Personally, I don’t really get this whole demonic presence deal. I don’t want to belittle people for what they believe, but it’s just really hard for me to believe that you can actually feel a demonic presence. I mean, how do you really know? If you talk to a priest, can he tell you whether it is real? Probably not. So how can laymen know? I mean there’s special training that a priest needs to go through to do an exorcism, and many times, it’s not a demonic presence, but rather something psychological or psychiatric. I’m sorry, but this just feels weird to me.
Not long after I first became a Christian, I got this sort of stuff more frequently. If you’re lying in bed, and something has you by the throat, with a heavy pressure bearing down on you, and the whole beds shaking, and you hear something like a growl, you know it’s not just your imagination.
You know all right. It’s also personal and unless you experience it yourself, there is no way that it can be accurately described. But as you are an atheist, the devil doesn’t need to disillusion you as to his reality. You’re in his camp, whether you feel like it or not. That doesn’t mean you’re bad and mean - you might be quite a good person as general moral behaviour goes. But it does mean he has a legal hold on you, even if you’re not aware of it.
So you’re not likely to experience such an attack. I didn’t get them in my atheist days either. They only started AFTER I became a Christian.
There’s also the other side of the coin, the angelic or perhaps the testimony of the Holy Spirit. I first became a serious Christian in late 1982, at the tail end of the worst four years of my life. A year later I went on my first “Scripture Union” camp, which is run by a sort of ecumenical Protestant outfit. I felt very much out of my depth, and I was not in a very good mood. I was going through a divorce, was depressed, had recently been chewed out by my boss at work and so on. And I was wondering “How do I know this stuff is real? How do I know this is not just a psychological prop?”
It was the habit of the camp to have a “Bible Study” every afternoon around 3pm for “leaders”. One afternoon, full of my cynical thoughts, but somewhat relaxed in the heat under a marquis, the leader read something about David. Just as he said the words, “man after my own heart”, I got hit immediately with what my Catholic psychiatrist called a “double whammy” (He called it that because he’s experienced them too). It was like a breath going through me in waves from head to foot, very strong, very pronounced, and it was certainly not from me.
I got such a shock I nearly fell off the seat. Obviously God knew my frame of mind, and had determined to make it clear it was
NOT just a “psychological prop”. But when I looked at the others in the group to see what they were making of it, they weren’t taking the least bit of notice, for the simple reason that it wasn’t happening to them. It was a personal message to me. Yet God (or an angel possibly) remained perfectly hidden.
As it turned out I was to experience two more of these “double whammies”, one in relation to some words in relation to Paul, and another in relation to CS Lewis, the Christian apologist. Each time it had the effect of highlighting the message.
And I haven’t had another one since. I suppose God’s said all He’s going to say in that regard.
However once I had the first episode, I also then seemed to become fair game for demonic occurrences. By God crossing the normal boundary of sensory experience, He apparently gave the devil the same right.
Actually the obvioulsy demonic sensations are the least of my worries. It’s the ones where the devil poses as an angel of light that are by far the most problematic.
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Say the names of the Holy Family aloud, piously. Cross yourself with the Sign of the Cross.