Just for the record…

Someone asked me today what I thought of the “Charismatic movement” in the Church.

“A charismaniac friend of mine tells me that mass with his ‘community’ tends toward two hours long because of periods of private prayer and contemplation after readings and communion.

What do you think of this?”

I respond:

“I think that yodelling in gibberish has never been identified by any spiritual writer as either ‘prayer’ or ‘contemplation’. And I think that people in the charismatic ‘community’ are mostly severely mentally and/or socially damaged folk who mostly can’t find their heads with both hands and a GPS and can’t be trusted not to fall into demon worship. I think the charismaniac movement in the Church is a result of bishops not giving a shit about their flocks’ desperate need for real spirituality, and deliberately starving the sheep until they’ll eat acorns and tulip bulbs just to survive.

“Everything I’ve seen of the ‘charismatic’ movement seems to involve the slightly less damaged and helpless, and therefore more successfully predatory, using the vast, savage and waterless wasteland of modern pseudospirituality as a hunting ground for weak and sickly prey. A manifestation of the stupid and often-evil leading the blind, lost, desperate and starving into a scummy alleyway and robbing them of everything they need to survive, beating the crap out of them and then tossing a wad of Canadian Tire money onto their barely breathing form.”

I went to a few charismaniac things in Halifax, back in the day, and the day they decided that, because the young immigrant fellow from Poland hadn’t yet been “given the gift of tongues” that he must be possessed, and that they would immediately start an exorcism was the day I got outta there as fast as my wee legs would carry me. When I butted in and said that this was very strictly forbidden to do by laypeple, and extremely dangerous, I was told, “Oh, that’s just a bunch of Church bullshit. We’ve got the Holy Spirit.”

I legged it. If I’d had an ounce of charity in my wretched soul at the time, I would have grabbed the young idiot by the scruff of the neck and dragged him bodily out of there.

But I didn’t. God forgive me.

As for Charismaticism, I’ve never come across anything that more brazenly stank of Stan.

~