There was a boy in my neighborhood, whose name was Corey.
Corey was a brat. He was the kind of boy who ran around making mischief and annoying people, anything to get people to look at him and yell. He would stand across the alley from us in old Mrs. Winner’s yard at the edge of the block as I played outside, taunting, teasing, name-calling, and when that didn’t work he would resort to more extreme tactics for attention.
“Look, a worm!” Corey said one summer afternoon, unzipping his fly and wiggling his member at me with both hands.
I was unimpressed by the worm. I had little brothers, and my friends had even more brothers than I did. A penis, at that age, wasn’t anything threatening; it was just an object I saw when a diaper was being changed, or when the boys’ bathroom door was left open. But I was told not to play with Corey after that, and I gladly obeyed that rule.
Corey had a “gang” in the most harmless sense of the word: a clique of annoying boys who followed him around and made minor mischief. Sometimes all of them would stand at the edge of Mrs. Winner’s yard trying to get attention, but I learned to ignore them as well.
One day, Corey and his gang disrupted a meeting of our Charismatic community.
The Charismatics showed up at our house for an interminable prayer session every other Sunday, and I loathed them. I loathed their loud music with nonsense lyrics, inexpertly played on guitar and tambourine. I loathed how they would convulse and fall over babbling in tongues. I loathed how they were morally opposed to personal space and insisted on bear hugs no matter how anxious I was. I hated their “prophecies” of persecution and doom, which gave me severe anxiety and eventually led to a nervous breakdown. I resented the ever-expanding list of things I was not allowed to do, because this or that prophet said it was “of the devil.”
The devil was an omnipresent and nearly all-powerful figure in the Charismatic Renewal. Every bad or mysterious occurrence was blamed on the devil. The devil could invade your body and cause chronic illness. He could invade your mind and cause anxiety and panic attacks. He could invade your family tree and cause hereditary curses, like alcoholism or unemployment. The devil was why houses leaked and cars broke down. The devil induced telemarketers to call your house at suppertime just as you were about to say Grace. Most of Charismatic prayer involved calling out the evil spirits by name and driving them away in the name of Jesus. If you weren’t diligent in exorcizing the devil from all aspects of your life, you could fall prey to oppression or full-blown demonic possession, and then you would go to hell– but first you would disgrace your family by becoming something terrible like an introvert, a drug addict or a homosexual.
I didn’t like calling out demons by name. I hated when people would group together and pray over me, calling out demons by name. I didn’t want to be gang-prayed-over, I wanted to be allowed to be alone. So I misbehaved at Community prayer meetings. I was impolite when people went to pray over me. I snarked and made fun of the lessons the Charismatic ladies prepared to catechize the little children. Eventually, my mother got so frustrated that she “punished” me by doing exactly what I longed for: she dropped me off at my Methodist grandparents’ house in Beechwold on Sunday afternoons, so I wouldn’t be in the house to ruin her Charismatic prayers. That was how I missed seeing Corey’s performance. I heard about it from my father after it was over.
That day was a warm one, so my mother opened the windows before twenty or thirty Charismatics showed up for Sunday prayer. They got out their guitars and tambourines and began to caterwaul meaningless praise and worship hymns at the top of their lungs, as usual. Then the noise devolved into shouts of praise, babbling in tongues, and prophecies. In all of that racket, they did not at first notice the dull thuds hitting the side of the house– eventually, though, they realized that they were being bombarded. They looked out the window to find that Corey and his friends were throwing apples and heckling the music.
The grown-ups ran outside to confront Corey and his gang, who were standing on the other side of the alley on the edge of Mrs. Winner’s yard. They fled, laughing, at the first sign of trouble. The grown-ups went inside. That was when my mother noticed that someone had drawn a smiley face on the dry erase board in our homeschooling classroom.
My mother immediately went into hysterics. She screamed that Corey had broken into her house while they were praying. He’d snuck into the homeschooling classroom and graffitied the dry erase board just to mess with her mind. This was the only possible explanation. Why he would write on the dry erase board and not write on the walls or carpet with the markers after he’d committed breaking and entering wasn’t a question she wrestled with; she was too busy panicking.
Eventually, one of the Charismatics said “that looks like my child’s drawing” and indeed, it was. One of the Charismatic children had drawn a picture to amuse himself while the grown-ups were praying. Corey hadn’t gotten into the house at all. He had remained across the alley, throwing apples. But it still took my mother quite awhile to calm down after that.
Now that I’ve grown up and cut all ties with the Charismatic Renewal, I see the world so differently than I used to.
I used to be afraid of everything, because everything was a possible conduit for demonic possession. Human beings, I thought, were porous, and the devil could come and go as he pleased. Now I see it differently.
I see that, if the devil exists at all, he is an annoying little boy standing across the alley on old Mrs. Winner’s lawn, taunting.
“Look, a worm!” says the devil, and I don’t pay attention because there’s nothing interesting about that worm. I’m not supposed to let him play at my house, but it’s not as though I’d ask him to come over anyway.
The devil might even throw an apple now and then, but he’s not getting inside the house. The house is mine. I belong to me, not the devil. The devil stays across the street.
If I find something out of place in my house, I need to find a more logical explanation. Go to the doctor or a therapist, don’t get an exorcism. Maybe I won’t even be able to discover what’s amiss, but I know it’s not the devil. The devil is outside, waving his member at me. I don’t have to pay attention.
Of course I’m not going to let the Charismatics in either, but that’s another story.
Image via pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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