chair.
The priest continued,
“Life is not for us but for the Lord. And to follow one’s own pleasure and whimsy is to go against the mighty and true way of God. It is not our will in this worlds, but the will of the Almighty Father.”
Thomas’s father was in the corner of the room, with his head down watching from the corner of his eye.
“Your family is concerned for your lack of adherence to the ways of this town. Too much time in the fields, away from mass. Too little care for following in the way of your father. We have no other option but to invoke The Separation.”
Thomas had heard of this. It was ancient lore. A priest invoking scripture onto a person to set them in line. Legend said there were hundreds of never realized persons haunting the village. Who they had desired to become turning into nothing more than ghost while their shadowed physical selves carried onward, abiding by expectation and norm.
With no further warning, the priest firmly placed both hands on Thomas and chanted 3 times,
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
And thus, a ghost was born.
The next day, Thomas woke early with his father and went to his shop. He crafted locks for the rest of his life. A breeze would blow through the fields during his evening walks home and every now and then, Thomas thought he heard his own voice whisper. Saying what? He knew not.
To ponder:
In what ways has the church limited the development of the full, authentic you? Creating ghosts of pieces.
What are the ghosts that religious dogma have created?
The Witch
Maggie was the child of Puritans. She hadn’t travelled over on the ships, but her parents had. She lived in Asbury Grove. A settlement just north of Salem. Her family and a few others sought to head inland a ways, opting to make their own way, uncorrupted by the inevitable slurring of the Word that comes from too many people in one place. The year was 1647.
From early on Maggie had an appreciation for the Bible and the ways and religion of her people. She fell in love with the stories of Christ and caring for the meek and mild. She loved to imagine young Jesus talking to the animals of his village, especially after his parents told him he was born in a manger. Maggie loved to study theology. Sneaking the Bible into her bedroom after learning how to read, obsessing over drawing nearer to her God and building her understanding. Wanting nothing more than to feel the presence of Divine love.
Time wore on and Maggie was eventually matched with a man to marry. But Maggie was unable to bear children, and as such, her husband left her. Alone and living in a cabin on the property of her aging parents, Maggie spent increasing amounts of time in scripture. Some of the interpretations always being spewed by the Reverend weren’t ringing as true anymore.
After the initial mourning, the inability to have her own kids made her see the rest of the world in a more tender and nurturing way. She began to feel that the way of Jesus was less one of judgment and condemnation, and more one of love and care.
One late September evening, sitting by the wood stove as the nights were getting cooler, Maggie read the passage from John 1. It struck her that God was not some proliferation that was there to judge, but was a presence that always had been. In all and through all. She felt this liberating freedom, this warmth but also a shiver. A kiss and and hug all at once.
And although frightened, she knew she had to share.
Word got around town in the community that Maggie had been reading her Bible and was coming up with new ways of understanding it. The women murmured of the news, and their husbands heard. And the husbands were not happy. This barren woman was corrupting their wives. The Bible was not some communal marketplace of ideas. So they took all this to the Reverend.
The men met around a table with the Reverend and he listened to all their complaints, holding the silence after the last one was finished.
Slowly he looked up, with a sinister glare,
“Well men. It is clear to me. Asbury Grove has a witch.”
Immediately all the men jumped from their chairs, they ran for their weapons and torches. They marched to Maggie’s cabin. Riled up and ready, when they reached it they didn’t even wait a moment to consider.
In their mind, all witches must burn.
Multiple torches flung through the windows of the cabin, and within seconds, the woodshed was ablaze.
The next day, a few women sifted through the ruble. No remains of Maggie were found. But once a year, tied to the branch of the first tree of the forest, a note would appear. And on it the phrase,
“Mary was the first to See.”
To ponder:
How have you been forced to repress the Divine feminine within you?
In what ways has the tender and nurturing been subdued by the domineering and violent?
The Curse
The revival has happened. Every Sunday, over 2,000 people would flock to All Saints Assembly. And every Sunday, we’d bring more and more people into the fold. The end was near. It was in the air and we all knew it. Jesus was coming back and we were preparing. My family knew where we were going and we couldn’t wait to dance in jubilation in that bright kingdom with our one true King, Jesus.
