You Wanted to Know About Exorcism
by Peter Davison
Q: I recently saw a program on exorcism. Does our church believe in this practice?
A: Your question deserves a careful answer. Let me begin my recalling the infamous Kathy Globe case of the nineteen-sixties in Toronto. Kathy was a young woman whose increasingly odd behaviour led her priest and fellow parishioners to believe she was “possessed.” In the course of a bizarre and lengthy exorcism Kathy died. It turned out she had had a brain tumour. The scandal of her death prompted the Diocese of Toronto, and subsequently the national church, to place strict limitations on exorcism rites. Such practice is extremely rare in the Anglican Church, but seems to be experiencing a (somewhat controversial) revival in the Roman Catholic Church, and is fairly common in some fundamentalist sects.
At this point we should notice the general growth of interest in the non-rational aspects of life. During the last forty years people have realized how the so-called “Age of Reason” has failed to provide us with a safe, orderly world — let alone a sense of meaning and purpose. The nuclear age has brought us more than once to the brink of destruction; tyrannies and genocides abound; millions of people feel enslaved by “principalities and powers” beyond their control. The number of addicts grows, and includes people of increasingly young age. At the same time novelists and filmmakers have presented us with a spate of books and movies about evil powers, social breakdown, and other apocalyptic themes. It would seem that neglect of the non-rational leads to the irrational — though the two should not be confused.
Along with all this has come the decline of traditional science and linear thinking — now being replaced by quantum theory, the discovery of multiple and parallel universes, and so on. Despite the rantings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their ilk, mystery and paradox have made a comeback, challenging the narrow dogmatisms of both radical secularists and religious fundamentalists.
It’s also worth noting that people suffering from addictions and certain forms of psychiatric illness have found a measure of healing when they've been able to “name their demons” and repudiate their power. Some psychotherapists have discovered, at a time when many churches have attempted to reduce faith to what is “logical and relevant,” that their role as healers has been at least in part to uncover the spiritual forces which can “drive our lives” for good or for ill.
Theology has always been formed in the crucible of life’s crises and questions. God is not so much “the answer” as the questioner who challenges our desire to limit life to what we can define and control. Our reluctance to acknowledge any power beyond our own leads to excessive alienation, irrationality and violence. An old saying suggests that “those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” In overcoming the root sin of human arrogance (“hubris”), wisdom leads us to both humility and courage. It enables us to “speak truth to power” and dethrone the principalities and powers that so easily enslave us. Exorcism can be seen, not as a magical solution, but as a carefully exercised invocation of that “Higher Power” we call God. But exorcism is never to be used lightly. Bishops are not allowed to authorize it apart from careful inquiry and the involvement of competent medical persons. In my own pastoral experience I have found that, for most situations, helping people to give thanks for God-given strengths they didn't know they had, coupled with a simple blessing, is enough. I have also used the rite for house blessings when people have sensed “disturbed spirits” in their homes. All in all, we might not be so concerned with “evil spirits” if we all engaged in what great spiritual writers have described as “the practice of the presence of God,” and in regular sacramental worship.
