god will put you there
a witch calls 911
at the beginning of the day, i didn’t think it was a spiritual call. my anxiety was eroding me. that’s normal. reluctance is also normal. my joke about being a witch at the christian food bank is normal.
not only is what comes next an example of spiritual warfare, it’s a perfect example that shows me how christians choose death. they choose the path that absolves them from responsibility. they choose to put horse-blinders on to real suffering. this is their route to salvation, absolution. it’s a classic choosing.
i cling to my curiosity as a safeguard. i write with vigor, and an understanding that my emotional landscape has been positioning me to be the observer with a pen. the pain of heartbreak is something that can be healed by the sewing of inky words to a blank page. there is a permanence to this story now that it’s placed outside of myself.
several archetypal interventions are present in the narrative. most of them are removed from the story because they cannot be thought of as extra characters. the uncanny begins to swallow the differentiation, anyways.
my spiritual inclinations can be mapped, too. indecision is my achilles heel, unless it applies to the choice between life and death.
my protective stance, firm and unwavering, wants me to omit the narrative altogether. sometimes, my protective self is also my critical self. i have a hard time seeing one without the other. if i think about protection only, not the fact of my writing and publishing the story, it’s actually not a big deal. my magical energy reserves are thin, though. maybe the critique overestimates my direct opposition, my ominous foe? i mean, i left the religion over a decade ago. my direct experience informs my craft, writing and magic, as does my location in the world. my reserves are low because my entire capacity is changed, refined. but when i consider the burden on myself, which is standing opposition to a christian zeitgeist, one that’s being ripped apart by our decolonial, deconstructive hands, i’m less than enthused to be standing there. still, my presence is necessary as someone with experience of the insider zeitgeist, and the occultist/scholarly interpretations of biblical understandings.
my protective and critical self wants to defer this issue to someone else. the issue in question is retaliatory spiritual warfare. my reserves are low. if you wanna add honey to the pot, there’s an open invitation. i’m mentioning this now because we won’t circle back here. it’s best if we don’t.
it’s hot as hell.
i marched up to the local christian food bank lady with the list in her hands. mine came after 50 or so names, 2 and a half pages of people. i’m also a half hour early. it behooves me to go early, to put my name on the list earlier than opening, because they don’t follow their own rules. the list is hardly a system.
i hate this food bank. they’re the closest to my house and the food is decent, which is why i still go.
my marching was stopped by the director wearing a yellow shirt. every other volunteer wore a blue one, like they’d just come from a bible study conference. the director yelled at the crowd of people waiting for food in the hot sun:
“you know, we never get just a moment with the lord, do we? let’s pray!”
she calls over a volunteer to do the praying. i rolled my eyes and walked back to the car with my wife and the blast of air conditioning.
i told her: “it’s like they know when the witch shows up, they start to pray the gay away.”
my annoyance had the better of me, and we kept complaining about the food bank.
there was a guy across the street, farther out from the greenery of the food bank yard, closer to us in the car, and he was swaying/dancing. sweaty. we’d just watched him blow a massive plume from his mouth. i could see him carrying the drugs in his hand, the way you hide them when you know people are around.
it didn’t start to smell like weed. the smell was non-existent. i told hayley: “it’s fentanyl or something. if it were a cig or a weed vape, we’d smell it by now.”
we watched him swaying, and i started my complaining: “does someone here know him? he looks like he needs help.”
he falls. the sun is blistering.
“and now it’s too late.” —hayley’s favorite line from my big mouth.
i get out of the car and try to wake him up. he was barely conscious before the fall, high as hell from a plume that big, and not responding to my voice. i breathlessly ran over to the food bank volunteers for help. they point and defer to the director (time is ticking). no one else moves.
she says: “show me.”
