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Between the Cross and the Unseen: A Journey Through Faith, Fear, and Spiritual Reckoning
10/8/20269 min read
Childhood was shaped by a spiritual crossroads I did not yet have the language to recognize. At home and in church, faith appeared ordered, familiar, and clearly defined. My parents raised me in the Episcopal Church, where Sunday mornings followed a dependable rhythm of hymns, prayers, scripture, and solemn explanations. In Sunday school, I learned the stories of creation, the flood, Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. These lessons presented God as loving but just, morality as a matter of obedience and conscience, and salvation as the promise offered through Christian faith.
That understanding was neither questioned nor treated as unusual. The church provided a framework for distinguishing right from wrong and for interpreting suffering, death, and hope. Yet beyond its quiet rituals, another spiritual vocabulary entered my childhood through my grandmother. She spoke about Great-Aunt Gracie, a reverend in a nearby spiritualist church, with a mixture of respect, amusement, and caution. Great-Aunt Gracie belonged to the family, but her religious world seemed to exist just beyond the boundaries established by my parents and the Episcopal congregation.
One story especially held my attention. According to my grandmother, a man once received a warning during a tarot reading. He dismissed it, continued with his plans, and later died in a freak accident. The account was never presented as a proof that tarot cards controlled fate. Instead, its power lay in the uncertainty surrounding it. Perhaps the reading had revealed a danger; perhaps coincidence had given an ordinary tragedy a supernatural shape. Either possibility left an impression.
These stories made spirituality seem powerful, mysterious, and potentially dangerous. The Christian teachings of my parents offered reassurance through established beliefs, while Great-Aunt Gracie represented an alternative dimension in which unseen forces might communicate through symbols, intuition, or warning. I was drawn to that world even as I feared it. Between the cross and the unfamiliar signs of spiritual practice, faith became more than instruction. It became a tension inherited from two branches of the same family, each suggesting a different way to understand what could not be seen.
When I was very young, I spent long hours near my mother’s vanity mirror, speaking to a companion no one else seemed able to see. The mirror stood among familiar things—brushes, bottles, folded cloth—and yet that corner of the room felt separate from the rest of the house. I would talk, ask questions, invent games, and wait for answers. To me, the presence was as ordinary as any childhood friend. My mother, when she noticed me speaking alone, gently explained that the companion was imaginary. I accepted her words without fully accepting her conclusion.
That companion was not the only unfamiliar visitor I remembered from childhood. At different times, I noticed figures, voices, or presences that appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving no clear evidence that they had been there. Some experiences may have belonged to dreams, half-formed memories, or the imaginative intensity of childhood. Others seemed connected to particular rooms or moments, although I could not explain why. I had no reliable language for separating perception from invention, recollection from fantasy, or an ordinary childhood reaction from something more mysterious. The uncertainty was less frightening than confusing, and I learned to keep much of it to myself.
Years later, after I began studying witchcraft, I revisited those memories with a different vocabulary. I wondered whether the child at the mirror might have been a spirit guide, or whether that interpretation had been shaped by what I encountered in my studies. I could not prove either possibility. The distance between the child I had been and the adult looking backward made certainty impossible, yet it also revealed how enduring those encounters had become. What once seemed like play acquired a new, unsettled significance. Rather than providing a final answer, the memories deepened my desire to understand what might exist beyond the visible world—and how much of that world is filtered through belief, fear, memory, and the searching mind.
In adolescence, the narrator entered a world shaped by peace-and-love ideals, poetry, marijuana, and persistent spiritual questions. The period carried an atmosphere of experimentation, yet beneath its cultural optimism lay uncertainty about morality, God, and the consequences of altered consciousness. One teacher discovered a poem written while the narrator was under the influence of marijuana. Rather than responding with ridicule, the teacher kept the narrator after class, offered a Christian tract, and explained the gospel of Jesus Christ. The teacher then suggested a prayer through which the narrator could ask God to reveal the truth.
The narrator attempted to respond sincerely, repeating the suggested words and trying to open inwardly to their meaning. Still, the message remained largely intellectual. The emotional and spiritual significance of salvation could not yet be grasped, and the encounter did not produce an immediate conversion. Later, after smoking marijuana, the narrator decided to ask God directly whether getting high was wrong. While walking home, that question became the center of a terrifying experience. An illuminated church sign announced, “Jesus saves and heals,” transforming an ordinary landmark into an urgent spiritual declaration.
The narrator felt that the soul could not keep pace with the body, as though consciousness were separating from physical movement. An auburn aura surrounded the experience, while an unseen force seemed to pull the narrator toward a dark abyss. Panic intensified into fear of judgment and possible damnation. A friend walking nearby offered reassurance that God was present, and, with startling suddenness, the fear subsided. Yet relief did not lead directly to Christian faith. Instead, the encounter drove the narrator away, leaving behind guilt, spiritual imagery, and a continuing fear of hell. The episode became a lasting reference point: proof, perhaps, that the unseen could intrude upon ordinary life, but also a source of confusion and dread that resisted easy interpretation.
After high school, I accepted an invitation to attend a Jesus crusade at Giants Stadium. I arrived expecting a large religious gathering, but the scene immediately felt charged with significance. Sunlight poured over the stadium, illuminating the seats and the faces of thousands who had gathered to worship. Beyond the stadium, however, rain fell across the surrounding city beneath heavy, dark clouds. The sharp division between brightness and storm seemed to mirror something within me: hope opening before me while fear, uncertainty, and old questions still gathered at the edges of my life.
