During God Bless You we discovered the origin of this polite idiom. In this episode we have two bonus clips for you to enjoy!
In this first clip, we talk to a fire fighter and paramedic about his superstitions about death and his encounter with a "possessed" patient.
Our second clip comes from a Reverend who talks to us about exorcisms and feeling evil spirits.
Both of our experts provided interesting information for the research of our God Bless You episode and some spine tingling stories that will leave you wanting to listen to this episode with the lights on.
Interact with us at myunoriginalthoughtpodcast@gmail.com.
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Looking for My Unoriginal Thought post its, notebooks, coffee mugs? Look no farther!
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During God Bless You we discovered the origin of this polite idiom. In this episode we have two bonus clips for you to enjoy!
In this first clip, we talk to a fire fighter and paramedic about his superstitions about death and his encounter with a "possessed" patient.
Our second clip comes from a Reverend who talks to us about exorcisms and feeling evil spirits.
Both of our experts provided interesting information for the research of our God Bless You episode and some spine tingling stories that will leave you wanting to listen to this episode with the lights on.
Interact with us at myunoriginalthoughtpodcast@gmail.com.
SWAG!
Looking for My Unoriginal Thought post its, notebooks, coffee mugs? Look no farther!
Click here for awesome swag!
感じ village. Oh yeah, bonus. Hello podcast family. This is your unoriginal host, afton Jay. Thanks for tuning in to our bonus clips. During this extra time together, I'll share interesting interviews and information that didn't make it into the final episodes. During the creation of each episode, there is always so much extra material and I want to share it because it's really interesting, but unfortunately sometimes we just don't have time or there wasn't a place for it in the final cut. These bonus episodes are created to help you learn and laugh a little more. I hope you enjoy. These clips are all from the God Bless you episode.
Speaker 1:We talked about medieval origins of the idiom, evil spirits, superstitions and exorcisms. This first clip comes from a conversation I had with a paramedic and fireman. He has over 15 years of experience with saving lives and experiencing death. His outlook on evil spirits and the dying is profoundly interesting. Most of us will never experience anything like what he does on a daily basis. I'm thankful for people like him and for the perspective he's able to give us. Next, we'll talk to an Episcopalian reverend that has been ordained for over 23 years. He's able to give us some information about the ritual of exorcisms, and we talked to him about the existence of evil spirits. These interviews helped with our research of the episode but are not featured in the main episode. You can only find them here in our bonus clips, the God Bless you episode. Do you have any superstitions that have to do with evil spirits, ghosts or death?
Speaker 2:I don't know about superstitions. I have a metaphysical theory that all we are. So when I pronounce a person dead, the only difference between them now and them 10 minutes ago, before they were dead, is electricity. It's just energy. I'm not talking about mystical energy or theoretical, actual electrical activity. That's really. The only difference between a live person and a dead person is real, measurable electronic activity energy. I think sometimes it is possible that that energy sticks around or gets caught in the environment, in the matter around it. I've never had any like a few experiences of work, but yeah, I don't think it's as simple as like ghosts, like that person's, you know, consciousness gets trapped. But I do think it's entirely possible that, like that person's energy good or bad gets caught in a place to where that place feels funny for others who are still lies well, feels good interesting.
Speaker 1:Have you a? So you said that you have stories from work like what, what kind of stories do you have about that? I think that's super interesting. I totally forgot that you like literally you're there at the moment of the things and stuff yeah, I mean a lot of it.
Speaker 2:I worked in a psychiatric facility, basically his muscle, so when people would lose their mind and needed to be restrained or put back in the rooms and stuff, and so if we're gonna talk about like so, like demonic or like spiritual or like weird shit if I can just call it that like saw a lot of weird shit right where people would be acting like you would see and like you know take any good exorcism movie, I think a lot of that like people run drugs, a lot of its mental illness, every once in a while you'd have something where someone would really be putting on a good show like a Hollywood quality exorcism act, where you're like I don't know, this one might be legit, there might be something else here, but it's hard to tell. Right, like it's hard to tell. I mean you get someone who is on on meth or any number of, like you know, psychedelic drugs and is hallucinating like who knows what the body says and does. But you know, I remember, I remember one where we got called in the middle of the night to this apartment and you know I walk up and there's a couple big cops outside the front door and they look nervous, like they look like they didn't like whatever they saw in this apartment. And so I walk up. I'm like, hey, what's going on? And I remember this one cop just looks at you guys, you just got to go see it, dude, okay. So I walk up the stairs in the apartment and there's two more cops in living room and they have two you know probably 18 year old kids sitting on the couch and they're interviewing them and they both look the kids, both look like shook up. And so I asked one of the cops and I'm like, hey, man, where, where are we going? He goes back bedroom.