“he’s not responding,” i tell her. “does anyone here know him?”
they certainly don’t. the blue shirts don’t know his name.
she says: “we should call 911.”
the frustration begins because i was on my phone calling 911 as she said the words. this is what you do when someone says call 911, you don’t waffle about it.
she waffles. she takes out her phone as a mirror to me, then sees the phone at my ear while it rings.
“yeah, you call 911.”
i’m good in a crisis, unfortunately for me. i took the verbal spiritual bullet like a champ. i was trying my best to remain calm if only for the man who is splayed out on the grass before me. i worried about his head next to a jagged rock, but there is no blood. just sweat. i remembered seeing him hit his shoulder upon falling, so i worry less.
i can’t administer first aid, anyways. i’m not even strong enough to lean him up. the sun is so damn hot.
the phone is still ringing, so i say: “does anyone have an umbrella to shade him? i don’t know if we should try to move him...”
the director denies the umbrella, but i suspect she could have tried to look for one. she stares at him. she’s angry. she also thinks i’m overreacting. why move the guy who did this to himself? let him pay for it in dishonor, right?
it’s not my establishment. this is not my friend. i didn’t want to call 911 because i didn’t know that the cops wouldn’t also show up. i wanted another patron at the food bank to say to me, “he’s okay. we got him. he’s with us. we know what he would want in this scenario.”
alternatively, this is a man is clearly a part of my neighborhood community. he needed my help because i was the one who saw him fall, the one on the phone with the dispatcher, and the one who cared enough to not leave him outside the food bank yard in the hot sun to die.
if i didn’t move from my seat in the car, he would likely be dead.
i’m trying to remember the name for naloxone, trying to find the word so i can call it out to the food bank patrons. the dispatcher asks her questions at a rapid rate, all questions i’m familiar with. the director is talking over me. she’s trying to talk to the dispatcher from where she stood with her arms crossed, or trying to tell me what i can already see for myself. she’s clearly disappointed in the man who’d just taken drugs at her establishment.
then, he stops breathing.
more people rush to help. the voice of the dispatcher is quiet against the shouting and forming chaos. i can’t do anything about that, and suddenly I’m forgetting more words, like CPR, but more people rush over to help. they start pushing him, slapping him, talking to him. someone finally knows his name.
the dispatcher says the word i’m looking for, narcan.
“does anyone have narcan?” i scream out.
someone does. he’s rifling through his backpack next to me. i notice a bunch of med supplies in the pocket.
the guy jolts up; he’s breathing. someone hands him water. he didn’t need the narcan to wake, a miraculous change of events.
i’m narrating all this to the dispatcher. i tell her i can hear the sirens. i ask her if it’s ok to hang up now that the paramedics are there.
the guy who’d been moments from death looks at me as i hang up the call. he rolls his eyes. not at all dignified. my heart breaks.
i turn to a lady paramedic, “the cops won’t come, right? because the drugs?”
she says no. they won’t call them unless they feel a reason to. she says the dispatcher makes the decision to call them, and if they aren’t here, they’re not coming.
the guy is hurt like a kicked puppy. he didn’t seem like the aggressive type. moments ago, he was dancing and swaying. he can barely keep his eyes open.
two women from the food bank line are easing his pain. they know his name. one of them says, “he’s been clean for a while. he doesn’t have a tolerance.”
the very christian director conceals her ignorance as naivety with a feminine edge: “how did he get drugs? why are drugs here, you guys?”
she’s looking for someone to punish. her eyes keep wandering to the door of the food bank. she’s shifty and tapping her foot.
she yells at the guy who’s trying to get the drugs off the street where they’d been dropped as if touching the supplies might send us all into a state of altered consciousness. she nearly slapped his hands. he drops them back down as a performance for her. i wanted it gone in case the cops were called. i assumed that the man who tried to clean up the scene thought similarly, that taking the stuff away might save the other man even more trouble. the director assumed he’d take the remnants for himself. in her eyes, we’re all drugged-out, transient, and one choice away from damnation. why else would we be at the food bank?
