On the morning of my baptism I woke up drenched in a nightmare sweat that felt simultaneously hot and cold. I really had to pee but it was one of those dreams where you wake up in such a state of abject terror that you are frozen still. I was too scared to move so I laid there clammy and afraid while my fiancé slept peacefully like a mummy on his back beside me. The hound was snoring in her dog bed on the other side of the bedroom. Hilma was nowhere to be found. I pieced together the nightmare I had just escaped in bedroom darkness, stupefied with fear. The dream began slightly funny: I had gone into the church parish hall bathroom to change into my baptismal garment and the toilets began spewing shit at me, all over the tile floors and cubicle walls. I frantically managed to clean it all up in a hurry and remain mostly unscathed before running over to the church. There waiting to cense me before the immersion in water was everyone I’d ever met standing in a circular line, all the pews were gone. Some of the people said things that were edifying and encouraging, others were howling and insane. One by one they came up to me and spoke their piece and then I was put on trial to testify about my Christian beliefs- my Serbian priest Father Russell asked off the sheet: “is there such thing as a ghost?” and I got the question wrong by answering “yes” but they let me continue with the baptism anyway (I have a deep fear of ghosts). Soon I was led to the back of the church, which was not an altar but a very Old Testament looking red dirt floor, where a very sexy woman who looked a whole lot like Zoe Kravitz was scratching written words I could not understand into a front door. Some wild, skinny-ribbed and three-legged jackal dogs started going bananas and howling, scrambling around in the red dirt. Suddenly the entire church was swallowed by a blackout. It felt like there was something very bad in there with me. I was horrified. All I thought to do was to recite the Jesus prayer over and over again: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have Mercy on me, a sinner. I kept saying it and not believing it so I said it louder and louder. The Church was completely dark and I was horrified. The dream ended with me yelling the Jesus prayer and walking while very afraid toward the front of the church, waiting for whatever horrible was ahead of me.
When I woke up all I could think about was Michelangelo’s Torment of Saint Anthony, a painting he made at like age 13. I was so scared I didn’t want to wake my almost-husband up. Eventually I mustard up the courage to check my watch beside the bed and it was 5:12, still ink-black outside with no trace of sunrise through the cottonwood trees[1]. 5 am was too late to technically be witching hour, which left me with a very dull, numb relief. It was, however, still too frightening to get up at the risk of seeing a demon or something I did not yet have the spiritual fortitude to face in the bedroom or hallway without literally turning into a pile of salt. I tried saying the Jesus prayer again but felt defeated and that the prayer had been rendered useless by the horror of my bad dream. Father Russell (my Serbian priest) had told me when I became a catechumen to expect something like this to happen: “when someone decides to take up the cross and devote oneself to Christ, the devil puts a target on your back.” He always said that we give ourselves too much credit for our bad thoughts, that Satan plants the bad seeds in our heads for us. This is also the same priest who assured me that the only possessed person he ever saw was a woman extremely high on crystal meth who wandered into the church before they called an ambulance for her.
Michelangelo, The Torment of Saint Anthony, 15th century? (Can’t remember)
I initially shrugged the devil comment off because the very idea of demons makes me more than a little uncomfortable, bringing me back to the darker parts of my evangelical upbringing that made me a justified atheist by kindergarten. It’s hard healing from the bizarre Left Behind movie my Dad let me watch as a five-year-old where old people get raptured on an airplane and the VHS tapes about end times fire-and-brimstone revelations (a distinctively American protestant obsession), but now all the countless depictions of demonic hedonism and evil from Breughel to Bosch are starting to make more sense and don’t seem as fictitious or fantastic as they used to. Satan is real. Angels are non-human energetic beings (mostly of light) and one big one fell because it wanted to detach from God energy and now our thoughts, the source of our lives and experience, are constantly under attack by fear, jealousy, anger, hedonism, gluttony, etc. The ancient Christians were extremely wary of many passions, and their fatphobia is something I respect deeply, but that is a story for another time. Anyway. Our thoughts are the source of all our sins and virtues. The good news is that there are lots of good angels looking out for us, too.
Once I decided to follow Christ it became transparently obvious how mudded up my thoughts are with tiny but very effective little demonic impulses—covetousness over worthless and expensive material possessions, callousness towards fat people, impatience toward others, an almost real hatred for libs who earnestly read the New York Times and believe war propaganda, etc. I don’t want to feel like this anymore and need help. I want to serve others and be freed from a nasty ego that tortures me and sometimes others in my daily life. I want peace. I have always wanted peace. I don’t want to be a slave to politics or a violent hive mind with zero epistemological anchoring to anything good whatsoever.
One doesn’t need to look very far to see that not much at all is very sacred: The Russian patriarch of the Orthodox church supports Putin’s violence against Ukraine, the American woke libs are frothing at the mouth for WAR and a no-fly zone against Russia with zero understanding whatsoever of the horrible history of NATO or the reality that some things can be extremely bad but also morally and politically complicated at the same time (I.e. maybe it’s not a good idea to egg on nuclear Holocaust), nobody has any idea what is real and what is not, etc. Etc.
