At that point, and without warning, the possessed man became rigid. He screamed and jeered: “If you take it from him, Priest, we needn’t leave. He has too many enemies. We needn’t leave! He didn’t help them when they asked him. We won’t leave! We needn’t leave!” Then a hideous, raucous laughter cackled at them all. The possessed man pointed a fine finger at David. “Hah-hah! Burnt. And he didn’t pray for them . . . Father of hopelessness! Hah-ha!”

David’s nerves were jangled. The parish priest took the crucifix and the holy-water flask himself and concluded the exorcism successfully. Afterward, he had a short chat with David. He calmed the young man, but added: “You have a problem. I don’t know your life. I am sure God will solve it at home for you.”

Back in his own diocese, David had a heart-to-heart talk with his bishop, who remarked on the change in David: no longer the self-confident, sometimes cocksure, always rather inaccessible intellectual he had known, David was now questioning and searching for internal peace, working through some puzzle he could not verbalize but which he felt entangling him.

David talked on, telling the bishop about the Paris exorcism and about his meeting with Teilhard years before.

“Well, have you some serious doubts about your orthodoxy as an anthropologist?”

asked the bishop after a time. “Or rather, perhaps, I should phrase the question differently. Do you feel that the exorcism experience has opened something in you, some deficiency perhaps, which your anthropology and your intellectualism were only hardening and making permanent?”

“I honestly don’t know,” David answered. “There is the death of Old Edward. Why did I take his last words so seriously? I know they meant something personal to me. But I don’t know exactly what.”

“Look, David,” the bishop finally said, “I will put you in touch with Father G., the diocesan exorcist. He has very little work, thank God. But he can help you one way or another-at least as far as the puzzle of that exorcism goes.”

Father G. turned out to be a breezy character full of snappy little phrases and quick, jerky movements. “Okay, Father David, okay,” was his comment on David’s story. “You have a problem. I have no solution for problems except action. I’m not an intellectual. I failed every exam they gave me. But they needed priests in the diocese so they let me through. I can say a valid Mass and baptize babies at any rate, even if my Latin is awful. And I am a good exorcist. The next time we have a case of possession, I’ll put you in the picture. Only concrete participation in this matter will help you.”

True to his word, Father G. took David as his assistant exorcist in two cases of possession the following year. Both were relatively uneventful; at any rate, nothing personal to David occurred in either of them. David, however, underwent a continuing change within himself in the succeeding two years. His experience with the possessed man in Paris and with the two exorcisms at home had convinced him that, whatever was at stake in possession and exorcism, it was not a question either of myth or fable, or of mental illness. In addition, he had to keep struggling to make sense of his personal history. He kept stringing a few facts together, trying to make sense out of them.

There was, first of all, the dying conversation of his Uncle Edward about praying for “them” and their going “home,” and David’s own failure to pray for “them.” Then there was Teilhard’s “give hope” and his words on the flyleaf of the book. And, finally, there were the jeering words of the fifty-year-old man in Paris. On the face of it, he could not understand any of these things, and there seemed to be very little connection between them all. Yet David felt sure there was a connection, if he could only perceive it.

During a few vacations at home on the farm, he walked down to the cemetery where Edward was buried. He sat in the old man’s bedroom. He hiked over to stand in the same place Edward and he had so often visited, and stood in full view of the “Old Man” of Franconia Notch. Once or twice after dinner, he strolled up and down the copse at the west end of the house and thought about Edward. He always felt calm and peaceful in that copse but could not understand why.

David’s mother, who was always very close to her son and his moods, said briefly to him as he was departing for the seminary after one of those home visits: “David, some things take time. Time. Only time can help. Be patient. With yourself, I mean. And with whatever it is that is bothering you. Remember how many years it took Edward to arrive at his own peace.”
 

David was grateful for these words and felt consoled. It was some sort of special message for him. But, again, there was the perplexing character of it: the consolation and the “message” character of herwords yielded to no rational explanation. Just as the effect of the copse on him, or the significance of Edward’s last words, or what precisely the possessed man in Paris had conveyed to him, or the strangeness he had discovered in Teilhard. The point was none of his knowledge and scholarship seemed to be of avail. The meanings of all these incidents seemed to flow from some source other than his intellect; they were foreign to his knowledge and his learning. And this disturbed him.

His students began to notice that the tone and, in part, the content of David’s lectures changed. He was still as unrelenting as ever in his probings of traditional doctrines in the light of modern scientific findings. And he excused in no way traditional presentations of doctrines about creation and Original Sin.

But a new element caught their attention. “Bones” returned again and again to the data of anthropology and paleontology with phrases they had not heard him use before. “As long as we measure this solely with our rulers and our logical reasoning, we will find no cause for hope,” he might say. Or: “In addition to the scientist’s eye and the theologian’s subtleties, we must have an eye for spirit.” Once he ended a lecture on burial cults in Africa saying, in effect: “But even if you analyze all these data theologically and rationally, you have to be careful. You can do all that faithfully, and yet pass blindly by the one trace of spirit present in the situation.” There seemed to be a note of regret in his tone at such moments.

Very few people-and this included his students, who generally got to know their professors intimately-very few knew that by this time David had been appointed diocesan exorcist. Father G. had been severely injured in an automobile accident and would never walk again.

David did not take his new post lightly. In his interview with the bishop when he accepted the post, he tried to get across a curious foreboding to his bishop. “I am changing,” he said. “I mean I am slowly coming to a deep, very deep realization about what I have become over the years. It isn’t that I have gruesome problems. Rather, it’s as if I had neglected something vital and the time is coming when I will have to face it. Exorcisms have the effect of making this need more acute,” he told the bishop.

“You, Father David, can never stop being useful to the diocese,” was the bishop’s remark.

“No. Of course not. That is, I hope not. But-“ David broke off and looked past the bishop. He had the vaguest premonition. If only he could tie it down in words. “It may be, Bishop, that at the end of a couple of years . . .” He broke off again and stared out the window. Vaguely he saw the faces of two choices rising up. Yet they made no sense to him. He turned and looked at the bishop. “It may be that I will resign from my teaching job at the seminary.”

“Let’s take a chance on that,” the bishop answered pleasantly, confidently.

For three weeks in November 1967, David was on leave from the seminary. He was in New York dealing with the strange case of one of his own students, Father Jonathan, born Yves L. in Manchester, New Hampshire. By the time of his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, Yves had changed his name. He was fourteen years younger than Father David. Like David, he came from an affluent home and, for all practical purposes, was an only child.

Yves’ father, Romain, was Catholic, French Canadian, originally from Montreal, and a doctor by profession. His mother, Sybil, a convert to Catholicism, was of Swedish parentage. Her first marriage, a childless one, had ended when she was twenty-seven years old, in the suicide of her husband.

Sybil was over forty and Romain was fifty-two years old when Yves was born. He had one half-brother, Pierre, by his father’s previous marriage in Canada. Pierre’s mother had died giving birth to him. When Yves was born, Pierre was twenty-eight, married, with children of his own, and living in New Jersey.

Before her first marriage, Sybil had taught in a private Swiss school. She had been educated at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and had a doctorate in philosophy. She emigrated to Canada with her parents in the early 19305. Yves’ good looks obviously reflected his Swedish ancestry and particularly his mother’s Nordic beauty.

His childhood was a happy one. Relations and friends who knew all three over many years always remembered how united they were as a family, though some remember the house as too adult and mind-oriented for a little boy. Under his mother’s influence in particular, by the age of nine Yves was reading voraciously; and seven years later, at the year-end examinations, he astounded his school examiners by his detailed knowledge of English and American literature.

Yves’ mother had a smoldering personality; she always conveyed the impression of deep and somber experiences within her. As with many converts, she was more Catholic than the Catholics themselves.

His father’s religion was of a more popular and instinctual kind. His youth had been spent in northwest Canada. Later, David was to find out that the earliest images retained by Yves’ father were more or less like David’s own: of rugged nature, gargantuan proportions of sky and mountain and water, unbeatable and often cruel forces in the snow, the storm, the wind, and the inhospitable soil.

Yves’ parents always remained devoted to one another, but sexual expression of that love stopped when Sybil underwent a hysterectomy after Yves’ birth. Apparently a deep feeling of being wounded or deficient in her femininity took hold of her.

Romain, on the other hand, entered a religious crisis of acute pain during his wife’s pregnancy. Partly because his wife’s life was endangered by the pregnancy, and partly due to a fleeting affair he had during that time, he developed a constant fear that, because of the sins of his earlier years and the affair during his wife’s pregnancy, he would lose his faith, die an unbeliever, and suffer the loss of eternal life in Heaven.

Yves never noticed any sign of his father’s agonizing scrupulousness; and he did not realize until much later in life that the marital love of his parents had cooled very early in his childhood. Both parents were outwardly very loving in every way.

