This essay appears in Issue 26 of The Mockingbird print magazine.
The Voice
When I was in college, I asked my dad to slay me in the Spirit. He and my mom had come to know God in the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, and they had both shared with me many stories of God making himself known in dreams, visions, healings, and other sensory experiences. By the time I was in college I’d had my fair share of God made manifest in the senses, but one thing I hadn’t experienced was being slain, so to speak. My mom had told me about how, at a large revival-like conference, she watched as people went to the altar, the priest laid hands on them, and then they’d fall seemingly unconscious into the arms of the altar servers. One-by-one the crowd filed forward to receive this radical indwelling of the Holy Spirit. She told me she didn’t buy it. It looked showy and strange, and she figured people must be faking it, but still she stepped into line when her turn came. She bowed her head and, she recounted, when the priest began to pray, a wave of calm flooded her body, a rush of unimaginable peace, to the point that she fell limp and was laid onto the ground like a baby being gently set into her crib. I think it was her suspicion, her doubt, that allowed me to trust her. But not simply doubt. Doubt says nothing substantial about character on its own. It was the risk — the risk of stepping beyond her doubt and finding out she had been wrong; a happy revelation indeed.
So I asked my dad to slay me. And he didn’t do it. Not my dad — he tried. He laid his hands on me right there at the kitchen table. It was God who didn’t do it. Though I can’t say definitively that this was the moment I began to doubt the ongoing activity of God, not long after I became a cessationist. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t speak or move all the time, I reasoned, then he doesn’t at all. He doesn’t speak anymore. Those who think he does must be self-absorbed, like they’re important enough for God to talk to personally. I joked about people who “ask God what socks they should wear” or “see a demon behind every bush.” I laughed at the theatrics of tent revivals and prayer closets. And eventually I became an atheist. What good is a God who doesn’t act?
Atheism was inevitable. When I broke from my family’s charismatic faith, I was in search of reality, a consistent and fundamental certainty about how the world worked. I wasn’t simply asking questions so much as accepting blindly the markers of what we’ve come to believe as North Atlantic intellectual authority. I was rewriting my past and ignoring the experiences that I had personally had.
It’s funny how memory works. How easily we forget; how readily we remake our stories to buttress our current circumstances or viewpoints. In my case, I chose to erase all of the visions and sensations I’d had growing up.
Vanja Bucan, from the series Sequences of Truth and Deception.
I saw demons starting at about six or seven. Angels came after that. They touched me, followed me, spoke to me, haunted me, until I began putting the pieces together: this must be my spiritual gift. Around seventh grade I remember studying them, this myriad species of various shapes, sizes, textures. I began noticing the differences between them when I struggled with body image, with a fear of death, with despair, and so on. I would see my peers walking down the hallways with demons following them, sometimes crawling up onto their backs and over their shoulders. Once I saw the small, Gollum-like one that I had learned to associate with body image crawl up onto a girl’s back; later I found out that she was struggling with an eating disorder. So I began praying for all of these students, secretly brushing my hands over their lockers as I passed. But also praying for myself, when at night I would be tormented by these beings, and stuck in sleep paralysis as they whispered to me.
As an adult, it seemed more reasonable for me to treat these experiences as dreams, as an immaturity I had woken up from, than dare to integrate them into my new, dogmatic, materialist framework for reality. And although I didn’t realize it, I was also saying to my parents, “I don’t believe any of the stories that you told me,” and ultimately, “I don’t trust you.” I no longer trusted them, and I lobotomized my own memory in pursuit of a reality that fit all the experiences of the other intellectuals that I was surrounded by. The dreams that I had were simply dreams, the sensations of evil were superstitions, and the presumed “rationality” I had developed was the epicenter of interpretation.
The lack of meaning in the mundane was finally what wiped me out. For my studies, I traveled to Israel. I’d be at these archeological digs, so excited to see relics of a life long past — to see the invisible past made visible in the present. But then my brain would halt. None of these matter, though. Nothing would last. Eventually the earth would be gone and all of this with it. History had no real significance. There was no larger story to fit any of this into, just a random series of events that led to the invasion and destruction of this ancient village. A series of events that facilitated the wall of this home to fall in this specific direction and protect the lackluster bowl that one of the workers pulled from the dirt before my eyes. The only significance that that bowl or that moment had was what I ascribed to it; me, alone, the only name-giving, meaning-making god there was. All of the excitement I had was drained out. And this happened over and over again. Meaningless. Alone.
