Bush Christianity & Lifted Curses

God Did It For Tammy Comer Four Years Ago. He Did It For Me Three Weeks Ago

Tammy Comer

Good morning from Heathrow Airport. I’m on my way to the US to launch Living In Wonder in Birmingham (if you see a video of my saying “Roll Tide!”, understand that it is a hostage’s signal for help). If you ain’t pre-ordered the thing by now, (UK readers go here), I think you are flat unpersuadable. But I love you anyway! I love errbody this morning. This has been a long time coming, this book launch. Since signing the initial contract, I’ve lost a marriage, a home, and a publisher, but I’ve also gained a fantastic new publisher (Zondervan), and a new home (Budapest) where my son Matt and I can recover from the pain of the abrupt and unwelcome dissolution of our family. That’s not nothing.

Plus, my research on wonder came at just the right time, as the worst catastrophe of my life pushed me hard to seek God’s presence, in ways I never had to before. I like to think this book will share treasures with you I’ve brought back from this perilous journey. What is broken has not been fixed, though my battered heart is slowly recovering, but the palpable sense of God’s presence has made bearing it so, so much easier. I have real hope for better days, and that’s really all I can ask for right now.

I forgot to include in yesterday’s commentary about curses this anecdote from Living In Wonder:

Backstage at a 2020 conference in Nashville, I met a well-known Protestant pastor, John Mark Comer, who leads a church in Portland, Oregon. “You’re the Benedict Option guy!” he said. “When your book first came out a few years ago, a lot of us thought you were alarmist. Now we’re living it.” He explained that his church used to be thought of as harmless by others in the famously progressive city. Now, with antifa activism having turned the town violent, many think of the Christians as a threat to all that is good and decent.

We talked about the spiritual-warfare aspects of the darkening situation in the United States. He told me that he and his wife, Tammy, had learned personally about the power of demonic evil and the greater power of Christ to defeat it. She had only a few weeks earlier been miraculously cured through prayer of a terrible disease over which doctors had no power.

“She had been living with a progressive disease that caused weakness and spasms all over her body,” he told me. “It had gotten so bad that her face was constantly jerking. It was to the point where she wouldn’t be able to go out in public without her face being covered. The doctors couldn’t figure out what it was, though one specialist thought it might be a rare neurological disorder that was incurable.”

Then Tammy’s brother told her he had discovered a frightening family secret. Their great-grandmother had lived with a Cuban diplomat as his common-law wife. They had a large family, but the diplomat had hidden the fact that he had a wife back in Cuba. He had sent his wife to an insane asylum and left her there.

“It turned out that the Cuban wife somehow put a curse on my wife’s great-grandmother,” Comer said. “The terms of the curse were that every first-born girl from her bloodline would either die young or have a terrible disease. When we started looking at the family tree, we were shocked to see that this had happened! Sure enough, Tammy was the first-born girl in her family.”

The Comers found a Christian healer who had experience dealing with family curses. When the man came to pray over her, Tammy’s face spasmed uncontrollably. But then the healer began to break the curse in Jesus’ name.

“I was right next to her, watching it all,” Comer told me. “Her face became calm. She was healed, right in front of me. After years of this, it was over. She told me it felt as though something had been removed from her. She has been fine ever since.”

The healing has been permanent. In 2021, just over a year after her restoration, Tammy Comer told her story to a Christian women’s website. She said there, “The mantra of my life is: ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I never expected to be healed. It never crossed my mind that my sickness could have a demonic element to it, or that when we broke the curse my health would be restored.”

If you have 15 minutes, I urge you to listen to Tammy tell the story herself on Father Carlos Martins’ podcast The Exorcist Files.

Note well that Tammy was a believing Christian, and yet still subject to this curse. In my book, “Emma” was also a believing Christian, and suffered the same thing — indeed, was possessed through a curse. Why does God permit this? I don’t know. Why did it require the ministry of a pastor to effect deliverance? Why wasn’t the prayer of the afflicted sufficient? I don’t know that either. It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery that doesn’t fit the way we think the world is supposed to work. But that’s how the world works.