By the time Yves reached his teens, Sybil had become a kind, intelligent, and healthy woman. While no longer attached to what she called the mechanisms of sexuality, she was very aware of her love and sensuality, very graceful in her life, creative, but beyond ambition. Romain was a doctor known for his devotion and skill as well as for his sense of community duty. Father and mother had an unwritten pact of close companionship and intimate care for each other. It created a personal world of utter trust and undisturbed peace.

All in all, the atmosphere in which Yves grew up and in which he felt secure was an adult one permeated by values he felt more than he understood.’ Home life was inspired by sentiments he perceived and reproduced but which did not deeply express his own tastes and inclinations. Life with Sybil and Romain gravitated around unseen things that the immature Yves knew best by intuition but could not identify. There was an integrity of person and a graceful style in their living. There was strength of love and a solidity of judgment. But the viewpoint was narrow, too narrow.

Within that family Yves’ values and personal ties-his parents, his school, his parish ambient, his friends-were held in place by solid moorings. He went to parish schools until he was eighteen. In retrospect, and as far as anyone can remember, there was no difference between him and the other boys of his acquaintance. He was excellent at sports and a very good dancer; he dated local girls, and moonlighted with another boy until they had put enough money together to buy a secondhand car.

He had only a few serious scrapes with the school authorities. It was never a matter of study-at that he was consistently beyond reproach. But now and then Yves would turn on one of his teachers in full view of the class in a fit of verbal abuse and uncontrollable rage.

He was always apologetic later, and his obviously sincere regret and winning smile generally had their effect; the school authorities forgave him easily. It probably did not hurt that his father was quite a prominent citizen, and that his mother was an active member of the parish, and that Yves won a state prize every year for his English essay, thus bringing honor to the school. He had a way with words and a touch of the poet that was beyond the ordinary. It helped him in his studies and in his scrapes.

By sixteen, Yves was an amateur painter, was writing poems to commemorate events at school and at home, was chosen to be his class valedictorian, and genuinely loved literature. By the time he was seventeen, he had decided to become a priest.

A final school essay written by Yves at the end of his last year reads today like a terrible prediction. In a precocious study of Shelley, Yves wrote: “But with all this beauty, no one can say what it would have done to the poet and the man had he lived beyond the age of thirty. Shelley pioneered a fresh idea of godliness. But it might-we will never know-have been a trap sprung by Job’s Satan or Dante’s Devil.” Yves carried the essay around with him for many years, because he felt that in writing it he had perceived something very profound.

He owed his decision to become a priest largely to his parents’ influence. Priesthood had been his father’s first ambition in life; and he transmitted this frustrated wish to his son-not as a command or an obligation, but as an ideal. Yves knew from the age of seven that, in his father’s eyes, the priesthood was the best, the highest, the most honorable profession. This is what his father conveyed by look, word, and attitude. His mother’s influence was not so positive. It was more that, by looking down on any other occupation as secondary, she highlighted priesthood as the ideal and the goal.

The seminary Yves attended was the same one to which two years later Father David M. was posted. Yves was one of many seminarians and did not arouse any particular attention on David’s part. His studies were, as usual, excellent. He had a very fine voice for chanting. He cut an impressive figure in ceremonial robes: over six feet in height, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with hands that were both masculine and beautiful. He was marked by a winsome grace and symmetry of movement; and, above all, he possessed a pair of eyes that radiated a striking luminosity and that had an almost hypnotic effect on people around him.

For all these reasons, Yves was the ideal actor in the liturgist’s manual and the type for which every preacher’s handbook was written. His knowledge of English and his good writing style helped him in the practice sermons he composed and delivered at the seminary.

In view of these talents, his interest in art and poetry was forgiven. In the atmosphere of any seminary during the 19505, there was always a general suspicion of anyone interested in painting and literature- especially poetry. Roman Catholicism of that time regarded such things as “dangerous.” The Church always had had difficulty in governing poets and painters; they sometimes were unwelcome prophets and discomforting commentators.

But Yves used his gifts well. He kept within the seminary mentality. He was careful, always careful.

One incident during his seminary years did disturb the authorities briefly. It was 1961.

As always with Yves, he quickly overcame it. The occasion was Yves’ final theological examinations, oral ones, conducted by three of his professors and presided over by a fourth, who would, if necessary, step in to arbitrate a dispute or cast a deciding vote in the assigning of grades. Generally, the moderator-as the fourth member of the examining board was called-had no part in the examinations and used the time to read a book or catch up with his correspondence.

This time the moderator was David. At one point in Yves’ oral examinations, a heated dispute developed between one of the examiners, Father Herlihy, and Yves. Father Herlihy was questioning Yves about the nature of the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, marriage, etc.), and he appeared to David to be angry. But it was Yves who drew David’s closest attention-the handsome face drawn and haggard, mouth pulled tight in an obstinate grimace, perspiring forehead, eyes empty of their usual winsomeness. The change, so complete, so rapid, startled David and worried him. He could see none of the accustomed light, but only bitter resentment in Yves’ eyes.

Yves finally was able to mumble out some sort of answer to Father Herlihy’s questions, and ran quickly from the examination room as soon as time was up.

In his concern, David went along after the examination to Father Herlihy’s study to discuss in greater detail exactly what had happened between him and Yves.

Apparently Yves had insisted at one point that all the sacraments were no more than expressions of man’s natural unity with the world around him. According to accepted doctrine, this is heretical. The sacraments are believed to be the supreme means of union with God. Yves’ words had implied that, after his death, Jesus had gone back to nature; and therefore the sacraments were our way of being one with Jesus in the earth, the sky, the sea, and the wide universe.

With his customary attention to detail, David wanted to know Father Herlihy’s exact impression from Yves’ words. “That was the funny part,” Father Herlihy answered-and David never forgot his next words-“what he said was just foolish; but it was the peculiar sense he communicated to me; I seemed to be listening to something not quite human-I know it sounds foolish.”

Afterward, David had deep qualms about the whole matter. In part, he blamed himself: he felt that his own lectures on creation and on the origin of man had something to do with Yves’ reaction. Yves could have wrongly interpreted the Teilhardian doctrines David taught. With only a thin and fragile line between Teilhard’s view and a total denial of divinity in Jesus, Teilhardian concepts were delicious mental playthings that could-David saw clearly for the first time-be used to exalt man as an animal, to make his world into a gilded menagerie, to reduce Jesus to the status of a Christian hero as grandly noble and as pitifully mortal as Prometheus in the Greek myth, and to picture God as no more than the very bowels of earth and sky and the spatial distances of the universe with all its expanding galaxies.

The incident continued to disturb David. Yves had conveyed merely by his looks during the exchange with Father Herlihy a sort of inner savagery and hate that David felt was out of kilter with Yves’ normal demeanor. David had an instinctive suspicion of such sudden and dramatic breaks in the normal patterns of behavior. Perhaps it was merely a bad moment-and everyone has such moments. But if not, then that winning exterior and compatible behavior Yves ordinarily displayed must mask something else, some inner condition of spirit and bent of mind that no amount of seminary training had touched.

However, there the matter rested. The end of the school year was on them. Three weeks later Yves, with eleven others, was ordained to the priesthood. David himself was scheduled to leave for a vacation at home on the family farm, and then to proceed to Mexico City for an international conference of anthropologists. The incident was quickly forgotten for the time being.

When the summer was over, Yves was posted as assistant to an outlying parish of Manchester. He was near his hometown and within calling distance of his parents. For Yves’ mother the new appointment was providential. Early in the new year, Yves’ father, Remain, died suddenly from a heart attack. She would have been quite alone if Yves had not been posted to Manchester.

Yves’ memory of the time span between September 1960 and January 1967 is clear and full of details. His recollections of 1967 are incomplete but still helpful in reconstructing what happened to him. From April 1968, when David made a first attempt to exorcise the evil spirit possessing Yves, until March 1970, when David concluded the exorcism, Yves’ memory has large gaps. But his recollections, the notes and memories of David, together with the transcript of his exorcism contribute mightily to create a whole picture, a photomontage of how satanic possession started in one individual, gained ground, progressed continuously, and finally became as total as we can imagine it ever to be.

Possession by the spirit of evil proceeds along the structure of day-to-day life. In Yves’ case, it used the priestly structure of his life, appearing first of all in the way he administered the Sacrament of Marriage, then in the way he said Mass, and finally in all his priestly activities.

In the Sacrament of Ordination, it is the whole man who is “priested.” He does not simply acquire an extra function. He is not endowed with merely a new faculty or granted a rare permission. Rather, it is a new dimension of his spirit which necessarily affects all he does bodily and mentally. Any deformation of that dimension by the introduction of some antipathetic or utterly foreign element spells disturbance and trouble. The dimension of priesthood cannot be removed or replaced; it can be degraded, neglected, distorted.

Yves took up his duties in St. Declan’s parish with apparent gusto. The work was not overwhelming. He had plenty of time for his own occupations. The parish bordered on the countryside; he had a view of the southeast from one window of his study and of the west from another. He rapidly became popular as a preacher in the parish, as a counselor for its younger members, and as a welcome visitor in the homes of the parishioners. At no time was there ever any question of his probity; he had no desire to accumulate wealth; he drank seldom; and those who knew him have always asserted that there was never in him the slightest deviation from his vow of celibacy. “A grand young priest” was the general judgment and impression.

