back to Issue 19
by Isaiah Lewis
The story the sisters told was about a man who claimed the Rosary didn’t matter. Or maybe the man was himself a demon, and the demon said the Rosary didn’t matter. But I think he was a regular, if perhaps unhappy, man. Anyway, the Virgin Mary appeared in front of him one day and hit him on the head with a staff and he threw up hundreds of demons until he pleaded with the Virgin Mary to make it stop. And she told him he had to agree that the Rosary was really important and that he would pray it every day, which he did. The end. At least, that’s the way I remember it.
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The sisters were from the Missionaries of Charity, the order St. Teresa of Calcutta founded. They wore white sari-habits with blue striped trim and sandals and came every Monday from Faith House, where they served poor women living with AIDS, to my church, whose membership was primarily people living on the streets of Atlanta. Many people were psychotic, some addicted, most unhoused. All but two or three of us on a given day were men. The sisters were there to teach us to pray, and perhaps through that act to save our souls. They never said that directly, so maybe I’m projecting. I was never brave enough to ask. Each week they passed out plastic Rosaries with molded plastic Jesuses in the same color as the beads. There were baby blue Jesuses and red ones, salmon-colored ones and green ones. I always thought it was interesting that Jesus was literally one with his plastic cross. You couldn’t pull him off if you tried.
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The story the sisters told us made me fear Mary more than adore her. I’ve struggled with doubt and with mental illness longer than I can remember, and at the time of their telling I had the disturbing feeling that I was the man being hit on the head with the staff, that soon I would be vomiting demons. I grew up Presbyterian. Presbyterians don’t talk about demons, they don’t pray the Rosary, and they think about Mary once a year during Christmas. But I was going to my church, Caritas, as a way to grasp at what was left of my sanity. I was there for breakfast and prayer, Bible study and clothing closet, lunch and cleanup every day the doors were open. I couldn’t hold down a full-time job but also couldn’t stand to be alone. I needed to be busy, needed to surround myself with people who were also suffering. I was obsessed with God, but not in a good way. When I prayed the Rosary along with the other droning voices in the room, I felt carbonated, pressurized. Like whatever was in me needed to come out.
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I had forgotten that St. Dominic was a main character in the story the sisters told. I had to search for demons rosary Mary story when I wanted to read it on my own. In thirteenth-century France he was in a theological battle with the Albigensians, whom the Church called heretics for their belief that the physical world didn’t matter. The demoniac in question was an Albigensian, and a popular one at that. According to St. Louis De Montfort’s The Secret of the Rosary, more than a thousand people were listening to him preach against the Rosary, and St. Dominic saw him as a teachable moment.
St. Dominic placed a rosary around the Albigensian’s neck and commanded the demons, who numbered fifteen thousand, to tell him whom among all the saints they most feared. They refused, and St. Dominic prayed for help from Mary. When he did this, fire shot from the Albigensian’s ears, nose, and mouth, and the demons begged to be released from the man because St. Dominic was torturing them. There’s a long speech from the demons in The Secret of the Rosary, and in it, they say that Mary’s intercessions and praying the Rosary can save people from Hell. The crowd of people who had gathered to hear the Albigensian slowly prayed the Rosary together, and the demons left him like “red hot coals.” The narrator says that the demons pleaded with St. Dominic, “weeping and begging for mercy,” and that “St. Dominic was not moved at all.” But demons don’t have bodies. What St. Dominic actually saw, then, was a man who was preaching something he disagreed with, whom he acted upon without consent, and who was now crying out for mercy. And he was not moved.
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In telling the story of the Albigensian and St. Dominic, the sisters were trying to warn us away from the sinister forces to which we seemed so vulnerable, but also cajole us into doing what they felt was right. There was a patina of blame that landed ever so lightly on us for our illnesses, addictions, hunger, and general misery. If they could have hit us each on the head to cure us, fire spouting out of all our orifices, they would have. Instead, they had to hope Mary would do it for them.
I say that I leaned on my church community while recovering from a mental health crisis, and that’s true. What’s equally and awkwardly true, however, is that in some sense that unfolding emergency was precipitated by my participation in that same community. I’m not saying that if it weren’t for Caritas I wouldn’t be bipolar. That diagnosis was a long time coming. But something happened there that warped my reality in a way that only religion can. The enormous wooden crucifix and bright murals on the walls, the music, the overlapping scents of shit and coffee, and the charismatic pastor preaching good news to the poor: they enveloped me, ate me whole. All the way to heaven is heaven, St. Catherine of Siena and this preacher would say. And for the first time in my life, I felt it. Fresh out of seminary and raging like a wildcat at an unjust world, I longed for a place that was good, that was right, that was holy. I had my suspicions of Pastor Paul at first because he was a white man ministering to a mostly Black and Brown congregation. He had two co-pastors, both white women, but people always called it Paul’s Place. I told him it wasn’t possible for a church (or any organization, really) to be antiracist if the staff was exclusively white, and he scoffed. Perhaps that should have been my cue to leave. But I wasn’t sure where else to go. My previous church was hemorrhaging members and their leadership had imploded, and even in a big city there aren’t a ton of churches that are trans-affirming without being weird about it.
