I wrote a piece here called “Energies”, in which I began to address the meta-material “energies” that I believe surround us and flow through us. The bias of our post-Enlightenment Western hermeneutic, of course, is that these “energies,” whether beneficent or malevolent, do not in fact exist, and that we are crazy or fanatically deluded to speak of them, let alone to try to invoke the protection of the good ones and fear the influence of the negative ones.
That materialist bias can be good because it keeps us from leaping off into an ether of ungrounded imagination, or from cowering in the face of baseless superstition; but it is also bad because this materialist bias, and the silencing from public discourse of people’s actual (and common) experiences of metaphysical forces, leaves us extremely vulnerable to dark forces. And this leaves us vulnerable to dark forces at a time when what is underway, more fundamentally than anything else on the planet, is a battle between good and evil.
This battle is probably a battle for our very souls.
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So much of what we see the perversions of pop culture, the abandonment by churches and synagogues of their missions, the division of families, the fetishization of abortion, the murder of elders in hospitals and the abandonment to hunger of citizens in North Carolina at this very moment, the worship of war in Washington DC — all of this surely is merely manifestations of this spiritual battle.
So I might as well just tell you. I now believe that metaphysical energies, good and evil, are real and surrounding us always and trying to affect us. Here are some experiences that led me to believe this more deeply and literally than ever.
I was always sensitive, as I have written before, to force fields such as those left in a building where violence or grief have taken place. I know plenty of people who have seen things they cannot explain materially — a pale figure flickering out of the corner of their eyes in a house they later learned was haunted, for instance.
Many years ago, a former partner of mine, when we stayed in a Civil War-era inn located at the edge of an old battlefield, was awakened all night by orbs of light. He thought at first that these were headlights of passing cars. I could not see them, thank God. But I watched him see them.
I’ve certainly heard footsteps I could not explain — this has happened to me three times. Once it happened in an old renovated shack in Massachusetts, where Brian, two young relatives of ours, and I, all stayed. The footsteps sounded like those of a man in heavy boots. They paced back and forth inside the little cabin all night long. At several points the footsteps sounded as if they had shifted onto the roof!
These footsteps were so scary and insistent that I ended up sleeping in the bathtub, as if that could help me. I was absolutely terrified.
In the morning, we all confirmed with one another that this had really happened; we all had individually heard these footsteps and for some reason we each had thought that none of the others present, could. There had also been a force field in the cabin when this was taking place, that felt to me rather paralyzing — as if it was pointless to try to do anything about what we were hearing, or to wake anyone else. I could not wait to just pack up and leave.
At another location, in an old hotel in Western Canada, years before that, I had heard male footsteps pacing back and forth all night about ten feet above me, in a room with a 12-foot ceiling. Again, I did not get the physics of what I was hearing. When I asked the hotel staff about it, they explained that a former guest, from the mid-20th century, checks in every day online at ten am, and that many guests hear his footsteps. Were the staff joking with me? Who knows; again, I was very happy to check out.
The last such instance took place when Brian and I were staying at Rhodes House. This is the beautiful home in Oxford University of the Rhodes Scholarship. It is an impressive stone building from 1926, built in memory of the founder of the scholarship, Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes’ is of course a complex and in some ways very dark legacy. In addition to his having founded a scholarship that has done a great deal of good, Rhodes could be considered a mass murderer for his imperialist policies in Southern Africa:
“As the greatest individual symbol of British imperialism, Rhodes’s memorials clearly need no longer occupy prominent places, as these constitute a permanent assault on the descendants of his black victims. However, it is also critical that Rhodes’s monuments not be totally erased. […]
Rhodes was a white supremacist who committed crimes against humanity. He dispossessed black people of their ancestral lands in contemporary Zimbabwe and Zambia – Southern and Northern Rhodesia – through aggressive and duplicitous means, killing an estimated 60,000 people, and stealing 3.5 million square miles of Southern African real estate. Rhodes’s mercenaries embarked on a savage scorched-earth policy: pillaging and raping; summarily executing black prisoners of war, stealing farm land and thousands of herds of cattle, and burning kraals.”
Late one night, Brian and I — and another young relative who was with us, staying in a separate bedroom — all heard, on the second floor of Rhodes House, the high-heeled footsteps of a woman, pacing back and forth down the lengthy wood-floored hallway.
So there I was cowering in bed — yet again — trying to tell myself that this was all my imagination. I fear and dread encountering the supernatural, and just want it to go away and leave me alone.
