I know that it’s pretty pointless to try to convince people of stuff that they don’t believe in~even though to my mind (and again, this is merely my opinion; I’m not trying to argue anything that I’m not qualified to at this point~I’m not currently a practicing Catholic, so how the Church feels about this stuff is not my area) it’s hard to just cherrypick bits of belief in the unseen(Good, Bad or Indifferent), if you see what I’m trying to say.
I have what seems to be a fairly typical story regarding Ouija boards in that I was a teenager when a few of my girlfriends and I started messing around with one. It seemed to work better in certain houses: some places it didn’t seem to work at all, others, the thing just went crazy. Mostly it was older houses where the latter was true, but not every older house that we ever used it in. In any case, for a few weeks we got into it to the point where it seemed to be more and more compelling of an activity, sort of to the exclusion of all else, and the messages began to get weirder and weirder: we weren’t, as a group, raised to be religious. I probably came from the home with the strongest religious background (Catholic) but that had mostly been my Grandmother’s influence, and she had died a few years earlier. So the only time I made confession or attended Mass was in the Summertime, at camp. When things around us, as a group, started to be unusually, all of a sudden, sort of chaotically bad: a series of unfortunate and extreme events including a friend (not involved in this little obsession with us, incidentally) attempting suicide, I may have been the only one that didn’t think of it as total coincidence. I don’t know. I imagine I should ask the other girls involved~it’s now been more than twenty-five years.
I’ll be honest because I believe in that above many things in this life: it is my instinct to take this and turn it into a good story. Not at the expense of the truth, but I am a writer and entertainer by nature. I don’t believe this is the place for that. As I look back at it I realize there IS a place for it, just not here. So I’m going to spare the more extraneous details and say this: we were unsupervised, lacked perspective and limits, and did not see any reason, initially, to hold ourselves to any ‘just tell me if I’m going to get married’ kind of stuff. We would ask the thing anything, and were undeterred, if a bit shaken (I can only speak for myself on that) by what seemed to be a whole bunch of really unpleasant events and craziness happening around us~including a great strain on our friendship as a group.
One day, the wine glass we were using in place of the plastic divination device provided by Parker Brothers slid violently as if shoved by an unseen hand onto a carpeted floor and shattered~and we knew better than to use the ‘good’ crystal glasses in the house, this one was hardy, regular glass that would have had to be thrown onto that floor to even be cracked. My hand to God, no B.S. The thing was in a million pieces and neither of us did that~it happened spontaneously on a level table on top of a level floor.
Not long after I found myself in church~this was back in the days when churches were unlocked at all hours for all who sought refuge there. I remember being on my knees, petitioning Mary and Saint Anthony (who I guess is kind of my family’s Saint) to find my sanity and inner strength and restore peace to the people around me, and promising never to touch that thing again.
All I know is, everything got strangely better after that.
that’s my Ouija board story~I would say that if I were blessed with children that I wouldn’t encourage the messing around with them as though they are harmless. Perhaps it is possible to contact good spirits through one~I wouldn’t know. It kind of seems to me though that the only entities accessable through such a device would be souls who are lost and drifting in some way or things that were never alive in the first place, meaning nothing you want to be talking to. And certainly children have no business or perspective or what have you playing around in that arena~they have enough to do learning to navigate our dimension, and you never know what door you might be opening, or if you can close it.
Again, just my opinion folks~though I am interested in what other people believe.
Thanks for listening, and today IS a good day to bring flowers to those who have left us~Happy All Saints Day and Dia de Los Muertos…
MM