My roommate at the time took me to one of our professors; he gave me little advice. Which was admirable now that I think back on it: he didn’t suggest he knew the answer to my problem. He simply sat with me and told me a little of his own story. He told me that in a multi-year period of great doubt in God, he carried around verses in his pocket, which on the verge of a panic attack he would silently slip out and read; this ritual helped him. He noted that it might not help me, and he couldn’t really say anything that he knew would actually help me. Yet, moved by his story, as much as you can feel moved in the middle of despair, I resumed reading my Bible in the mornings and, too, carried verses in my pockets to push back the dark.
Three months passed. Early in the morning, I was sitting on the balcony of the hostel when the sun just peeked over the mountain before me. The light was so startlingly bright that I had to shut my eyes for a moment; its heat warmed the skin of my face. And the dawn from on high broke upon me in a very experiential way. Inwardly I felt the first breath of faith move in me: one that had been eclipsed in darkness awoke.
After that, the breath of faith was hot and alive, my artwork began to flourish, and I began to love every moment of study. My world was meaningful again — filled with meaning beyond what I alone could endow it with.
Is it possible that the Spirit speaks many languages? Sometimes it is one that we speak, and sometimes He calls us to learn something new. As Taika Waititi says in his film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, “He’s tricky like that, Jesus.”
When I returned to Chicago, more visions awoke — love in the form of the natural world. At times I understood the meanings of birdsongs, and sensed that the fallen leaves were following me, skipping along behind me like children. I began to see luminous purple strings floating in the air; I could move them with my fingers and attach them to material objects. I saw dazzling multicolored auras emerge from the people around me and reverberate off the furniture. It was then that I began to sense the connection of all things, living and nonliving, verbal and nonverbal, visible and invisible, conversations I overheard with things I read and dreams I had at night, and Debussy with Dostoevsky with Wittgenstein and ecclesiology. It was a year of bright, luminous visions. These directed my studies and infused my artwork, yet still in the corners of my perception there were shadows. I’d see silhouettes of people following me and often feel that there were attackers hidden around corners; I’d find myself running home at night to get away from them. They were in my apartment too but were much less inhuman than my demonic visions. I’d feel the presence of someone else in the apartment with me, or I’d see a human form leaning against the bathroom door frame. When I’d turn my head, it would be gone.
Illustrations by Melisa Gerecci.
Over the next year and a half, my heightened awareness of the connections between everything, the thrill of new discoveries in my studies, the paranoia of being hunted, and the hallucinations of people in my apartment grew stronger. By the snow-covered December of my senior year in college, I found myself, much to my surprise, in a psychiatrist’s office. The symptoms had spiraled into psychosis. But by the grace of God, the unwavering support of my roommates, and the physically present love of my mom, who had driven six hours across Ohio to stay with me in Chicago, I sat across from the psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with schizophrenia.
It wasn’t a shock to hear. It was surreal, but not a shock. Earlier that semester I had caught onto something. While I was washing dishes one day, a little girl had appeared beside me, not a shadowy figure, but a fully present girl. Alarmed, I turned to meet her gaze, and we stared into each other’s eyes. I had never seen her in my life, and I knew I was home alone. She disappeared, like sparks from a bonfire, into the air. I immediately called my brother to tell him. By the end of the conversation, he wasn’t sure what to make of it, and neither was I. I did my best to move on. At the school library later, sitting alongside many other students, I heard a loud yell, like a fun yell. It was sudden and echoed across the library. My head snapped up, but no one else moved. Everyone kept studying as though nothing had happened. I began posing nonchalant questions to my friend in the counseling program about auditory hallucinations, whether there were such things. But the semester with its demands trekked on, and my fear of even mentioning this to another person in any honest way was beyond the courage I was capable of. And so it took the finals-week breakdown of 2013 to be the courage I didn’t have.
My departure from reality, psychosis — or, as I like to think of it, my journey to the underworld — scared the crap out of me. In some ways it felt like my innermost self, the darkness and the light, was made public, like a kind of forced vulnerability.