But Brian, Irishman that he is, welcomes it. At the same moment that I was under the covers hoping that I was not hearing what I was hearing, Brian was pouring himself a drink in a guest kitchen on the bedroom level. He told me later that the high-heeled steps paused outside this kitchen door. Brian spoke aloud then, and invited whoever it was to stop trying to spook him, and to come on in for a drink.
After he said that, he told me the later, the sound of the steps just stopped.
The jovial Rhodes House porters the next day confirmed that others had also told tales of inexplicable activities on the second floor. Were they kidding with us? Who knows?
Thankfully, I have never previously, til recently, seen anything I can’t explain. I don’t want to!
But that all began to change when I started in 2024 to read the 1560 Geneva Bible aloud on video, and to compare it to the Hebrew Torah.
When I first felt moved to do this — to read both texts from beginning to end on video, and to analyze them and compare them with a typical modern English translation — I knew that this was an unusual and even Quixotic-seeming impulse. But something just pushed and pushed me to start achieving this task; even if no-one watched or followed these videos, it was something I felt I had to do.
I had never read the Hebrew Torah in anything like its entirety. I was on fire with excitement about having stumbled upon the 1560 Geneva Bible, with its extremely faithful translation into English from the Hebrew (rather than from the Latin) and its beautiful Shakespearean, pre-King James Bible wording. The 1560 Geneva Bible, as you know if you follow this project of mine, is the Founders’ Bible and the Puritans’ Bible. This is a translation that Protestant critics of Catholicism had risked their lives to create.
They had fled England, where Protestant reformers were being martyred, and formed an enclave in Geneva, where they worked at this dangerous, revolutionary task. They wanted every plow boy, as they put it, to be able to read and understand the Word of God, with no intermediaries. In the 1560 Geneva Bible, and in the original Hebrew, I have been astonished to learn (forgive me if you have heard me say this already, it is the eternal headline of this revelatory task) that God is a far different literary character than He is later mis-translated as being; in these two original texts, He is far more “like us”; far more present, loving, understandable, compassionate, kind and accepting of us, than later versions, from the KJV on, represent Him as being.
The mistranslations later consistently also privilege or elevate the role of Priest or intermediary in a way that is not present in the originals. In the 1560 Geneva Bible and the Hebrew Torah, as I started to learn the minute I began my reading, God makes it very clear that you don’t need anyone between Him and you if you wish to speak with Him. In addition, later translations are far more “theological”, and they tend to imply, inaccurately, that manmade “religion” itself is needed for one’s access to God, when in the original texts, this is just not true.
It was, I think, late January or early February of 2024; Brian had to travel to see family, and I elected to stay behind and get to work with these first readings. I chose to stay in a Bed and Breakfast run by a neighbor of ours, near our house in the woods, rather than risk being alone in our house in the event that there was a power outage, which often happens in our remote area during stormy winters. I had never stayed in that Bed and Breakfast before.
My neighbor showed me upstairs to my room for the weekend. Her Bed and Breakfast was a lovely and well-run two-story farmhouse from about 1820. It was mostly unchanged from its 19th century appearance. It still had its original wide wood plank floors; maroon-curtain-festooned high windows framed snowy drifts. A parlor and a dining room were downstairs. Classic polished dark wood banisters, curved beautifully at the bottom, led you to the second floor. Charming framed photographs of our rural area area in the late 19th century lined the walls, alongside traditional paintings of landscapes and florals.
Upstairs were four bedrooms, two small and two larger. Each one was furnished with modest, historically-appropriate furnishings in warm colors — russets and goldens and leafy greens. It all made for a comfortable set of choices.
I selected a small back bedroom with a tiny en-suite bathroom. Its high window looked onto the pretty snowdrifts of the garden. A soft, deep, old-fashioned double bed awaited, as did bookshelves filled with second-hand biographies and histories that are a treat to browse on lazy snowy weekends in the country.
It was the perfect writer’s retreat: quiet and private, with layers of history to add to the general air of inspiration. And there would be a hot breakfast in the morning, made not by me! I could not wait to get started on my reading project.
I had brought two gigantic tomes with me: The 1560 Geneva Bible itself, in hardcover, was one. My 1560 Geneva Bible is a wonderfully-produced, faithfully printed facsimile copy of the original Geneva Bible, complete with golden linen covers under the dust jacket, and with the original woodcut engravings and the original fantastically relatable, down-to-Earth and illuminating editorial comments in the margins.