It recently happened to me too. As you all know, I’m pretty much an open book, but there are some things that are too personal to discuss here, even about my spiritual life. But I have to tell you this, though you will forgive me for not being completely open. There’s nothing bad here, just … really personal. I’m only telling you in hope that it will encourage you to think in new ways about things troubling you.

When I was in Chicago at the Touchstone conference, I asked an Orthodox priest — whose name I am withholding only to protect that overworked man from being swamped by requests — to come to my hotel room to hear my confession. This was not like any confession I had made before. In it, I told the priest how exhausted I was dealing with the dead weight of depression, which preceded my divorce, and which has lingered. It’s easy to be active online, but most of this year, unless I have had to travel for business, I’ve stayed on the couch, uninterested in going out and doing anything. This is not me … but it has been me, for a while.

I told him that in prayer and discernment, I had come to the intuition that there might well be an element of spiritual oppression here. Some of it is divorce-related, but most of it is also tied into childhood trauma — you know, the massive struggle with my family, especially my father, that I’ve detailed in these pages, and in a couple of my past books. I told Father that I had begun to think seriously that in addition to the mental and emotional brokenness, there might also have been spiritual oppression that came upon me. I wasn’t just guessing; I had specific things that could be evidence of this. Researching Living In Wonder helped me think more deeply and precisely about this stuff, and how it works.

I asked him if, in addition to praying the prayers of absolution over me, he could pray for me to be delivered of any dark spirits that might be harassing me. He did, praying for about 20 minutes, specific prayers. I felt nothing while this was going on.

But the next morning, I woke up feeling very different. I felt so much lighter and more hopeful. It was as if dark curtains had not only been opened, but torn down. Self-destructive thoughts that had been tormenting me since my teenage years, when I first started fighting with my dad, disappeared. I mean that: disappeared. I don’t have to fight them anymore — at least I haven’t in the three weeks since this happened. Not once.

The Holy Spirit seems so close now. At first I thought it might be a brief sense of euphoria, of the sort that I get sometimes after a meaningful confession. But it has persisted. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. For years and years and years, I have begged God for deliverance from all this. He helped me a lot with it back in 2013, as I wrote about in How Dante Can Save Your Life. But a lot of it still remained, and my prayers seemed powerless to make it go away. From How Dante:

I had done all I could to bridge the chasm, and it still had not been enough. It was time to move on in my heart, for my own good and the good of Julie and the kids.

And yet there I was, behaving like Dante, standing at Farinata’s tomb arguing over things that once were but are no more. I too was caught up in the world that used to be: a world in which I tried to appease the household gods of family and place, thinking that if only I worked at it a little harder, they would accept me. Farinata could not move; Dante still had the freedom to walk on. I needed to get on down the road, so to speak.

What I could do, and what I did, was to recognize the extent to which in my heart of hearts I had always accepted this judgment and oriented my own interior life around it. The division existed tangibly in the world, and because of that, it existed in my soul as well. It came between God and me. I had always believed that God loved me but that he couldn’t possibly approve of me, no matter what I did. My spiritual life, I came to see, had been for many years oriented around appeasing a father God who was unappeasable.

It had been built around the idea that if only I did the right thing to prove my love and loyalty, he would find me worthy of his love.

Once Dante unmasked this within me, I saw that I too had made false idols of family and place. It’s not that loving family and loving place are bad, but that they are only good relative to the ultimate good, which is unity with God. We were all professed Christians, but it sometimes seemed that the family’s real religion was ancestor worship.

In his beautiful little book The Return of the Prodigal Son, the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen writes of the exiled wastrel in the Gospel parable:

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses. He was shocked into the awareness of his utter alienation and suddenly understood that he had embarked on the road to death. . . . In fact, it was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity. He hit the bedrock of his sonship.