I put on my coat and headed out to my car. Service wasn’t until 10 but I had to pick up Jenny on the way. We were volunteering at the coffee bar at church, Holy Grounds, and needed to make sure everything was ready and in order. As Pastor Johnny says, “even the coffee should be imbued with the spirit”. A wrong attitude at the coffee bar can impede the presence of the the Lord. We take our roles seriously! Not wanting to lead any one away from the glory of our God.
Jenny was quiet when she got in the car, not her usual chipper self. I talked to her about the passage from Romans our Bible study discussed on Tuesday morning at 6am at our local coffee shop. How brilliant Paul is at making the Gospel make sense for the culture of the Romans and how great that we are doing that same good work here over 2000 years later. We drove by billboards showing just how backwards and far away from The Path our culture truly is.
“Everything okay, Jenny,” I asked, as she has only been “mhming” and sighing to my commentary on all this.
She turns away, looking out her window. I think I see the hint of a tear in her eye.
“Nancy, Pastor Johnny said I need to come straight to his office this morning. I think it’s about my brother,” Jenny says through tears.
Jenny’s younger brother Ken fell away from the fold a couple years ago. He was always the one to challenge in the high school ministry. I volunteered there during college. When he went away to school, he stopped going to church altogether. Last month he confided in Jenny that he was gay. I was the only one Jenny had told. I shared with her all the scriptures pointing out his sin but also the way in which we could lead him back through prayer. I offered to pray with her numerous times. She wouldn’t add much to the prayer though. Her and her brother were close, and I sensed this was hitting her hard.
“Nancy, my parents found out about Ken. They requested text transcripts from our phone carrier and saw him making date plans with another boy. They told him they never want him back in our house,” she was sobbing at this point.
“Oh Jenny, I’m so sorry. But remember pastor Johnny’s sermon last week about the prodigal son?! Even the most wayward can return!”
“Fuck that, Nance. It’s bullshit,” she erupted. “My brother is not some sinner who needs to return. He’s my brother! And I love him. This is bullshit what they are doing,”
We pulled into the parking lot, no more words spoken. Jenny opened and slammed the door to the car and walked into the church.
She never showed up to the coffee bar.
I heard pastor Johnny’s voice over the live feed coming into the lobby as I poured drinks for those running late for service.
“The path to destruction is wide, the path to salvation narrow. Some of our family is on that path of destruction. And we must chose if we give into them and the way of the world, or follow the way of our Savior. There is no middle way.
Jenny didn’t reply to any of my texts and calls. It was like she disappeared. I don’t know what was said in that meeting between her and pastor Johnny.
But then, one morning I received a letter in the mail.
Nancy,
I am convinced there is love in the world. A love that wraps and hugs and brings us all in. But that love has been cursed by the very places that say they are imparting it. I’ve realized that if I want the full love, I have to leave where the curse that now haunts my brother was born. A curse that tells him he is less than when the version of him I see now is the fullest and most beautiful version I have ever seen. I’m losing my church for this, I’m losing my parents for this. But I refuse to be a part of the cauldron from which the curse is born. Look around. You and I both know All Saints Assembly is casting curses, not sharing a message of love.
To ponder:
What traumatic wound have you seen curse yourself or someone you love?
What are the curses that swirl our society because of the historic church?
Perhaps a bit more vulnerable and hard, in what ways have you cursed others through what you though needed to be imparted based on religious dogma?
A Benediction
Let us bring out the ghosts to dance To haunt us in their vitality And full expression a True life lived and accessed, allowed. Let the witch cast her spell on us all imbuing us with a new, more tender more full more powerful understanding of Flow within the Divine. Let our curses be broken by a freedom imparted from a sacredness that does not put bounds but instead swirls in and through all celebrating fullness in all it’s expression and vitality and form. The church has haunted created ghosts, brandished witches, instilled curses. But those haunts hold no power when placed beside an overarching Love that stretch’s far beyond institution. This is a deep and wide river. A love that flows and inhabits All things All things All things All ghosts All witches Breaking all curses A love that flows and inhabits All things. All things. All things.
Wow! Thank you!