Soldier of God

David Jackson came from a secular, bourgeois household. His father, a urologist, and his mother, a lawyer, scoffed at all forms of religiosity or spirituality. But his paternal grandfather, ironically, had been a Baptist minister, known for his fiery sermons and his staunch devotion to the spread of the gospels. Apparently, he had been somewhat of an ogre. He relied heavily on corporeal punishment—“beating the Devil out of the children” is what he called it. When he died young, David’s grandmother remarried and the family lost any connection it had with the church.

            As all young men do when they leave for college, David suffered the burden of very high hopes. First there were the hopes of his parents—that he would choose either the path of law or medicine and thrive academically—and then there were his own hopes, which, oddly enough, were more vague in David’s mind. David had long sensed that he had a passionate heart, though to him it seemed that that passion had not yet had a real outlet. He longed for something to pour this passion into, whether it be a lover, an occupation, or, even, a way of life. And he realized that there were certain values and certain prejudices that his parents had worked so hard to instill in him which he simply could not accept, and that it was his own responsibility to build his own set of values, and reject all prejudices as they presented themselves.

            David, however, had several bad habits that made adapting to college life difficult. For one, when left to his own devices, he had the tendency to stay up and sleep in late. Often, especially in his senior year of high school, he would miss classes because of this habit, though he was able to make up for it by doing well on tests and completing his assignments on time. He also smoked a great deal of marijuana, and occasionally, at parties and such, would snort adderall as a way to enhance his experience. This could not be so much attributed to any real addictive quality to his personality, however, but rather, more to a free-spirited, adventurous nature that, to his parents, in their own liberal bourgeois mindsets, was a virtue.

            In college these bad habits were intensified. Whereas in high school he would only smoke pot a few days a week, in college it increased to a daily habit. And, as far as his sleep went, things became highly problematic. Some nights he did not sleep at all, and when he did sleep, he slept for long stretches—sometimes more than a day—so that he missed his classes and became depressed. In fact, it didn’t take long for David to begin to disregard his classes altogether. He was a Philosophy major. He had tried to read the texts for his courses, but found them lacking in something that he considered essential. What that essential quality was he couldn’t exactly say, but when a friend of his introduced him to the Old Testament, he found in that work the missing element. He spent weeks pouring over this text, even hearing his grandfather’s voice come through in some of the passages, particularly in the Book of Proverbs.

            By the time David came home for Thanksgiving break, his head was filled with vague conceptualizations of God and the spiritual realm. He used strange terms like mamon and sheol, and had arguments with his parents about their lack of faith. The night after Thanksgiving Day, David went out to a party with his brother, Jason. Jason was sixteen, an A student and a promising basketball player, who only recently had become involved in the wider social scene at his school. He looked up to his brother (who had also been a superior athlete in high school), both for his athletic prowess and his jovial nature. Jason himself was shy by nature, and very susceptible to peer pressure.

The party was being held at a senior’s house, an old friend of David’s named Thomas Bowman. Thomas, a bench warmer for the school’s basketball team, was otherwise known as a pothead, a slacker, someone who, while David had once felt an affinity with, he now looked at with an air of distrust. When David and Jason arrived at the party, Thomas, along with an underclassman everyone called Shorty, greeted them enthusiastically. Everyone was so thrilled to see David, and David greeted everyone with a mixture of bashfulness and distrust. In truth, he felt awkward being here with his younger brother, who he had always known to be such a straight-laced person.

Thomas and Shorty invited David and Jason to Thomas’ bedroom. “There’s something you have to see,” Thomas said, glancing down at Shorty, who nodded, his face red with excitement. David and Jason followed Thomas and Shorty through the crowd of people, up the stairs and down the hall to Thomas’ bedroom. The four boys walked in. It was a typical high school boy’s bedroom, replete with a beanbag chair, lava lamp, and dirty clothes strewn over the bed, dresser, and floor. Incense was burning on the nightstand. Thomas walked over to the dresser and opened the second drawer from the top—his underwear drawer. From beneath a pile of socks, he took out a large ziploc bag full of some of the largest buds of marijuana David had ever seen. “This is some of that chronic shit,” said Thomas. “Here,” he said to Jason, “smell that shit.”

Jason took the bag, opened it, and stuck his nose inside. “Mmmmm.” David was surprised by his little brother’s behavior. He would never have guessed he would be the type to smoke pot.

Jason passed the bag to David, who took it, not without some ambivalence, and smelled inside. He nodded, and handed the bag back to Thomas. “Let’s fire that shit up,” said Shorty, grinning and nearly shaking with anticipation.

Thomas pulled a packet of Zig-Zags from his pocket and proceeded to roll a joint. “Let’s make this nice and fat,” he said, crumbling up copious amounts of the red-haired bud into the rolling paper. When he was finished rolling the joint, he lit it up and took a hit, coughing. As the four boys smoked, David began to feel extremely uncomfortable. His mind was racing with lines he remembered from the Proverbs. The laughter of the other boys sounded demonic, and he completely lost track of the conversation. He looked up at Jason after Stephen had made a joke. As he laughed, David noticed there was something strange about him—a look in his eyes that was unfamiliar, even sinister. Then he saw two bright red fiery horns appear on top of his head, and the whites of his eyes became black. “Your brother is mine!” cried Jason, or rather the demon which had been Jason a moment before. David, amazed, walked up to his brother, and peered into his black eyes. He grabbed his throat and began to squeeze. The other boys looked on in amazement. Jason was terrified. “I won’t let you take him!” he cried. He forced his brother to the floor, continuing to strangle him. The other two boys, now recognizing the severity of the situation, began to shout at David, but he did not listen. Finally, they grabbed hold of him and pulled him off of his brother. Pushing the two boys away, David ran out of the room and down the stairs, exiting the house in a fury.

