Post by Radrook Admin on Nov 11, 2022 22:29:35 GMT -5
Aunt Felicita and her Voodoo-like ways
By Radrook
I was recently watching one of the latest versions of the classic King Kong films, where the primitive natives of Skull Island are beating drums, gyrating their bodies, showing the whites of their eyes, and grimacing gruesomely in their effort to make King Kong appear. Ironically, such display reminded me of my childhood experience involving my Aunt Felicita.
Now that's rather ironic. After all, Voodoo practitioners are dwelling in darkness, and can be expected behave in harmony with it and its lord of darkness, the Devil. But such behavior is definitely not typical nor expected from followers of Christ.
No, I had never seen that kind of macabre display as shown in the King Kong movie before, neither from pagans, nor from professed Christians. But unfortunately for me, that was soon to change when we went to visit my Aunt Felicita, my father's sister in San Juan Puerto Rico.
She was a Pentecostal married to a husband who was 100 times more dedicated to being a real Christian than anyone I have yet encountered. A man who truly wanted to serve Christ, and whose biblically-based decisions to serve Christ seemed to constantly annoy my aunt Felicita.
For example, he would turn the other cheek, never retaliate, but respond with kindness. If questioned, he would cite scriptures proving that Christ told us to behave that way. Yet, despite his very impressive dedication, he never displayed any kind of behavior similar to the natives in the King Kong film.
Unfortunately, my aunt Felicita, turned out to be quite a different. Well, the first thing I noticed about her was that she would suddenly slam the palm of her right hand against a wall, the dinner table, or any other available flat surface, and yell out “Barkay!” right in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation.
She would also suddenly utter totally unintelligible sounds while claiming to be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now, although I was a child, I was unconvinced. You see, I was familiar with Jesus Christ and found it impossible to imagine him making such garbled sounds while depriving people of their free will. In short, her sincerity and sanity began to concern me.
Also, she was also extremely evangelistic.
“Why don’t we all attend church tonight!?” she kept enthusiastically insisting very often out of the proverbial clear blue.
“Some other time,” my father had kept calmly responding.
“You are all going to burn in the lake of fire forever if you don’t!” she kept warning.
Well, since that threat didn’t seem to motivate my parents into complying, I figured that it couldn’t really be that serious. However, the more they didn’t comply with her demand, the more erratic her behavior seemed to become. Soon, she began claiming that she had visions of demons invading her house, and describing how holy angels would suddenly arrive from heaven to forcefully evict them.
For some reason, she went to great lengths in meticulously describing the gruesome physical appearances of the demons with great relish, but never that of the holy angels. On and on she went, until I really began wishing to get back home to Newark NJ where I wouldn’t have to listen to all her horrifying drivel.
Well, the time to leave was approaching, and that’s when it happened. One moment, my father was criticizing me as usual, I responded in frustration, and aunt Felicita suddenly yelled “Barkay!" dropped to the bedroom floor, and began frenetically rolling back and forth as if overtaken by some supernatural force.
Then, to my horror, she rose up slowly, as pale as a ghost, her black, limp, hair drenched in perspiration, showing only the white of her eyes, and slowly contorting her body in voodoo-like ways.
Then, to my horror, she extended her skinny arms towards me, while making clutching motions with her boney hands, and began slowly approaching me in that semi dark room. My mother hugged me to her chest protectively, but relentlessly, on she came, until she was kneeling right in front of where I was sitting.
“Do you know who I am? I am the Lord Jesus Christ,” she proclaimed calmly, in this deep, threatening, manlike voice I had thought her incapable of producing.
“Why are you disrespecting your father? Ehhhh?” she suddenly said in a threatening tone.
That's when I decided that staying near her wasn’t such a good idea, and that my parents weren’t going to be able to protect me against this supernatural force. So I cut loose and bolted out of the house into the darkness outside. Now, I didn’t have any particular destination. I just wanted distance between us.
Once out of the gate, I turned left onto the dark, narrow dirt path in front of the house while imagining her arms extended with clutching hands in pursuit. Then, after running approx. 200 feet, I suddenly saw this silhouette of a male figure slowly limping towards me and stopped. I stood squinting to get a better look and gradually noticed something rather unusual about the shape of its head, as if it had three long, curved horns protruding from it. So I decided to take my chances with my aunt and bolted back up the dirt path imagining this hideous being, whatever it might have been, hot on my heels.
Well, to my surprise, I found Aunt Felicita sitting smugly in the living room with my parents as if absolutely nothing unusual had happened. I was shaking and crying from the sheer terror.
“What happened?” my hitherto recently-demonic-looking aunt asked calmly.
