EXECUTING JUDGMENT

“For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” 1 Corinthians 11:31

How I got to be sitting in the police chief’s office tripping on acid is the exterior heart of this story. But I will begin by approaching its interior heart.

The year was 1985, and the Lord had two years earlier broken me of seeking the love of woman outside wedlock. The story of that, in the mostly destroyed book of poems, A Fire In The Lake, tells of His using a woman (did He use Delilah of old?) to effect great change – and devastation – in me. From the last lines of the last poem:

My adventure and song are finished.
If I sing and adventure again
it will be as one raised from the dead, Heaven-sent.
For she who stripped me utter was God’s instrument.

This “adventure” was the odyssey of an occultist-poet warrior-priest who fell from his Master's presence into the abyss in the human heart, and found himself in the archetypal heartlands of humanity – a waste and howling wilderness – where he began to search for the way back. He could not fathom the cause of his fall – there was no fault in the Master – and he could not see the snare of deception he had been taken in, and the demons wasted no time in seeking to kill his will to live. The “song” was the story of all this, as well the ontologic-erotic unions with the women he met, for such only kept him aloft over the seething abyss and the gnawing hunger of dread Thanatos lurking therein.

A brief word about “the occult”: its root meaning is hidden (from view), concealed, covered over, coming from the Latin occulere; in medicine it is used as in the terms “occult blood in the stool,” or “occult carcinoma.” I use it in a neutral sense, not specifically referring to demonic practitioners (as common usage does) unless so indicated. The term “occultist-poet” may also refer to the spiritual activities of a saint. The prayers (and prayer warfare!) of a saint as well as the spells of a sorcerer are both in the realm of the occult – hidden from human eyes! – or so is my use of the word in these writings.

Back to 1985. A year earlier, in the summer, I sent my daughter to visit her mom in NYC, and I went up into the mountains – a remote area in the wilderness of the southern Catskills – to fast and pray. After two weeks I became discouraged and came out. This whole business of fasting was at the center of the snare, erected on a foundation of spiritual ignorance, but I could not yet see that. He nonetheless heard my cries, the One who watches over His children, and was preparing a terrible deliverance, snatching me before I plunged over the edge. But that is another story, too far ahead!

And so I went about my life in the small town of Woodstock, New York. Like a lion caged, tormented by its wardens, I went. The cage was my sins – keeping me from the air of Heaven my spirit longed to breathe – and the keepers malign spirits. My closest friends knew I belonged to Christ, as did most of the town, for I would write in the local paper – under the nom de plume Steve Levin – about my adventures in drugs and love, and also of my true but lost Love. In Toleration City I was accepted and loved; in those days I spoke for myself, not for Christ, although it was clear for whom my heart longed. I say I was caged – a prisoner – as I didn’t know how to escape: repentance supposedly required a long fast, which my distorted faith would not sustain. And even when I did fast well, I did not have the inner stability of a sound faith. I must have fasted and failed some hundreds of times. It was when, some years earlier, eating had become sin to me, that I – with grief – forsook the Way.

My 5-year-old cub and I came to Woodstock from NYC in 1978. I had just wrapped up publishing and distributing a journal, The Lightning Herald: Un Journal De Poètes Terribles, and wanted a simpler life for us both, she now of age to go to school. So we settled in, the town receiving us warmly. I did free-lance child-care work (having good human services references from NYC), and then was a Teaching Assistant in a special-needs school.

I continued to write my book. I sought out the local seers and leaders among the Christians, seeking to gain insight into my condition, which no man could speak to, and so I remained aloof from the churches, due to the kind of life I lived, and the heart I had. From a letter to the editor of Woodstock Times in 1979, when Dylan’s newest record came out:

To the Editor:

Why I just broke my record of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming: it ain’t that I don’t love ya, Bobby, and it ain’t that I don’t think you’re true, it’s that I don’t want to hear none a’ that stuff till that train done come and stopped. Maybe you’ll tell me, “Now is the day, and this is the hour,” but I heard them words before, I even read ‘em in the Bible, but I also read about “a kingdom that cometh in power, and not in word,” and that ain’t here, not by a long shot.