i held in my rage. well, it had been holding the whole time. i’m always pissed when i have to get food from the christians.
she walks away. all the volunteers go back to their spots with the crowd. the crisis has been averted. everyone else is safely re-filling their social roles at the local food bank.
now, the man is alone with the paramedics. i’m a few paces away. i’m watching him and them. they assess that he’s ok enough to be left here at the food bank. it’s a decision, for sure. i supposed the man might not have the means to be taken away and nursed back to health, even for the day. he’s still hungry.
i look back at the car. hayley’s waving me over through the driver’s side window.
i slam the car door and cry.
“you did the right thing.”
“now what? he’s hungry, he’s high, and no one there seems to really know him well-enough to help him!”
never mind that, we’re at a food bank. every week i go, it’s clear to me that over half the people there are transient and hungry. most people can’t carry a box of food out; they shove food into a backpack and walk off.
but also, it’s a fucking food bank. the ignorance of the director was a massive failure to respond. there should be some sort of protocol for this. more organization than, “how in the world did drugs get here?”
it’s a church. it’s not a real food bank.
it’s a way for the christians to sink their teeth into vulnerable people.
“come to church and everything will be ok.”
we bail. we drive home. we’re hungry, too. i couldn’t see myself waiting for my name to be called. i couldn’t see myself walking past all the blue shirts to get food.
is it pride? hell yes it is!
it’s not the kind of pride that outweighs my hunger. making the choice between pride and food is a systemic cost-benefit analysis. choosing my pride over food was self-preservation in a system that’s broken. my heart needed care before my stomach did. and that man needed care before my heart. was i the only one aware of the prioritization needed for the man to survive an overdose? we live in a system that allows people to think about their stomachs before they make the move to help another human being.
i’m not hiding my own complaining. truly, my Aquarian nature took over. the humanitarian in me was driving. i maintained my hatred for the establishment and the real people around me who are affiliated. fire was already licking the walls of my belly before i noticed the man swaying.
my pride tells me i did the right thing.
it’s worse to be authentically standing in your pride next to a crowd of christians. it might be better if i wore a shirt that said, “i am a satanist.” they’d know their target. i’d get to have a real fight about moral rightness because the shirt would be an invitation for inciting more violence.
you know, if spiritual warfare was less what it is and more a discussion council, here’s what i would say to the opposition:
“god will put you there.”
for fuck’s sake, they wanted a moment with the lord. they asked for it!
i didn’t want to go the food bank. we were seconds from deciding not to. we were hanging onto the hope that hayley’s mom would help us. waiting for her mom’s help would have meant a few days without food. (it’s a whole thing.) reluctantly, i told hayley to get dressed to go.
if a righteous god could rely on the spiritual values of his followers, i wouldn’t have been called there that afternoon.
at the beginning of the day, i didn’t think it was a spiritual call. my anxiety was eroding me. that’s normal. reluctance is also normal. my joke about being a witch at the christian food bank is normal.
god’s not gonna just tell you it’s your job to save a life. that’s your choice! i had a choice to keep watching, to keep hoping that the blue shirts would notice. or, maybe someone who wandered around the block might see him there.
personally, i didn’t need to think about the fact that he might stop breathing, or that it might force his heart to also stop. i didn’t need to think about the drugs at all, save for the type as to communicate that to a paramedic. i saw him fall, and that was enough for me to get out of the car.
he was a tree in the riddle about the forest. no one noticed.
except us, i guess. god will put you there.
imagine the riddle again: a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?
my answer: if the tree falls, the birds lose their nest and they fly into the air calling for help. the deer at the forest floor scatters in the brush. the falling tree cracks open a small rock and the critters go this way and that. the creatures at the creek feel alerted to a vibration….is there really “no one” around in a forest?
we don’t live in a vacuum.
hayley is very much a, “she’s got this,” wife. she didn’t follow me because she didn’t think it would go-down bad like that, but also because she knows the fire in my belly licks like dragon’s breath.