I truly believe that in order to not spiral into the misery of this mass-hallucination prodigal pigpen we have been born into (against our will) we must, every single one of us, find a spiritual anchor and stick to it. Buddhism, Sufism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity (though those Protestants and to be honest the Catholics for that matter but who am I to judge seem to have a lot if not most of the teachings of Christ totally backwards), whatever it is, pick something, preferably something that has stood the test of a thousand years or more. What matters is the contents of man’s heart, not the amount of times he went to church or let someone know he/hims/his proper pronouns. I have also been to enough sacred DMT vape retreat ceremonies upstate with the most filler-injected, wealthy human beings imaginable to see that none of these methods of new age toad-venom-smoking shamanism are really working. Our hollowed-out modern spirituality is poisoned by a love of the Self. We have to find a way of thinking that reorients our thoughts from fear and ego/identity worship to the awareness of divine Love. I also have to stop judging people who get lots of fillers and smoke a maimed toad’s venom, though that is objectively a very cruel way to get high.
Christ’s words after his baptism were: “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Repentance comes from the ancient Greek metanoia/ μετάνοια and literally means to TURN ONESELF AROUND or reorient ourselves. If I cannot turn my consciousness AROUND I will wipe myself out with fear and guilt. We as a collective are so close to self-annihilation, a very sad nation of simultaneously fat and starving people addicted to drugs, hedonism, negativity, the news. Anyone who says their mind is not constantly at war with itself is almost certainly lying. We cannot and will not save ourselves. The good news is that we are already saved, but we have forgotten this. Our western, guilt-ridden colonialist misery has convinced us that all there is is the crucifixion— the misery and torment of death. We forget that the message of the crucifixion, the painful cross we all carry is the Resurrection, the ability to Love and forgive everyone and literally transcend the consciousness that tried to crucify us. There is no need to crucify ourselves or those around us, nor do we have to live in guilt or fear. The Orthodox church spoke to me because it is Christianity that works on a medical theology of healing, not a juridical one like the Catholics and (most of) the protestants. The church is a hospital, and God is the physician of our souls and bodies. There is no original sin. We’re just born into a hell we did not create and we need healing from it. We pray, forgive, participate in the holy mysteries of sacraments for HEALING, not penance. Health is inner peace and the joining of our consciousness with God, known as Theosis.
After about 45 minutes of lying in bed miserably afraid, at 6 am I crawled out of bed, peed very timidly, and went downstairs. My beloved chocolate toy poodle was sleeping on a pile of my coats on the bench near our front door. She wagged her little tail stump (which was, unfortunately, docked against her will at birth) and gave me some little kisses. I lit a stick of Astier De Villete incense and crossed myself in front of the living room icons. Little flecks of golden morning were starting to glitter through the trees outside my window. I made the sign of the cross again and started praying again, begging for mercy (which is not pity from punishment but comes from the Greek word for olive oil, the original healing balm- mercy is healing, medicine).
I remember reading about a Serbian elder’s life recently from a book a priest from Volos recently sent me. When the monk Thaddeus first joined the monastery and started praying ceaselessly in the church for vespers, he was tormented by demons and horrible thoughts in ways he had never experienced before. He told his spiritual father, who responded that the answer was to pray more. He prayed more but the demons did not leave. He told his father again that he was praying more but the devil would not leave him. The priest said: “then don’t pray more, pray better and with more heart.” Before healing the sick and the insane, Christ would always ask: “Do you want to be healed?” We have to want to heal with all our hearts. When he prayed from the heart in full presence, not just yelling words into the void, the demons went away.
I later read from the same elder that one should never take their dreams seriously, as demons love to scare the shit out of people with night visions, enslaving us with more fear and frivolous desires, more distractions from the peace and Divine Love which is our inheritance. This further confirms my theory that psychotherapy focused on dream analysis is more than a little bit retarded. After praying a little longer with full earnestness and no distraction the tiny little mean dream hooks unstuck from me and I drank some coffee before getting dressed for the liturgy. Later I was baptized in a horse trough, as adult baptisms in the Orthodox Church are still rare and they had nothing else to immerse me in. I left feeling unafraid and full of divine courage, unaware of the horror I would feel after getting too high off a pot gummy on the flight to Greece 24 hours later. I will be repenting and working to change my stupid thoughts and behavior for the rest of my life.
The purpose of baptism is to die to one’s former self, to take up the cross and martyr oneself for the sake / Love of others, to try every moment to forgive those who have trespassed against us, to stop fighting violence with more violence, to enter eternal life through death itself— one baptism for the remission of sins. It’s not just for everyone else, changing our thoughts and lives to align with God frees us too. Christ defeated death by the very act of facing his human death with Love and forgiveness. Pontius Pilate’s last words during the crucifixion: “behold, the human being.” None of us asked to be born and that is our cross. We all are going to die, but can choose to remember that there is no death by entering through death, understanding the light of God, which is always Love. The message is not so much the crucifixion, but the resurrection.
I am in Greece, about to experience my first holy week of the Resurrection where Christianity first began. God is with me, and God is with you too.
Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
and to those in the tombs
granting life!
[1] I spelled mustered like that on purpose because I’ve always wanted to
Below is Leonora Carrington’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, painted in 1945. I also love the photo of her painting it. Below that is me standing with my Greek Godmother Ellie and my spiritual father Father Russell after baptism. I’m staying in a Volos hotel with awful wifi and it is filled with over 100 very rude and loud teenagers visiting on a school trip. I’m filled with anger towards them all and will likely stand in the shower for 30 minutes saying the Jesus prayer, begging for my mind to stop thinking so viciously about them. This is after spending the evening with an incredibly kind Greek priest who gave me many beautiful books and food for thought about art and I’m still angry and sleep-deprived. Pray for me brothers and sisters.
