encounters with evil 3 oh come on

The dulcet Spring of that fateful year 2014.

Visiting for the first time Gwen Healy (no relation of mine) at her home.

She showed me around her house.

Something troubled me.

Something nagging at the edge of my senses.

For some reason I was in fact quickly and quite completely appalled.

My host's manner was gracious.

There was nothing wrong with the house.

It was perfectly fine, bright, airy, spacious, well appointed.

But I was appalled.

I checked myself.

What on earth am I feeling here.

I gazed around me.

There were no Christian images in the house.

Could it be that?

No.

No.

It's a bit incongruous for someone who claims to be such a down the line Christian but not everyone expresses their faith in decor.

And houses don't usually overwhelm me just because there's no religious symbols in em.

What then.

I'm feeling something terrible.

What is it?

It's sadness certainly.

But I'm not that delicate.

Sadness doesn't faze me.

Seriously though bold readers. You wouldn't know it from this blog but I'm actually quite nice. I can sit with someone who's suffering for any amount of time and I will feel only honoured to be there. I can reach out. I can empathise. I can blah blah blah.

Seriously though.

Sadness is not my enemy.

In the mystical sense, sadness can be a gift from God.

The sadness of mourning.

The sadness of pain.

The shared sadness in defiance of any tough circumstances.

So what in tarnation was this?

It was none of the above.

I called it sadness but it wasn't any category of the positive Christian grace that can be sadness.

It was desolate and desolating.

My soul shivered.

Oh come on.

I thought to myself: Well she's in a wheelchair. Maybe that's what I'm feeling. But I've known her for three years and I never got this.

This.

This desolation.

This.

This absence.

Yes.

Absence...

That's it.

Absence of what?

The answer came back instantly.

The absence of joy.

There you go.

That's what was hurting me.

Bear in mind this woman had pretended to be Christian with me for three years. I still didn't really suspect she was anything else. I'd never doubted her faith, or her claims of miraculous experiences.

But ah.

I do regard joy as the keynote of Christianity.

So this experience in her house was quite seditious of my sentiment.

All my life whenever I meet someone from whatever background or life style, professional or unemployed, aesthete or drug addict, whom I believe to be close to God, joy is the common denominator.

It is a sign of the true presence.

And I wasn't getting even a smidgen of it here.

That's why I was so bowled over.

Here in a house with a woman I thought a true believer, I felt no sign of the presence of the Lord.

Let me say it again.

The sign you'll feel when Jesus is present in even the teensiest weensiest way bold readers, is joy.

I steadied myself.

Okay.

Maybe her family aren't sympathetic to the Christian faith.

That could be a bit sad for her if she's a believer.

But desolating?

No.

What I was feeling was quite distinct.

It was simply and solely the desolation of evil.

The palpable presence of evil in the form of an absence of good.

The absence of good.

The absence of joy in any form.

It was horrific.

Horrific not spectacular.

Can you see?

Nothing spectacular.

No voices coming from the walls.

No taps leaking blood.

No evaporating ghosts on the second floor.

Just the banal absence of joy.

It scared the living shit out of me.

That's satan's calling card.

He can't do joy.

He can do drugs or sex.

He can do cash or carpets.

But he can't do joy.

Oh Stanley Kubrick and the eejits who made the Amityville Horror may have sensationalised evil into an entertainment.

But it is not an entertainment.

It's just sad.

I mean the kind of sadness without the redeeming presence of joy.

For those who have truck with it thinking to obtain power thereby, it is nothing less than a tragedy.

A boring, joyless, deceitful, tragedy.

I sat there stirring one of my trade mark cups of coffee, growing ever more troubled by what I had discerned.

I broke with her a few months later but only after she had made the decision inevitable through more blatant acts of evil.

Once I'd broken with her, I didn't see her again for a long time although her husband would occasionally buzz me in traffic in his Pat Healy Plumbing van.

Using the family business vehicle for harassment.

What a fucking get.

Needless to say I do not endorse this service.

A few years went by and one day I was in the Newbridge Silverware cafe with my 82 year old American Aunt Eileen.

We were queueing at the counter.

Presently I turned around and saw that Gwen Healy had rolled up from the side and was introducing herself to my aunt.

The dimmest satanist in the coven knows they're not allowed approach me in public.

I thought to myself: We can't have this.

I reached out and unclasped her claw from my Aunt's hand.

Then I physically seized the Aunt by the shoulders and turned her back towards the counter, whispering firmly: "Be strong Aunt."

Then I turned to Gwen Healy and said in that much loved fake British accent I adopt in moments of confrontation:"Off with you now. There's nothing for you here."

The wheelchair bitch decided to try a bluff.

"Are you serious James?" she said in her dreadful Dublin accent and then again with even moe faux incredulity: "Are you serious James?"

She said it about ten more times as we stood at the counter with our backs to her.

And each time I rebuked her in declamatory tones like something from The Exorcist or maybe the Benny Hill Show: "Off with you now. There's nothing for you here."

At one stage I turned and gave the wheelchair a bold transgressive push.

The big wheels performed a barely perceptible rotation.

It moved about a centimetre.

In the Benny Hill Show it would have raced along the aisle, careened through the exit, and we would have heard a loud satisfying crash from off stage.

Ho hum.

I gazed around the cafe.

A hundred of Nathalie Collins' mid morning diners had paused so as not to miss a word.

I supposed they were each in their way mulling over the conundrum as to why that terrible man was being so mean to the nice woman in the wheelchair.

Then I thought: No, wait a minute. Evil is never as invisible as it thinks it is. There will be some people here who are looking at this and know exactly what's going on.

The wheelchair bitch had wearied of the pantomime.

She turned to go, calling back with raucous mockery over her shoulder: "Maybe I'll just ring your Uncle Jim."

Without looking up I answered fake British accentily: "I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear from you."

I got just that top spin of inflection which in the good old days used to drive Michael Sheeran and Ian Stuart, former editor and managing director respectively of the Leinster Leader newspaper, bonkers in the nut.

She was gone.

I addressed Aunty Eileen thusly.

"I hope you won't let that spoil our lunch."

Her eyes were wide and round.

"James I'm 82 years of age," she said. "I've known you all your life. And I thought I'd seen it all."

In the evening I recounted the story to an acquaintance familiar with my foibles called Rowena Baines.

Rowena said: "Did the Captain arrive?"

I said: "Who's the Captain?"

Rowena said: "That voice you use in confrontations."

I said: "You've given him a rank?"

Rowena said: "He deserved some recognition after all the work he's put in over the years."

I said: "But surely he'd be a Colonel at least."

"No," said Rowena firmly. "He's the Captain."