THE DEMON JONATHAN

I’m not sure what I believed about demons before I met one.  As a Psychic Medium, I probably should have read up on them and contemplated their existence, but aside from their portrayal in movies and the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I really didn’t think about them at all.  But I think about them now.

I encountered the demon Jonathan in my basement.  I had no inkling that he was there, so the confrontation was sudden, shocking, and terrifying.  Which is precisely what he was going for.

To describe him: Jonathan was a massive bundle of spirit energy, huge, probably 10 feet tall, and appearing very red.  He was bipedal and humanoid, but horned with two of those big, longhorn cattle style horns.  He was dressed, with no cape and no wings, in an outfit that screamed, “bad ass.”  His feet were feet, but his hands had those pointy, talon-style fingernails.  In short, he looked like the devil.

I’ve blanked out what I said to him in greeting.  But I’m pretty sure if I did remember, about half the words would be !*&%#@.

I probably shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was, though, because it turns out that I had encountered him before.  A few months before my “official” meeting of Jonathan, my husband came home from walking the dog to report that, “There’s something evil at Annie’s house.”  Annie was our backyard neighbor, and his comment was unsettling, as he has some psychic abilities of his own and is usually right about these things. I went out in the yard to see for myself, heard nothing, but sensed an entity with dark energy in her house.  I couldn’t see it clearly, and when I spoke to it, it didn’t talk back, so I went back inside and planned to check it out more fully the next day.  But the next day it was gone, and I figured that was that.

But no, that wasn’t that.  The “entity” was the demon, and when he caught that I could sense him that night, he moved into our house.  Delightful.  That meant he had been in our house for months.

How could I not know?

As it turned out, Jonathan was human spirit by day and demon at night.  I don’t know if it is this way for all demons, but it was that way for him.

I found out that at the time of Jonathan’s death, he was in love with a woman named Maureen.  Maureen was involved with both Jonathan and another man, and that love triangle resulted in the death of both Jonathan and Maureen.  I do not know the details, if it was a double-murder at the hands of the other man, or a murder-suicide at the hands of Maureen, but regardless of that, Jonathan died believing that love killed him.  So he hated love.  As twisted as it sounds, he absolutely hated love.  Any expression of love in his midst, or even just the sight of a loving couple threw him into a vengeful rage, the likes of which I cannot describe.  He was a red, raving, 10-foot-tall demon with horns and talons who was perpetually pissed off and wanted to obliterate love.

Any sane person would have run away screaming.

But I stood there and felt sorry for him.  I believed that it was his belief that love kills, his feelings of being wronged by love, and his monumental rage over his whole situation that turned him into a demon.  But none of that was true.  Love doesn’t kill.  Love only loves.  Which meant to me that he could be healed.  I wasn’t sure what it would take, but I decided to try.

At first, I only spoke to him during the day, when he was human.  But these “therapy” sessions weren’t getting to the heart of his rage and weren’t working to change his beliefs about love.  So then I worked with him at night, when he was all big and red and angry, telling him over and over and over again that love never kills, that he was killed by anger or jealousy or revenge or hate.

It made him exponentially angrier to have me challenging his whole belief system.  Again, if sanity had ruled the day, I would have bolted.  But I persisted because here’s the thing: I knew that he couldn’t hurt me.  He was dead and I was alive and even as powerful as he was, he was just energy, so the most he could do was power-surge me.  Which is no worse than an adrenaline rush.  So day after day after day I talked to him, listened to him.  His story was a sad one: a father who drank, a mother who did not show love and affection, a lifetime of dealing with the world with his fists.  He had all these distorted ideas about what love is, what love looks like, and no ideas at all of what love feels like.  I would ask him to, “Look again,” to look into his life again for someone who truly loved him, but for months he came up blank.  I remember the day quite clearly when he remembered a grandmother whom he saw only a couple times in his life, and remembered how she looked at him.  Lovingly.

It was a small thing, but it was enough to turn a corner, and slowly — oh, so slowly — he started to change and to heal.  It took over a year, but he finally came around, finally felt the love coming from me, finally came to understand that love only loves, it never hurts or kills.  He came to terms with what really happened, what really killed him, and what part he played in that.  Over time, his whole everything changed, and then one day, as if a switch flipped, he wasn’t a demon at all anymore.

It was around this time that Kevin and Dennis showed up.  Kevin and Dennis were a couple of stoners who died sometime in the 1970’s, and had lingered as Earth-bound spirits I think out of laziness more than anything.  I was not happy to have them around.  But they hit it off with Jonathan — duuude — and an amazing thing happened.  Jonathan never had real friends while he was alive, had never known the kind of acceptance that comes with belonging to a group, and all of a sudden he had that with Kevin and Dennis.  The three of them were inseparable and talked endlessly about music, “chicks,” and the best parties, and the healing that came from that for Jonathan was incredible to witness.

I had lectured Jonathan on the importance of ascension, but was not sure he would ever be ready for that, ever be fully at peace.  But then one day he was.  All three of them were.  So, I opened a portal to the other side, they stood in a circle and held hands, and off they went, ascended.  I was so surprised and so happy that I just cried and cried.

I learned a lot from Jonathan.  I don’t know if all demons are the same, but he was definitely not sent by Satan to possess me, and he most certainly was not a fallen angel.  And where most people who encounter a demon would seek to banish them, I wouldn’t.  Love is a powerful, powerful thing.  Do not ever underestimate it.