LISTENING TO THE SILENCES

Once there was certainty. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order, in his Spiritual Exercises, defined Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, i.e. is the spirit that has entered your mind or presence from God, or is it malevolent? A recent writer in the same Order follows the modern trend of watering down, even abandoning, the concept of intrusive spiritual malevolence and instead writes of the 'discernment of moods'. He also advises his retreatants to keep a dream diary 'in case God is speaking to them in their dreams'. No doubt he, like many, was suffering from a surfeit of Jung! From priests and religious who come under the spell of Jung, may the good Lord deliver us.

No, we must return to a third Jesuit to put the matter right and help us to retrace a step or two. In his book Silent Music, a study of meditation, William Johnston treats of the perils of too hasty a descent into the 'deeper realms of the mind' and quotes from Dr.Elmer Green of the Menninger Foundation, who writes:

"According to various warnings, the persistent explorer in these realms… brings himself to the attention of indigenous beings who, under normal circumstances, pay little attention to humans…

…Systems for inner exploration describe these indigenous beings as entities whose bodies are composed entirely of emotional, mental and etheric substance, and say that at this level of development they are psychologically no better than average man himself. They are of many natures and some are malicious, cruel and cunning, and use the emergence of the explorer out of his previously protective cocoon with its built-in barriers of mental and emotional substance as an opportunity to move, in reverse so to speak, into the personal subjective realm of the investigator. If he is not relatively free from personality dross, it is said, they can obsess him with various compulsions for their own amusement and in extreme cases can even disrupt the normally automatic functioning of the nervous system, by controlling the brain through the chakras. Many mental patients have made the claim of being controlled by subjective entities, but the doctors in general regard these statements as part of the behavioural aberration, pure subconscious projections, and do not investigate further".

Johnston continued - "I reflected that a decade ago religious people were affirming the existence of devils, while the scientist smiled with amused incredulity. But now, just as we find religious people doubting about devils, we find the scientists affirming their existence. And so the wheel turns". (The particular chapter entitled A Perilous Journey is worth reading in its entirety).

Dr. Kenneth McAll qualified in medicine in Edinburgh and then spent a number of years, including war internment by the Japanese, as a missionary-surgeon in China. Returning to Britain, he worked for the next ten years in general practice and from then onwards as a Consultant Psychiatrist. His experience in China led to interest in the power of 'possession', and he has devoted his life since to the curing of psychiatric illness 'through divine guidance'. In his book Healing the Family Tree Dr. McAll writes -

"When patients come to me, often after enduring years of unsuccessful medical and psychiatric treatment, they can be in a highly unreceptive state of mind, unwilling to co-operate and reluctant to trust another doctor…When a mutual feeling of trust has been established, the patients are usually able to unburden themselves of the 'secrets' that have been the source of their illnesses.
Many emotional problems have their roots in a purely biochemical imbalance which requires medication, and this can be remedied easily enough when once identified, although it is not always easy to discover. But many deep emotional hurts need a different sort of therapy and the supportive love of a Christian community. We cannot ignore any means by which the full healing of an individual can be achieved.
An increasing number of the patients sent to me admitted that they suffered from the presence of 'spirits' or the intrusion of 'voices' from another world which were apparent and audible only to themselves and which psychiatry dismissed as madness. This was reminiscent of the traditional Chinese superstitions about good and evil spirits that I had encountered so many times when I lived in the Far East. Gradually, I realised that the spirits and the voices were real and also that there was a distinction between them. Some seemed to be evil and often came as the result of occult practices, while others seemed to be neutral, harmless voices begging for help. Sometimes the patient could identify the voices as belonging to a recently dead relative, but often there was no known connection in the patient's mind.
Who were these unbidden, unquiet spirits? Why and how could they hold living people in bondage…".

Perhaps we should ask a former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Professor Andrew Sims of Leeds University is quoted as saying that psychiatrists should give less emphasis to a patient's sex life and more to his or her prayer life. Many people, he said, spent more time in prayer than in sexual intercourse, so "why is it therefore that prayer is given much less prominence by our profession in our enquiries of patients?" And further - "Psychiatrists have exclusively concentrated upon the mental and ignored, to the extent of denying, the possibility of another, spiritual, dimension".