and feel so thankful that he came home from that campfire so long ago.
“What was the vote?” I’d ask, even years after I knew the answer.
“The vote was 4–0. There is a God, but we’d better get more rifles.”
YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ARGUE WITH GOD
“What will the Egyptians say?”
—MOSES TO GOD
IT WAS JUST FOUR college chums going out to the movies. Granted, the offering that chilly winter night in Cincinnati was not typical fare. The Exorcist was a runaway blockbuster because of both its chilling storyline and because many religious authoritarians, especially in the Catholic Church, had a big problem with it. No wonder: In their minds, it sensationalized an extremely grave matter in church theology—the invasion of a human being by a satanic demon and the treacherous, sacred rite of exorcizing it from the person. For church zealots, this is serious business and hardly the appropriate material for Hollywood thrillers.
Three of my campus buddies joined me as we trekked out to see “the movie about the possessed girl whose head spins around.” Everybody was talking about that supernatural horror film, and we were intrigued. It had already been named “the scariest film of all time” by Entertainment Weekly.
My friend Eric Downey was joining us against the wishes of his stern Catholic parents. I grew up a few doors from the Downeys on a street that literally ended at the gates of Our Mother of Sorrows Church. Eric, who was mercilessly mocked in the neighborhood for his grueling stutter, was one of nine children and his parents were active in the parish.
The Downeys were neighborly and generous and observed their faith with discreet service and good works. They wanted Eric, their middle son, to enter the priesthood. They did not want him to go see The Exorcist. For them, the motion picture was a celluloid sacrilege. Perhaps they were particularly sensitive about it because the screenplay was based upon a revealing, real-life incident that exposed a whispered-about church procedure.
In 1949, Catholic priests performed a series of such exorcisms upon an anonymous boy in Maryland known as “Roland Doe.” The haunted boy’s family was actually Lutheran; the busy priests just saw a Christian child possessed and controlled by a bloodcurdling spirit and this kind of situation was a denominational specialty of theirs.
The rituals were shrouded in controversy and mystery but regarded with absolute ecclesiastic solemnity by devout Catholics. No different from the many instances across the centuries when fundamentalist or mystical Jews have grappled with a dybbuk—the dreaded but believed evil spirit that enters into a living person. The dybbuk would cleave to the poor soul, cause wild dysfunction and schizophrenia, babble through the person’s mouth and, as with other religious delusions, represent a separate and alien personality.
None of this dark folklore was on our minds as we boys romped to the cinema house. There were two shows playing and we almost made a last minute switch into Blazing Saddles—the Mel Brooks Western satire featuring Yiddish-speaking Indians and a drunken cowboy who punched out horses. Our rabid curiosity about child-actress Linda Blair’s bulging, petrifying eyes; the deep, monstrous voice that inhabited her; the notorious, rotating head; and the intermittent, projectile green vomit she emitted all won us over.
The movie was at once, ghoulish, unsettling, clever, and cartoonish. There are good reasons why it spawned several sequels and is now a classic enshrined in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Three of us four moviegoers exited the theater howling with mimicking demonic exertions and a show of bravado meant to distill our undeniable mixture of fun and fear. My dorm roommate Walter, an engineering student, kept speculating on “how the hell they made that girl’s head spin like that.”
“How the hell?” That was too much for Dennis, who lived across the hall. The three of us now completely keeled over in laughter and naughtiness. Then we realized that Eric was off to the side, crumpled on the sidewalk, looking like he was cringing in agony. Eric was not laughing. Eric was sobbing even as he cradled his midsection with his own arms.
Snapping out of our release and delirium, we ran over to our friend. Before we could even ask him what the matter was, he turned his head toward us, looking disturbingly like something out of the movie we just saw. His hands trembled, his shoulders convulsed, tears streamed down his face, and his eyes were two dark wells of panic.
“THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ME!” Eric cried out from somewhere within him that we young men could not categorize. A place that now alarmed us more than anything we had just viewed on screen.
“Don’t you see?” He bowed his head down and wept like a fearful child. “That could happen to me. At any time. I could be possessed by a demon!”
He meant it. We understood he was not feigning anything. What was a horror flick for the other three of us was a grim and shocking liturgical reality for our buddy. And this was, at least for me, a marker on my relationship with religion—even as I was planning a career in religion.
Eric eventually recovered from his trauma. In a way, the shrill alarm he experienced served to cleanse his sectarian-sullied soul of the indoctrinations, the propaganda, and the superstitions. I was close enough to him to learn that two of the parish priests, certainly at their own professional peril, defying the rectory canon, helped Eric out of his anxiety and guilt. This is not to say that those two exceptional reverends did not fall into church code of belief on the rule of the devil. But they at least were equally concerned with the psychological well-being of a young man within their ministry.
Eric also convinced his parents to pay for psychotherapy, ostensibly for his speech defect. In fact, he underwent analysis that relieved him of the stutter in his soul. Years after the night at the movies, I ran into Eric during a visit to my hometown. I knew he had become a schoolteacher—of world religions. He was happily married with two small children, and he spoke without a trace of mumbling and with quiet confidence. We laughed about our milestone night at the movies. I asked him, “How did you really get out of that rut?”
He responded: “I decided to argue with it.”
IN ORDER TO MAKE a bed with your religious tradition, you must struggle with it from time to time. The very name, “Israel,” means “the one who wrestles with angels.” You have to stand up, even to God or those who claim to represent God. The preachers won’t often tell you, because it threatens their authority, that this is a key fabric in the biblical tapestry. As we shall see, every true leader, prophet, and spiritualist of every faith has argued with fate and with God—from Sarah to Moses to Jesus to Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is obvious that uncompromising religious obeisance is the source of most every deadly conflict now blazing in this world. A religious crusade, of any kind, has nothing to do with the human spirit and everything to do with tyranny. Violence is not only physical; there is spiritual violence that turns growing children into cowering, angst-ridden misfits and that corrupts righteous clerics into bloodthirsty warlords. My boyhood chum Eric did not suffer from such persons but he did suffer from such sanctimoniousness.
Being a rabbi, a pastor, or an imam is not about power.