When, after a couple of months, he had established a daily routine and found out what amount of time was needed for his official duties as an assistant, he started again to cultivate his two principal hobbies: painting and English literature. Once he made a trip to New York to talk with a publisher about a study of the poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, and he returned home full of enthusiasm for the project.

It was toward the end of 1961, a little over a year after his arrival at St. Declan’s, that the first traces of change became apparent in him.

On an average, Yves performed ceremonies of marriage three to five times every month. He seemed to add a special note of solemnity, joy, and celebration by his mere presence. His sermons on these occasions were beautifully delivered. And it thrilled everyone present to see this handsome and graceful young priest celebrating the love of the newlyweds within the purlieu of the Church’s holiness and God’s purity, and the Lordship of Jesus. For these were the themes on which Yves preached again and again in modulated tones and poetic language.

As time went on, however, Yves became more and more dissatisfied with the marriage ceremonial as prescribed in the Roman Ritual, the official handbook for priests that contains detailed instructions on how priests are to celebrate the various sacraments. He felt that the words and gestures assigned to the priest in performing a marriage ceremony were not merely outmoded, but that they did not convey what modern men and women thought and felt about marriage.

Above all, Yves found the actual words of the marriage vows more and more repulsive and irrelevant. Here he was, standing in front of two young people about to embark on a marvelous union and life together; and, as official representative of the Church, all he could tell them to do in the name of God and religion was to “stick it out,” to stay together no matter what happened, until they were parted by death. Was that precisely what marriage partners promised each other? he asked himself.

In the beginning, he made no change in the words of the actual vows. But in his sermon at each marriage, he began to outline what the marriage partners did really promise to each other.

In the first sermons he insisted that the partners were giving each other what Jesus gave his Church. Jesus was the supreme model. Then, as he developed this theme, he began to say more explicitly what it was Jesus gave his Church.
Consciously now, Yves was drawing on what he had heard Father “Bones” say at the seminary and what he had thought out by his own reading of Teilhardian doctrines. Mixed with all he said were lines of poetry about Jesus which he applied to the bridegroom and the bride.

In these sermons Jesus was pictured by Yves as the summit of human development, the great Omega Point. He made all nature beautiful, including the bodies and the love of married people. Jesus was so dedicated to perfecting the material world that he was evolving as that world’s peak of perfection. In the same total way that Jesus gave himself to this human world even to the point of dying like every living element in it, so the marriage partners should, Yves pointed out, adapt themselves to this world. They would find perfection primarily in each other, secondarily in other people around them, then in nature, in life, and finally in their dying and death.

All this was, of course, far from the normal teaching of Yves’ Church, according to which Jesus does not depend on the material world in any way, and marriage is a sacrament which enables the partners to live their lives with supernatural grace and to achieve eternal life in heaven after death.

But the change in Yves’ beliefs was not the strangest or most dramatic thing about this early “enigmatic stage” of his possession. What is relevant and striking is that Yves constantly found his thoughts and words “coming” to him. Sometimes, having spoken to the congregation in the church, he woke up to the fact that he had said this or thought that without having willed it or even been conscious of what he had done. It was not that his mind had wandered. It was a sort of “remote control.”

In fact, Yves’ first clear idea of what was happening within himself did not come because his clerical colleagues in the rectory and a few parishioners objected to some of his thoughts and expressions. They did, but this of itself did not bother Yves very much. He still relied on his charm and his words to get him out of any incidental difficulties.

That “remote control” which was to increase in him until it became paramount in his life-this was the first sign to him of something alien within him. It had become apparent to him at first during his free hours.

In his free time away from the church and his parish duties, Yves tackled painting and writing much as any other artist. He would be in the mood for painting or poetry. He would have some perceptions of color, line, form, or spatial dimensions. The perceptions burned in his imagination and inner sensibilities for some period of time.

He would sit down to paint, for instance, while he thus burned inside with images, imaginings, flights of fancy and inner landscapes.

While doing initial drafts on canvas or paper, motivated by that not unusual activity of his imagination, he normally experienced a special inner perception which was always pleasurable. It was, Yves said, his mind and will gathering in and enjoying the fruits of his imagination. And there poured back into his imagination freshly burnished forms of what originally had entered through his senses.

It was these burnished forms he tried to depict on canvas or to express in his poetry. But even as he painted or wrote, he found his memory of past things reviving and lighting up like a panel, pouring assonances and shadings into his imagination. And his general effort suddenly expanded and became richer as he tried to reproduce the new form his experience had taken.

It was this rather normal creative routine that began to take a peculiar turn; and it was always in strict relationship to some exterior trouble or difficulty Yves had as a priest.

The most important occasion which he clearly remembers hinged upon a bit of unpleasantness with the senior assistant in his parish. In late September 1962, he had preached at a marriage. Afterward, the senior assistant of the parish, who had been present at the ceremony, admonished Yves about his sermon. “You are making marriage a merely human thing,” he argued. “It is a sacrament, a channel of supernatural grace. The Lord Jesus is not going to evolve out of the earth or a woman’s body or from gases in the upper atmosphere.”

The rebuke was potentially serious, but Yves had talked his way out of it; the senior assistant was very firm, but he liked Yves, as everyone did. For his part, Yves wanted no trouble. He liked his post too much. But, afterwards, he had a deep surge of resentment about the whole matter.

The following day was his weekly free day. In the morning, while he was painting, the incident was still annoyingly in the forefront of his mind. But there was also a peculiarity which he was quick to notice and apparently powerless to prevent: he felt there were two parts of him or two functions going on at the same time in him, each of them working in different directions.

He went on painting, holding the brush, choosing colors, dipping, painting, standing back and returning to his easel and continuing to paint. All the while, the normal mechanism of his inner man was at work-imagination, memory, mind, will.

But all that while, too, another and parallel process was going on. His imagination was receiving data-images, impressions, forms- from some source other than the outside world. He knew this because they resembled nothing he had ever seen, heard, or thought. And then, too, it seemed to him that these images were not assimilated by his mind and will. Rather, they seemed to paralyze mind and will, to freeze them so that bit by bit they went fallow. An entire idea-he could not even make out its contours or details-was being “shoved” into his mind and forced into his will for acceptance.

He resisted the “push” of the idea; but it eventually invaded his mind and will through his imagination. And finally, as far as he could make out, he yielded. Then that grossly strange idea flooded back into his imagination with all its parts, reasons, and logic, there to be clothed in new images. His mind even supplied words for those images and sometimes, indeed, he found himself pronouncing these words in whole sentences.

After about an hour, on the first vivid and eerie occasion of this kind, he was shocked to discover that he was now painting in a strange and completely alien fashion compared to his normal way. His canvas had become a hodgepodge of his initial brushings, which he had intended to portray a street scene. On top of them was a crazy quilt of other forms and shapes-shadowy trees, rivers, irregular forms with legs, squares with ears, loops that ended in numerals.

When he resisted that inner “push” of ideas from that unknown source, his painting followed the normal course. But when he yielded, the hodgepodge started anew. He seemed to have become a means of translating into pictorial images some message or instructions or thoughts conveyed to him forcibly and not by his own choosing.

Yves felt alone and vulnerable. He was very disturbed. On an impulse he decided to drive out to see some friends in the country. But there was no letup. Along the way, he found he could no longer concentrate on his driving, so great and distracting was the force of all that was now pouring into him. He had to stop the car on the side of the road. He sat there and tried to keep his mind and will free of all those images and forms that were pounding at them from some source he could not identify.

But as he intensified his struggle, another element crept to the fore: his resentment about the previous day’s argument with the senior assistant. When Yves yielded to the “push” of the idea being “shoved” into his mind, it brought with it some peculiar satisfaction in resentment. When Yves resisted, the resentment smoldered there and hurt him. In the brief pauses between these inner gyrations, Yves’ mind dwelt on what he had said during the sermon and elaborated the ideas still further. He found intense satisfaction in this.

Eventually, as he sat beside the road, his planned visit with friends forgotten, he found himself yielding willingly to the “push” of the idea. And the moment he yielded, he felt immediate relief from an internal pressure and a deep conviction that his resentment against the senior assistant was justified: Yves had been right all along. He knew what was going on. Besides, he found his imagination and feelings once more chockful of inspiration which he knew would pour into his sermons, his painting, and his poetry.

Yves points to this experience as the moment “remote control” became a constant element in his life, because at that instant he accepted it willingly. It was, so to speak, the “consecration” of Yves’ possession.

Once he voluntarily accepted it-and he insists today that he knew he was accepting some “remote” or “alien” control-he was suddenly inundated. He still had not moved from his car. All around him was soft-spoken countryside. But every sense-eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch-was saturated with a discordant medley of experiences. A riot of sounds, colors, odors, tastes, skin feelings washed over him. He could distinguish a certain rhythmic beat throughout this confusion and din. But he had no control and could not shake himself loose from these perceptions. Throughout, he felt a certain privileged awe, a secret pride. Then the storm in his senses gathered up inside him somewhere, absorbing utterly his imagination and memory. He now felt as if serpentine thoughts were touching the furthest reaches of his mind, and that fine tendrils were closing around each fiber of his will.