Later that night, the police found David on the street, running furiously, trying to escape (as David later said) the Devil, which he believed to be after him because (as he also said), he was a “soldier of God.” David resisted arrest, and even knocked one of the police officers to the ground before he was tackled and cuffed. At the emergency room, he was injected with an HA cocktail and slept for nearly fifteen hours. He would have slept even longer had not the psychiatrist awoken him that afternoon.

The psychiatrist was a gray haired man in his early sixties, with dark, gentle eyes and a deep, comforting voice. In his calm manner, he informed David that he had had what he believed to be a psychotic episode. As soon as the doctor said this, he remembered everything and a wave of shame flowed over his entire body. He explained to the doctor that he had been smoking marijuana, and pleaded that that had been the sole cause of his problems. But the psychiatrist had been informed by his parents that he had been displaying signs of distorted thinking and having trouble sleeping, and because of this, he believed the problem was more complicated than just the marijuana. He believed that David suffered from bipolar disorder, and he wanted to prescribe him Lithium. As the doctor explained in detail how the drug would affect him, David’s shame turned to outright anger, and fear bordering on panic. Before he could object to the idea, however, the doctor said that the choice, in the end, was his own to make, and that he would give him time to think about it. “But,” he insisted, “I would urge you to keep in mind that this is a degenerative illness, and without medication, it will only get worse.”

All the rest of that day and all that night (he did not sleep), David’s mind went back and forth on the idea of taking a prescribed drug. To accept would be admitting defeat, and what made the possibility of this defeat so bitter was that he had never even suspected the enemy. He had never even known that it existed. Part of him wanted to go on denying its existence, but when he remembered the events that took place the night before, he realized that to go on denying it would mean living in a world completely apart from everyone he had ever loved. He decided that morning that he would take the drug.

Though the drug’s effect was almost immediately beneficial for David, many scruples still ran through his mind. The main one was the idea that his life, now under the influence of a prescribed drug, was somehow no longer his own, and that it was therefore less “real” than before. His anguish over this was almost constant, yet he continued to take the drug and benefit from it.

One afternoon, after he had been in the hospital for close to a week, his brother came to visit him. Because of his shame in regards to the tenuousness of his situation, and the guilt he felt over what had happened a week before, David felt very awkward seeing his brother. But by the warmth and enthusiasm of his embrace, David could tell that his brother had forgiven him and did not scorn him for his situation, but rather had more compassion and understanding for it than he himself did. When Jason asked him how he was doing, because of the complexity of his situation, he hesitated, despite the fact that he and his brother had always had a very open relationship. But, again, when he saw the look of responsive compassion in his eyes, he felt such an affection for his brother that he knew he could keep nothing from him. “I’m in pain,” he said. “I feel such a regret. And more than that, I feel my situation is completely ridiculous. This drug that I’m taking, it’s killing something in me. Maybe that’s a good thing but...it’s hard to accept it, because it’s making me less than what I was. At least it feels that way. Don’t you think,” he continued on, pleading passionately with his brother, “that by taking this drug, I am making myself and my life...less real?”

Jason looked at the ground. It was strange for him, seeing his brother this way, so unsure of himself. “I don’t know that it makes it any less real,” he said. “Maybe, if anything, it makes it more real.”

David looked at his brother inquisitively.

“Because,” Jason continued, “instead of being a devil, I’m just your brother. And, instead of you being a soldier of God, you’re just a man.”

Had not Jason’s statement been so completely bound in the love he had for his brother, David might have again felt ashamed. As it were, its poignancy brought him to tears. His brother again embraced him in the same warm, compassionate embrace. “I love you, brother,” he said as David continued to weep. “No matter what.”

David stayed another week in the hospital, in which time he met several times with a pastor. David explained to the pastor that he had found great meaning in the texts of the Old Testament, but that he was now afraid to go back to it on account of what had happened. This was when the pastor recommended David read the New Testament. “You might find it enlightening,” he said, “after your experience.” And so David began to read the New Testament. And like the pastor had said, he found it enlightening, mostly because the God which Christ spoke of was a compassionate, forgiving God, and those two things were exactly what he needed. He often found himself weeping as he read it, and it was as though through these emotional outpourings, the demons which had entered him as he read the Old Testament were exorcised from his soul. By the time he finished reading, he was again a changed man—full of hope, faith, and love.

When David went back to school the next year, it was to study theology in the hopes of one day becoming a minister, like his grandfather. He continued taking his medicine, and though he continued to feel as if something inside of him was dying as a result of this, he also recognized that each day something new was born inside of him as well, and it was this constant renewal that kept his love—for his brother, for his family, for himself, and for all—strong in his heart.