This is what happened to me. I had circled back on the road to home and found that I could not cross the threshold of my father’s house. The legacy of my dutiful sibling was a barrier whose gates would never really open. In a line that pierced my heart, Nouwen wrote, “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”

Despite parallels between my story and the Gospel parable, I had not thought of myself as a prodigal son, because unlike the wretched man of the parable, I had not squandered my inheritance in wild living in the world. But now I saw that I was, in fact, a prodigal, in the sense that I had looked for unconditional love in the wrong place. My father, for all his strength and virtue, and for all the love that he had for me, could not offer me that love without conditions. Nor could my sister.

It hit me that I had made myself a prodigal son by searching for unconditional love and security in a place where it could not exist. Only God the Father could offer what I wanted and needed. Suddenly it was clear: I had made family and place, and above all Daddy, into my gods.

I was not only a prodigal but also, in a sense, a heretic, an idol worshiper. My decades-long dream of coming back to take my rightful place among my family in our ancestral home had been revealed as an illusion by my homecoming. That fantasy was as much a Medusa to me now as Farinata’s Florence was to him.

Reading Dante had unearthed the torment that had dogged me throughout my religious life. I had never believed that God loved me. Oh, I knew on an abstract level that he loved me, because he is God, and God is supposed to love his creatures. It’s his duty. But I knew that I disappointed him. I was not the son he really wanted.

When I was a Protestant, I didn’t believe that God loved me. When I was a Catholic, I didn’t believe it. And now that I was Orthodox, I still didn’t believe it. Not really. To affirm it in your mind, as I did, is not the same thing as taking it into your heart.

At last I knew why this had been impossible for me. As my father was on earth, so was my Father in heaven. He was so good, strong, and wise that his judgment on my worth (as I perceived it) must be true. If only I could make myself perfect, maybe he would accept me.

There it was. The lie, unveiled. I had enthroned family and place—and their personification, my father—in my heart in the place of God. This was the greatest sin that led me to the dark wood in the middle of the journey of my life. It was my sin, not the sins of others. I had to own it and repent of it. This sinful disposition, the refusal to believe that God the Father loved and affirmed me, formed an impassable barrier around my heart, one I had spent a lifetime reinforcing. Tearing down that wall would require nothing less than divine intervention.

But at least now I knew what I was dealing with.

Later, I took it all to confession, and told my priest that I had made an idol, and that I wanted to repent. I told him that I had never been able to believe that God really loved me, because in my subconscious, I had confused God the Father with my earthly father. I wanted to repent of it. He absolved me. A couple of nights later, I was lying in bed praying my prayer rope…

And then something strange happened. The words God loves me appeared not in my head but in my heart. It was the strangest thing—like someone was standing at my bedside, placing them into my chest. Not God loves you, but God loves me.

Just like that: God loves me. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. There it sat in my heart, like a pearl, glowing. It scared me at first, this mystical experience, because I feared it might go away. I finished my prayers, smiling in the darkness, because the words remained there, radiating. I fell asleep with the words repeating in my mind: God loves me. God loves me.

When I awakened the next morning, the first thing I noticed was a feeling in my chest. It was as if someone had laid a cornerstone in my heart, and chiseled into the stone were those three blessed words. All morning, I could physically feel them in my chest, humming along like a happy little pacemaker. I refused my usual impulse to analyze what happened; I chose to accept it as a gift.

A great burden lifted that night. But as I mentioned above, the deliverance was partial. It might have been complete had I not come out of that crisis to face, after publication of How Dante, that in fact my wife and I had not been going through a mere rough patch in our marriage, but that it really was over — a casualty of the hideous drama of my family’s rejection, and the collapse of my physical health. The weight of all this dragged me back into the muck.

And then came the prayers of deliverance in a Chicago hotel room.