Slowly he began again to be conscious of the world around him. What had occurred had taken only moments, but for those moments he had been totally abstracted, walled up within himself.

Sound and light and shape now wafted back through the trellis of his senses, making him a newly aware observer of the world. He heard birds singing once more; he felt the sunlight on his face again. The coolness of the wind and the smell of morning-fresh grass and flowers became vivid for him. But now each lattice of sensation was filled by some coiling presence weaving slowly, possessively, with ease, lazily enjoying an acquired resting place in the shaded corners of his being.

For a brief instant, there was some echo of resistance in him. Some ancient voice protested in dim tones. Then it ceased. Yves “let go,” and all tension fled. He was at peace for the first time in many years. And he felt renewed. There was a sudden ease throughout his body and an almost fierce, certainly overpowering calm flooding his thoughts.

He was never more conscious of being “visited.” And every image he ever had of those who had been “visited” by “another” came tumbling from his memory: Moses at the burning bush; Isaiah catching sight of the flaming seraphs in the temple of Yahweh; Mary the Virgin in Nazareth bowing before Gabriel the messenger; Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elias on Mount Tabor and conversing with God; St. John in his Patmos cavern gazing at the Mystic Lamb in all his glory; Constantine galvanized by the Cross in the clouds; Joan of Arc in her prison cell tearfully hearing her “voices” in the depths of pain; John of the Cross in his prison cell piercing the Dark Night and embracing the Beloved; Teilhard fingering the bones of Sinanthropos and seeing Jesus, Omega Point, prefigured in those pathetic pieces. Yves had a clear sense of being destined, as all those had been, for a special revelation.

All this rushed by him and fell away as he raised his eyes and looked again at the fields, the trees, the sky. All was now moving in a new vision, animated by a life he had dreamed of, but never known. It was all, he now knew, a sacrament, a row of sacraments strung together as a lovely necklace around man’s world. And his mind, will, and inner senses were permeated with a strange new incense consecrating him-as no bishop’s hands could ever do-to the priesthood of a new being. He knew: always it had been so near him and yet so far. “Beauty, ever ancient, ever new! Too late have I known thee!” he murmured Augustine’s quiet regret.

There was awe at the surprise of it all, humbleness at not having seen it all before. And, dominantly, an enthusiasm lush with passion. The coiling presence stirred in him; and he began to daydream.

“Hey, Father! Having any trouble?” The shout startled Yves. It was a local state trooper who had drawn alongside in his patrol car. Yves snapped his head around, angry at the interruption, his eyes blazing. But the genial smile of the trooper reassured him. They knew each other. “Just passing a few moments in peace, Pat,” he said, recovering himself and reaching for the ignition key. “Give Jane and the kids my love.”

With a wave of his hand he continued on his way to see his friends. From then on, Yves became extremely careful. It was as if he had been put on his guard. He knew with an almost uncanny foresight when trouble was in store for him. At times he was forewarned about a particular person. “Someone” told him. At other times the warning concerned activities: a request to solemnize a marriage, a request for confessions, an invitation to dinner at a parishioner’s house or with his fellow priests; or it might be a book or article in a magazine or a letter. The warning was silent, but clear and pithy:

“Avoid it!” or “Don’t do it!” or “Don’t meet them!” Except for an occasional flourish in a sermon, his colleagues found no further reason to cavil at his ideas.

But when he spoke privately with parishioners, with an engaged couple about to be married, for example, it was different. Then he explained their union so poetically, and he dwelt so insistingly on the peculiarly earthly role of Jesus, that they always departed completely charmed by his counseling.

Yves himself clearly explains now how the entire purpose, meaning, and reason of marriage as a Sacrament had changed for him. It had become a Sacrament of nature for him. It had lost its dimension as a channel of supernatural grace, just as the senior assistant had warned him. It was something that united people with the natural universe. And this meant there had been some deep damage to Yves’ own faith. As time went by, and Yves introduced this same dark element to the other Sacraments, his own condition became far more extreme; and he himself began to sense more clearly the meaning of his voluntary commitment to a force he now could not control. The moment for possible resistance had passed.

In 1963, Yves’ situation became critical for him. Saying Mass was a prime example.

The servers and the people found that he began to take a longer time to say Mass. Peculiarly enough, it was only one part of the Mass that took the additional time. It was the most solemn section immediately preceding the Consecration that begins when the priest extends his hands, palms downward, fingers together, over the chalice and the bread. The ceremonial calls for complete silence, broken only by the tinkling of the Mass bell. Yves would now remain for abnormal lengths of time, with his hands outstretched-at first only three minutes, then ten, then fifteen, once thirty agonizing additional minutes, with congregation and attendants waiting and watching. Then he would take an abnormally long time to utter the actual words of Consecration. At an ordinary pace, all these ceremonial actions take no more than three to five minutes.

His colleagues thought he was going through a “mystical” period, or that he was suffering from “religious scruples,” that he took too seriously each official prescription for the actions and words of the Mass. Some priests go through such a phase. They know that any deviation can result in venial or mortal sin. So they torture themselves, making sure they observe all the rules; they go back again and again repeating actions and words, to make sure they consciously do everything correctly.

But Yves neither was mystical nor was he paralyzed by religious scruples. He was undergoing what he now describes as the most agonizing whipping and thrashing of his inner self. It began one day when, as he tells it, from the moment that his hands were outstretched over the chalice and the bread, until after the Consecration, the “remote control” changed in force and in its “message.”

“I fought every inch of the way,” Yves recounts today, “and I lost every inch of that fight.”

Instead of the officially prescribed words of the Mass and the concepts expressed in those words, Yves now found different concepts and different words. It was always and only key words that were changed. Every time, for instance, the word “saving” or “salvation” was ritually prescribed, he could only think and say “winning” and “triumph.” “Saving” and “salvation” appeared to him like words scribbled on bits of torn paper and pinned to a wall out of his reach. To reach for them impotently was the source of intense agony and searing pain.

Similarly with “love” (this now became “pride”), “died” and “death” (now “returned home to death” and “nothingness”), “sacrifice” (now “defiance”), “sins” (now “myths and fables”), “bread” and “wine” (now “desire” and “pleasure”). So it went.
An additional agony ensued whenever a sign of the cross was called for by the ritual, when Yves would find only the index finger of his right hand capable of motion, and it could trace only a vertical line upward.

Throughout, his memory and reflexes propelled him to act according to the ritual. The substitute words and thoughts poured in. He recognized immediately that the sense and intent of the whole ceremony was changed utterly by those new words and thoughts. He fought with will and mind to retain the ritual. But each time it was the same: as long as he fought, some hard lump seemed to start expanding deep within him-not in his body, not in his brain, but in his living consciousness. “It was like remembering last night’s nightmare and knowing that this reality was what frightened you then.” As the lump expanded, it began to reduce in a sinister fashion the area of his very self.

At the excruciating limit of this inner pain, it began to have a physical and psychological ricochet: the blood roared in his ears and peculiar pains started-his hair, eyelashes, and toenails ached unbearably. Quick kaleidoscopic pictures of his entire life tumbled in front of his mind, always making him look ludicrous, smelly, contemptible, beyond help. He could hear himself beginning to form a scream, which, if it had emerged, would have been: “I’m drowning! I’m perishing! Save me!”
It never emerged. He stopped fighting. All agony ceased. And a marvelous exhilaration-not unmixed with relief-flooded him. The ease was almost painful in its contrast with the pain that had preceded it.

The final agony came one day when he started to pronounce the words of Consecration. Instead of “This is My Body” and “This is My Blood,” other words echoed in his own voice: “This is My Tombstone” and “This is My Sexuality.” As he pronounced these words while bending over the altar as prescribed by the ritual, all intent of authentic Consecration fled from him. His index finger bent into a hook shape, thrust itself into the wine, and then scratched a vertical red stain on the white wafer.

At that moment, Yves could not straighten up. His ears were filled with two different sounds. He was sure he actually heard them: a jeering laugh that echoed and echoed and echoed; and a faint keening, a muted wail or cry of protest which eventually died away in the reverberations of that heinous laugh. Then, as from that “remote control,” he heard the syllables: “Jesus is now Jonathan,” and “Jonathan is now Yves,” and “Yves is now Jonathan and Jesus.” And finally, “All is gathered into Mr. Natural.”

It was some time before Yves realized that only he had heard all those profanities. But whether they heard those words or not, it was Yves’ appearance after those painfully extended moments of inward battle that shocked the people who watched him. When he turned around finally to distribute communion, his face was terribly drawn, haggard, the color of chalk. His hair, cut short then, seemed to be standing on end. His eyes, normally so impressively clear and winning, were narrowed to slits; and he was muttering through clenched teeth. The whole impression was stark and lifeless.