There is not much more than the polemic of psychosis that can so thoroughly convince you that you are not your own. I saw that, but I didn’t take it very well. I was still hell-bent on individualism: only I could determine what was real, what was good, true, beautiful, what was faith and what was fiction. I started medication, then, as so many stories go, took myself off it for very logical, fearful, and individualistic reasons.
I moved to Dallas for seminary. When my symptoms surged, I began seeing a counselor who was incredibly helpful, especially in teaching me ways to live with my paranoia. After several months my counselor advised me to return to a psychiatrist. It took a year and a half — and several lapses in mental stability — before I actually followed through. After a full day of testing, this psychiatrist provided a more nuanced diagnosis. He seemed to really understand, and the parts that he didn’t understand, he admitted to. This marked the beginning of the true miracle: one that saved me from the kind of decline that often accompanies these illnesses and causes a person to retract from human connection. Opening before me was a path toward genuine interdependence and, therein, the possibility of hope.
Discerning the Voice
Let’s put any kind of mental disorders to the side for a moment and talk about a more in-the-bell-curve experience of otherness. If you’re a creative in any capacity, you’ve no doubt had the experience of otherness, of inspiration outside your own mind, beyond your own pen, voice, or paintbrush. It seems to visit you from another world. Characters you’ve labored over suddenly take on a life of their own, speaking in unforeseen ways. A painting demands a new shade or direction outside your perception, and you must follow, trusting without picturing the result. Perhaps you sing, and your voice lifts, infiltrated by an enthusiasm that strikes not only the hearts of your audience but your very own. In creative circles, I’ve often found it more acceptable to talk about this presence, this spiritual otherness, than in many American church traditions I’ve been a part of.
One of the major comforts of an artists’ group is that everyone understands the creative process experientially. Everyone has, at some point, given themselves over to an idea they didn’t fully understand. In their best form, writers’ and artists’ groups — whether MFA workshops or informal gatherings of creative friends — can be powerful forces in a creative journey. The most influential groups I’ve been a part of moved away from questions like, “Where did this idea come from?” and, “Is she copying another writer?” Instead, they asked, “What now? What could this idea mean, and how does it affect the work as a whole?” Presenting my unpolished writing to workshops has been one of my greatest lessons in humility, and in trust. If they are going to determine if my work is valid, coherent, and good, then I have to come to grips with missing the mark of perfection before I even click send. Receiving and giving feedback on my peers’ work halted my modern compulsion to overanalyze the origins of other people’s ideas; in other words, it yelled at me with a megaphone: “You are judgy!” And instead of prejudging a work or a writer, I learned to simply listen and allow the work to surprise me.
In these creative writing workshops, people would often use phrases like, “The story wants to go here,” as if discerning a desire in the story itself. Sometimes, in a gentle yet startlingly prophetic way, someone would say, “This isn’t a short story; it’s a scene from a novella.” My peers spoke about showing up at the desk, putting your pen to work, and ultimately knowing that inspiration will come — if you show up to your “writing practices,” much like showing up to “spiritual practices.” We’d talk about characters saying things we didn’t expect, as if there were an invisible personhood alive in and behind the story. I was often encouraged to release my grip on a story, to let go of my ambitions for it, and to allow it to become what it wanted.
Once, I was working on a short story and felt I had completely lost control of it. Some things I wrote even scared me. The degree of gore and horror made me wonder if there would be any goodness left in it, but I stuck to the advice to let the story go where it wanted. I prayed frequently throughout the process, lifting my chin, praying through the ceiling of my apartment, “Lord, help me. Help me. Make me an instrument of your peace.” And I continued writing. Near what I assumed would be the end of the story, a memory flashed across my mind: at the start of an old journal, I had written, large across the first blank page, “selige sehnsucht.” The exact words, in their font, appeared in my imagination — translated as “blessed longing” or “soulful yearning.” I quickly looked up the Goethe poem I had once quoted and since forgotten. As I read the poem, the story became alight with meaning. I saw how it all connected, what it was saying, who my characters were. Having found the story’s soul, I could then bring it to my workshop for technical refinement, so that the soul I experienced would be made manifest to readers. And that’s where a writing partner, a writer’s group, a class, friends, or a workshop comes into play: for clarity on meaning and direction, for help digging into it, or for learning the technical skills needed to communicate it.
