Once again my friend and fellow worker in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, Canon Geoffrey Mayers, St John’s Parish Church rector who is also rural dean of St John, sent me another email and I have decided to share it with my readers.
A few weeks ago our Minister of Education alluded to demon possession as a possible cause of behaviour by some elements in our society, who seem bent on committing crime.
His comments have brought some discussion about the presence of demons, their influence on human beings and how we could rid ourselves of them.
One of my church members asked me if demons could enter the human body.
What the minister said was not that far from what some of our parents would have said about us when they could not understand our behaviour.
Some would have said “you like you got a demon in you”. We accepted that as a way of speaking, it was not an attempt to express theological opinion.
The truth is that if we accept a spirit, then we must accept variations of expressions of this spirit.
We talk about the Holy Spirit and we accept that this Spirit has influence. My belief is that there is one Spirit.
From the Christian perspective, that Spirit is the gift of Creation.
God breathed into human kind and we became a living spirit.
The spirit helps to shape who we are. That spirit makes communication possible between us.
How often you might have heard or have said yourself “our spirits do not meet” or from the first time we met “our spirits meet”.
We feed this spirit in the Christian context through prayer in its various forms, and through thinking good and holy thoughts, and usually this kind of development leads to good and positive action.
The environment we are born into and in which we grow is very powerful in helping to shape this spirit.
It is possible then for someone to have such experiences which they interpret as bad, to feed this spirit on negative things. Such a person will likely produce fruits that are antisocial.
We all try to find reasons for our behaviour and that of the other person. Various persons will offer various explanations.
The religious will most likely say that our behaviour is a result of sin.
In a world where people see the battle as between God and the devil, we cannot avoid these explanations.