He finished the Mass in a violent state of inner tension. Only after some time spent alone was he once more flooded with that strange peace and exultation. Finally, when he had recovered himself alone in the vesting room, he emerged smiling, composed, looking as he had always looked.

His yielding to the “control” at Mass had immediate and far-reaching effects. In baptizing infants, he changed the Latin words, which were unintelligible to the parents and bystanders. When he was supposed to say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he said, “I baptize you in the name of the Sky, the Earth, and Water.”

But the most momentous change in his performance both of Baptism and the other Sacraments (Extreme Unction, Confession) affected those parts which spoke of “Satan” or the “Devil” or “evil spirits.”

At Baptism, instead of saying (in Latin), “Depart, Unclean Spirit” or “To renounce Satan and all his works” or “Become a child of God,” he now said, “Depart, spirit of hate for the Angel of Light,” and “To renounce all exile of Prince Lucifer,” and “Become a member of the Kingdom.”

In Confession, he stopped saying, “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”; instead, he said, “I confirm you in your natural wishes, in the name of Sky, Earth, and Water.” And when he administered the Sacrament of the Dying (“Extreme Unction” was its old name), he committed the dying person to the mercy and peace of “Sister Earth” and to the eternity of “Mother Nature.”

Whenever he felt an initial repugnance to accepting what was “dictated” to him by the “remote control,” that frightful inner lump grew sensitive; and Yves became a being of pure pain. He quickly obeyed, and he was rewarded always by a wild exultation. The sun was brighter. The blue of the sky was deeper. The coffee he drank was never so good. The blood coursed vigorously in his veins. And his head never felt clearer.

By the end of 1964, it became obvious to his colleagues there was something wrong with Yves that they could no longer explain by his artistic temperament, his French Canadian-Swedish ancestry, a mystical period of life, or religious scruples. It was all too peculiar. It frightened some. It repelled others. It angered still others. It left all with an eerie sense of something utterly alien in Yves. And to cap it all, Yves had begun to refer to himself as “Father Jonathan.”

But it was always isolated things, and nobody ever put them all together into a definite pattern. When he turned around at Mass (as the priest did four or five times) to say “Dominus vobiscum” (“The Lord be with you”), one colleague swore he heard Yves say, “Dominus Lucis vobiscum” (“The Lord of Light be with you”). Others did not hear that single added word, but the faint glint in his eyes gave them a momentary shock. Once, as he touched the forehead of a baby he was baptizing, the baby went into violent hysteria and had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment.

All such incidents taken individually were susceptible of perfectly rational explanations. But his visit to a boy dying of bone cancer was the final incident that led ultimately to his abandonment of his post.

It was at the end of 1966. The boy, the fourteen-year-old red-haired son of Irish immigrant parents, was to be anointed: death was certain and imminent. Before the priest, Father Yves, arrived, the boy asked his mother to wash his face and hands and help him put on his favorite shirt and tie. He also asked his father to turn his bed toward the door, because, he said, there was a dark thing in the corner of the room.

When Yves arrived, all went normally until Yves endeavored to straighten the bed, making the boy again face the “darkened” corner. The boy started to scream: “No! Father! No! Please! Mother!” Then as his mother ran in and Yves, having straightened the bed, stood over toward that particular corner, the boy started to weep uncontrollably. Yves does not remember all the boy said, but he does recall certain words and sentences: “darkness,” “they smile at each other,” “he hates Jesus,” “save me,” “I don’t want to go with them.”

Finally the boy’s father apologetically requested Yves to leave and come back the next day. But his mother telephoned Yves’ superior, the pastor of the parish. The pastor came an hour later, anointed the boy, and waited for the end, which came quickly.

The incident was the last straw. And now everything known and remarked about Yves for the previous three years was put together. The pastor and his senior assistant said nothing to Yves, but they spent about three months gathering information and watching Yves closely. In addition to the peculiarities mentioned already, they received a puzzling report they could not make head or tail of. A man answering Yves’ description periodically lived in a loft in Greenwich Village, New York. His appearances there always coincided with Yves’ vacations and the free days when he was away from his home parish.

They found out that the loft was known as the Shrine of the New Being; that the man was called Father Jonathan; that he held services for all and sundry: said Mass, performed marriages, heard confessions, ordained men and women as priests of the Shrine, baptized infants and adults, went on call to homes and hospitals where the dying lay; and that he had one other specific rite, which he called the Bearing of the Light. Its initiated members were called the Light-Bearers. But no details about either members or their rites were available.

Just at the moment that a full written report was ready and about to be sent to the bishop, Yves seemed to have been alerted-however late-to the intentions of his colleagues. For about two months his behavior, as far as anyone could judge, was absolutely normal. He never went to Greenwich Village. He worked hard.

Then, in mid-June 1967, when all concerned were just about to dismiss the whole affair as exaggerated and irrelevant, Yves had his first terrible seizure. Predictably, perhaps, it was at Mass.

When he had stretched his hands out, palms downward over the chalice, he suddenly started to weep and groan and sway. One hand clamped down roughly over the chalice. The other fell resoundingly on the white wafer of bread. The servers called the pastor. He, together with the two other assistants, could not physically dislodge Yves’ hands, or move the chalice, or stop Yves’ weeping and groaning. He and the chalice and the bread were rooted physically to their place as if by rivets. He became incontinent on the altar.

By that time, the pastor had emptied the church and locked the doors. They were about to call a doctor when Yves suddenly let go of the chalice and the bread. He seemed to be flung backward, tumbling down the three steps of the altar and falling heavily to the marble floor of the sanctuary. He was unconscious when they reached him.

He awoke about an hour later. When the pastor spoke with him, Yves disclosed to him that his mother had been epileptic, and he pleaded with the pastor not to put him to shame publicly. He would go away in order to rest, follow a doctor’s advice after a checkup, and all would be well.

But now the pastor believed the worst. In his eyes, Father Yves must be possessed. The pastor’s conclusion was no more than a deep conviction based on his personal reactions. But even so, it was a serious matter, and it would not be dropped or postponed again until the pastor was sure one way or the other. A discreet inquiry revealed that Sybil, Yves’ mother, was not epileptic. In a long Sunday morning interview, the bishop was told the whole story, including the pastor’s worst fears. That was in June at the seminary, where the bishop was ordaining the new young priests.

The bishop called in Father David M. for consultation.

After his consultation with the bishop, Father David had an interview with Yves. He came away completely baffled. Not only did Yves cooperate fully with him, but whatever Yves said seemed to strike a sympathetic chord in David. The only two peculiarities he could not explain satisfactorily were Yves’ constant use of his new name, Jonathan, and the condition of Yves’ right index finger.

The name David could accept. After all, only ten years before, David had started to call himself, or at least to sign letters to his intimate friends, as “Pierre” (after Teilhard de Chardin); and he had taken a lot of leg-pulling from his colleagues about that. And the name “Bones” had stuck to David chiefly because David, once he heard the name, deliberately used it several times during his lectures; he liked it.

The finger was another matter. According to the doctor who had X-rayed it, no bone was broken and no nerve was shattered. The problem could in no way be traced to the supposed epileptic history of Yves’ mother. There was calcification in the finger; but the deformity could not be traced to a blow or injury; and no calcification could be found elsewhere in Yves’ body. He was found not to be arthritic.

For the rest of it, David could not find much to be alarmed about. He had checked out Yves’ mother: she had, indeed, been subject to some sort of seizures, but the doctors who examined her always ruled out epilepsy. That much left David relieved. But he still came away baffled. He was convinced that he had missed something essential; and he felt foolish without knowing why. His discussion with Yves had covered both the doctrine Yves professed as a priest and Yves’ own spirituality. As far as David could make out, both doctrine and spirituality coincided more or less with his own.

“If Yves is in error,” David told the bishop later, “then so am I. Now what do I do?”

The bishop eyed David speculatively for a while. Then he said softly: “I suppose if all this paleontology and de Chardin’s teachings were to lead you to a point where you had to choose faith or de Chardin, you would choose faith, Father David.”
It was a statement of fact, with an implied question. David glanced at the bishop, who was now looking out the window of his study with his back to David.

The bishop continued. “Tell me, Father. Is evolution as much a fact as, say, the salvation of us all by Jesus?”

David faced the question with its now distant echoes of the foreboding he had felt the day the bishop had named him to the post of exorcist. Today he says his first reaction to the question was surprise: “It’s as if I had neglected something final, and the time was coming when I would have to face it.” Deep in his mind, he realized, he had spontaneously said, “Yes.”

To the bishop he answered by rising and saying something to the effect that it was like comparing apples and oranges. And the bishop apparently wanted only to put the question. He was far too old and wise a man always to expect precise answers.

After this interview with his bishop, David was not at peace. He made up his mind to see Yves the following day.

What he proposed to Yves was quite simple. After much thought, it seemed to David that they should conduct a ceremony in which they would say special prayers for the sick and against disease, and in which they would also go through the main parts of the Exorcism ritual. He, David, would conduct a simple exorcism. The idea, he told Yves, was to satisfy the bishop and the pastor.

