Yes, Virginia, there Is a Satan: A Conversion Story, Part One

Having shared the story of my healing from an eating disorder in these pages last year (“Faith by Moonlight,” September 18, 2024), I have been invited to relate how that healing led to my entry into the Catholic Church about nine years later.

This story will be a romantic comedy in three parts, with God supplying the romance, and I the comedy. Part One, however, must be the story of my encounter with something I had not believed in: spiritual evil.

Studies and troubles

I arrived back in the United States in the summer of 1985, still glowing from my experience of healing and with a new sense of purpose: I would find a way to keep my promise to God to help other people with eating disorders. New York City seemed a good place to start. I loved New York; I had grown up visiting relatives who lived there, and I thought it would offer a pathway no matter what direction my vocation took. I moved to the city later that summer, rented a tiny room, found a lively, charismatic Episcopalian Church (All Angels), and took an office job to pay the bills as I considered my next step. I eventually decided on the M.Div./MSW joint degree program at Union Theological Seminary, where my parents had earned their degrees. I applied and was accepted for the fall semester of 1986.

All seemed to be smooth sailing, but I was troubled by sharp pains in my knees and feet that sometimes hobbled me. Conventional doctors could provide little more than analgesics and a vague diagnosis of “arthritis.” In September, I turned instead to alternative medicine. I found a therapist who offered a combination of physical therapy, nutritional counseling, and psychotherapy. The treatment alleviated my symptoms, but for reasons I could not put my finger on, I disliked the therapist, whom I will call H.R. We argued over Christianity since H.R. considered belief in sin to be a source of unhealthy guilt. After two months of treatment, I realized that H.R.’s techniques were sex acts masquerading as medical procedures. I discontinued the treatments.

What to do next? My first reaction was to cry, “I want this not to have happened!” That being futile, my second step was to attempt to confront H.R. He denied all wrongdoing and put the blame on my lack of assertiveness. I thought, “H.R. has no conscience and will do the same thing to someone else. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t do what I can to stop him.” My third course, then, was to report H.R. to the licensing authorities. It was then that I learned that New York State, at that time, required no professional credentials to practice as a psychotherapist. H.R., however, had also claimed to be a nurse, and nurses were licensed by the New York State Board of Education. I filed a complaint, and this was the start of a lengthy investigation. Early on, I learned that H.R.’s license was pending.

In the fall of 1986, I began my studies at Union Theological Seminary. I signed the mandatory statement that I would refer to the Divinity only in gender-balanced or gender-neutral terms. I was at first delighted with my academic studies, the beautiful campus, and the Old Testament professor who opened his course with a prayer. I expected to form close friendships and pray regularly with my fellow students. Instead, I was an outsider, and I found no prayer companions.

When my parents attended Union in the 1950s, the emphasis had been on racial and economic justice. In the 1980s, the focus was on sexuality, and there was a widespread attitude of contempt for thinking patterns considered less enlightened. A fellow student corroborated my impression: “The sneer is real big here.” His label for the dominant culture at UTS was “liberal fundamentalism.” (In later decades, it would be called “political correctness,” but this term had not yet entered the popular lexicon.) My conclusion at the time was that I had to accept this theology because there was no intellectually valid alternative. I could not accept it, nor did I have the mental resources to challenge it.

After that first semester, I was too depressed to study. I considered suicide and bought a package of sleeping pills. Instead of taking them, I called my aunt, who lived a few blocks away. She began to cry over the phone. “Sara, I hear you. You’re hurting real bad. Why don’t you come stay with me for a while?” She called my father, who came and stayed in New York for a few days. They provided emotional comfort, but there was no resolution to my spiritual dilemma. I left UTS and returned to office work, thinking that I would not attempt graduate studies again until I understood what had gone wrong.

Demonic presence

By a curious coincidence, I was able to move back into the same tiny room I had rented prior to entering Union. My apartment mate, whom I will call “Janelle,” was prospering in her career in stage production and sometimes toured with the company she worked for. I had a job, a social life, and my church, but I had lost my sense of direction and my moral vision. I began to have nightmares and, upon waking, would sense a malignant presence in the dark room. When I prayed the “Our Father,” the presence would disappear. I wondered, “Am I going insane?” My family has no history of psychosis. I believed I could think rationally, and no one around me seemed to think me mentally unstable, yet the nightmares continued.

