Interviewing Octavio was no easy task. I had trouble maintaining the thread of our conversation. Octavio received messages from God every few minutes, and excused himself from our conversation to listen and answer out loud. A mysterious force also seemed to keep me from arriving for our interviews at the appointed time and place. This time I could not get my daughter down to sleep at the usual hour. By the time I arrived at Restoration House, culto had long since ended and Octavio was settled into evening prayer. His eyes were bloodshot. He and the other leaders had been praying around the clock on a difficult case.
The Bible says: “call on me; I will answer and show you grand and occult things that you have never known,” in that order. There is a young man here because of his behavior, strange behavior. It is [due to] more than a trauma. In the name of Jesus we will get it out. It’s something spiritual. Psychologists talk about multiple personalities, [but these spirits], in order to destroy, they have to be human, they enter the body. . . . The Bible talks about our struggle not being against blood, or flesh, but against spirits of evil in the celestial regions. We fight something that we can’t see.
He warned me that these forces were operating even as he and I spoke about them: “In the name of Jesus. . . . Maybe you’ll listen to this tape [that is recording the interview] and hear voices that aren’t human.”
Octavio told me that just as the Holy Spirit enter the body when called, demonic spirits can enter human bodies. The wounded heart is particularly vulnerable.
It is a mystery how a God so large can enter our hearts, [which are] so wounded, so small, having suffered . . . the young man last night, somewhere [in his past] there is a trauma. Something happened, someone abandoned him . . . science studies only what can be seen. We’re talking about something which can’t be seen.
The spirits also work externally, driving events in ways that appear coincidental. Talking about my daughter’s cries at bedtime, which had kept me from attending culto, Octavio was clear that more was at work than met the eye: “It was something occult.”
As I listened to him, I sensed intention in the winds. Was it Octavio’s scanning of the spaces behind me as we talked that was so contagious? Or was it his rhythmic incantation of the hidden? Was it the fact that he drew my story into his, weaving in my own struggles and superstitions?
I found myself taking the mystical realm seriously in my own life. Starting my car that night, I wondered if its stalling was a sign that I should stay at the ministry. Once it started, I thought the car’s quick acceleration was a sign that I needed to get home.5 I drove away from the scene, attempting to pass from Octavio’s world, crowded with spirits, back to the innocence of the mundane. But this was in vain. His narrative had altered mine.
Of all the men I met at Restoration House, Octavio was the one that lived most immersed in the dimension of spirits. He told me that God had cured him of the HIV and hepatitis that he’d gotten while injecting cocaine, and that he had not had any AIDS-related opportunistic infections since he accepted Christ. Octavio’s communion with the Holy Spirit was his lifeline, a type of existential intravenous drip. This communion gained him the respect of his colleagues in the church; as they said, “Octavio is a man of God. He knows the Bible very well.” They named him a medium. His communion with the Spirit sustained him in both the spiritual realm and in the everyday world.
Juan’s teachings on spiritual eyes and ears helped me to understand why ministry converts did not see Octavio as mentally ill, but instead celebrated him as a beacon of spiritual health. Had I met Octavio in a medical clinic, without an understanding of Pentecostal cosmology, I would have diagnosed him with a psychotic disorder or with HIV dementia based on his limited attention to my questions, and his communication with beings that others could not see or hear. In the ministry, his unending dialogue with spirits was a coveted state that required focused self-discipline and skill.
And it was Octavio and Juan’s testimony that allowed me to imagine, if not experience, the spiritual eyes and ears with which they perceived the occult realm and channeled spiritual power. Testimony was the narrative tool bridging the everyday world to the enchanted world of spiritual knowing that opened up to converts, a world in which hidden meaning was revealed, in which the apparent disorder of addicted pasts became part of a grander design, and which portended a victorious future. Juan and Octavio’s testimony inserted glimpses of the occult into my own perceptions; they gave me experiential clues to the world they inhabited. Their testimony worked on me in a less cognitive, in a more visceral, somatic way than that described by Susan Harding (2000). Her classic linguistic analysis of witness—the testimony of fundamentalist Christians to the power and reality of their salvation—identified it as a narrative technique that moves listeners from unbelief to the gap between unbelief and belief (Harding 2000). What I observed at Restoration House was not the inculcation of sheer belief but, rather, of experiential proof, through Juan and Octavio’s testimony: the occult perceptions and sensations that listening to testimony generated in naïve listeners stoked a curiosity and desire for more. At the same time, it was a practice that reinforced the single-minded commitment of those giving testimony, allowing them to experience and re-experience their own inhabitation by spirits in the intimate folds of their story.
Through testimony, moments of insight, spirit possession, and Christian passion could be relived again and again in a timeless space of memory and sensation that gave converts a sense of what eternal salvation might be like. As George Saunders (1995) wrote of Pentecostal conversion stories, “The ‘eternalness’ of Pentecostal time horizons . . . also allows them to live in the present moment, as ‘inner-worldly’ activists” (Saunders 1995, 335). In other words, converts use testimony to till and seed their inner terrain with guided imagery and the renaming of sensory experience; to make the self the site of action and change. Testimony allows converts to treat their thoughts and internal signals as clay to be shaped through narrative and bodily practices. In testifying to their choice to follow the Lord, argues Saunders, “They are liberated from their passivity. They have recreated their own histories and, in the process, have regained a presence in history itself” (Saunders 1995, 336).
What this means is that testimony is as important for the faith of the person giving it as for the future faith of the person receiving it. Harding (2000) describes testimony as a tool for evangelism, for creating doubt in non-believers and moving them toward belief. I came to see testimony as an equally critical tool for believers to cultivate their own belief. Testimony shapes the self by narrating it into an archetype of trial, decision, and transformation. It injects everyday life with a sense of significance and forward motion, locating converts in mystical time and space that is both immediate and perpetual.
Ironically, these themes of immediacy and perpetuity, repetition and memory, are echoed by clinical and neuroscience researchers describing addiction itself. Their descriptions highlight the phenomena of “triggers”; memory cues in the environment that lead to cravings, to the compulsion to give one’s full attention to the pursuit of drugs in a way that is as absorbing and anticipatory as it is repetitive and unchanging. As stated in a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry that reviewed biological models of addiction, “evidence at the molecular, cellular, systems, behavioral, and computational levels of analysis is converging to suggest the view that addiction represents a pathological usurpation of the neural mechanisms of learning and memory” (Hyman 2005: 1414).
If nothing else, evangelical testimony is a practice of memory creation, a practice that is both relational and internal, one that cues the testifier to re-experience spiritual encounters. Yet, when neuroscientists propose “treating addiction through manipulations of learning and memory” (Torregrossa, Corlett, and Taylor 2011, 609) they refer to pharmaceuticals that disrupt the chemical reactions at neuroreceptors that consolidate memories and facilitate learning of new cues. Their studies are based largely on mice that model human behavior. Missing from their inquiry are the ways that human subjects shape their own external and internal environments to create new cues.
TESTS