Yves saw no difficulty. He would like that, he said. Only Yves’ pastor would be present; no trouble was anticipated.

They performed the exorcism in the private oratory of the seminary, all three men kneeling in the pews normally occupied by the seminarians. Yves answered in a low murmur all the questions put to him by David as exorcist. “Do you believe in God?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, Our Lord?”- “Do you renounce the Devil and all his works and pomps?” and so on.
Yves kissed the crucifix; and, jabbing his crooked index finger into the holy-water font, he blessed himself.

David and the pastor rose to their feet at the end of the ceremony. Yves had not budged from his place where he knelt with his face in his hands. They both went out quietly, leaving him alone.

“That’s that,” said David with a sigh of relief.
“I did not hear one clear word from him,” rejoined the pastor, “but I suppose I’d be as subdued as he was in the same circumstances.”

In the oratory, Yves raised his face from his hands a few minutes later and looked around; he was alone; and he could not remember much. He remembered coming in with David and the pastor, kneeling down, and opening the ritual book. But that was all. For the 15 minutes of the exorcism ceremony he had completely blacked out.

When he knelt down, it was as if a powerful sedative had been injected into him. He remembered nothing except a sudden compulsion forcing his lips to speak and his limbs to move.

He waited a. moment now, then looked toward the altar. All was normal on the altar; but between him and it a bulky, formless shadow hung in the air blotting out all sight of the crucifix over the altar and of the stained-glass windows behind the altar. Then, abruptly but calmly, like a man remembering a decision he had made or some instructions from a superior, Yves rose and left the oratory. A seminarian he met at the door caught sight of Yves’ face: it was glowing and laughing.

That evening, as David sat in his study, he could not concentrate on the work in hand.

He was supposed to finish a paper for a conference on de Chardin’s work at Choukoutien, China, where the Jesuit had unearthed the fossil of Sinanthropos. But David’s mind kept going back again and again to the bishop’s question: “Is evolution as much a fact as the salvation of us all by Jesus?” A foolish question, he told himself. No meaning to it at all. The bishop was of the old school. But still it kept bothering him.

He looked up at the glass cases where all his beloved fossils and paleontological treasures were exhibited. His eyes traveled over a chipped skull casing, the collection of anklebones, the pieces of ancient rock in which flora and fauna fossils were embedded, and the series of reconstructed busts: Solo Man, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man. His mind was playing tricks with him: not only were the plaster busts looking at him, he thought, but these dead and broken human bones seemed to be speaking without sound.

Then his head cleared. He got angry with himself. Had a choice to be made between evolution and Jesus? Must it be made? If Jesus were the culmination of it all, there was no such choice to be made. Jesus and evolution were one in some deep way or other.

He hung along the edge of these considerations for a while. Then on a sudden impulse he went over to the house phone and called to the guest room where Yves was spending the night.

“Hello, Yves-eh-Jonathan,” he stumbled.
“Hello, Father,” Yves answered in a calm and pleasant tone.

“I just had an idea, Jonathan. About evolution and all that, I mean. Supposing Teilhard was wrong all the time and his whole theory and evolution itself was irreconcilable with the divinity of Jesus, what would you say?”

There was a short pause. Then in a level voice with a certain note of hidden triumph, Yves said: “You seem to be asking this to yourself and for the first time, Father David!”

“But what do you say, Yves-Jonathan, excuse me,” David insisted. “I am now asking you.”

“There can never be any such conflict, Father David”-David began to feel some relief-“for the simple reason that evolution makes Jesus possible. And only evolution can do that.” Yves remembers the conversation very well. The “remote control” was on him again with a strong compulsion; he waited until the thoughts and words came to him. Then he continued quietly, but with the emphasis of one in possession of some superior or additional knowledge.

“Father David, all I have become, you made me. My spirituality and my beliefs and my explanations all come from you. You also know that evolution makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus; it makes Jesus possible for us as rational men. Don’t you, Father David?”

At the other end of the telephone, David caught his breath sharply. As Yves’ words hit his ears, the thoughts and images they conveyed pushed past all his mental safeguards like rough visitors. He felt an invasion of himself such as he had never known before.

He struggled for a moment: “Do you really think . . .”

“Father David, you have the testimony of your own conscience and your conscious mind.” Then, with terrible deliberateness and a hard note in his voice that completely destroyed David’s self-confidence: “After all, if I had to be exorcised, you also need it. Perhaps it is both of us who needed it. Or, perhaps-and this is a better idea-we are both beyond exorcism.” The telephone clicked and went dead.

David was stunned. Within a few hours, he decided to telephone the bishop. Before he could say a word, he was given the latest news: Yves had gone to the bishop that evening, resigned from the diocese, and left with some friends for New York.
From that time onward until the marriage by the sea, David did not see much of Yves, though he heard about him constantly as Father Jonathan.

But now David had a problem of his own: had he in some way or other been contaminated? Had he yielded to the Evil One? Had he voluntarily, although under the veil of goodness and wisdom, admitted the influence of the Devil into his own personal life?

He thought back over the exorcism. Come to think of it now, Yves was not the only one who had mumbled the Latin words. He himself had mumbled them, his mind had been absent half the time thinking of other problems.

David did not realize it then, but he would not enjoy any peace until the exorcism of Yves had been accomplished some two years later.

When Father Jonathan, as Yves now called himself, came to stay in Greenwich Village, he chose at first to work among its inhabitants, seeking neophytes and converts for his cause. He hung around the popular discotheques and bars, joined the clubs, took part in several of the “happenings” organized by the various Village groups of the time. He became known for what he claimed to be: the founder of a new religion.

But after a year of this apostolate, Jonathan’s emphasis changed. He no longer consorted with the ordinary denizens of the Village. He had a different mission: to create a new religious movement among the well-heeled families of upper Manhattan. Initially he became good friends with a few people he met by chance. As time went on, he enlarged his circle. Soon he had enough voluntary contributions to enlarge and decorate his Shrine of the Loft, as he called it. And there, every Wednesday evening, he held services, administered the new “Sacraments,” and counseled the members of his “parish.”

By the autumn of 1968, he had attracted a solid congregation who found that Jonathan, far from being an iconoclast or a preacher of strange doctrines, seemed to revive in them a new sense of religious belief and a trust in the future. His message was simple. He couched it in beautiful language. He strewed his addresses with a genuine knowledge of art and poetry. And, most especially, he had a knack of suffusing everything with esthetic values. He could preach on the Missing Link, for example, or a picture of Neanderthal Man, and make the entire idea of evolution from inanimate matter appear a glorious beginning. For the future, Jonathan had a still more glorious outlook. There was a new being in process now, he told his congregations; and it would live in a new time. “New Being” and “New Time” became his watchwords.

Jonathan’s outlook and his intuition of the rather sinister “New Being” came just in time to fill a vacuum felt by many people. The vacuum had begun to appear many years before Jonathan’s arrival; its effects in theater, poetry, and art had been felt far and wide during preceding decades. All-poetry, theater, and art-had constantly lamented the fact that man’s world had increasingly sacrificed meaning for usefulness. And without any further meaning, without the possibility of some transcendence, that world, however “useful,” ceases to nourish the spirit of men and women and children. Without that nourishment, the spirit of man must die.

In the area of religion and especially of Roman Catholicism, the vacuum became widely visible and tangible in the late 19605, when the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council had taken effect. The new changes did away with much of the ancient symbolism-its mystery and its immemorial associations. The changes might have evolved into something worthwhile, except for the strange vacuum that now seized Roman Catholics and religious people in general.

Its effect seemed sudden. And it was numbing. For it was a vacuum of indifference: to the external rites-words, actions, objects-proper to religion; to the concepts of religious thought and theology; and to the functions and character of religious people-priests, rabbis, ministers, bishops, popes-to all of these was now applied the norm of “usefulness”: form equals function; but, beyond practical use, there is meaning. The externals of religion no longer seemed to have any compelling significance. Increasing numbers of people laid them aside, or ignored them, or used them as mere social conveniences and conventional signposts.

Jonathan’s message was simple and geared to this new situation. All the beauty of being human had, he said, been obscured by religious theorizing and institutional churches. But now is a new time, he preached: all is and always was really natural. Good meant natural. We did not need such artificial supports as organized religions had supplied. We must just rediscover the perfectly natural. Everywhere in the world around us there were natural sacraments, natural shrines, natural holiness, natural immortality, natural deity. There was a natural grace and overwhelming natural beauty. Furthermore, in spite of the chasm that institutional religion had dug between humans and the nature of the world, the world and all humans were one in some naturally mystical union. We came from that union and by death we went back into it. Jonathan called that natural union “Abba Father.”

In effect, Jonathan made a fateful synthesis of Teilhardian evolutionary doctrines and Teilhard’s idea of Jesus. And he permeated it with a deep humanism and had a knowing eye for the yawning indifference now gripping traditional Christian believers.