as for the spiritual warfare—the question becomes: “who is the victor?” maybe also, “which god is which?”
my gods are hardly considered gods in the same way that the christians believe in god. suffice it to say that i was warned. i was warned last week that spiritual warfare was at my doorstep in more ways than one.
i don’t know who’s victorious; my pride won’t claim it.
i suppose it’s not the establishment or the christians. they’re definitely the losers. i’ve painted it like that. also, the material of the scenario indicates as much. the systemic ecosystem indicates otherwise, but remember, by the scope at this level, the burden becomes collective. at the collective level, we’re war-torn.
maybe it’s the man who became victorious. maybe it’s his fight. maybe i’m just an angel. i was a person in the right place at the right time making the choice of life.
the blue shirts will erase me from the narrative. i’m not their preferred characterization of angelic duty. if i was, i’d have on the same blue shirt. their preferred vision of an angel is hovering over the food bank in the sky with sky daddy. the angels and god are more of an ornament to remind them of the sacredness of life, an idea cloaked by deadly lies and grifts. life becomes synonymous with death for these people.
they’ll reward themselves for the fact that they came away from the situation unscathed (did they?). they’ll cheer for the fact that they didn’t have to touch the man with leprosy at their front gates. they’ll honor the first responders. they’ll ask themselves why i didn’t claim my place in the line for food. they’ll dismiss my absence as emotional distress if they’re considerate, and i don’t believe them to be.
i’ll stay hungry and trust that the reciprocity of life brings me food. i can laugh about it with tears in my eyes. i was lucky for the veiling of that day.
the spiritual warfare is obvious to me. i’m observing as if i’m an outsider while narrating my internal space. i’m writing for you, dear reader, because this is the most mundane, real example of spiritual warfare i can think to interpret. this is a model for how you choose life, no matter how you think you can handle it.
it sucks that doing something is the standard for care. it sucks that people are so far gone that they play with deadly drugs in line for the food bank. it sucks that the food bank line is a list 50 people deep before the door is supposed to open. it sucks that we all have to wait in the hot sun and wonder how much will be left for us to take home. it sucks that the stipulation of getting food is being agreeable with right-wing christians. it sucks that people prey on the vulnerable, holding the promise of drug-induced pain management, or offering a cherry-picking of groceries so long as you pray at the front gates.
i don’t make the rules. i fight the good fight. i know what i’m fighting for.
FIND A NALOXONE TRAINING NEAR YOU!!
dear reader, Archangel Michael came to me in january 2025 to tell me that in exchange for information, which i don’t remember the nature of now, i needed to get first aid and CPR certification. there were several instances in which i could have attended a naloxone training. it goes without saying that i could have been more spiritually discerning. there was a timeline in which i could have shown up prepared for the event. i might also remember the information relayed by Archangel Michael.
the address to the food bank features “angel” numbers 222 in the address. i learned this on the call with the dispatcher. tell me that’s not enough to make you wanna puke.
this is not a story of spiritual obligation, mine or the man who took the drugs. we are not facing judgement. my duty is done. that guy is still fighting his demons. the christians are still operating a food bank to uplift their egos. the spiritual war wages on.
the narrative of spiritual warfare holds weight. so does a narrative that’s really mundane about how anyone and everyone should go get naloxone training. it’s both. when the spiritual is the material and the material is the spiritual, it doesn’t matter what we believe. in this case, it matters what we choose to do.
you’re enlisted whether you think you are or aren’t. remember the parallels. you know them. in the cost-benefit analysis that our systems force upon us, you benefit when you acknowledge where you stand on the battlefield. and if you don’t want to be a part of it, move!!! do something you mean to be a part of that still participates in the dismantling of corrupt systems and the building of new, caring and just systems. when you look at the choices made in the narration, they’re very easy. they’re dangling fruits.