Christian Hocus Pocus

inner healing, soul ties, and other bullshit

I had driven 5 hours away into the verdant rolling hills of Greensboro, North Carolina. I was going for a 3 day “inner healing prayer intensive” with a Christian spiritual guide (I’m not really sure what else to call him) that I had never met. It had been recommended to me by a friend.

“I feel like I need a spiritual doctor. What I’m experiencing cannot be normal.” I was on a walk with a friend in the spring of 2024 when I said those words in pure exasperation. I was describing the years of anguish I had been living in trying to keep up my “relationship with God”. Anguish that was bubbling up and starting to overflow out of the pot that I had tried so hard to keep a lid on. She agreed and told me she would reach out to this person she knew that ran this inner healing ministry.

That sounded good to me. I was desperate. The wheels were falling off the bus for me spiritually and I was trying so hard to keep them on. I felt sure I had some kind of mysterious spiritual disease and if I could just see the right doctor, they would know what was wrong, diagnose me and be able to fix the misery I had lived in my whole life.

I was willing to try anything. In hindsight, this was my religious swan song.

So there I sat at this man’s kitchen table on a Sunday evening with his wife eating dinner. That’s how the 3 day retreat started. It felt so awkward. They were kind, but I felt weird. I felt intimidated and I wanted them to like me so I was trying to be very polite and sweet.

I remember him asking me, “Well Mallory, why are you here?” Tears welled up in my eyes as I described that my faith was falling apart, and my family of origin had fallen apart and I couldn’t go back to what I had known, but I wasn’t really sure where to go from here. He assured me I was in the right place. I felt hopeful.

I arrived at his office the next day. Just me and this 70 year old man. And he sat in his chair across from me and asked me to tell him my story. I tell him my story. I spare no detail. I share intimate details of my life. My most shameful moments, things I’m not proud of. I was determined to get what I came for - relief, healing.

I was fully on board, I held nothing back. It was not the first time that I have shared vulnerable details of my story with a spiritual authority in hopes that I would gain healing.

But that’s what I was taught had to be done to gain absolution - confession, truth telling, so I spilled my guts to this stranger.

He pauses every few hours to lead me through some scriptures. He explains the passages in a cryptic way that I had never heard before. It feels both a-ha and also deeply frustrating. I would have never been able to arrive at this interpretation on my own. On the second day of this, he senses my frustration. “I would never be able to understand this on my own. Why is it so difficult?” His answer to me was, “You’ve never been discipled.”

What!?! This answer pisses me off, not because I think I’ve been discipled, but just how hard it is apparently to understand “the gospel”. I’ve grown up in Church my entire life, I know my Bible. I’ve participated in all the Christian activities, done all the Bible studies, retreats, conferences, done Christian mentorship programs, had the quiet times. If someone like me who has earnestly tried to pursue the Christian faith with all of their heart and strength is still lacking a critical component necessary to understand the faith - WTF?!? And what about all the unfortunate people who can’t spend a weekend with this man in Greensboro? They’re all fucked.

If your religion is so difficult to understand that you have to travel 5 hours away to a guru to understand it, something is wrong.

The inaccessibility of it really burns my buns.

But let’s go on.

Day 2 is more talking and listening to him explain Scripture to me. He asks me to find out if anyone in my family has a history of Freemasonry. I call my mom. She says yes, my Great Grandfather was a Freemason. Apparently that’s a big problem.

Day 3 is the heavy hitting. It’s the prayer intensive day. This is when the Christian hocus pocus begins. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Christian hocus pocus. It was pretty popular in the charismatic circles that I had more recently been a part of.

He pulls out a photocopied three page, numbered prayer to “break the curse” of the Freemasons on me and my family lineage. He reads each line and then I repeat each line. It takes a long time to work our way through the entire three pages. Each line follows a similar format, “I renounce all oaths and ties to blah, blah, blah.” It’s filled with deep Freemason references and very specific details of all their rituals. I’m not gonna lie, it was some very weird stuff.

It feels like we are breaking a spell, but trying to do it in a “Christian” way. We attach “in Jesus name” to the breaking of the curses. I’m expecting to feel some shift in the atmosphere, some energetic release. But I feel nothing.

I wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t known to come to the Greensboro man and read this specific prayer and broken all three pages of the curses. What would have happened to me and my family?

Then we move on to Soul Ties. The mother fucking soul ties.

This is when the “Spirit prompted him” that I need to write out the names of every single person I had ever been sexually intimate with on a piece of paper. My cheeks flush. I know what this is. I’ve heard of “breaking soul ties”.

Everything in my body resists this. My stomach churns, my jaw clenches. I don’t want to do this. I’ve actually already “confessed” all of this to a previous male counselor, my husband, God, etc. I do not want to go down this road and be forced to recount all of my most personal, private transgressions.

But I’m a good girl. I’m a do what I’m told girl. I’m a submit to authority girl. So I ignore my body, I abandon myself and I reluctantly pull out a sheet of paper and start writing.

I’ve been a faithfully married woman for 17 years at this point so we’re going way back into the archives to dig this information up. Teenage years, teenage mistakes, teenage “sins” that somehow (in this theology) 17 years later still have a mystical, sinister hold on me spiritually despite the fact that I have already shared all this information with myself, spouse and God.

I feel so humiliated. I’m so angry. I shut down internally. He sits there across from me as I make my list.

Apparently “in his discernment, the Spirit” told him this was necessary for my healing. We embark on another Hocus Pocus prayer where I go through and repeat a rote prayer one at a time including every name on my list.

It goes something like this….

I repent of my sin with ___so and so_____ and I take back from him the piece of me I gave to him and I give back to him the piece of him I took from him.

We go through the list, one name at a time.

Again, I feel nothing except humiliation and anger.

I think to myself, how the fuck is this not its own form of witchcraft? Since when did believing in Jesus not be enough? Since when is “the blood” not enough?

Why do I have to repeat these incantations (and thats exactly what they are) that are masked as being biblical? Where in the Bible is the concept of “soul ties” even supported?

Why am I sitting here with this man once again spilling my most vulnerable details of my entire life? What is happening!?!?

I know why it’s happening. It’s happening because I have such a pure desire to be right with God that is being taken advantage of. It’s happening because I was desperate to try to save my relationship with God and Christianity and I was willing to humiliate myself to do so.

I was willing to lay down my dignity. My sense of self. I was willing to obey any Christian “authority” to try to stay in good standing with all of it.

My tender and pure spirit led me to sacrifice myself at the altar of “saving my faith”.

I wish I had said “NO! I’m not doing that.” Oh well. At least I know I will never, ever, ever put myself in a situation like that again.

A few months after that retreat experience, I was sharing with someone who was deep into Christian hocus hocus stuff that I was struggling with insomnia. Bad move.

Of course the explanation for my insomnia must be a spiritual one. Of course the solution was an immediate prayer session. She asked if she could pray for me, everything in my body got immediately uncomfortable, but I said yes, because how would that have looked if I had said, “No thank you.” In hindsight, thats exactly what I should have done.

This isn’t just a normal, “God please help Mallory sleep” prayer session. This is a casting out spirits - let me roll up my sleeves - level prayer that’s about to happen. The first thing that happens, of course, is to ask me if I have any known areas of sin. Because that could definitely be causing my insomnia and must be confessed before the prayer gets started. I didn’t want to say, “Nope, no known sin”. So I offer up, “well I’ve been listening to some music lately that doesn’t really glorify God.”

What?!? I’m embarrassed for myself just writing this out. I’m an adult woman! Why am I confessing my music choices to someone trying to pray for me?

Chalk to this up to more crazy shit I’ve done trying to make myself acceptable to those deep in the throes of religion. I will never be like them.

She begins the Christian hocus pocus and I think she casts out the “spirit of insomnia” and some other things. My sleep does not improve. I’m not surprised. It was not a spiritual problem. It was a nervous system problem.

I really wished it had all worked. I wish the retreat had worked. I wish the prayers had worked. It would have been so much easier if it had all worked. But the problem is, it didn’t work for me. And it never had worked. I never experienced the intended outcome. And now, I finally have to courage to be honest about that.

And if I’m being honest….I think Christian hocus pocus is bullshit. I think breaking soul ties is bullshit. I think inner healing is bullshit. And I think it has harmed so many people. And I’m tired of it. And I’m tired of protecting those systems and people that do not deserve my protection.