In Jonathan’s outlook, “religious” belief became easy again. At one pole, one could accept the currently pervasive idea that man evolved from inanimate matter. At the other, one had no need to aim at believing in an unimaginable “resurrection” of the body. Instead, there was a return “to where we came from,” as Jonathan used to say: a going back to the oneness of nature and of this universe.

All this allowed the clever use of the full range of vocabulary and concept about “salvation,” “divine love,” “hope,” “goodness,” “evil,” “honesty”-all terms and ideas that were already so comforting and familiar to his congregation. But all these terms were understood in a sense completely different from the traditional one: minus a supernatural god, minus a man-god called Jesus, and minus a supernatural condition called “personal afterlife.”

Jonathan’s congregation was never very large-never more than about 150 people. But he drew deep satisfaction from it all; for in his mind, all this was a preparation for the glorious New Time which was just around the corner-at the Shrine of the Loft.

But there were deep consequences for Jonathan. As time went on, and the spring of 1969 approached, he found more and more that, in the literal sense of the words, “he was not his own man” any longer. Outsiders-his flock, his friends-noticed no difference beyond that he had let his golden hair grow longer, that he wore exotic clothes, and that his language became very exalted.

With the passage of time, however, Jonathan’s “movement” seemed to be in danger of petering out-before the New Time started! He was getting no new followers. His doctrine and outlook did not easily accommodate the more flamboyant upheavals of the 19605. He was no revolutionary in the political sense. The Shrine of the Loft was clearly on the wane before it had really taken off. He needed something new.

Meanwhile, Jonathan would wake up in the middle of the night and find his mind full of strange impulses coming from that “remote control.” He kept finding himself packing a bag and preparing for a journey. He spent long hours alone in his Shrine; and later he did not know what he had been doing there all that time. The “remote control” was inexorable in its domination. He had to wait until he was told what to do. While waiting for that order, he performed marriages and birth celebrations for his few followers. He held weekly services. He dreamed constantly of starting a new priesthood and a new church that would sweep the ranks of Catholics and Protestants.

Toward the end of the summer of 1969, Jonathan’s “instructions” started to come in earnest. He was invited to spend three weeks in the Canadian wilds with a party of friends who annually went there to hunt and fish.

Jonathan knew the moment he received the letter of invitation that this was it. Some inner voice kept telling him: “Go! Go! You will now find your mirror of eternity. Ordination to the supreme priesthood is at hand!” When asked if he heard an actual voice on this occasion, he denies this. It was an inner conviction coming with the same firmness of all his other “instructions” and exercising the same irresistible compulsion, far beyond the effect of mere words.

With Jonathan, the hunting party numbered 12 people. They lodged at a base camp. Each day they split up into groups. Each group departed for two- to four-day treks in the wilderness.

Apart from some fishing, Father Jonathan busied himself with painting and writing. But after the first week, he found himself venturing alone farther and farther from the base camp. He was looking for something or some place. When he came on it, he would recognize it, he knew. His walks always followed the course of a river on whose bank the base camp stood. He could easily find his way home by retracing his steps along the river.

It was on one of these forays that he found his place-as he called it later. That name, “my place,” has now a grisly significance for Jonathan: there his final immersion in demonic possession was accomplished.

One day after lunch, he had been walking for about three hours in a southerly direction along the river. For those hours, the course of the waters had run fairly straight. At a certain spot, however, Jonathan noticed that the river entered between two high ridges of ground and that within them it described an S-shape. When Jonathan reached the farther curve of the S-shape, his whole body and mind suddenly became electrified with a sense of discovery. He stood stock-still, one Latin word-sacerdos (priest)-ringing like a clear bell in his ears. Sacerdos!

That was it! This was the place! Here he would be ordained truly as priest of the New Being and Bishop-Leader of the New Time. This was it! He felt full of gratitude.

The place was beautiful. The water in that corner was not more than a few feet deep.

The center of the riverbed was a soft, shifting carpet of sand as white as salt. On each side, like rows of attendant black-cowled monks, there were tiers of boulders and rocks, rounded and smoothed by the overflow of water during the yearly flooding of the river. In the corners of the S-shape, on each bank, there was a small, shelving beach of that pure white carpet of sand sloping up out of the water to a rim of blue and black pebbles, then ferns and grass, then the pines, alders, sycamores, chestnuts. Everything burned in the sun, and silent shadows gloomed over rock and sand and river to make a patchwork of green half-darkness in the yellow light.

Jonathan could see a hundred summer suns mirrored in the green-gray water, and each of them gave off a fire that dazzled him. The river moved slowly, but not sluggishly, all the while singing a pervasive refrain of calm and constancy.

The place was Jonathan’s “mirror of eternity,” an opening in nature through which he could glimpse the strength of eternity, its softness and cleansing power, and the boundless spaces of its being.

Jonathan fell stunned and crying on the beach. Stretched out full length, face down, his hands digging into the sand, he kept shouting: “Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos!” His cries ricocheted off the rocks and the trees, each echo coming back fainter and fainter as if traveling away with his petitions and hopes, until he found himself listening silently.

The wetness of the sand soaked into his clothes, and the sun warmed his back. He began to feel a buoyancy all through his body: some mighty hand held him on its palm. He heard himself saying almost plaintively: “Make me . . . make me, please . . . make me . . . priest . . . priest-make ...” Every word was spoken into the white sand beneath his face.

Now thoughts, emotions, imaginings, all seemed to be under the control of that hand. And he began to feel an emptying sensation. His past was being erased; his entire past, what he remembered and even what he had forgotten, all that had entered into the making of what he had been up to that moment, was being flushed from him. He was being emptied of every concept, every logical reasoning, every memory and image which his culture, his religion, his ambient, his reading had formed in him.
Then, under some inner impulse which he questioned no longer, he rose and went slowly into the water. He stood in midstream looking at the sky for a moment. Obeying the inner voice, he bent down; his hands groped at the base of a rock and sought to reach to where its roots went deep in water. The river swirled caressingly over his shoulders and back. His chin now was almost level with the surface.

“I was reaching for the veined heart of our world,” he told me in one of our conversations, “to where Jesus, the Omega Point, was evolving and evolving, and was on the threshold of emerging.”

It seemed to him that “only this world was forgiving and cleansing,” it alone had “united elements.” He had the impression that now at last he had “broken through,” and that the revelation of all revelations had been granted him: the real truth, the real god, the real Jesus, the real holiness, the real sacrament, the real being, and the new time in which all this newness would inevitably take over.

He lost count of ordinary time, of the sun and the wind, of the river and its banks. The wind was a great rushing bird whose wings dovetailed into the green and brown arms of the trees on either side of him. The rocks became living things, his brothers and sisters, his millennial cousins, witnessing his consecration with the reverence that only nature had. And the water around him winked with gleaming eyes as it sang the song it had learned millions of years ago, from the swirling atoms of space, before there was any world and man to hear it. It was an irresistible ecstasy for Jonathan.

He began to chant to himself: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Then this became “Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!” Once again he had no control. Every fiber and sinew in his body and mind was flooded with a dusky power. Now he was chanting: “Lord of Light! Lord of Jesus and of all things! Your slave! Your servant! Your creature! Your priest!”

He felt a soft relaxation throughout himself; he had now no trace of tension, no anticipation, no forward-looking thought or emotion. All was wrapped up and contained in the now, the here-present.

He rose to his feet in the shallow water and faced the bank; his hands, bleeding from his efforts to dig for the bottom of that rock, hung by his sides. He looked at the scratches and tears in his fingers and palms, loving the gleam of blood in the sunshine on the background of his clean skin.

Slowly he walked up the beach. For no reason his pace quickened. He started to trot. Once past the sand and on solid ground, he ran zigzagging through the trees, propelled by the force within him. The ground sloped upward. Still running, he was out of breath as he reached the top of the slope. He began to falter and stumble.

He reached out for support. But on every side the tall, rough bodies of the pine trees, their branches many times his height off the ground, their heads lost in the sky, were the only things near to him; and they gave no help.

Through the haze of his sweat and weariness he saw on the ridge he was approaching a small tree with branches near the ground. He stumbled, fell, got up, and labored until he fell against the tree trunk, his outstretched arms falling on the short branches sticking out on either side. He leaned there a while, his cheek against the tree, his armpits resting on the branches, catching his breath and sobbing half syllables, waiting for his strength to return.

But he became aware that his face was lying against something smooth: this was no rough pine bark or knotty sycamore skin. He opened his eyes slowly, easing himself to a standing position and drew back from the tree wonderingly.

With a growing horror he could not control, he now saw it in clear outline: a bare tree trunk, stripped of all its bark, severed to a quarter of its original height by some force-a lightning bolt, a random axe, some accident. It was a withered tree trunk with only two stubby arms. Blood stained the putty-white surface of those mute cross-pieces and its withered trunk.

He was standing in front of a cross, he thought with a fierce horror and revulsion. There’s blood on it. My blood? Or whose blood? His blood? Whose blood? The questions were hysterical cries of fear in his brain.

