Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Southern Demonology, and as always, I'm JJ. This episode is going to be a little different, and I hope you forgive the departure. I'm not going to talk about demons or biblical history or even horror movies this time around. Rather, I want to step back and talk about faith. And no, I am not going to advocate for any particular faith or religion here. I'm not a missionary hoping to sway you to my way of thinking. In fact, if you do think like I do, then God help you.
Honestly, I love the sheer amount of diversity in the people that have joined our Discord group, the Facebook page, and those who have contacted me on my website. I've had the pleasure to speaking with Wiccans, practicing demonologists, occultists, people from every faction within Christianity, Muslims, atheists, and the list just keeps going on and on and on. And I've learned from every single one of them. As you know, I approach these topics from a pure academic perspective.
And while I have experience with Protestantism, Catholicism, Shentoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship, that's an extremely narrow band of overall possible religious experience. And getting to learn more and hear about people's experiences have not just been an eye opener, but an honor for me. Anyway, the point of this episode is to talk about my journey to the faith that I have. Maybe it will help you. Maybe you'll laugh at me. Maybe it will even provide another perspective. One day last month in the Southern Demonology Discord group, we got to talking about faith.
And one member stated that they wish they could have seen an exorcism, as maybe that would shore up their belief in something higher. And two things sprung to mind. First, I thought about the horror movie We Go On, in which the main character has a severe phobia regarding anything that rots or could lead to death. And he decides to place an expensive ad in the newspaper for his way to thinking. It's either he has to have proof that there is something that goes on after death, or he could spend decades in therapy trying to conquer his fears.
However, the other thing that it made me think about was myself. I knew about death very early on in my life. And I grew up feasting upon ghost stories and hellfire and brimstone sermons. Yet when it came to the subject of God, I always questioned. I wanted to believe. I truly did. Yet I never found a church that I delighted in. In fact, I kept running into devious churches that either espoused heretical teachings or out and out racism.
For example, I went on a mission trip to Detroit at the end of middle school as a friend of the family had recently joined a new church and had invited me along. Not only was the trip deeply strange for an entire variety of reasons, but after returning and going to a few Sunday sessions, I learned that the preacher, and yes, that word is in quotation marks, actively preached to children that everyone had a guardian angel, and if the person that angel was sent to look over was not saved and instead went to hell, then that angel would be exiled to limbo for all eternity.
I'm sorry for the blue language, y'all, but that is batshit crazy. Another church that my next door neighbors attended, and I had been to a time or two myself, had a guest preacher come in one Sunday, and rather than talk about the Bible, this preacher, also in quotation marks, began ranting about how non-whites had destroyed the country and the world. Now I know I'm from an extremely small town in the south, but that was the most blatant and horrifying racism I'd ever heard, and I was literally physically sick after hearing it. I left and never went back.
And it wasn't just bad churches that caused me to wrestle with my faith. At the end of the day, I simply doubted. On that same mission trip, I could see other kids praying for hours, and I mean hours, and with a ferverance that no matter how much I strove or tried, I could never begin to match. There was this gigantic tent that was set up in a rather large megachurch in Detroit, and no, I don't remember the name of it, it was a quite a while ago. And in between, you know, sermons, etc.
, uh people would just pop a squat in a chair outside underneath his tent, and my fellow churchgoers, they would they would just be there and they would stay for two to three hours at a time just praying. And you know, I I want it to be like that. Um I wanted to have that faith and that kind of connection with God. And so I would sit there, but after twenty minutes, thirty minutes, I I I couldn't do it. I I was just that was done. And that left me feeling not just self-conscious, but also as if there was something wrong with me.
Like there was something else that all of these other people had, but I I I was just lacking. And when I looked around at others and a variety of churches I attended, you know, I see the same kind of thing. I see others adsorbing something from those sermons, but I didn't. I was just bored. When I was twelve or thirteen, I had a good friend with whom we would stay over at each other's houses a lot. And I love going to his house, not just because it was big, but also because he had several sisters who were rather beautiful.
