I've got compounding problems. To say where exactly they begin is part of the problem. How far back am I supposed to go? How far back do the issues run? How much am I supposed to, or should I reveal?

These aren't relatively new questions either. They are in part what ended an e-mail conversation between myself and a man from the Catholic Center on campus last week. They are what have kept therapuetic relationships taut and cautious. They are what drives me to be vague and elusive on-line at times. These questions also drive me to reveal certain events and information to one person and not to another, which can get confusing when you all sit together and talk to a bunch of people and they all know different amounts of information.

Santeria is only one experience I have had. I did not participate voluntarily, but I had to do it. What was I going to do otherwise? The common line I use to explain my experience is "Chicken blood smells bad." It does, but so did the herbal bath and the incense and the powders. I was scared and humiliated. I can't remember if it was senior year of high school or if it was freshman year of college. All I know is that it was in the spring and I had homework I would have much rather done in place of the initiation rite.

Mom has continously seen it fit to involve myself and my sister in her Santeria practices. I remember being involved little by little around the age of 13 or so. Mom would walk around the house and our rooms sprinkling herbal waters everywhere. Or she would involve me in the tarot card readings not too infrequently. Several years ago, Dad convinced mom to burn her tarot cards. That did nothing to slow her down. She found a different santero and paid out more and more money for rituals, herbs, and readings. When she walks into bookstores she heads straight to the "new age/wiccan" section. Apparently the "magic spells" aren't a far cry from the Santeria potions and lotions. She's got her candles lined up in the kitchen windowsill. They look like candles to the saints, but that's just the guise for the gods that the santeros adopted back when Santeria was developing in the 1500s.

She hasn't involved me since the initiation rite, to my knowledge. I wish my experiences ended there, but they don't.

I am a former cult member. More information on the group here.
I transfered from CSU Long Beach to USC in the spring of 2004, and I found this great Bible study group that was so friendly and open to new members it was amazing. For a long time all I did was bible study with them. Even during the summer months away from campus I kept up contact with them for other Bible study sessions and luncheons. It was in the fall semester in which I jumped headlong into the group, spending at least 8 hours a week doing Bible study with the group.

The woman I had done Bible study with at CSULB emailed me, as she was concerned about the amount of time was I spending with the group and told me that if they were the "Los Angeles Church of Christ" to leave since they were a cult. That sounds really similar to one of the names of the group (Local Church in Los Angeles), so I did a quick Google search on them and found tonnes of negative responses to the group. That was October 4th 2004. I officially left on October 14th. By the 22nd, I was approaching denial and withdrawal.

I am not going to recount everything in my post-cultic experience, but I think I need to put the spiritual attack from a week or two ago into it's correct perspective.

Once I left the cult, it felt like I was dying; God's prescence in my life was oppressive, and I felt like if God continued to be a part of it in any way I was going do die. So, once I told God to get the f*** out of my life, a weight lifted off of me. But soon that wasn't good enough. He was still there and I needed out, I told God that He was dead to me. But that wasn't good enough. I still didn't feel free and I hated God just oh so much. I came to realize that God was suffocating me, and that He was my Enemy. But my new Enemy had an enemy. Are not the enemy of your enemy your friend? Yeah, you can obvioulsy see where my train of thought led me to: more Darkness. I turned to Satan.

But I believe now, I began believing on August 8th 2005.

But now I have to wonder, does my past open me up to Satan's exploitation? Am I somehow putty in his hands? Am I more suspectible to his Lies and Deciet now?

Because I don't want to be.

So you can see how I can just have a spiritual attack and react to it like a pebble in my shoe -- pull it out and move on. Sort of.

God provides.

It's a complete sentece with a noun and a verb; a subject and a predicate. A whole and complete thought. Simple and complex all at once.



On a randomized side-note: Look at the grand simplicity of life, perhaps focus on a tree. Yet, upon a closer look it’s not all that simple. There is complexity in the simplicity of life, each planned cell, the DNA, the very fact that a zillion cells can create a unified mass such as Fido or a maple tree. If we are to follow Emerson (or was itThoreau?) and God at the admonishment to lead a simple life, is there complexity in that simplicity?