He started to shout. “Curse it! Curse him! Curse that blood! Curse that false Jesus!” The “remote control” was pouring the words into his brain, and he was echoing them with his lips. “Destroy it! Break those arms!” The instructions tumbled pell-mell.

He stretched out his hands, gripped one arm of the tree, and began to pull while he shouted. “Curses on you! Curses on you! I am free of you! Lord of Light! Save me! Help!” The arm of the tree broke. He seized the other arm with both hands and started pulling and shouting. It gave without warning, and its release sent him flying backward, tumbling down the slope toward the river, his world now a careening tunnel of lights and blows and bumps, until he fell against a tree trunk and lost consciousness.

The search party found him there a few hours later, just before sundown. He was semiconscious and weak, his two hands still holding a broken tree branch. They lifted him to a sitting position, his back resting against the tree that had broken his fall. He was facing the ridge. The sun was setting, but its last red-gold rays flowed thinly around the withered tree, its cross-arms now splintered stubs, its trunk stained with dark splotches.

Jonathan did not notice it for a while until his vision focused. Gradually he became aware of tall figures around him, of voices speaking, of hands that were putting a flask of whisky to his lips, and of other hands tending to his bruises. He heard the sounds of branches being cut with axes. But his gaze fell on the tree. Alarm bells sounded in him. He began to struggle to his feet, his eyes fixed on that tree.

The red light of the sun was rapidly fading to blue-black twilight, and the tree was dissolving into the ridge. One of the men in the search party saw Jonathan struggling to rise and noticed the fixity of his stare at the tree.

“Don’t worry, Father,” he said, “it’s only a tree. A dead tree. It’s all right, I tell you. Take it easy, will you, Father! It’s only a tree, Father.” He exerted pressure on Jonathan and prevented him from standing up.

Jonathan slumped back wearily and muttered: “Only a tree. Only a tree.” Then he blacked out. They placed him on the makeshift stretcher they had fashioned and set off for the campsite.

The end was not far off for Jonathan; but he did not seem to realize it. After a few days’ rest at the base camp, the party journeyed to Manchester, New Hampshire. Jonathan was taken to his mother’s house.

He was extremely weak, suffered bouts of dizziness, had pains all over his body. He found it difficult to sleep at night and could not concentrate on reading or painting. The family doctor prescribed a two-month rest.

Jonathan spent the first few weeks in bed under sedation. He was tended by his mother and a day nurse. Gradually his strength returned. By October’s end he was up and around the house. In November he was strong enough to walk around the garden, and he started to read and paint again.

His mother had been in touch with Father David at the seminary through her pastor. And the moment Jonathan (she also had to adopt his new name) was at all well, she telephoned David. He arrived one afternoon to see Jonathan.

The meeting was a disturbing one for David, but for Jonathan it seemed to be an occasion of new strength, an eerie triumph bathed him even in his misery. He addressed David as “my son,” using a paternalistic tone of voice that affected David in an unexpected way. It was the first time in all his years as an adult that David had felt real fear.

With this atmosphere as a brooding backdrop to their conversation, David and Jonathan chatted about Canada. The common report brought back by his companions had been that either Jonathan had been attacked by a wild animal, or that for some other reason he had panicked, taken to his heels, and knocked himself unconscious while running. After a few minutes with Jonathan, David was certain that something much more significant than a mere accident had happened, but Jonathan would not open up to him.

After a while, Jonathan succeeded in shifting David’s queries away from Canada and the recent trip. He began talking instead about his new apostolate and of his plans for a New York “mission.” Then surprisingly, and in ways that seemed elusive to him, the conversation began returning to David himself. And once again David found that a whole part of his being was in total accord with all that Jonathan said. And again, in some other part of him, he felt a deep resistance.

Finally Jonathan rounded on him at one moment: “Father David, my son, eventually you too will find the light, and come out into the open and preach the New Time and the New Being.”

David’s conflict welled up full inside him, a welcoming chord for Jonathan’s portentous words, and a hard, gripping fright. Supposing he could not stop himself going all the way into exactly what Jonathan was doing-whatever that was. What then?

David recalls vividly the slow and deep nausea that built up inside him as he sat in that sick room surrounded by a quiet countryside. It was disgust driven with fear. He had had a similar but not quite identical experience once before, descending into a mass grave in Africa, at the tomb of an ancient tribal chieftain. Over the piles of bones of people sacrificed to ensure a chieftain’s safe passage to eternal happiness, he had felt the touch of independent and sovereign evil, almost heard its voice in the fetid darkness saying silkily to him: “Come into my domain, David! You belong here!” And it kept coming into his mind that those long-buried men had never known anything about Jesus or Christianity. Some obscure conclusions had started to run around his head as he had stood in the tomb. But his nausea had not permitted him to examine them clearly.

Now, trying to fathom the mystery, he looked at Jonathan. Who was possessed? Was either of them possessed? Was it all imagination? Jonathan, in spite of his illness, seemed erect, tall, the color back in his cheeks, his blue eyes gleaming, his long hair falling gracefully over his shoulders. All his strength and natural comeliness seemed restored. Facing him, David suddenly felt weak and puny and somehow dirty. A phrase of Jonathan’s sent his courage reeling further.

“Not for nothing, my son, have I been named Jonathan. You are David. And in the Bible they were bound together in the divine work.”

David turned away helplessly, fighting the floods of weakness and fear that engulfed him. He was seeking composure, but Jonathan’s voice pursued, triumphant, resounding.

“What happens to me, happens to you, my son. Don’t you see? It is all foreordained.
We have entered the Kingdom of the New Time and the New Being.”

David felt at the end of his resistance. The nausea was increasing. He was enmeshed in a trap he had not suspected. He went to the door, opened it, and spoke over his shoulder in a weak voice:

“Jonathan. Let’s agree on one thing. If you need help, I shall help. Is it a deal?” When there was no answer, he turned slowly around. “Jonathan! We have an appointment the day you-“ He broke off. Jonathan was standing in the middle of the room, his eyes closed, his body swaying back and forth as if buffeted by a strong wind.

“Jonathan! Jonathan! Are you all right?”

“Father David,” the voice was almost a whisper and full of pain. “Father David, help me . . . not now . . , impossible now . . . too far ... but at the moment . . . it’s a deal ... if ...”

The rest was lost in a mumbling confusion. Jonathan turned away and then slumped down into an armchair. David noticed Jonathan’s right index finger was held in his left hand.

The door opened. Jonathan’s mother entered quietly, unhurriedly. Her face was a mask. “Don’t worry, Father David,” she murmured. “He will sleep now. And in the aftertime you can get back to him. Go and rest. You need it. You all need rest.”
He chatted for a few minutes with her, then left. She would keep him posted on Jonathan’s movements.

In the middle of December Jonathan left home again and went back to New York. For the next four months David followed Jonathan’s activities. He was always available but never conspicuous, visiting New York regularly, keeping informed of Jonathan’s whereabouts and activities. For the moment he could not intervene. That moment would come, he knew.

He now was convinced that Jonathan had ceded full possession of himself to some evil spirit. He was half-convinced that he himself was affected by all this, but he did not understand exactly how. Not until the disastrous marriage ceremony by the sea was he to have the opportunity of helping Jonathan and of finding out exactly what had happened to himself.

In mid-February, David heard quite by accident of the marriage ceremony Jonathan was going to perform at Dutchman’s Point. The bride’s father, a prominent broker, was an old acquaintance of David. He immediately telephoned the father and arranged to have lunch with him at his home in Manchester. David was received at first with great warmth as an old friend. But the conversation turned sour, as the reason for his visit became clear: David wanted the bride’s father either to postpone the marriage or to engage another clergyman.

Father Jonathan was a good priest, sniffed Hilda’s father. Then, unpleasantly, he went on to grumble about the clergy in general, saying that at least Jonathan got the younger generation to say their prayers and to believe in God and take care of the environment- something “men of the cloth” did not ordinarily do. David argued, hinting at his basic fears and suspicions about Jonathan. But it was of no avail. The world was changing, he was told. What was all this sinister talk of evil and of the Devil? Father David did not believe, or did he, in all that nonsense anymore? David’s only answer was an expression of his deep apprehension for Jonathan and for his friend’s daughter.

Then, if he was so afraid, the broker concluded as he rose from the table, why didn’t Father David come himself? He was thereby invited. He would see, the broker added, his daughter would be all right. For once Hilda was going to be gloriously happy. She wanted things this way. She was to be married only once.

“I’ll be there,” answered David quietly. “Don’t worry. But you will have to answer for the result.”

The broker stopped and looked at David, thought for a few seconds, then his face clouded over with anger. His words cut into David deeply. “Father David, I am a simple man as far as religion and religious matters go. Whatever happens in that area is the fault of all you clergy. You know”-he broke off, scrutinizing David’s face and figure-“sometimes I have a feeling that you people are the really lost ones. We lay people have some sort of protection. We were never in charge of religion, y’know.”

They parted.

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