Now one would later shatter my heart into a billion pieces after college, but that's neither here nor there. Thank God. Um I don't remember how the conversation started, but one night before going to sleep, I wound wound up having a talk with his mom about faith. And I remember her telling me, you know, a lot of scientists are Christian. And somehow that quieted my anxiety for a few years. If highly educated people who judge the merit of something solely through data and experimentation still believe in God then there must be something to that, right? And I clung to that.
Whenever a crisis of faith would rear its ugly head, I would faint back on that for a measure of peace. Of course, later I would come to realize that this was an attempt by an adult to try to find a way to quell the uneasiness of a child. However, weirdly enough, later in life, I was able to attend the CS Lewis Lecture Series at Harvard, which on that year, hosted by the Surgeon General C Everett Coop, did feature prominent scientists who reflected on their faith. It was like coming full circle. In college and grad school is when I finally found my faith.
I believe I spoke of this before, but I had two experiences in college that felt like God personally touched me. One was after an all nighter where some friends and I were working on a term paper for postmodern philosophy, and the and in the wee hours of the morning I was on the balcony of our apartment taking a cigarette break. A light mist had begun to fall, and darkness was beginning to give way to the dawn's light. And I felt something. Do you know the feeling where a favorite song begins to play and the entire top of your head starts to tingle from sheer enjoyment?
The feeling was akin to that, but amplified by a hundred. There was no physical sensation, but it was as if my body was being filled with light. And the second occurrence was driving down a dusty road with a friend. I was at an all-time low because my grandmother had just been diagnosed with cancer. Sadness weighed down my entire spirit, but somehow I felt that same touch and once again my soul was refilled. And that's actually how I thought of it. That my soul was empty and was being filled again with God's light. I have no idea what these sensations were.
They could have been brought on by exhaustion. After all, I did have the habit of pulling multiple all all nighters in a row then, but by some or by some random neuron firing. But they put me at peace in a way that still brings a quiet smile to my lips whenever I think back on it. But what cemented my faith was a fateful visit to a Catholic church. Saint Teresa's in Farmville, Virginia, to be precise. I was dating a Catholic girl at the time, and she encouraged me to attend Mass with her one Saturday. I wasn't even looking forward to it, to be honest.
Have you ever seen the adult swim show Moral Oral? If not, it's fantastic. It began as a simplistic formulae joke about how a boy who attempted to do what's right and truly love God, maybe a little bit too much if that's possibility, um, but would inevitably commit sacrilege after sacrilege. Yet that show blossomed into something so much darker by the end that it it became just sheer genius. Anyway, uh the family in that show is Protestant and they believe that Catholics are the epitome of evil.
Well, I hadn't been taught by taught that same thing exactly, but there weren't any positive connotations that that topic was ever brought up. But I was completely ignorant about Catholicism. On that first visit, I thought I had almost bumped into a smaller lady at the entrance ray, and I was mortified. I turned to apologize profusely when to my surprise I realized it was actually an icon of Saint Teresa herself. At that point I had never even seen an icon, and a feeling of puzzled curiosity combined with a lightness of spirit stole over me. And it persisted.
The priest, Father Joe, was an amazing orator, and he filled that church with light and love. The Richmond Diocese is known for embracing song and hugs during the peace be with you portion of Mass. And I was dazzled. Of course I had no idea when to stand or when to sit down or when to kneel, and that was more than a little off putting. Yet rather than to be a detractor, I took that as a friendly challenge. Here's a new way to worship that I had no idea about, and I wanted to learn the ins and outs of it. And that charm kept growing on me.
You know, if I embrace Catholicism, then suddenly there are a brand new series of books that are considered sacred uh to Catholics and to the Orthodox, which is the Apocrypha that the Protestants do out the door uh way back when. And to me, the one thing I wanted to ensure was that my burgeoning love for Catholicism wasn't being unduly influenced by the feelings I had for my then girlfriend. So I waited a year before deciding to proceed through the conversion process.