A key part of receiving that kind of feedback is trusting and relying on your editors. For me, the most influential and trustworthy feedback came through two professors. Both expected brilliance from every piece in their classes — not as a demand but as a promise. They read each story, no matter the subject, themes, setting, or level of technical skill, with the assumption of brilliance, as if each piece were infused with meaning, profundity, and worthiness. This taught me a way of perceiving that went beyond reading — it transformed how I read, study, engage with students, and meet new people. It reconnected me with the work of God in all things, as all things are already infused with His brilliance.
Last year, I hesitantly mentioned a dream I’d had — one that came like a radio tuned into a clear frequency — to a very close friend from church. Still tiptoeing, I told her I was unsure of the dream’s meaning, of course, but that the Spirit of God was certainly there. After listening pensively, she shyly leaned in close to me and said, “I’ve never told anyone this, but I had this dream a few years ago…” Why did we both give this conversation so much pause? Why was I so nervous to share an encounter with God with someone I’m close to, who believes in this God as well? Why did she wait years to tell anyone in her life that she thought God spoke to her in a dream? Why are we, who believe in the living God, so hesitant to suggest He has a place in our immanent reality when many of my nonreligious writing comrades speak about otherness with confidence?
Sometimes, when it comes to God’s present activity in our lives, we’re entranced by a need for certainty. And for many decent reasons — whether those be abuses by people who claim to hear from God, or various historical departures from creedal Christianity because of a fixation on these “enthusiasms,” or good ol’ cosmic fear that the world may recede from our sane vision entirely — we hold a belief in a living, present God in one hand and a fear of the ambiguity inherent in discerning the voice of that God in the other. And so for many years, I found myself asking, “How do I know if God truly gave me that idea?” “Was that truly the spiritual world, or just disrupted brain chemistry?” “Was that really a vision or did I accidentally doze off while in Savasana?” If I could learn these things, I would know when God was speaking and when He wasn’t, and I would never have to talk to anyone about it. I would know my own bread crumb trail and make it out of the woods easily without ever lighting a flare. Our longing for certainty handicaps our ability to “expect brilliance,” and limits our ability to discover and attend to the radio waves of the Spirit connecting and infusing all things with meaning, including our dreams, visions, hunches, voices, revelations, and mental health.
Knowing the Voice
In my journey toward stability and peace, shifting away from questions of certainty, and moving toward the question, “What then shall we do?” was fundamental.
It was the first run of a four-week Cognitive-Behavioral group therapy (CBT) session for schizophrenics on the fourth floor of a run-of-the-mill office building along Route 75 in Dallas. Ten of us sat at a rectangular table, seeking a toolkit for living like Persephone, with one foot in this world and one in another. The years between my original diagnosis in Chicago and my sitting at this table in Dallas were filled with breakdowns, hospital visits, going off my medications and then going back on them. And at last, through the work of God, I was connected with the aforementioned psychiatrist, who took the time to really investigate my range of off-the-bell curve experiences. I ended up re-diagnosed with a much more complex cocktail that, even so, provided a clearer path forward. When my doctor and I first started working together, I didn’t just happily skip over to a group like this, at peace with all the realities I was living in. I had to first learn that in order to live, you can’t just grave-dig your past or slam your here-and-now into the investigator’s spotlight over and over again.
For years, I’d been hung up on the question, Is it demonic or hallucinatory? Meaning, is it something I should listen to or something to dismiss? If I could just determine that, I thought, I’d know how to move forward. I think my psychiatrist recognized how hamstrung I was by this question long before I did. He maneuvered around it — not by avoiding it, but by seeing beyond my disoriented longing for a clear system of thought. He understood that my desire for a dogmatic system to explain myself haunted me. I thought that if I could hardline the distinction between real and chemical, I could cure my instability and gain spiritual clarity. Instead, he asked a better question: “How did those experiences affect you then?” My answer came naturally: they brought me closer to God, inspired my prayer life, and deepened my concern for others. Discerning voices wasn’t, as I had initially thought, about throwing out some experiences and accepting others as completely accurate to reality.