Speaker 2:So I walk into the back bedroom and there's this girl laying on the floor. This apartment bedroom that's got all this like weird gothic, you know, decorations and slipknot posters and pentagram shit in the apartment which isn't you know, abnormal. But she's laying on the ground and she's like soaking wet, like she had just like gotten out of the bathtub. So my first thought of the paramedic is like, okay, did she fall in the shower? Is there any mechanism injury here I need to be worried about? And if she's soaking wet, was she in the shower and did she fall? And so I had my partner go. Look, he's like showers dry dude, like there's nothing in here to explain all like why.
Speaker 2:She's like soaking wet and so she's laying on the ground, she's on her back and she's like Slythering is the only way I can put it. Like she's on her back, she's like moving in this weird like S formation on the ground and she's got her. She's counting on her fingers. She's got her eyes shut and she's counting on her fingers One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And she's like with both hands, like finger to thumb One, two, three, four, five, six.
Speaker 2:And now I'm like what the fuck is going on here? And it's like dark in the room. The only light in the room is like a little lamp on a table right. There's like curtains over the window and it's like two in the morning, like it's nighttime. So it's a little weird, right, but really not out of the realm of like shit.
Speaker 2:We see people get high and do weird stuff, but so I kind of like bend down next to her, like not close enough for her to like reach up and scratch me across the face, like sometimes I do. I can't have you kneel down next to me like hey, my name is Tony, what's your name? You know, to kind of see if she's responsive. And she just doesn't do anything, doesn't say anything, and I'm like, hey, you need to talk to me. You know, your friend's called 911 for me to know what happened, and nothing, she just keeps doing her weird shit. And so I was like eventually, I was like, all right, well, we got to, can't stay here all night. We got to get her up on the gurney and take her over to the hospital and see what happened.
Speaker 2:Well, so it's me and my partner in two cops in the bedroom and I go to okay, I'm going to grab your hand, I'm going to help you up and plan just to kind of sit her up and stand her up, and you have to walk her out and can't get the gurney up the stairs into the apartment.
Speaker 2:And I grab her hand and, mind you, she's laying flat on her back. I grab her hand and she stops counting, squeezes my hand and from the like if you were to pick up a shoestring laying on the ground from the center, she started to raise up, from like the waist up to her feet and her head were still on the ground, but she started to like raise up like she was levitating from the center. So now I'm like, ah, the cops are like I don't know. I'm like step out of the room and my partner's just standing there and she like does this gravity defying, like standing up, move where you know? She just floats up from the center, feet are on the ground the whole time but she just like floats up and she's still got my hand and she like stands up. And then now we're standing kind of eye to eye and she's opens her eyes and looks at me and I was like don't move.
Speaker 2:Like because I don't know. Like in my head she's still just on drugs, right, but I'm like, don't move. I kind of turn around, at least where she's facing away from me. I'm like we're going to walk downstairs and just creepy looking long, stringy black hair mascara running down her face like soaking wet that we still can't figure out how she got soaking wet from head to toe and I walk her downstairs and hand her off to the other two medics at the bottom of the stairs. I was like, just restrain her, Like she's just restrain her.
Speaker 2:I walk back up into the apartment and to talk to her friends that were in there and I walk in. I'm like what the hell happened? Like I still not even sure why you guys called 911. What was the reason for the original fall and this kid? They didn't look like they had been drinking or doing drugs. And I asked them. They said they hadn't. I was like why did you guys call? And he just looks at me. He goes. Dude, I don't know how to explain it, other than she just climbed up the wall. I was like she did what? Now he goes.
Speaker 2:She started acting really strange earlier. She's into a lot of weird stuff. We went in her bedroom because we heard these weird noises and she like growled at us and climbed up the wall and was on the wall up by the ceiling and we freaked out and called cops. I was like, okay, I'm the fuck out of here, Like I wasn't part of it. He's like, oh, look at the wall, dude, See if there's any like marks on the wall. But I was like no, no, no, I'm out of here. So, like, here's the thing, Like. And then I've had a lot of weird calls over the years where like people have claimed stuff like that, or people have like talked in the third person like they are a demon at me, and a lot of it, I think, is just drugs. But every once in a while I've wondered like I don't know, dude, that was really good, that was like an Oscar worthy demon performance and is there something in there? I don't know, I don't know. I'll say hail.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, it's yeah, I'm like you can't leave, though you can't be like, okay, I'm going to leave now Like the call 911 you got to handle.
