The doctrine transformed into a living and effective word in my life.
I looked at my life and realised that I can sum it up in three stages. The first, which lasted eighteen years, I have completely forgotten, repressed and therefore, in a way, lost.
The second lasted roughly thirty years, characterised by a significant dichotomy between my inner self, where I felt inadequate, confused, insecure and ineffective, and my outer self, where I masked it all with an aggressive, determined, at times almost masculine attitude, always aiming for the top, first in my studies and then in my work.
The result of this division was a complete immersion in a very long and hectic journey consisting of fortune-telling, palm reading, years of psychoanalysis, reiki courses and sessions, reading and studying time regression, family constellations, bioenergetic therapy, transactional analysis courses and sessions… and all this whilst travelling far and wide. I described myself as a woman in search of enlightenment.
What exactly I meant by ‘enlightenment’ back then, I don’t know for sure. I only know that I was desperately seeking answers to why I felt so latently sad, angry and so inadequate, especially in the intimacy of my romantic relationships.
Well, at every stage of this journey, those few flashes—relics of that forgotten adolescence, carefully hidden—relating to the abuse I had suffered were confirmed. This explained many things, but it didn’t heal. Quite the opposite.
In the meantime, I had graduated with top marks, had relationships—some significant ones—whose ends I had painfully engineered each time. I had got married, suffered two miscarriages, and gone through a difficult divorce. And I had discovered by chance that I was possessed by demons. Many of them, or so I was told.
From there began my odyssey of persistent and even violent exorcisms, in which I now see the utter failure to give Jesus the role he deserves as Saviour and Victor, instead magnifying the power of a demon who had in fact already been defeated and stripping the person to be freed—me, in this case—of their dignity.
Yet it was during these years that I realised Jesus was more than just a name, that there was something more behind the simple definition of the Son of a God who felt distant to me. One evening, after one of the first exorcisms in a small chapel, I remember that without thinking I got up from the chair where I was sitting and rushed towards the crucifix on the wall, and there I remained in tears, looking up at it from below, feeling that only there was I safe. From then on, every morning and every evening I had to go into a church, any church, and sit beneath a crucifix. I remember one afternoon when I was feeling unwell, I found the church near my home closed. Through the window I could see the crucifix inside and I clung to it, pressing myself against that glass, in tears, staring at it and asking for help.
In my ignorance of God’s plan of salvation, I felt that only Jesus on that cross could save me.
From exorcisms I moved on to deliverance (I had, in fact, left the Catholic Church to join an Evangelical one). Finally guided to recognise how and why I had sinned and to ask God for forgiveness for each of my mistakes, a new phase began in that second half of my life, in which I read the Bible and regularly attended Bible studies. My search for God was passionate, I would dare to say compulsive: I listened to sermon after sermon, attended courses and seminars, and took part in conferences. It didn’t matter where I had to go, as long as they spoke of God and of that Son on whom I felt everything depended.
I was thirsty for the Word, but I drank it haphazardly and continued to harbour a latent sense of condemnation within me. The deliverance sessions I underwent, still frequent, were indeed less intense but seemed as though they would never end. Focused as I was on freeing myself from something, it was as though I were running whilst constantly looking over my shoulder… and I ran… I ran… forgetting to live and, above all, to live a Christian life as a daughter of God, which I was, having recognised Jesus with all my heart as my one and only Lord and Saviour.
The watershed between all this—which I call my ‘BEFORE’—and my ‘NOW’ is Cantonuovo. Now I see how the Lord, with His gentleness and grace, led me step by step to that place, where God lived and revealed Himself to others in His very essence, without additions or omissions; where Jesus’ commandment to love one another is fulfilled; where praying for one another is a constant and listening is genuine.
It was the teachings so full of enthusiasm, the prayers, the praise and the passionate and tireless spiritual guidance that I found there which set in motion within me a process of truth and of experiencing the Holy Spirit, which is transforming me. I was finally able to put things in order.
With my spirit finally freed from its bonds, I have had the grace to experience God and his love! And doctrine has been transformed into a living and effective word in my life.
I have experienced His peace, His joy; I have felt within me a love for others that has surprised me by how it has overwhelmed me: a love that is overwhelming, uncontrollable, moving, absolute.
My prayer in recent years has always been this: “Lord, set me free and teach me to love”, and He is answering me, making me feel that what I have felt in recent times is only a part of the love with which He loves me too! He is removing the masks, shattering the scripts, revealing every lie with which the devil still tries to drag me back into old patterns. But God is faithful and transforms everything into an opportunity for learning and drawing closer to Him. And He listens to me and sets me free every time.
By accepting Jesus into my life, I have gone from casting out the evil one to understanding who I am, to savouring what it means to be a child of God, to finding my true self and my true identity.
The first time everyone prayed together for me and two other people, placing us at the centre of a circle made of hands, prayer and singing in the Spirit, I closed my eyes and felt for the first time that I belonged to something unique; I felt part of a whole. I too felt worthy of receiving attention and love freely.
And I felt that my place was there.