After I described what I thought I had seen, and after my father had gone out to investigate and had found absolutely nothing unusual, she said:
“Do you know why that just happened to you? Eh? Do you know?"
"Because I talked back to my father and don’t go to church!” I responded in order to prevent her from coming at me with another terrifying voodoo-like performance.
“That is right! That happened to you because you were naughty with your father and because you don’t go to church. Do you want to go to church now? Are you two going to take him to church now?” she also asked my parents:
“Yes! Yes! I’ll go to church! I’ll go to church!” I fearfully responded before my parents could react. Of course, my parents finally agreed to attend as well after that compelling demonstration.
The next day, late in the evening, we were present at church as promised. Initially, everything looked normal, and I felt that I was under the protection of Almighty God. I listened calmly as a fervent sermon was given and fiery testimonies were provided expressing faith and describing miracles. Listened to the songs were sung enthusiastically accompanied by piano and the palm-slaps on tambourines. Then finally, the there was the fervent call for converts to approach the stage to give themselves over to Christ.
Now, I was still observing all this calmly and with great interest, when suddenly, some women on the other side of the church began dropping to the floor and rolling down the aisle exactly as my aunt had done the night before. Then, to make maters even worse, the man standing next to me, began uttering strange unintelligible sounds with a quavering voice followed by many others who began behaving similar to the way my aunt had behaved that unforgettable terrifying night before.
Suddenly, instead of feeling that I was in a church, I felt that my aunt had cunningly led me into a devious trap so she could finish the gruesome ritual she had performed the night before albeit with their help. I panicked and for a brief moment, I considered bolting for the nearest exit.
But then I imagined that they would either intercept me on the way there, or else follow me outside and converge on me in the darkness, you know, hunt me down like in the film The Body Snatchers. So, trembling fearfully for my life, I just stood horrified and endured the situation as best as I could.
Results? After finally arriving back home in Newark NJ, I simply wasn’t the same. I had become a very nervous kid who morbidly feared the darkness, being alone in the apartment, and who flinched fearfully at shadows. I also found that I could no longer sleep with my bedroom lights off, and had developed a fear of this huge crucifix with a glowing green Christ on it which my parents had placed prominently on my bedroom wall. Finally, I had to have it removed in order to sleep in peace.
Naturally, I promised myself never to be exposed to that kind of experience again by avoiding any religion related to it. Now, I’m sure that back at her home, my Aunt Felicita felt she had done an excellent job in evangelizing.
Instead, she had made me a nonreligious, nervous wreck and convinced me that her particular version of what she had chosen to consider Christianity was definitely not for me.
Now that's rather ironic. After all, Voodoo practitioners are dwelling in darkness, and can be expected behave in harmony with it and its lord of darkness, the Devil. But such behavior is definitely not typical nor expected from followers of Christ.
No, I had never seen that kind of macabre display as shown in the King Kong movie before, neither from pagans, nor from professed Christians. But unfortunately for me, that was soon to change when we went to visit my Aunt Felicita, my father's sister in San Juan Puerto Rico.
She was a Pentecostal married to a husband who was 100 times more dedicated to being a real Christian than anyone I have yet encountered. A man who truly wanted to serve Christ, and whose biblically-based decisions to serve Christ seemed to constantly annoy my aunt Felicita.
For example, he would turn the other cheek, never retaliate, but respond with kindness. If questioned, he would cite scriptures proving that Christ told us to behave that way. Yet, despite his very impressive dedication, he never displayed any kind of behavior similar to the natives in the King Kong film.
Unfortunately, my aunt Felicita, turned out to be quite a different. Well, the first thing I noticed about her was that she would suddenly slam the palm of her right hand against a wall, the dinner table, or any other available flat surface, and yell out “Barkay!” right in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation.
She would also suddenly utter totally unintelligible sounds while claiming to be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now, although I was a child, I was unconvinced. You see, I was familiar with Jesus Christ and found it impossible to imagine him making such garbled sounds while depriving people of their free will. In short, her sincerity and sanity began to concern me.
Also, she was also extremely evangelistic.
“Why don’t we all attend church tonight!?” she kept enthusiastically insisting very often out of the proverbial clear blue.
“Some other time,” my father had kept calmly responding.
“You are all going to burn in the lake of fire forever if you don’t!” she kept warning.
Well, since that threat didn’t seem to motivate my parents into complying, I figured that it couldn’t really be that serious. However, the more they didn’t comply with her demand, the more erratic her behavior seemed to become. Soon, she began claiming that she had visions of demons invading her house, and describing how holy angels would suddenly arrive from heaven to forcefully evict them.