The meeting grew intense as music, preaching, and communal prayer joined in a single rising movement. People lifted their hands, sang with conviction, and spoke openly about surrender and redemption. Amid the worship, I experienced what I understood as the revelation of a new prayer language. It was unfamiliar, yet it seemed to emerge from a place deeper than ordinary speech. Rather than analyzing the experience, I received it as an invitation to trust. When the preacher led the crowd in the sinner’s prayer, I repeated the words sincerely, asking Jesus to forgive me and enter my life. I regarded that moment as a spiritual turning point, a threshold between the person I had been and the person I hoped to become.
In the months that followed, I became involved with a nondenominational church. Faith moved beyond a single event and became central to my daily identity, shaping my choices, relationships, and sense of purpose. At that stage, my commitment was hopeful and deeply felt; I genuinely wanted my life to glorify God, not because someone had forced the desire upon me, but because I believed I had found direction. Within that community, I also met the man who would become my husband. Our relationship developed alongside my growing faith, and I understood both love and devotion through the language of service, promise, and shared spiritual purpose. The stadium’s sunlight remained, in memory, a sign that transition could begin even while storms still surrounded me.
After marriage, the narrator entered motherhood with a sincere hope of building a faithful, stable home. She imagined family life shaped by prayer, responsibility, and shared religious convictions. Raising children soon demanded nearly all her strength, yet she continued trying to honor her commitments and preserve a sense of normalcy. Behind that effort, however, the household was becoming increasingly unpredictable.
Bills went unpaid, utilities were disconnected, and ordinary responsibilities became sources of crisis. The husband’s emotional volatility meant that everyone learned to monitor his moods, choose words carefully, and organize daily life around avoiding his anger. His frightening behavior could not initially be explained by the family. They saw the consequences—tension, confusion, and instability—without understanding the illness that would later be identified as bipolar disorder. Recognizing that diagnosis did not erase the harm, nor did it reduce him to a label; it helped clarify how untreated or unmanaged mental illness had affected every member of the household.
A pastor attempted to counsel the couple, offering spiritual guidance and an opportunity to confront the growing strain within the marriage. For a time, that effort suggested that communication and faith might restore what was breaking apart. Eventually, the husband refused to continue participating. The narrator was left carrying the practical and emotional burdens while trying to protect the children and maintain the appearance of a functioning family.
She prayed repeatedly for improvement, asking God to bring peace, healing, and steadiness. Yet the circumstances continued to deteriorate, creating a painful distance between her belief in divine help and the reality she lived each day. Exhaustion replaced confidence, and safety became a question rather than an assumption. Marriage came to mean more than devotion and shared ideals; it also involved limits, responsibility, and the difficult recognition that love and faith could not, by themselves, control another person’s illness or choices.
As the years passed, the marital situation did not improve in the way the narrator had prayed it would. Each crisis seemed to demand another season of patience, another request for guidance, and another assurance that change was still possible. Prayer became constant, woven into mornings, sleepless nights, church services, and the quiet moments spent caring for the children. Yet its familiarity did not make it easier. Gradually, religious commitment became associated less with comfort than with fatigue, disappointment, and the fear of asking for an answer that never came.
Attempts to seek pastoral support offered moments of recognition, but they did not resolve the instability at home. Advice about endurance, forgiveness, obedience, or stronger faith could feel inadequate beside financial pressure, domestic uncertainty, and the continuing need to protect the children. The narrator learned to perform steadiness in public while privately managing fear. Worship continued, but the experience of worship changed. Words that had once conveyed assurance began to sound distant, especially when they seemed to explain suffering without relieving it.
This did not amount to a simple rejection of religion. The narrator still longed for protection, meaning, and truth, and still remembered earlier experiences of conversion as genuine and deeply significant. What weakened was confidence in the expected relationship between devotion and deliverance. If God had been present before, why did the danger persist? If prayer mattered, why did the most urgent prayers appear unanswered? At times, it seemed that God had turned away; at others, the narrator could only conclude that the explanations offered by the church were incomplete. Spiritual doubt emerged not from indifference, but from prolonged suffering. Maintaining the appearance of faith while feeling abandoned created its own burden, forcing the narrator to question whether belief could survive without certainty that relief was coming.
The path ahead does not require the narrator to deny the mirror experiences of childhood, the spiritualist stories carried through the family, or the frightening visions associated with altered states. Nor does it require accepting every interpretation attached to them. Those memories, whether understood as supernatural encounters, psychological responses, symbolic images, or some combination of these, helped shape a lasting relationship with fear and uncertainty. The later evangelical conversion offered language, structure, and community, while church life supplied moral certainty and a framework for surviving experiences that seemed impossible to explain. Yet when certainty collapsed within marriage, inherited answers could no longer contain the questions.
This unsettled space may lead the narrator back toward subjects once dismissed or condemned: witchcraft, spirit guides, intuition, tarot, and other spiritual practices. Such a return need not represent rebellion for its own sake. It can be an attempt to examine neglected parts of the self and to reconcile perceptions that conventional teachings left unresolved. At the same time, spiritual curiosity requires discernment. A powerful memory is not automatically verifiable evidence, and a frightening impression should not be treated as proof of a supernatural cause. Separating personal meaning from factual certainty makes room to honor trauma without allowing fear, family narratives, or institutional authority to dictate every interpretation.
That distinction also restores agency. The narrator is a survivor, a mother, and a person entitled to ask whether beliefs formed through family expectations, frightening stories, religious instruction, or intimate dependence still serve life as it is now. Questioning does not erase faith, nor does exploration demand a new system of absolute answers. It creates an honest practice of listening, testing, grieving, and choosing. What emerges is not a simple escape from Christianity or a final allegiance to another tradition, but a more deliberate relationship with the unknown. The narrator is beginning to move beyond the inherited contest between good and evil, asking instead how good is recognized, how harm is prevented, how freedom is lived, and who the self may become when it is no longer defined by fear.