The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. -- Martin Luther

The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked. -- Sir Thomas More

Those two quotes are on the dedication page of my copy of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, and I like them quite a bit. It's what I often do, either in the silence of my mind, on-line, or out loud. I like saying to the demons and Devil that they're all a bunch of fools who aren't only decieving society at large, but also themselves. For we see God telling us in parables of the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" that will occur for those rejecting the Son. But can it not also invite the demon to attack you? At what point do we cross our Christian-warrior stance of being on guard and become paranoid?

I've experienced what I consider to be an attack because it does not meet any DSM IV criteria as some people have suggested. I can understand well why people need to label human experiences as normal or abnormal. But not all that we categorize as abnormal can be solely due to deviances in psychology or upbringing.

It has not been so long ago that I cannot remember the darkness, of the wild goose chase I willingly accepted. There is true Darkness to be experienced when you give yourself over to Satan as your new best friend. All the Lies become fact. The Evening becomes your friend, your cloak, your garment of choice. Your life as you knew it so distant you're not sure you even lived it, more distant than the nightmares of childhood.

They couldn't classify it. I didn't fit into the diagnostic criteria of anorexia nervosa, I also did not fit the criteria for depression. They were supposed to have taken into account the "cultural" aspects that includes religious affiliation or they could have looked at Adjustment. Back to the Lies and Darkness, at least there somebody understood just how much God hated me.

Only, Satan did not plan on my going to a funeral mass in August. He also did not plan on the Spirit's continual fight for me.

Stupid demon, do you really think that I would willingly go back to your Darkness now that I've had some fine months in the Light? You think you can fool me into fearing God, without realizing that it was your troublemaking?

Oh yes, I will deride you. I'll drag you out and about, so long as the Lord gives me charge to do so - so long as I live.

Let me preface this entry with a bit of an explanation. There is in every generation, a certain grouping of people who know without a doubt that they belong to a bygone era. I do not say this with pride, but with longing. For the need to escape into a world and a time long gone often calls my name. My favorite time period is the '50s, and no, I do not refer to the 1950s, but rather the 1850s. What could I possibly want to be a poineer woman barely surviving the bitter winters of the plains in a mudhouse? Why, a fight of course. I need something to conquer.

Only recently do I feel at peace with this need to conquer and win something for it is God who helps to fill this need. He created me to embody this fighting and conquering spirit. I express a need for the 1850s as it is the last known untamed, wind and snow ravaged territory known to the American. Once the West was ours, all there was to look towards was the Moon and Space, of which there really no is daily struggle for Life and Death in a safe little bubble of steel and fire-resistant foam. There is no great monster whether it's the unrelinquishing cold, the ruined crops that were planted with the remaining harvested seed, or the fear of not knowing whether the Indians would harm yourself and your children.

There is a spiritual bend to this need to conquer, and conquer I will, in the name of my Lord. But woe to the person who thinks they can start an arguement with me and win. The call of a fight is louder and stronger than nearly anything I've known. I have got to learn how to harness this power, this drive and use it solely in the name and the goodness of my Christ. As I have not yet learned to do this fully as of yet, I am liable to lapse into fighting spells and old language and turns of speech. For the need to conquer lies in my blood, it engulfs me, and therefore ought to be released and expressed in every manner of things whether it's my speech, my handwriting, my hand-sewing, or my gardening. I will let it out until my Lord shows me who and where upon to target my conquering spirit.

Perhaps now you can understand my argumentative side a bit better and also understand my deep interest in Spiritual Warfare.

For a while now I have had an intense interest in Spiritual Warfare, because I thought it was so interesting of how there could be battles occurring daily for our minds and souls between Angels, demons, and ourselves. That interest has not gone away.

I do not think that before this weekend I understood the warnings others had given to me for being interested in the darkness that enfolds Spiritual Warfare. Now I do, and I have a new vested interest in the matter.

I have read only a little on the subject matter, but what I have seen has given me tools to understand how to bring down the demon: scorn, laughter, knowledge that the Battle has long been won, and the tools of the opposition are endless, dark, and deceitful tearing away at the human heart, but not at the life and light we have in our Father.

I know understand and believe what I did not really trust in before, that my Father will come down as a Living God, and defeat and scare away the demons if only I ask Him to. All I have to do is ask and He is there for me.