But in the end, I knew that this was the religion I had been waiting for, and on Easter of my senior year in college, I officially underwent baptism, adopted the saint name of Ernest, and joined the Catholic faith. And for the first time in my life, I drew comfort and yes, even faith from attending services. As I kneeled in front of the pew at which I was sitting, my hands clasped together in front of me, I felt closer to God.
And that I drew in his blessing. So much so that after finding out that there was a chapter house of Jesuits at my graduate school, I decided to study with him in spiritual direction. They handed me books to read, which were amazing, and I also attended structural prayer sessions with them, which was for some reason deeply embarrassing. You know, I never told anyone how I prayed. The specific imagery that I had in my head when I reached out to God in my thoughts never even occurred to me to share that with somebody.
No, I'm going to reveal something else that I really haven't shared with many souls on this planet. My college was made up of a myriad of traditions. And that happens when the institution you attended is several months older than the country itself. But one of them is streaking. Starting at your residence, you run across campus to the old bell tower, the actual oldest can manually ring bell tower in the country still. You ring the bell and then you book it back to your place of living as fast as humanly possible, all the while butt naked. And I did this twice for some god awful reason.
And when living in Japan, I I became a huge fan of onsons or hot springs. You go into a huge locker room, you strip down, you shower off, and then lounge around in huge tubs, whether outside or inside with complete strangers. Or, stranger yet, with coworkers if you're attending it together. And you know, even with those two things that I just told you about, I never felt more naked when I was going through spiritual direction. There was something so profoundly humbling about admitting to those. Things that you never really expected to reveal to others. Especially when it comes to prayer.
You know, and it's not like I had any deviant thoughts or weird images that I would be embarrassed to share with others. To me, prayer is intimately personal, and to reveal that took more courage than I care to admit. But I did. And I came through the experience a better person for it. And plus, my guide revealed some powerful thought exercises to perform while praying in order to hopefully strengthen one's dynamic with God. I'm going to share one now. And it's one that I still practice to this very day.
Picture yourself in a dark and labyrinthine space filled with walkways that zig and zag and curve in every direction. Really put yourself into this space. Imagine everything around you. How your footsteps sound, the look of the wood, the dust motes as they filter through the air. Actually force your mental image of yourself to walk through this crazy series of walkways for a while, feeling your legs burn from the exhaustion until you finally come to a door. And after opening it, there's simply two chairs. And one is Christ himself, Lotus Abhat. And the other directly facing him is empty.
Sit down in that unoccupied chair and have a conversation with him. Open yourself up completely and just talk. Don't rush it. Take your time and picture everything. For if you rush and finish, then you may be closing yourself off to God. Allow him the time to come to you. And as I've said before, I did contemplate becoming a Jesuit priest. But that just wasn't in the cards for me. I have a family that I could not imagine my life without, a job that is challenging and fulfilling, and hobbies that fill me with delight. You know I'm in my mid-40s now and knock on wood.
I don't have those spiritual crises anymore. I'm comfortable with my faith and my path. Moments of mystery find me. And I relish them when they do. And I want to be more open to them. And in perhaps in time I'll be able to do so. As I said at the beginning, I am not advocating that my path should be or could be your path. I'm not urging anyone to run out and join a Catholic church. Catholicism, for all of its strengths and, you know, wonderful moments that I've experienced, it has its fair share of problems. And I'm not going to go into that. This is not a critique of Catholicism.
But you know, be aware that, yes, I know that there are complications with that. I also know that what drew me in to that faith was highly circumstantial. There are much more conservative dioceses out there. Like if I actually uh, you know, found the Catholic faith through the Arlington Archdiocese, I probably would not have felt anywhere near the warm comfort that I did at St. Teresa's. Uh I've attended a few masses and I kind of came away scratching my head more so than anything else.