One nightmare was especially vivid: I was at home, alone in the dark apartment, and heard a faint tinkling of bells. I walked down the hall to the living room and found the small Hitachi television set on. The screen was white static (old televisions used to do this), but as I gazed at it, the static began to form into a face that I knew would be demonic. Panicking, I flipped the wall switch to turn the ceiling light on. The dream changed completely. I was still at home, but the apartment was now brightly lit and crowded with visitors attending a cocktail party. On that nonsensical note, I woke up.

A few nights later, I returned home in a bleak mood following an evening out with friends. There had been an interaction that had embarrassed me and reminded me how alone I was. Knowing my way in the dark, I plodded down the hall and into the living room without turning on the lights–and was amazed to see the TV screen glowing with static as it had in my nightmare. I thought quickly—had I turned the TV set on before I left? No, I had not. It was my apartment mate’s TV. I didn’t use it, and she was away on a weeks-long tour. The snowy screen began to form into a face. I thought, “My nightmare is actually happening in real life!” As I had in the dream, I hastily switched on the ceiling light. There was no change of scene this time. I shakily turned on more lights. The face never formed. The television continued to glow but slowly faded.

As the screen dimmed, I called my friend John for help. A tiny man who looked to me like a leprechaun, John worked in the mailroom of a nearby company. We both regularly attended the noontime worship service at St. Bartholomew’s Church (Episcopalian) in midtown. He had smiled at me from his pew one day and said, “Jesus loves you,” and we had begun to talk. John was Catholic, and although he was barely literate, he had impressed me as having a gift of spiritual insight.

Now, on the other end of the line, John took a moment to pray with me. He concluded, “Yes, this is demonic, but you don’t need to be afraid. Satan can’t hurt you, he’s just trying to scare you.” He then asked, “Do you own anything connected with the occult?”

“I don’t,” I replied. “Janelle says she flirted with witchcraft when she was in college, but then she rejected it and got rid of all the occult stuff she had.”

“Let’s pray again,” John replied. After a few minutes of prayer, he concluded, “There is something occult in your home. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to your roommate.”

“Well,” I answered, “my roommate is away on a trip, and I don’t have the right to rifle through her things. I’ll have to wait until she gets home.” (This was before email and cell phones.)

“We’ll just pray for your protection, then,” said John. We prayed once more. The glow on the TV screen further dimmed and finally disappeared. The process had taken about twenty minutes.

The following day, I called Hitachi, provided the model number of the TV set, and asked whether there was any way that the screen on that model could glow as if it were on while the set was turned off. The customer service rep sounded puzzled. No, she didn’t know of any reason that would happen, but she would make some inquiries. A couple of days later, she called back to tell me that there was no reason that a Hitachi set would glow when off.¹

When Janelle returned home a few weeks later, I told her what had happened and asked whether she owned anything related to the occult. “No, I got rid of all that stuff,” Janelle replied. Perhaps John was mistaken, I thought. A few days later, however, Janelle approached me holding the large woodblock print that had been hanging above the living room sofa. It was an elaborate scene of a fox in a forest, given to her by a former apartment mate. Janelle and I had admired it many times, but only now, on closer inspection, had Janelle noticed that the intricate border design was based on tarot cards. She showed me the eerie “death card” design in one corner. Her first thought had been that she could cut off the border and keep the illustration. Then she had noticed the multiple sinister jack-o’-lanterns peering out from between the trees. She pointed them out to me. Somehow, I had not seen them before.

“Do you think we should burn it?” Janelle asked.

“No,” I answered, “Let’s not risk burning the apartment building down trying to exorcise it. Let’s just tear it up and throw it out.”

“Okay.” Janelle ripped the print up and threw it into the kitchen garbage can.

A few minutes later, I exclaimed, “Oh, look, Janelle, you missed this large piece.”

About one-third of the original print was lying on the kitchen floor. I picked it up, tore it up in turn, and deposited the pieces in the garbage. A short time later, I noticed that I, too, had dropped a piece about a third of the size of the original shred. I wadded it up and dashed it into the garbage can, thinking that the picture was certainly resisting our attempts to get rid of it.