For some reason, she went to great lengths in meticulously describing the gruesome physical appearances of the demons with great relish, but never that of the holy angels. On and on she went, until I really began wishing to get back home to Newark NJ where I wouldn’t have to listen to all her horrifying drivel.
Well, the time to leave was approaching, and that’s when it happened. One moment, my father was criticizing me as usual, I responded in frustration, and aunt Felicita suddenly yelled “Barkay!" dropped to the bedroom floor, and began frenetically rolling back and forth as if overtaken by some supernatural force.
Then, to my horror, she rose up slowly, as pale as a ghost, her black, limp, hair drenched in perspiration, showing only the white of her eyes, and slowly contorting her body in voodoo-like ways.
Then, to my horror, she extended her skinny arms towards me, while making clutching motions with her boney hands, and began slowly approaching me in that semi dark room. My mother hugged me to her chest protectively, but relentlessly, on she came, until she was kneeling right in front of where I was sitting.
“Do you know who I am? I am the Lord Jesus Christ,” she proclaimed calmly, in this deep, threatening, manlike voice I had thought her incapable of producing.
“Why are you disrespecting your father? Ehhhh?” she suddenly said in a threatening tone.
That's when I decided that staying near her wasn’t such a good idea, and that my parents weren’t going to be able to protect me against this supernatural force. So I cut loose and bolted out of the house into the darkness outside. Now, I didn’t have any particular destination. I just wanted distance between us.
Once out of the gate, I turned left onto the dark, narrow dirt path in front of the house while imagining her arms extended with clutching hands in pursuit. Then, after running approx. 200 feet, I suddenly saw this silhouette of a male figure slowly limping towards me and stopped. I stood squinting to get a better look and gradually noticed something rather unusual about the shape of its head, as if it had three long, curved horns protruding from it. So I decided to take my chances with my aunt and bolted back up the dirt path imagining this hideous being, whatever it might have been, hot on my heels.
Well, to my surprise, I found Aunt Felicita sitting smugly in the living room with my parents as if absolutely nothing unusual had happened. I was shaking and crying from the sheer terror.
“What happened?” my hitherto recently-demonic-looking aunt asked calmly.
After I described what I thought I had seen, and after my father had gone out to investigate and had found absolutely nothing unusual, she said:
“Do you know why that just happened to you? Eh? Do you know?"
"Because I talked back to my father and don’t go to church!” I responded in order to prevent her from coming at me with another terrifying voodoo-like performance.
“That is right! That happened to you because you were naughty with your father and because you don’t go to church. Do you want to go to church now? Are you two going to take him to church now?” she also asked my parents:
“Yes! Yes! I’ll go to church! I’ll go to church!” I fearfully responded before my parents could react. Of course, my parents finally agreed to attend as well after that compelling demonstration.
The next day, late in the evening, we were present at church as promised. Initially, everything looked normal, and I felt that I was under the protection of Almighty God. I listened calmly as a fervent sermon was given and fiery testimonies were provided expressing faith and describing miracles. Listened to the songs were sung enthusiastically accompanied by piano and the palm-slaps on tambourines. Then finally, the there was the fervent call for converts to approach the stage to give themselves over to Christ.
Now, I was still observing all this calmly and with great interest, when suddenly, some women on the other side of the church began dropping to the floor and rolling down the aisle exactly as my aunt had done the night before. Then, to make maters even worse, the man standing next to me, began uttering strange unintelligible sounds with a quavering voice followed by many others who began behaving similar to the way my aunt had behaved that unforgettable terrifying night before.
Suddenly, instead of feeling that I was in a church, I felt that my aunt had cunningly led me into a devious trap so she could finish the gruesome ritual she had performed the night before albeit with their help. I panicked and for a brief moment, I considered bolting for the nearest exit.
But then I imagined that they would either intercept me on the way there, or else follow me outside and converge on me in the darkness, you know, hunt me down like in the film The Body Snatchers. So, trembling fearfully for my life, I just stood horrified and endured the situation as best as I could.
Results? After finally arriving back home in Newark NJ, I simply wasn’t the same. I had become a very nervous kid who morbidly feared the darkness, being alone in the apartment, and who flinched fearfully at shadows. I also found that I could no longer sleep with my bedroom lights off, and had developed a fear of this huge crucifix with a glowing green Christ on it which my parents had placed prominently on my bedroom wall. Finally, I had to have it removed in order to sleep in peace.
Naturally, I promised myself never to be exposed to that kind of experience again by avoiding any religion related to it. Now, I’m sure that back at her home, my Aunt Felicita felt she had done an excellent job in evangelizing.
Instead, she had made me a nonreligious, nervous wreck and convinced me that her particular version of what she had chosen to consider Christianity was definitely not for me.