It wasn't that it was bad, it's just much more of a conservative bent to things, and it it just really didn't compare to that warmth that I had at St. Teresa's. And even my time in graduate school can show kind of that conflicting circumstantial nature to things. I started off going to one church, and it was a church that was being led by the same Jesuit priest that I was taking spiritual direction from, and he was an extremely thoughtful, thought-provoking individual. And you know, his orations were wonderful. I always came came out of those masses feeling energized.
But then like all things in life, things change. And another priest took over um most of the masses there. And this priest he began ad libbing when he would actually read from the Christian New Testament or whatever section that he was reading. And he had a good goal, he was attempting to make the language less patriarchal and much more inclusive. But the way that this one individual was doing it was slaughtering the meaning. He would find himself taking longer and longer diversions to achieve the goal that he was trying to do, which was an admirable one.
Let us make language so inclusive that everyone feels like they are participating, they're not being locked out from this very central religious experience. I am on board with that principle. I you know, language can be hurtful. To be able to include others is a good thing. But if you are having to constantly change every other word and then make diversions upon it, it would lead me to anger. I would wound up so frustrated at listening to this person's orations that by the end of it I knew I had to find another church.
And luckily, down the street in Harvard Square, there was another Catholic church that was much more geared to students, and they practiced that same type of, you know, open warmth that I felt so comfortable uh participating in at St. Teresa's. And I found that again. But what I'm trying to say is that you know, don't feel like you need to cling to someone else's path. When you run into something that speaks to you, then go with it. That's all I can tell you. If something is calling out your name, even if it's something new, don't turn your back on it.
That could be faith looking to embrace you even more. And I I'm not trying to be heretical, but I have found faith in other places than a Catholic Mass. I have prayed at Buddhist and Shinto shrines in Japan. And no, I was not talking to God. I was talking to a local deity, at least at the in the Shinto cases. And I knew that, but yet it was still fulfilling. I have prayed to dead relatives at alt at family altars in Japanese homes.
And that was fulfilling, not in the same way, but to be able to greet this past person and hope that they're doing well, and uh, you know, try to ease whatever they're experiencing. It was humbling and wonderful and very sad. So that is my take on faith. And take from it what you will, not advocating anything, but uh I at the very least, I hope it gives you a perspective. Could be on me, could be on how someone finds faith, how it's okay to question. Don't feel like you have to have this impenetrable faith, and if you ever have a moment of doubt that something's wrong, I felt that way.
And maybe to you there is no faith. Maybe the answer is that there is, you know, no God, or it's a different God, or it's something entirely different. I don't know. All I can say is that if that speaks to you, if it fulfills you, then go with it. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this departure from our normal content. Um but I felt really strongly that I wanted to get something out, and it really didn't feel right to do this during the month of October, and that's why I wanted to get it out first thing um for the month of November. Anyway, um as always, please visit us on at Southern Demonology.
com on our Facebook page uh facebook.com slash Southern Demonology or uh find us at on uh Discord. Um the information is on the website. Uh it's free to join, and we have a rather large group now, and we have some very lively discussions about anything and everything, from Japan to anime to uh etymology to weekly discourses. Um it's it's a lot of fun. In fact, one of our members ran across a weird Facebook um um picture that was supposed to represent the angel um as as real and actually like had questions about it, and we were able to debunk most of the stuff that was found there.
You know, it's these moments of delight that have really made our Discord community so wonderful to be in. And I do hope you join us. Uh, there's no obligation whatsoever, but it it's a very fun time. Um, but more than that, if you do have a few dollars to spare and you would like to support me on Patreon, uh feel free to. However, there is no obligation by any stretch of the imagination, and in these times, I know how things are tight. Um, so if you can't, it doesn't bother me at all. Um, just hope you keep listening, hope you keep coming back.
It's a real pleasure to get to talk to you in one way, shape, or form. And if you have questions, you want to reach out, um, you can contact me on either Facebook or the website, or of course in Discord. You have complete access to DM me whenever you want to. So I hope you have a wonderful evening. Stay safe out there, and until next time, stay safe.