Speaker 2:Wherever that shit is, I'm like I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, you can't leave, though you can't be like okay, I'm going to leave now, like the call 911, you got to handle wherever that shit is and then you can leave.
Speaker 1:I feel like if someone's crawling on the wall.
Speaker 2:That's like a good excuse to be like I'm sick, I'm going home, I quit, yeah. So so I don't know, like, uh, superstitions about death. I don't know. I've watched so many people die that, uh, I don't know, I don't know. I tend to think that, hey, we're at some point. There's a spark of life that innervates you and it sticks with you your whole life. And you know, I could do an EKG on you right now and show you the electrical activity moving through your heart. It's not something that's hard to explain or see, like right now I could just put some stickers on the outside of your body and hook it up to a little computer and it would show the electrical tracing that is moving through your heart. And we can do the same thing with the brain. It's not, it's right there, it's literally right there.
Speaker 1:And then A tangible thing.
Speaker 2:It's very tangible. It's very I mean shoot a lot of times if that electricity isn't moving appropriately through the heart of the body, I can put pads on someone and defibrillate them or use electricity to correct that electrical activity in the heart. So it's very basic and we've known about it forever. It's not a new thing. We've known about electrical activity in the body forever.
Speaker 2:It's just so strange that it's just gone and that's what dying is from a clinical perspective, is the one I have to do a few things to pronounce someone dead. But the one, definitive, is sustained, a cystillary or a flat line, and that is, you know. After that goes on long enough, you are clinically dead, if it happens at all. You're dead. Your heart isn't beating, but that electricity leaves and you're dead. So as far as superstitions, I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's so weird because I think death is such a mysterious thing that most people we create a lot of superstition about it, kind of like Bigfoot. If you saw Bigfoot once a week it'd be like it's just a big hairy dude, you know, but he's not. So there's all this mystique around it. I sort of have a very pragmatic look at death. Where I'm like it's when I've seen it so much. There's not a lot of mystery around it, it doesn't scare me. I've sat you know I sit and babysit people until the corner shows up all the time where I've spent hundreds of hours like standing in rooms with dead bodies waiting for the corner to come get them to where I don't know. I think the superstition is kind of gone for me. I think a lot most of the superstitions about death have to do it. How rarely people actually see it, especially nowadays.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all I've got for you, cool.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 1:Thanks, I really appreciate everything.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate the perspective. I didn't even think about the perspective of like well, this is my job and I do this all day, so like I don't have a superstition, because I literally have no mystery to it. Like that's very interesting perspective on it. Yeah, if having to deal with life and death every day is not hard enough, you then have people crawling up the walls on top of it. To all of our men and women, first responders, thank you so much for being there in our times of need. You truly are our heroes. Another difficult job deals with our spiritual life and death.
Speaker 1:In this next clip, the Reverend and I talk about what it's like for him to be a spiritual leader and what it's like to feel evil spirits. With the God bless you episode, I think we talked about it like hey, why do you think I bless you? It actually could be true in the Pope and then. But there are like different religions and cultures that think that hey, like if you sneeze, then you know, you know there might be an evil spirit or, like you know the dark, like you know your soul could come out of your body, and so that episode gets into exorcisms, which I thought was really interesting because not a lot of people know or understand about it, like they've seen it in movies, but but it's actually like a growing thing within the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1:The article that I was reading said he said and this comes from like a Roman Catholic, bc's of Columbus, he's a priest in Indiana and he says that in 2005, there were 12 Catholic priests in the United States that did it. Today there's over 150. And that's just because more and more people who believe that they're dealing with demonic are asking for this particular practice, which I thought was super interesting. And obviously there's two sides that corn. You've got the minor and the major exorcism and they're not all like head spinning and pea soup spinning out the mouth exorcisms. So I didn't know if you had any historical, cultural or personal information about exorcisms that I can either use to explain it or research it, or if you knew anything about it. I don't know if that's really a thing, maybe in your lane of faith.
