Hail Satan

"I want you to close your eyes right now. Think about your life. Think about all the bad things you've ever done. If you died right now, right this instant, would you spend eternity in the warmth of God's love or Satan's flames? Would you go to Heaven or Hell?" So spoke the skinny lady with the wild eyes in the basement of the church.

In that moment, I felt incredibly angry. I looked around the room and saw a group of my friends, nine, ten and eleven-year-olds, closing their eyes as hard as they could, some of them shaking their heads and crying. I thought of the flyer that had been handed out at school that said, "The Best Spring Break of Your Life," 9am-12pm, Monday-Friday. My mom thought it would be a good way to keep me occupied for the week, and I knew a lot of my friends would be there. The rest of the flyer had mentioned that there would be fun and games in a wholesome setting. I later learned that wholesome meant being berated by the two women running the program when I answered that finding hidden eggs was the meaning of Easter. It was the perfect time for them to mention (in great detail) that actually Easter was when we celebrated the unbelievable torture that our savior, Jesus Christ, had endured to save our sorry asses.

And so, by the end of the week, when confronted with the idea of my ten years on the Earth being cut short and possibly burning in eternal damnation, I became very pissed off. The last thing we were supposed to do was accept Jesus Christ into our hearts so that we would be saved. When it came my turn I said, "Yes". and then immediately whispered, "No."

The church was on the route I walked every day to and from school. One evening, a few weeks after 'the best spring break of my life,' I found myself stopping on the sidewalk in front of the church. Now I stood alone, a ten-year-old boy with every nerve ending in my body pulsing, my breath catching in my throat. Even still, I knew I was going to say it aloud. And so I did.

"I love the Devil."

I felt immediately dizzy, like looking out over a cliff into infinite space. I had said it so quietly that I had felt the words move my lips more than actually hearing the words out loud. Maybe God had not heard me. So I said it again. Louder this time.

"I love the Devil."

My heart pounded. And yet. No lightening bolt descended from the sky. No fiery pit opened up in front of me. No thunder clap - just the routine quietness of a spring afternoon in southeastern Kansas. I quit while I was ahead but made note of the lack of any visible consequence. A tiny pinhole was poked into the world as I knew it.

On the second day I repeated my sins. Louder than the day before. Still nothing. By the end of the week I was strolling by the church, tossing out the words casually, occasionally mixing it up with a choice sentence or two. "Screw you, Jesus." "God sucks." "I hate Christians."

Honestly, I wanted to stop but could not. It became something I had to do. Each day a new line a little farther out into the ether of the universe would present itself and I would erase it. Then I started saying it at night before bed, like a prayer. "Dear God, I love the Devil," I would whisper before lying awake wide-eyed and worried throughout the night. I felt terrible most of the time, wanting desperately to stop my obsessive behavior, but unable to. Even worse, I couldn't ask for help. What was I going to say? "Mom, for some reason I can't stop walking around telling inanimate objects that I am in love with Satan." That didn't seem as if it would go over all that well.

After maybe a month of whispering those words - into the ears of dogs, pressed up against the couch pillows with my family watching television, into the sky - it began to lose its elicit thrill. I had not actually felt any affection for the devil, it was just the most fucked up thing I could think of to do. The real result of my month-long pursuit of deviance was that I no longer feared God in the way I previously had.

Over the course of the next few years I witnessed instances of tragedy and suffering. I saw people die who were much too young. I watched families suffer the consequences. A minister I had actually liked was eventually accused and convicted of child molestation. He admitted his guilt. Some people look at these things as tests of faith from God, look to God for answers and find them by strengthening their faith.  Not me.

I keep going back to that moment in the darkly lit basement. I look around at a room full of children too young to understand lessons that they were tricked into learning. I think of those two women taking advantage of our innocence, desperate in their attempts to force their belief system upon us. I remember the softly whispered chants, the guilt, the crying. There was something sinister about the whole thing… something almost satanic.