My Third Religious Experience

Purpose: To help people struggling with Lent.

Date and sin: Unnamed.

The following account is abridged, but its core details are present.

The experience is not mystical and its occurrence and meaning are unquestionable.

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Hours were gone in the relapse and what remained of my sapience was sedated, bedridden with palliative pretensions of rationality, control, the possibility of recompense, and a false hope only meant to keep the bits of good in me entertained. The rest was either numbed or found all five stages of grief except anger simultaneously.

“I couldn’t die without being given a chance to turn things around, that wouldn’t be fair. I have addiction issues, it’s not all my fault. What am I supposed to do, try to go cold turkey and be almost non-functional at times? Have my mind yet more on that? My life will keep going as normal, it has to. Right? Why wouldn’t it? How would that be fair?”

“Okay well I’m doing this, but I’m also praying more, fasting better, etc., I’m still getting better and figuring things out, the ship isn’t totally sunk.”

“All this time pissed away when I could be doing anything else. But I wouldn’t be able to stand it, that’s how sick I am. Why can’t I just sleep through it all?”

“Well there’s only one thing you can do: get better and be regretful of what you did. All you can do is ‘do’ and try to turn things around.”

But I didn’t regret it. I could ‘see’ what it was, but I didn’t regret it. It gave me too much to be regretful. Maintaining the opportunity to not go beyond a certain point just allowed me to drag things out and keep the ephemeral forever-charade going longer.

-

Then I feel a vibrating flutter in a small, roughly circular area ‘at the top-center’ of my ‘brain.’

A thought crosses my mind involuntarily in its force, quantifiably barely enough to be an interruption but absolutely no less, and something I’d never naturally felt anything like before or since.

Subtle, gentle, graceful in a purpose equally unmistakable and impossible to anticipate.

It doesn’t at all feel offensive; inexplicable in reach, forceful, materialistically unnatural, yes, but it didn’t give me any reason to assume, be scrupulous, or to reject it. It speaks as a thought louder than my thoughts and impossibly phrased nothing like my internal monologue.

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“Do you really want to pledge yourself to Satan like this?”

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I wonder as quickly as it ends.

‘Is that my guardian angel?’ — With the complete account, I think that’s likely.

‘Did that just happen?’ — Yes.

‘If I can disprove it through any means both just to be sure and also because I’m living a dream right here…’ — …no; even if the phenomena itself is doubtful, that you should stop doing this is inarguable.

I distract myself a little bit with Substack, YouTube, etc., and in what’s either just prudence or an absurd arrogance, I wonder one more time.

‘Can I have another sign? Just to be sure?’

.

A website I’m using has an error I’ve never seen before. Displayed at the top-center screen in red, the alert is normally-sized, nothing immediately unnatural, but gone before I can even read it. I see how I’d have to refresh the page—an act of deliberate will—to fix it.

Off to bed.

.

Two days later, I write in my journal:

‘When you have the chance to make this all right, TAKE IT.’

As I put it back, a soft ‘pulse’ of sensation went through the back and bottom of my head, a featherlight spreading neural stimulus.

“I would suggest that.”