It ain’t no use for me to listen, it don’t do nuthin’ for me except to break my heart, tear it between love and my own integrity. Got I any integrity to speak so to you? My own peculiar path I walk, and if any man on the earth can minister the spirit of Christ to me according to my needs, and the needs of my world (is it not mine? am I not its poet?), him I will listen to. But don’t you preachers come beatin’ a path to my door if you can’t raise the dead, heal the sick, and establish your kingdom of grace in full power, ‘cause I’m sick of guilt-trippin’ spiels and words that break but don’t quicken. Try to quicken the stones if you will, but don’t come knockin’ on my door, my heart is as hard as a diamond to anything less than the apostolic reality, and I do make short work of preachers who come preachin’ anything less.

I don’t reckon you to be preachin’, Bob, but rather singin’ love songs, that’s why I broke your record—rather that than my heart. An’ I’ll go my own path through this bloody world, and know what love I can, an’ maybe I’ll see ya at the station. Oh yeah, an’ I got my own song to sing, an’ I know it well.

It was intolerable to me that my consciousness should be that of a meat-head, someone with no spiritual or psychic awareness, existing simply in the baser appetites, such as eating. This is why I got high, so my heart would have a life in the realms of consciousness. Better to exist spiritually in the outlaw regions than not at all! Better an outlaw than a meat-head! And so I lived my life, thinking myself hero and anti-hero at the same time. For how it pained me to knowingly enter and function in the realms of sorcery in disobedience to the worthy King I was sworn to serve. And in this darkness how terrible the ontologic depths: once, while still in the City of New York, I saw in my own heart the reality of the living dead and cried out in a poem, “O zombie I!” For such did I see myself to be (and mistakenly believed): without the life of God, the living dead. To knowingly be such a denizen of the realms of horror! But as I wrote in those days, “Better terrible truth than none at all, or the usual hype and jive.”

What if Dostoevsky
were a poet
after acid
in this day

what if Rimbaud
were alive today
in children of integrity
come what may

what if
Dylan
had a brother
who now took his stand

Un Poète terrible

A title I had given myself was just this, un Poète terrible, a new breed of being on the earth (not un Poète maudit as some suggested I change the journal’s name to), for I loathed the term sorcerer yet functioned in that realm. And hated the powers of darkness.

You who think to judge me, what option would you have had me take? To end my life? Or to exist bereft of consciousness? Which latter would have been an intolerable form of death to me. I found no help among the Christians. I sought the Lord with long fasts among wild dog-packs and bear in remote wilderness. No! Better an outlaw than dead meat! My blood was too hot, and heart too engaged with the worlds of letters and spirits and humans to lie down and die. I would live!

One of the poems of that time:

WOODSTOCK BREAKFAST

Never heard of it? Well, it’s
coffee & acid

lean and hearty fare
for those
with feet on the earth,
hearts in the tower
of vision

on this the dark planet.

Breakfast of fools
and champions.

But in ’85 I was thinking more and more of seeking once again to walk with Christ. I may not have talked about it much – my friends in town were not interested in this – but it was on my heart. When I thought of my ongoing life without Him, and of my young daughter without a true knowledge of Him from my heart to hers, I was filled with a quiet dread. One of the things I sometimes did when I felt my mind filled with cobwebs, and my heart shallow and restless, was to take a hit of acid. And so I sought out two different friends to cop from. In case one was beat I’d at least have the other, as I hated expecting to trip, and nothing happening.

One friend was a street person with good connections, and the other a human services professional, likewise with access to quality stuff. They both came through, and so I had two hits on me.

I dropped one in town, I think at my friend Karen’s house – she like a sister to me, and a fellow poet – as that was where I often hung out, and from there I went to the village green, but when awareness became as intense as a storm I realized I wanted to be somewhere more peaceful.

I drove home some three miles to Peter Pan Farm (the real name of the place in those days), and went to a field near the cottage where my daughter and I lived. She was nearby with another family who were friends of ours. I had bought a pint of muscatel to take the edge off, and sat in the field sipping my wine, relaxing in the increasing awareness.