As my grip was loosened on the certainty question, I found myself more curious about how to be in the world even as I continue to experience these things. And so I landed at that table of crazy people. People I could learn from, trust, follow. The toolbox of techniques became like our sola CBT, and within the context of our Thursday night liturgy, I found a council of witnesses who helped me respond to my own experiences, interpret them, and redirect me when needed.
There, on the shiny surface of the CBT table, I saw a reflection of Christ’s body, his meeting us in the very thing that we were ashamed of, in the dream that we were afraid to tell or the voice we were alone in hearing, because outside of this table there was no safe place to cast our burdens and assuredly receive grace. At that table I cast off those burdens and, to my surprise, they were received like gifts by my comrades. Those stories of horrors and hunches we shared were opportunities to care for one another, to be enamored by another’s courage, to fall with one another in our weaknesses, and to rejoice with one another in our triumphs. Participating in that group wasn’t simply acquiring the toolbox that initially brought us all there. I’m fairly confident I could have learned and implemented those tools elsewhere. It was the table’s call to come and die to those pangs of shame and uncertainty that transformed us.
In July of 2023 I had a series of Lutheran dreams. Yes, like a TV mini-series that I might click on in the early afternoon each day. Before flying out to spend a month in Paris to live as a bohemian and write a novel, a dear friend handed me On Being a Theologian of the Cross, by the Lutheran theologian Gerhard O. Forde. Every evening in place of a substantial dinner I’d scramble two eggs and read a few pages — because that’s all you can digest at once when it comes to Luther. I did this for a week or two. Then the dreams started.
They were very poignant and avant-garde dreams which I knew quite assuredly were caused by this book. One of which startled me to the core. I won’t go into the details of it now, but I knew that it had depth beyond what I alone could perceive. I sensed the presence of the Spirit in that dream. It was forming me in some way and seeking to enlighten. I did nothing immediately: I was too afraid of really discerning what the dream was inviting me to.
A few days later that dream still hung its hat in my mind. And something between curiosity and annoyance led me to send a multi-message audio WhatsApp to one of my brothers, retelling the dream. He answered rather quickly, saying that he had listened and needed to pray about it before giving his opinion, which took a few days. In the meantime, I called my parents and recounted the dream to each of them. They listened thoughtfully, right away trusting they were hearing the voice of God and already discerning what God was saying. Zoom out: these are people intimately acquainted with my mental challenges. They could have so easily written it off as the vivid dreaming that often accompanies bipolar, or the fixation that accompanies schizoaffective. At the very least they could have chalked it up to a combination of myriad arts museums and too much butter. There were so many reasons to disregard my intuition that there was something in there for me to see, but they didn’t. They all spoke to that dream. And they all said something similar and pointed me in the same direction. And I know the unity of their responses was a gift, not just from them but from God.
Today that dream proves to be as poignant and compelling as it was a year and a half ago — a gift that literally keeps on giving. Were it not for my family expecting the brilliance of God, the work of the Spirit in that strange blip of a dream, I wouldn’t have experienced the conviction and encouragement that God brought to me from it. And I, certainly, without those dreams as a whole, would not have understood Forde’s book.
If there’s one thing I’m continually coming to realize, it’s that God meets us in the present — our present. Though we may disagree on how, when, or to what extent, He is there with us, especially in times of ambiguity. God speaks to us uniquely in the language that is our own, and His voice finds clarity not in our individual interpretations of it, but in Christ’s body. Our fellowship is indeed much more than a social club or the once-a-week manifestation of internet friends. Our fellowship is like that CBT table. It’s the MFA workshop. It’s the brother at the other end of the WhatsApp message. I see the Spirit moving when our private experiences of God are reintegrated with our corporate experiences. It’s in moments when a friend has a vision, dream, or insight about what God may be saying to them that I’m invited not only to help discern but also to witness firsthand. It doesn’t matter that my parents were slain in the Spirit and I was not — through their stories, I experience the manifestation of Christ’s body, drawn together by the sinews of His Spirit. We all share in the Christ who dwells within us corporately. This, I know, is real.
Kylee, thank you for sharing your story! so beautifully and powerfully written.