Today in the pre-dawn taxi to the Budapest airport, I texted that priest, who hadn’t yet gone to bed back in the US, telling him that I was in a cab and feeling an almost overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude. Specifically, I felt that by writing this book, I had done something that pleased God the Father. My usual reflexive move is to refuse this kind of thing, but somehow now I caught myself, and sat there basking in the love of God the Father. Tears came to my eyes. Once again, I refused my usual impulse to analyze what happened; I chose to accept it as a gift.

I wasn’t going to say anything about this in this space, but sitting here in Heathrow, I thought that I should not keep it to myself if telling the story might encourage some of you readers to seek the kind of intense spiritual medicine that Father administered to me. It struck me that I don’t have a right to be silent about what God did for me through the prayers of a faithful priest who takes spiritual warfare seriously. I am not ashamed. I’m telling you, thoughts of self-hatred that have been a cross for me for most of my life have been utterly absent for the past three weeks — and that has never happened before. Even when I’ve kept them at bay in the past, it has been a struggle. Not now. I can’t remember exactly what the priest said that night in the hotel room, but I do recall him calling out certain spirits, binding them, and sending them to the foot of the Cross, for Christ to deal with.

It worked. I know that I will have a fight ahead to stay faithful to prayer and confession, so that whatever was sent away doesn’t come back. But it worked, and it worked because our God is a powerful God, and a good God. Because He works through his servants, our faithful priests. Because, as I say in the first line of Living In Wonder, “The world is not what you think it is.”

This will be my sixth book release, but the first one I face with total confidence and joy, as opposed to the usual self-doubt, which I have learned to mask, but which has always been there. That is a gift of God the Father. This morning I received a very kind and supportive note from an executive at Zondervan, the one who signed the book after it had been cancelled by the previous publisher. He wrote,

A week out from the publication of Living in Wonder, I wanted to write to say thank you for writing this book and to acknowledge how powerful it is. The book will initiate a paradigm shift in nearly everyone who reads it, equipped as they will be by it to see reality as it is—not as it as they have been conditioned to perceive it.

Yes! That is my great hope for the book. And you know, I wrote it with conviction because I lived so much of it — and am still living it, every day.

I am excited thinking about all the stories I’m going to be hearing from people who read this book, and changed their lives in ways that plunged them deeper into the mystery and joy of God. I hope you, reader, are one of them.

You know, I have a whole line-up of bad news things I had planned to comment on, but on this day of days, I’m going to leave it. I’ll part with you by sharing you a prayer that has become dear to me: St. Patrick’s Breastplate. It is an ancient Irish lorica prayer — lorica meaning “breastplate,” as in armor. It is a Celtic prayer of protection (you can read it in Irish here) that has been dated to the 8th century; we can’t say for sure if St. Patrick (5th century) knew it, though it is attributed to him. It is a wild prayer, a prayer of what Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw call “bush Christianity.”

As the world grows ever more jungle-like, we need bush Christianity:

I arise today 
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

—

One more word about “bush Christianity”. When I went to the west country of Ireland to interview Paul Kingsnorth for this book, he took me to St. Colman’s Cave. St. Colman lived in this cave, in the same period as St. Patrick’s Breastplate was first used. I wrote about it here. I sat inside the shallow cave, where the wild Irish holy man slept for seven years, and prayed an entire cycle of my prayer rope. This is the photo I took from inside the cave. This is the same thing St. Colman saw every morning when he woke up.

May the Holy Spirit teach us to see the world as St. Colman did. I hope my book contributes to that mission. I hope readers experience Living In Wonder as a kind of retreat into St. Colman’s cave, for a time, so that they may emerge in a world of awe.

Last word: Today is the final day you can pre-order a signed copy of Living In Wonder exclusively from Eighth Day Books! Warren is going to climb into the old van tomorrow morning and drive to Birmingham, where I can sign them. Get your order in today! I’ll probably sign some book plates for him to paste into future orders, but the ones I sign in Birmingham are the only ones that will be signed directly onto the page.

Today’s newsletter is free to all. Please forward it to someone who needs to read it.