#4: 7 Steps to Demon Possession and a Spirit-Filled Party

And other tales that did not make my mom proud.

I dropped out of college in 1995, the year I was supposed to graduate.

Mom was not proud.  

But, my life was in a tailspin and I couldn’t figure out how to make it stop, shy of, well, stopping. But, at 21, my judgment was, shall we say, not fully developed. I was extremely reactive to most things and lacked the skills necessary to process high stakes information in a thoughtful, methodical manner.

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In my last post, Hippies Don’t Wear Lipliner, I shared about the death of a classmate who was just 41 years old.

Julia Rebman was a radical feminist qua radical feminist in every sense of the term … I thought she was a total baller and super cool. But, she had a dark side that scared me.

Julia carried a type of sadness and hopelessness that I’d never known. It was more than the clinical depression and mood swings I’d experienced, it was more of a plunging discontent that wasn’t going to bottom out any time soon, at least not on its own. It had a stickiness to it that made me nervous. As a deep empath, I wasn’t loving the weight of it hanging out in my orbit …

Alcohol & Cartwheels Are a Recipe for Disater

I was a big drinker in college. 

I justified it because I needed large wine bottles to serve as candle stands in my small attic apartment in a local professor’s home. I must have set up 50 bottles aka candlesticks decorated with dripped and dried wax. Why someone didn’t stop me from sleeping in a combustible attic space, I don’t know … but I was all about my candle light, incense, and late night listening to my fav, Nanci Griffith. 

Then I was introduced to Vodka - a better alternative when you’re not interested in wearing the scent of cheap wine. Enter the VT into my life - always with extra lime. 

Mom was not proud!

As an aside, I tried to be a smoker for the “cool factor,” but it turns out my gag reflex had a different idea. When I’d try to inhale, I’d just cough instead, which was definitely not helping the “cool factor.” So I’d try to semi-inhale and hold the smoke with my breath, and then slowly blow it out of my mouth like Frenchie.

This was in the middle of President' Clinton’s first term, so the “not inhaling thing” was pretty funny.  

Turns out not only can I not inhale smoke, I can’t use a Neti Pot, and I can barely use Nasacort or Flonase! I have a small nose, a small mouth, and a small “wind passage” as they say. Getting tested for strep is sheer torture!  

But, I digress.

My drinking was the catalyst for the moniker “Fun Kelley” …  we’d spend Saturday nights at the Three D’s in Erie, PA jamming to Rupert Holmes, Van Morrison, Don McLean, and The Bangles. Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Ah Ha were staples, of course, ‘cause the 80s were, in a word, impeccable.  

I lived within walking distance from the bar (my whole crowd did) and one particular Saturday evening we sang our way through the streets and I, being the former cheerleader and power tumbler, took my skills to the pavement and started to turn cartwheels. My foot got stuck in a pothole and that was the end of “Fun Kelley.”

** Breaking an ankle is a total buzz kill. **

Again, this did not make my mom proud.

The next morning, I decided that I needed to get a grip and fix my life. I’d just connected with my birth mother for the first time, which was a very intense experience, and I was getting bored in school. My compass was broken. 

Some Thoughts From School

I finally tired of delivering the party line to get an A on papers … sure Willa Cather’s O Pioneers was a symbolic representation of her lesbianism. If you say so … here’s my analysis!  A+ for me. Never mind the main storyline about Alexandra Bergson who spends her life making the family farm she inherited a viable enterprise in the early 20th century, which was no small feat at that time.    

And, we must hate men, except for when we don’t?

After all, violence is a synonym for heterosexual intercourse, according to famed radical feminist, pornography scholar, and lesbian, Andrea Dworkin. Except … of course, when it isn’t. Her critics have translated her statement to mean that “all [straight] sex is rape” … she disputed that interpretation.  

Dworkin on a television program in 1988. She passed away in 2005 from heart disease, shortly after she married her gay husband for legal and inheritance purposes.

Dworkin’s book on Intercourse was published in 1987. It extended her study of pornography into sexual intercourse itself. She takes no prisoners.

Last but not least, I was growing weary of studying critical theory and being encouraged to revere Marxist thought, depsite my logical brain’s rebellion. I was struggling to ignore the fact that the professors who taught this stuff live in homes they own fee simple, which for those who didn’t have to study property in law school, means a “permanent and absolute tenure in land with the freedom to dispose of it at will.”

Marxism = no private property, period, full stop.

My brain just ached all the time … cognitive dissonance is exhausting.   