I don’t remember when I first became conscious of it, but I sensed an evil spirit, and it did not go away. This is one of the problems with these kinds of drugs – they give you direct and immediate access to the realm of spirits. Often I have no awareness of them at all – I avoid like the plague even any hint of such, but occasionally it happens. Once in New York I was on acid and interacted with this man whom I sensed was into deep evil, and even after I left him a spirit’s presence I felt when near him dogged me wherever I went, and I walked down the city streets, actually haunted. It is a terrible feeling being in their presence, the foulness, the malignity, the horror that such an entity has a personal interest in and direct access to my being. And one never knows what evil may materialize under their influence. It is unnerving!

Some of you reading this will of course think me mad and given to hallucinations – I expect that from those with an anti-supernatural worldview – but others of you will know I may indeed be speaking the truth. And mind you, the genre of this piece you are reading is not fiction, but visionary adventure, non-fiction. I mean, it happened as I tell it. Yes, my perceptions and understanding may be off in some things, and that is a key part of the larger story, but you must judge for yourselves if I have my wits about me, and see clearly in these things I say, or no.

I could not bear it, being vulnerable to a demon, and not knowing what might occur. It is not just a static entity, emanating like a street lamp, but a being sworn to my destruction – and under orders from beings higher up, and answerable to them in their horrid cruelty, yes, even to their own – and if we were already in each other’s presence….I was not ignorant of the possibility of a direct assault upon me, and what would be the outcome of that – at best – but me undone in a mental institution somewhere.

I could not endure this infernal creature’s presence in my perceptual field, unpredictable and violent. I had to take up a weapon against it, and there is only one place in all of existence where such are forged, and available to those who know their proper use. Regardless of the grief that may follow – the failure – I had no choice but to avail myself of the armory of Heaven, and get ahold of a Spirit-blade – the one issued to me called Lightning Sword – and go after this spirit. You attack one rightly and they flee.

And so, tripping, while I poured the wine out into the field, I went to my Lord, approaching the presence of His majesty with these words, “Lord Jesus, forgive me and cleanse me with Your blood.” He and I had been through this before, and we minced no words. His little brother come to Him in desperation and repentance would be received. We knew each other’s hearts. (What I didn’t know – and needed to know to walk what Isaiah called the highway of holiness – I would not learn till I was as good as dead, at the end of my own strength and wisdom. This would be some years away.)

The glory of my King flooded through my heart, and I was quickened with Power, the life of Heaven. Against such no demon can stand. I turned to the demon and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and in the power of His Spirit who is the life of my spirit, I command you to go from me.” It was that simple. My words were as sharp and penetrating as a razor-edged blade, but such a blade as would cut into spirits. (John Bunyan called such a weapon “a right Jerusalem blade.”) The spirit left, and did not return.

I drew near to my Lord. It had been so long I was away from Him. What a joy to be approved and in His favor once again! And so I remained a while, rejoicing. Then I received intelligence in my understanding – the Lord communicates with his people in various ways – indicating a course of action He desired of me, and the reasons behind it. I suppose I could also put it, this was my conscience, and my intuitive grasp of the implications of my having taken the acid in light of my having made a profession of faith in the town, however faulty my profession and life were. Even so, it is the light of Christ’s Spirit that informs and quickens my conscience; He is the intelligence of my intelligence.

I saw how my friends could easily say, upon my speaking of my renewed communion with Christ, “Steve, that sounds great, but as I see it this ‘communion with Christ’ is just a part of your acid trip. You got any more of this great acid?” And they could rightly say that, for it was in the midst of the trip I sought and found Him, and the distinctions I would try to draw separating Him from the acid experience would be but sophistries in their eyes, just clever words covering what they saw (or seemed to see) was the truth of the matter. For everyone knows – who is experienced with LSD – that there are many so-called “Christ consciousness” experiences folks have while tripping, and this would seem to them but another such delusion, or peculiar subjective experience.

I saw I needed to do something to nullify the grounds for these conclusions. I would execute judgment on the criminality of the act by turning myself in to the police, thereby condemning the having taken LSD, while leaving my union with Christ inviolate and free from the impugnment of it being acid-based, for it was in Christian respect of the law I judged myself a transgressor.

