Remembering
How a small town revival led me to my psychic senses
As a child, I badly wanted to be connected to god. I had an innate desire to explore spirituality but had no tools to do so which created a void inside me. It’s that void which had me attending different churches as a kid in the south. Each one left me feeling spiritually unsatisfied and absolutely terrified of whoever god was. I remember attending a revival at a 7th Day Adventist church in a neighboring town. I was a delicate age of about 13 or 14. It was also the age where I was questioning whether or not Christianity was a religion I really wanted to be a part of.
My memory of the revival isn’t complete but there are pieces that stand out because they evoked strong feelings. Feelings have a way of imbedding in your memory in a way that exact events don’t. I do remember long stretches of being incredibly anxious, hoping the revival would end. I felt like we sat there listening to this skinny, old man yell and gripe about the evils of the world for way too long. I also knew the man was a hypocrite. I didn’t know why I knew that and I didn’t know why he was a hypocrite but I knew he was and that he couldn’t be trusted. Then, they brought out the snakes. This made the energy of the room tremble. Suddenly, people who were ready to leave because it was tedious to listen to a man ramble for hours, were now squirming in their seats with anticipation? Fear? I don’t know for sure but I do remember the feeling of the energy. Where once the air felt chilly and a bit stale, it now felt dense and hot. It felt like we were squeezed into an even tighter space with no air flow. I didn’t like breathing the air. The snakes were paraded around the room while the old hypocrite screeched about the evils of satan and these snakes were representative of that evil. I remember feeling really sorry for these snakes.
Christianity uses magic, the establishment just doesn’t call it that. They are masters of manipulating a crowd into believing in an enemy that may or may not exist and then siphoning the energy. In this moment where they parade snakes around a crowded room of tired, hungry, stressed humans, it’s like a reverse snake charm. Some perfectly timed stressors have successfully charged the room with thick, fear-soaked energy. How is this energy being used? I wondered why they were so focused on making us afraid. As an adult, I know that scared people are more easily manipulated and controlled, you just have to give them a direction to move. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s not. What I do know is that the experience demonstrated a few different spiritual truths within me that I didn’t consciously know at the time.
The first was a psychic sense, claircognizance. I’m not the psychic you go to for exact details but I am the one you go to if you want to know about someone’s character. At that revival, I picked up on that old man’s character. It may have been general but it was enough to keep me from being fooled by him. That information came in via a “knowing”. If you just know that something is going on with your best friend a thousand miles away, then you may be claircognizant. It’s knowing information without it being given through other means. If you want to know more about the different types of psychic senses, I recommend a book called The Seven Psychic Paths by Aly Cardinalli.
The second was the ability to sense the energy changing in a room. Although the snakes were not the direct cause of the shift, their entrance induced a palpable change. I believe that to be because of the fear people have attached to the snakes. First as that animal instinct because we’re afraid it could be venomous and then as a spiritual scapegoat for all the evil that “satan” creates. I could feel the difference between those two energies and the latter is much more insidious. Because if they can get you to believe snakes are the devil’s helper, then it isn’t a stretch to get you to believe people that don’t have the same religion, language, or skin color are a source of malevolence in the world.
The third was that all things have spirit. This would lead me to druidry later in my life. I felt deep empathy for those snakes. It felt icky to apply so much hatred to an innocent animal. Physically, they were not being harmed but psychically they were. Emotionally they were. How scary for them to be carried into a room of terrified, dangerous predators and then it gets worse because they are now applying a whole cosmos of pain and suffering onto them.
After that revival, I knew what I didn’t want in a spiritual practice. I didn’t want it dictated by fear. I knew there was something in me (and I now know it’s what helped me read that room that night) that no church would recognize with honesty, curiosity, or love. I was not going to find a loving god in a place that was trying their best to instill as much fear as possible within me.
I don’t know a lot but I do know, if you go looking for something to be afraid of, you’ll find it. So which do you prefer? A religion which profits off your fear and misery? Or a spiritual practice aligned with making you the best version of yourself possible?