A Date with Death

Julia, my classmate, died around the same time I broke my ankle. I think it was October 1994 - I was still using crutches at her funeral.

Julia wasn’t a close friend, but we sat next to each other in class, so it was an enormous shock to see her empty chair the rest of the semester. It was heavy, a lot to process.

What keeps her memory alive, however, is not how I knew her in life, but how I saw her in death. You may recall from my last post that hers was the first non-religious funeral I’d ever attended. It was also the first funeral I’d attended in a funeral home, instead of a church. She did not attend religious services anywhere, so there was no minister or Pastor who knew and cared for her to deliver her eulogy, just the funeral home staff who stepped in the gap on that ominous day.

It was an open casket funeral.

Julia looked awful. She was so bloated she appeared disfigured and her makeup was caked on so thick you could slice right through it. It was more like plaster than foundation.

I was just shy of 21 (even though I partied a lot) so my funeral experience was limited. I think I’d been to 4 or so at that time, but only one was open casket. She was a 17 year old who died from Leukemia. When I passed by her coffin, she was like a songbird, a quite angel, in her final resting place. Julia was just the opposite.

I sat in the back of the room with my roommates and listened as her Narcotics Anonymous tribe stood and recited the twelve steps in unison. It was an acapella hymn of sorts. It was a dark day, a plunging day.

But that wasn’t all.

While I was sitting in my aisle seat, I had the first and last vision of my life. I don’t mean dream, but an actual vision. I “saw” 7 eel-shaped cloud-like bodies swirling around her coffin so swiftly and violently I thought they were going to crush her. I thought she was being possessed by demons and escorted straight to hell and, if I stayed, they would take me too. It was the most disturbing thing I’d ever seen, felt, or experienced, and still is.

I couldn’t breathe. I had to leave, fast.

This was a Saturday.

I lived two blocks from an inner-city church, the Family Worship Center (FWC) of Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a black church. It would become my church.

The day after my “date with death,” I needed an antidote to the demonic disaster of the day before. I grew up in the church and it was always a comforting place, so I was eager to return “home.” I started to calm down the minute I walked into the building, but I didn’t know what I was in for.

Two Surprises …

First, FWC is a charismatic church, meaning they emphasize that the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues, prophesy, and healing are part of the everyday lives of Christian believers. This comes from a theological belief that these particular supernatural gifts, also called revelatory gifts, have continued to the present age. This is referred to as continuationism.

There is a counter-belief called cessationism, which holds that these revelatory gifts ceased with the Apostolic Age, around 100 AD, the same time the Bible was complete and canonized. Upon canonization, God would speak to His people directly through His completed Word, as opposed to through the Apostles and Prophets who were supernaturally equipped for prophetic teaching and assigned to record His Word in writing.

Suffice it to say, I grew up in the cessationist tradition and was not quite ready for the “Spirit-filled party” to come. If you’ve ever been to a charasmatic church service, you probably know what I’m talking about.

While the style was VERY different from my childhood’s, it was still a precious tonic to my hurting heart and breaking soul.

Second, the sermon preached the first Sunday I attended FWC was on the 7 Steps to Demon Possession. Remember that I’d just had a vision of Julia being crushed into darkness by 7 “demonic creatures,” so this was no bueno.

By the end of the hour, I self-diagnosed. I was at Step 5 … there could be no doubt that I on a highway to Hell and had better get off … stat. I don’t remember the steps anymore, but you better believe I made sure my butt was in those pews every single time the doors were open.

A few weeks later, I happened to turn my gaze across the simple sanctuary and set my eyes upon a VERY handsome man worshipping alongside the rest of us. I was on a personal mission and was curious to see if he was game for helping me get there ... a little faster than I could flying solo, and perhaps with a softer landing as well.

My life was falling apart and I was heading in the wrong direction, so what better way to course correct than to get a new man?

Poor guy had no idea what he would be getting himself into … I was certainly more than he was bargaining for, but those details could sort themselves out later, right?

Mom was not proud!

But, I was tired, exhausted, confused, and depressed … so definitely a great catch!

And, a little instability never hurt anyone, right?

This was December 1994.

Operation Fix Kelley Fast was underway …

But, it wouldn’t gain traction until I took care of some other business that would change my life forever.

Mom was not proud.

But, that would change … one day …

Stay with me as I keep unpacking and revealing my ongoing journey to finding, understanding, and confronting the TRUTH.

With heartfelt thanks,

Kelley

November 30, 2022