Let me be clear: there are no perfect victims here. This charismatic, white male pastor poured hours of care into me. He would drive me home in his ’96 Chevy pickup, all the while listening to me curse God and wish I were dead. He would scrape me up from the bottom of whatever emotional cesspool I had sunken into that day and reassemble me into a human shape, more or less, and he would do it four times a week. When I was with him, I thought he was Jesus and could read my mind. When I wasn’t, I thought he was a cult leader and could probably still read my mind. I was volatile, even by the standards of Caritas, but he never gave up on me. I wanted someone to show me a God I couldn’t hurt—who would never leave me, no matter how feral I became. I wanted someone strong enough to hold me. Paul was that for me for a while, but at a price. Our relationship was predicated on a dual hierarchy: parishioner and pastor, crazy and sane. He taught that God desires wellness for his children, but I was not well. I was one in need of healing, of saving, of grace. As such, my observations about power dynamics and privilege could be ignored. Worse, I started suppressing them. I began to see myself as an unreliable narrator in a story not my own.
The pandemic pulled me out of the death spiral, oddly enough. In the spring of 2020, the family that had hired me as a part-time nanny graciously let me go with a monthslong stipend, and I began to spend all of my time at Caritas. Except the more I was at the church, the more paranoid and enraged I became. I started writing labyrinthine emails to Paul. I loathed one of his co-pastors because she also worked as a chaplain at the large public hospital and I was sure she wanted to commit me there. I called the other pastor every single day because my emotions were so intense and chaotic that I felt like I had to tell someone what I was feeling or I would combust. I was so desperate to leave the anxiety and anger that I once walked down a major thoroughfare almost to the highway exit before turning around. Wherever you go, there you are, I repeated, over and over until I was on the bus home. I had never read the book by that title, but it still felt suffocatingly true. I kept checking to see if I was ready to kill myself yet. But when the pastors finally asked me to stop coming to Caritas until I had a therapist and ideally medication on board, it felt like the ultimate abandonment.
I did indeed start seeing a therapist—one who chronically misunderstood me but charged me nearly nothing and got me into a good dialectical behavioral therapy group. She sent me to a psychiatric nurse practitioner who described herself as a radical lesbian feminist socialist and said that I was bipolar because being trans in a hostile society is inherently traumatic. She put me on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant that made me so nauseated I could eat only peanut butter and crackers for the two or three months I was on it and made me even sicker when I had to go off. But eventually I got a job, and with it insurance that allowed me to get better psychiatric help. I stayed in group therapy for eighteen months, cycled through half a dozen more therapists, kept the mood stabilizer, and started a new antidepressant and an antipsychotic. I cautiously began going back to Caritas. In short, I got better.
*
It’s so tempting to write out a linear narrative of recovery and call it the truth. I was sick, I got help, and I’m all better now, thanks to the support of caring professionals and medication. Ta-da! Sure, the process was painful, but it worked out in the end. All of this illness, and thus all of the responsibility for getting better, was mine to handle as an individual. Other people could step in to help, but I needed to exercise my agency to solve what was fundamentally my problem. It was evident that I had done so when I became a fully functioning—which is to say, productive—and independent adult. I could be employed and take pride in my labor, even if I was being exploited for poverty wages. I could participate in my church community and not require a pastor’s attention. In short, I needed less from other people, and that lack of overt dependence meant that I was better. “Better” in this context is multivalent; the more self-sufficient I am, the less sick and also the more valuable I must be as a human being. But this betterness is an insidious lie that Jesus himself refutes. In Matthew 25, Jesus puts himself in the position of the one cared for, not the caretaker. He says that when “one of [his] least brothers” is hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, or imprisoned, so is he (Matthew 25:40). And that hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, imprisoned Jesus is God. If we actually believed it, this revelation would upend our understandings of power, both human and divine.
The story the sisters told and the one I remembered were different stories. There is often a chasm between the way care is intended and how it’s received. Paul and the sisters were certain about so many things: about God, about justice, about mercy, about health. Over time, I began to notice a conflation of the qualities that were so key to their worldview. To be well was to be right and certain and in control. It was to agree with, if not become like, them. Paul was St. Dominic, the holy protagonist, and the sisters with their Rosaries were Mary. And me? I had to play the heretic. They were there to help, and they did for a while. But we were also locked in a power struggle for defining reality. Part of my clambering toward wellness has been a recognition that I will rarely be certain of my reality, much less in control of it.
These days, I wrap the rosary I once feared around my wrist when I need courage. The Virgin Mary does not hit me on the head to cure me; no demons shoot out of my throat. I pray for peace because I want it for myself and for the community of Christs I left behind at Caritas. I let myself grow still inside. I let myself be held.
Isaiah Lewis has published essays in The Christian Century, The Plentitudes, Geez, and Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature. He lives outside of Atlanta.