I was afraid of what might happen at the police station, but it was crucial I follow my conscience, and maintain the integrity – the credibility – of my testimony of Christ. So I told my daughter I was going into town for a while (it must have been 5:30 or 6 in the evening), and that I would see her in a while. I said I was leaving the car, and walking. I walked because it was against the law to drive while under the influence of drugs, and Scripture enjoins I should obey the just laws of the land. I walked the few miles into town rejoicing, and also a little nervous at what might happen. I went straight to the station house, which was on Tinker Street – one of the two main streets in the village – and asked the dispatcher at the window if I might speak to the Chief (which is how we called him), who at this time was Richie Ostrander. Chief Ostrander came and opened the door, and let me in, and invited me into his small office. He said, “How can I help you?” He knew me from around town, had given a talk on police work to the children in my special ed class, and I was on nodding terms with him. Part of my disguise as high-flyin’ outlaw poet was to have my hair cut short in a military style, which I had often sported since my days in the Marine Corps, and to officialdom I appeared Mr. Straight, compared to the long-haired hippies in town.

I said, “Chief, I have a confession to make. I took some LSD, and as I’m a Christian I know it’s wrong, and I’m turning myself in.” He asked, “Are you on it right now?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Excuse me a minute,” and walked out of the office. I think he alerted one of his deputies to be at the ready in case I were to go crazy. He came back in and sat at his desk across from the chair I was in. He said, “What can I do for you? Do you want to go to jail?” And I said, “No.” “Are you carrying any of the drug on you now?” I replied, “No.”

I liked the Chief. He was gentle with me. I knew he went to the Methodist Church in town – I had seen him there when I visited that congregation. So I knew that at the least he had an understanding of Christian thought. (I had seen a number of good men – and later, women – on the Woodstock police force, where kindness ruled in their dealings with the people.) I knew he was puzzled as to why I was there in his office. “Chief, I’ve turned myself in because I’ve been talking about Jesus Christ to people in town – and I have tried to live the Christian life – but I got depressed and discouraged, and reverted back to my older ways, and took the LSD. I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. When I came to my senses I asked God to forgive me, and He did. But I know I have lost my credibility as a follower of Christ with some of the people in town, such as those I got the drug from, and others. So I wanted them to know that I didn’t look lightly on this that I have done, but knew it to be a sin in God’s eyes, and a violation of the law of the land, and I have executed judgment on myself by turning myself in to the law.”

He said, “You don’t want to go to jail. Will you tell me who you got the drug from?” I said, “No, Chief, I’m not a rat. And these are just street users, not dealers.” He said, “Well, what would you like me to do to you?” And I replied, “Let me go, and I will not do this again. I have learned a hard lesson. I just needed to execute this judgment on my actions, for the sake of my testimony to Christ in town.”

He asked, “Where do you live?” And I told him. He then asked, “Does anyone else live with you?” I said, “Yes, my 12-year-old daughter. I’m a single parent.” He said, “Is she home now?” And I said, “Yes.” He asked, “How will you get home?” I said, “I’ll walk. That’s how I got into town. I like walking.”

He asked, “Can I trust you to go home and not have any trouble?” He could tell I was calm and emotionally stable with him in the office (the Lord’s Spirit was the peace of my heart). He said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll let you go home, but I want you to call me here in the station later this evening, and let me know how you are. Will you do that?” I said, “I will. And thank you for your understanding.”

I left the police station and stopped over at Karen’s house, looking for my street friend, as I had given him the extra hit of acid once I knew the first one I took was good. When I saw him I said, “John, would you please do me a favor and give me that hit back? I know I gave it to you, but I really need it!”

And so he did. As soon as I was out of his sight, and passing on the bridge over Tannery Brook, I tossed it in the water. I didn’t want his or anyone else’s trip on my conscience. And I never took another such drug – imagine having to go through that again! With cause I could be thrown into an asylum! And I would not trifle with God in this.

I was now free. Free to speak of my Savior without fear of the rejoinder that my faith – and experience of God – was simply an extension of an acid trip. And I rejoiced in the wisdom and graciousness of my Lord. I walked home with joy and peace in my soul.

This is one story from a visionary adventure, which still goes on twenty years later, part of A Great And Terrible Love.