Speaker 3:Sure, sure, Well you. Your question prompted me to do a little research and what I learned was, as liturgy as the practice of worship developed over the centuries through the church before the Protestant Reformation, that exorcism was part of the right of baptism and there would be an exorcism that would take place before a baptismal candidate could could be baptized, and it wasn't the head spinning pea soup kind of a thing, it was kind of a recognition of the reality of spirits in the world and it was like a right of cleansing.
Speaker 1:My research says the same thing. Yep, and it's exactly like what most exorcisms the minor is is just there's to break the influence of evil and sin into person's life when preparing for baptism, or if you just need that kind of like boost of like, oh, we're just going to kind of like exercise you You've had a lot going on like you're good, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And and it and gradually it faded out of practice over the years. And then what I hear you're saying is it seems to be making a resurgence in the Catholic Church. It's not so much in in our brand of Protestantism, that's not something that's really going on. I know that in the more Protestant churches, particularly when you get into the Pentecostal churches, there's a lot of practice of exorcism and they believe very much in in evil spirits and and that that they are part of what is wrong with us and wrong with the world.
Speaker 1:How do you like sense that somebody is evil or that there is evil?
Speaker 2:around.
Speaker 1:Like have you actually felt that before?
Speaker 3:Yes, on a few occasions. You know that sense of You're in a location, like you're downtown for something and it's out of the norm for you, so you're a little more attentive than you are normally and you take a wrong turn and all of a sudden your senses go on high alert and you're like wait a minute, this is not a safe place for me to be. That same sense but spiritually rather than physically of wait a minute, something's not right here and we actually hear about it all the time. Particularly women are more attuned to it than men and if that sense of danger, danger, danger which goes back to our brains, and physical input and stimulus and response and all that kind of stuff, and lots of times we ignore it and you need to recognize that feeling in your gut and don't just brush it off.
Speaker 1:You need to be very aware of what's going on. Yeah, as a woman especially, I feel that physically a lot. I do feel that physical energy of this is not a safe place for me to be, or physically around that person. I guess I've just never thought about it like if you are spiritually empathetic, you might feel that spiritually.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's the exact same thing, but on a spiritual rather than a physical level, and it can contain some physical stuff too. I mean, certainly that's something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that guy is creepy.
Speaker 3:And it's not even like we like to think. Oh well, predators look like this. No, no, no, they don't. They feel like this and lots of times we can. If we pay attention to those feelings, we can go there's something just off here. And as a priest who part of my charge as a priest is to care of the people in my congregation I have to pay attention to that. I have to pay attention and say wait a minute, there's something off here and this person may be a predator and I need to be wary of that and find out what's going on. Why is this setting off my alarm bells? And there have been a couple of times in my life when I've had an experience of somebody and just run there's just something wrong. There's just something deeply, deeply wrong here. You know, I've had some experiences happen more than once of meeting people and say, and it's that sense of this isn't just a predator, but this is somebody who doesn't want to be, who's broken and rebels in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. Like you know the difference between the people that make that decision because they're trying and make that decision because it just comes from a different place. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it's hard for the rest of us to understand that, but they do.
Speaker 3:We have adopted humanist materialism as our philosophy, post-enlightenment as our understanding and primary worldview, and I think that when we do that, the natural consequence of that is that, well, evil has a better opportunity to grab a foothold.
Speaker 3:Cs Lewis, who was an English theologian and author, he said that there are two mistakes. They're two equal and opposite mistakes we can fall into when it comes to the devils, and that's lowercase d, it means evil spirits. One is to and I'm messing up the quote, but you can find the quote somewhere and it's essential one is to be fascinated by them and to be drawn into them, and the other is to disbelieve in them entirely. And we as Western people, for the last I don't know how long, probably since the Enlightenment have really aired on that other side of disbelieving. And when we do that, it creates opportunities for evil to grow in the dark, because that's what evil does. So as a priest and a Christian, I absolutely believe that there are evil spirits and that they mean human beings, nothing but pain and hatred and suffering and destruction. And part of what we do as Christians is reject that and work against it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for really enjoying our conversation.
Speaker 3:Thank you Right back at you. It has been a joy for me to visit with you and to get to know you a little bit, and I'm interested to see how your podcast comes together, and I will look forward to for you and I to have some more conversation.
Speaker 1:That's a wrap for today. I'll leave you here with these intellectual snacks to think about, and you can tell me what you think by leaving us a comment on the podcast or sending us an email to myanoriginalthoughtpodcastatgmailcom. I want to hear from you and, as always, like and subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss a new episode. We'll see you next time and, as always, keep being inquisitive.