Deliverance and humility

After these events, I no longer worried that I was on the verge of insanity. Raised as a liberal Episcopalian, I had not believed in human evil, interpreting evil as psychological illness and/or misunderstanding. I certainly had not believed in the demonic. Now, I had been shown that the supernatural, including evil, was part of reality. I recalled that Fr. Francis MacNutt, the Episcopalian priest whose books on healing prayer had impressed me years earlier, had written about delivering people from demons. Come to think of it, I reflected, the Gospels themselves described demons as actual beings, even if modern scholars had interpreted these accounts as primitive explanations for natural illnesses. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Satan,” I remarked to myself.

The nightmares continued. It occurred to me that I could ask the demon its name, having seen this done in a movie about a haunting. One night, I had the presence of mind to do so. The name flashed before my mind’s eye: Kanethgülá

Kanethgülá? What kind of name would that be? Some ancient Middle Eastern tongue? I visited the library at Union Theological Seminary, pored over their books on mythology (again, this was before the Internet), and found nothing. In my search for healing, I had had several meetings with the prayer team at my church. I now told them about Kanethgülá, and we scheduled an evening session for deliverance prayer.

It was now the autumn of 1987. H.R.’s investigation had been completed, and the date for his hearing approached. I would have to testify. In one of my rambles through a bookstore, I had come across M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie. The notable psychiatrist’s exploration of evil was a revelation to me. Peck proposed that the evil personality be added to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual as a variant of the narcissistic personality disorder. His description of human evil matched my experience with H.R. I had felt the revulsion and confusion that Peck described as common reactions to evil.² Like the evil people Peck had encountered in his clinical experience, H.R. had layered deception upon deception, refusing to admit even to himself that he had done wrong.

Peck’s book fortified me as I testified against H.R. The hearing was as unpleasant as might be expected, but afterwards I had a sense that I had just been delivered. I sensed rather than heard the demon’s name, but it grew fainter and fainter. It seemed to me also that I heard retreating footsteps. I was unsurprised when, in a letter dated August 9, 1989, the prosecuting attorney wrote to inform me that the Office of Professional Discipline had denied H.R. a nurse’s license on grounds of his lack of ethical character. I was sent a copy of the official report, from which I learned that a young woman whom H.R. had referred to a shadowy clinic for a colonic irrigation had died from the treatment. He had referred me to the same clinic, but I had been unable to make an appointment.

As it happened, my evening deliverance session was scheduled for the same day as H.R.’s hearing, January 19, 1988. As I entered the room, I told the two women who were to pray for me that I believed that I had already been delivered. We prayed for discernment. After a few minutes of prayer, one woman said that she had heard the demon’s name, but it had grown fainter and fainter. The other woman had heard the sound of retreating footsteps. We ended up praying, not for deliverance, but for my ongoing healing and protection. There were no more nightmares.

One hurt still nagged at me, months later. I was ashamed of having been deceived. Frears are supposed to be smart. They are never to be taken in. The cure for this ailment turned out to be a dinner at a hamburger joint with my new and staunchly Calvinist friend David. There was no one like David! Hard of doctrine and soft of heart, with thick-framed glasses and a boyish grin. After listening to my story, his first reaction was to tell me that the sin of pride lay at the root of my sense of humiliation. I had wanted to believe that I was smarter than I was. I was hurt because my pride was hurt. Eyes downcast, I had to agree.

Then, David abruptly reframed the entire scenario. “You’ve been thinking of this as a defeat,” he exclaimed, “but it’s really a victory! This guy did everything he could to seduce you physically and to seduce you away from Christianity. He lied about his credentials. He used brainwashing techniques. There was even demonic involvement. And – ha hah! – he failed! He failed on every level! Sure, you were hurt, but you came out on top!”

“Listen!” David interrupted himself and held up his hand. The song being played over the loudspeaker was The Main Ingredient’s hit from 1973. Smiling, David repeated the lyrics to me: “Sometimes everyone plays the fool. There’s no exception to the rule.”

And with that song, over that friendly hamburger, the last shred of pain evaporated.

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