them clients, because that implies they’re paying for something. Here we say brother, or sister, because we are like a family, or students, because it is an Academy.” Long-term residents got the titles of program leaders or co-directors. Program directors did not see addiction as the primary reason that residents needed help. Instead they saw addiction as a symptom of moral weakness. At times, people who had never used drugs came to the ministry; one woman asked to live at Victory Academy to pray about the fact that her husband physically abused her, and another was there to earn custody of children that were in foster care because of alleged neglect.
In this atmosphere of open admission, the program leadership accepted that I was studying evangelism as a treatment for addiction, but told me that God led me to them, whether I knew it or not. They called me the student or, jesting about my broken Spanish, la Gringa (“the North American”). They were convinced that my writing would help the Holy Spirit to reach readers on the mainland. I was invited to baptisms, weddings, and family homes. I took my daughter with me. With their pro-natalist ethos, my daughter’s presence made me easier to place. Coincidentally, or not, family relations emerged as central themes in the stories they told about themselves.
I participated daily in culto (worship services), Bible study, training sessions for program leaders in discipleship, and the everyday life of the ministry. Helping to prepare meals in the kitchen and listening to conversation while cleaning the dormitories gave me a window onto the backstage performance (Goffman 1973) of ministry residents and staff. I was privy to gossip, conflict, and anxieties that people concerned about setting a Christian example did not make public. Taking part in the daily routine of ministry residents also taught me about the physical, embodied aspects of evangelism. Indoctrination was not only a matter of the spoken and written biblical Word, but was also a matter of upright posture, seating that was segregated by gender and seniority in the ministry, sleep deprivation, and emotional release while dancing to music at culto.
Ministry leaders reminded me that I could only truly understand Christian treatment for addiction by accepting Christ myself. And I was often mistaken for a convert: instead of the tight shorts and halter tops worn by unconverted young Puerto Rican women, I wore loose shirts that covered my shoulders, long skirts, and no makeup. On one occasion, Pagan, a former prison guard–turned–ministry program leader at Restoration House, stopped midsentence in our conversation to eye my ankle-length navy dress. “But you look so Christian!” he said plaintively. “Maybe you will find God this year.”
I also tended to pass for “nuyorican” (New York Puerto Rican); with my curly hair and brown complexion, I was called “trigueña” (“wheat colored”) in the rich Puerto Rican vocabulary for describing skin tone.3 It was easy for me and my informants to begin talking as if I were a convert. I reflexively greeted familiar faces with “Que le bendiga” (“May God bless you”), and carried a Bible. At times, I wondered if God was asking me to go native. I knew that, for Pentecostals, there could be no fence sitting, and there was no true knowledge external to faith. To keep his job, my husband spent much of his time on the mainland, so I often was with my daughter in the ministries, and it was there that I felt most connected and a part of a community. This immersion planted a seed of doubt in my agnostic worldview.
Although I was disturbed by this doubt, I also saw it as a source of insight.4 I, too, was affected by their evangelist techniques, and I felt the same need to belong that my informants did. I saw that the boundary between believer and non-believer was permeable, that crossing over and back again was common, and that conversion could be tenuous. Sermon after sermon in culto was about doubt, and the need for Christians to be vigilant of their faith. I suspected that the drama of conversion and evangelical performance reflected converts’ anxiety about this tenuousness.
COSAS OCULTAS (“THE OCCULT”)
A few weeks passed at Restoration House before Juan introduced me to Octavio. Like Juan, Octavio was a program leader. Dark half-moons under his eyes accentuated his pale face and bony frame. Octavio was in a constant state of prayer; he was said to have given up sleep to talk with God without interruption. I had noticed Octavio in the front of the pulpit during culto. With a dimpled smile, he chanted ¡Santo! ¡Santo! ¡Gloria a Dios! (“Holy! Holy! Glory to God!”) into the microphone and sang the opening lyrics to a salsa-inflected hymn. The congregation picked up the tune, and he kneeled to the far left of the altar and remained there, head down, for the duration of the two-hour culto.
Interviewing Octavio was no easy task. I had trouble maintaining the thread of our conversation. Octavio received messages from God every few minutes, and excused himself from our conversation to listen and answer out loud. A mysterious force also seemed to keep me from arriving for our interviews at the appointed time and place. This time I could not get my daughter down to sleep at the usual hour. By the time I arrived at Restoration House, culto had long since ended and Octavio was settled into evening prayer. His eyes were bloodshot. He and the other leaders had been praying around the clock on a difficult case.
The Bible says: “call on me; I will answer and show you grand and occult things that you have never known,” in that order. There is a young man here because of his behavior, strange behavior. It is [due to] more than a trauma. In the name of Jesus we will get it out. It’s something spiritual. Psychologists talk about multiple personalities, [but these spirits], in order to destroy, they have to be human, they enter the body. . . . The Bible talks about our struggle not being against blood, or flesh, but against spirits of evil in the celestial regions. We fight something that we can’t see.
He warned me that these forces were operating even as he and I spoke about them: “In the name of Jesus. . . . Maybe you’ll listen to this tape [that is recording the interview] and hear voices that aren’t human.”
Octavio told me that just as the Holy Spirit enter the body when called, demonic spirits can enter human bodies. The wounded heart is particularly vulnerable.
It is a mystery how a God so large can enter our hearts, [which are] so wounded, so small, having suffered . . . the young man last night, somewhere [in his past] there is a trauma. Something happened, someone abandoned him . . . science studies only what can be seen. We’re talking about something which can’t be seen.
The spirits also work externally, driving events in ways that appear coincidental. Talking about my daughter’s cries at bedtime, which had kept me from attending culto, Octavio was clear that more was at work than met the eye: “It was something occult.”
As I listened to him, I sensed intention in the winds. Was it Octavio’s scanning of the spaces behind me as we talked that was so contagious? Or was it his rhythmic incantation of the hidden? Was it the fact that he drew my story into his, weaving in my own struggles and superstitions?
I found myself taking the mystical realm seriously in my own life. Starting my car that night, I wondered if its stalling was a sign that I should stay at the ministry. Once it started, I thought the car’s quick acceleration was a sign that I needed to get home.5 I drove away from the scene, attempting to pass from Octavio’s world, crowded with spirits, back to the innocence of the mundane. But this was in vain. His narrative had altered mine.
Of all the men I met at Restoration House, Octavio was the one that lived most immersed in the dimension of spirits. He told me that God had cured him of the HIV and hepatitis that he’d gotten while injecting cocaine, and that he had not had any AIDS-related opportunistic infections since he accepted Christ. Octavio’s communion with the Holy Spirit was his lifeline, a type of existential intravenous drip. This communion gained him the respect of his colleagues in the church; as they said, “Octavio is a man of God. He knows the Bible very well.” They named him a medium. His communion with the Spirit sustained him in both the spiritual realm and in the everyday world.
Juan’s
