A letter of this kind comes to the fellowship every few weeks. A student went to a ritual: because she thought it would be interesting, or because she wanted a spiritual lift, or because she had a real trouble and someone promised to fix it. Things got worse afterward, not better. Since then there have been nightmares she never used to have, thoughts that do not feel like her own, a heaviness she cannot shake, a sense of having been followed home. She asks whether something has attached itself to her. Those who work with such troubles have a homely name for it. They call it a spiritual hitchhiker.
We take the question seriously, and we will answer it. But we begin where the most experienced people in this work begin, and where the fellowship insists on beginning: with the practical before the spiritual.
The Practical Before the Spiritual
Before anything else, look honestly at the ordinary causes, because every one of them can feel exactly like being oppressed by something unseen. A home where there is violence or fear. Severe trouble with money. An illness of the body. An illness of the mind. Any of these can turn a life upside down, bring nightmares and dark thoughts and a sense of being hunted, and none of them needs an exorcist. If you are not safe at home, you do not have a spirit; you have a danger, and it deserves help from people who can give it. If your body or mind is unwell, see a physician. If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, speak to a doctor or a counselor today, and if you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number now, before you read any further.
None of this is a failure of faith. The wisdom of the son of Sirach, a book the desert community knew, says: honour a physician with the honour due unto him, for the Lord hath created him. Prayer and medicine are not rivals, and the fellowship has never met a holy person who thought they were.
What, then, points elsewhere? Those who do this work say that a true attachment usually comes on suddenly, and usually after a particular event: a ceremony, a session, a reading, a place. What follows is often a complete reversal of who the person normally is, or nightmares and impulses she has never had, or a run of strange and extreme happenings with no ordinary cause. Even then, the first step is not a stranger with a technique. It is the pastor, priest, or rabbi of your own tradition. Several of the great churches have kept ministries of deliverance for centuries, even if they seldom speak of them now.
What Those Who Do This Work Describe
People who spend their lives helping others out of these troubles sort what they meet into kinds. There are moods and thought forms: clouds of feeling that every human being gives off, the heavy air one walks into on entering a room where someone is seething. There are beings that have never had a body and would like the use of one. There are the spirits of the departed. And there are the malevolent, of whom scripture speaks plainly. The fellowship has no expertise in such sorting, and does not need it, because the remedy it knows is the same for all of them.
What such workers say next matters more than their categories. What clings to us, they say, usually clings to something in us: the self-concern, the resentment, the old wound, the appetite that makes an opening. That is why they speak so much of shadow work and spiritual hygiene, and why the fellowship speaks of the evening examination and the washing. The page Asking and Commanding calls the slow build-up of what blocks us by the prophets' word, dross, and says the most hopeful thing we know about it: it comes off, and it comes off while we are alive.
The House Swept and Empty
The teacher of the Way told a short and unsettling story about this. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there.
The house in the story was cleaned but not filled. That, in the experience of those who help people out of these troubles, is how most of the troubles began. The practitioner the person went to opened her without protecting her. She went in innocently, and came out giving off, as it were, a sign that read: I am open to anything. But she was not open to anything, and should not have been. None of us should be. We want to be open to what we choose to be open to.
A clear aim is itself a kind of protection. A person who is set on one thing pushes aside, without effort, much of what is not that thing. And a house that is full of order, attention, and prayer has no empty room to let. The scripture says: lay hands suddenly on no man. The fellowship adds: let no one lay them on you lightly, either. We do not say that every healer is dangerous. We say that any serious practice, in any tradition, begins by making the space its own, and that a practitioner who does not trouble to do so has not earned your trust.
What the Caves Kept
The Essenes were known as healers. The historian says they searched the writings of the ancients for the roots and stones that cure, and the article The Healers of the Lake follows the thread. Their library shows how they thought about protection, and it is worth seeing.
They copied the book of Tobit, in which the angel Raphael, sent and not summoned, drives away the demon that has tormented a household. Their Genesis Apocryphon tells how Abram prayed for the stricken king of Egypt and laid his hands on his head, and the plague was removed and the evil spirit rebuked. Among the fragments of the fourth cave are the Songs of the Sage, in which the sage declares the splendor of God's radiance to frighten all the spirits of destruction. And a scroll of the eleventh cave preserves songs against demons in the name of David, which end with the ninety-first psalm: he that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty; thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.
Notice what every one of these is. A prayer, a blessing, a praise, a sending. None of them commands a spirit by its own name or claims an authority of its own. It is the archangel's word again: the Lord rebuke thee.
Five Disciplines That Keep a Door
Here is what the fellowship counsels, drawn from the old texts, from those who do this work, and from our own long practice. None of it is exotic. That is the point.
- Keep order. Spirituality is a verb. Whatever troubles us hates form, and sudden chaos is the commonest mark of these troubles. So answer it with order. Rise at the same hour. Make the bed. Put dinner on the table at the same time every day. Arrive at work on time. If you go to the gym, keep going. Keep the Morning and Evening Watch, which is the smallest enclosure the fellowship knows and among the strongest. The Essenes lived by a Rule for a reason.
- Watch yourself. You do not have to meditate, though the fellowship hopes you will. The point of meditation is the observation of the self: a training by which you come to understand your own patterns, and why you do what you do when you do it. A person who can watch herself as she acts has begun to keep her own house, and what troubles us cannot abide a person who is awake in her own house. The Still Lamp is our way of practicing this.
- Make the space your own. Before any prayer, study, or practice, do what every serious tradition does in its own way: claim the space. The ceremonial orders have elaborate rites for this; the fellowship does not teach them, since they belong to a tradition we do not keep. Ours is simpler. Wash, face the light, and say aloud: this place is given to God, and nothing enters here that he has not sent. Sometimes it is as simple as saying to whatever presses: this is my space, and you shall not pass.
- Wash and stand on the earth. Water has always been the first remedy, and the page The Washing in Living Water describes the fellowship's practice. Some people find a bath with salt in it a help. Others walk barefoot on the grass each morning. The earthly Communions are, among other things, a way of standing on the ground again.
- Pray the old prayers, and ask. Say the ninety-first psalm at the Evening Watch, as the desert community seems to have done against the terrors of the night. If something presses, do not argue with it, do not question it, and do not command it. Say what the archangel said: the Lord rebuke thee. Then turn back to what you were doing. Ask; never command.
Do Not Carry It Alone
Most of what comes to the fellowship as fear of an attachment turns out, with time and order and the help of a physician or a pastor, to be something that lifts. Some of it is dross, and washes off. Some of it was never spiritual at all, and is healed by ordinary means, which are also gifts. A little of it is what it seemed to be, and yields to prayer and to the patience of people who know this work and keep the line between asking and commanding.
Whatever it is, do not carry it alone, and do not let fear make you dramatic. The Light keeps its appointments, as the Lection says. Keep yours. Rise, wash, face the east, and go about the day. The door is kept, in the end, not by a great ceremony but by a small one, kept every morning.