Introduction
This is the witness of the Rev. Al Durrance. It was dictated to me, Rob Sanders, on June, 14, 2002. It is written in the first person and I essentially typed it as Al narrated his thoughts. I edited it slightly to make sure it was clear and to clean up my typing mistakes. Every now and then I've inserted a couple of remarks in brackets to clarify what Al said.
Al's Witness
The reason I went to seminary was to find out if there was any possibility of God being available to anyone in this creation, for if it was left up to human beings, I wanted to get off the train. It seemed that the obvious place to go to find out about God would be to a seminary. One day, after I had been accepted as a postulant for holy orders in the Episcopal Church, I was sitting on the side porch of my banker's house, listening to his wife. [Virginia Lively] She told me how Jesus had been with her for three months, and he was still healing people. She saw him healing people, her father was one of them. This raised a lot of questions for me. Why don't I hear about this in the church? So when I got to seminary, I intended to find out about it. When I got there, I realized that nobody wanted to deal with my questions.
The other thing that had happened to me, prior to seminary, was that I asked a friend of mine, who was a priest, what I could do to prepare to go to seminary. He said, "Why don't you try reading the Bible." So I did, and got to know what it said. The only way I know to find out about anything, given my chemical engineering background, was to develop an experiment and to try it out. What I found when I started trying it out was that Jesus Christ was real. He doesn't do everything I asked him to do, but I never prayed for anybody that he didn't touch. [Here Al is referring to prayer with the laying on of hands as did Jesus when he touched and healed people.]
In seminary, and in general, when people brush off healing and other matters and start arguing about it instead of trying it out, it didn't meet my criteria for the scientific approach. As it was, there were two people in my class I could talk to, both had been in engineering before attending seminary. [Al and one of them were ranked equally at the top of the class at graduation from seminary.]
When I got ordained to the diaconate, I started a healing class, and when I was ordained to the priesthood, I started a healing service. During that first year, my organist came to me saying that she had ovarian cancer and was given six to nine months to live. "What should I do?" she asked. I told her to come on Tuesday and we will study and pray, and come on Wednesday for communion and anointing. In six weeks one tumor was completely gone, and the other had not grown. At the end of three months, she was totally clear of cancer. This gave impetus to my idea of trying out the commissions that Jesus gave his church. [Here Al is thinking of Jesus sending out his disciples to heal and cast out demons.] This happened while I was a priest at St. Cloud, Florida.
After that, I moved to Maitland with the proviso that we would have a healing service. The senior warden said that I was welcome to do so, but not to expect anyone to come. So we started one and had about seven families who were comfortable with it. We talked and prayed. After some months I went to Sewanee for continuing education. [Doctorate of Ministry] I left each one of the persons who attended the service in charge of one session in my absence. When I got back they said, "Al, we're glad to have you back, but we are not going to give up the service." So we alternated, one priest led service and one lay led service. For the lay led service we had no communion, but used a liturgy from the OSL [Order of St. Luke] chapter from the cathedral. That was our pattern. People started getting healed, and the witness of that service attracted people from all over town. From time to time, my spiritual mother, Virginia Lively, would come and talk, and that would increase the numbers. We had so many people that we had to build a new church because the old one would not hold them all.
At about that time, I got involved in deliverance and exorcism. Someone came in my office and said, "Fr. Al, my psychiatrist says I have a demon. My priest agrees, but neither of them will do anything about it." I got mad and said, "If they won't do anything, I'll find someone who will or do it myself." This opened a ministry that wasn't found in very many places. What we found was that not everything in the spiritual dimension is the same kind of spirit. Satan is there, as well as works of the flesh such as anger, fear, anxiety, vanity. [What the New Testament calls unclear spirits and not simply demons.] One day, when praying for someone, my discerner [the person who prays with Al and discerns the spirits] said that the person being prayed for had a spirit of vanity. When that happened, the vain spirit spoke through the woman and said, "Oh don't do that." There are also spirits of humans [ghosts] not yet free in the Lord, hanging around and also entering people. These were absolved and sent to Jesus. In the end, everything was sent to Jesus so he could sort them out. Subsequently, I have encountered multiple personalities, and found that there are alters egos that cannot be cast out, but reintroduced into the host persons as part of their original personality. Jesus does this, based on forgiveness. The other thing I've found is that sexual bondage occurs when two people have intercourse. The two become one flesh and they carry each other inside of themselves. That also can be removed through repentance and forgiveness. Jesus can take that. As this was happening, a lady came through Maitland who had narcolepsy, and in praying for her, we were told to case out a spirit of anger. We did, and she was healed of the narcolepsy. Until then we had no idea that she had a spirit of anger.
I also had a problem with abusive anger. I got mad once and threw one of my children against the wall. I though I had better do something about that, but could not find anyone to do an exorcism. So I went to a Franciscan monastery, talked to a friend who was a friar, and asked him if he would cast out the spirit of anger. He did, and since that day I have never struck one of my children in anger, and never had a drink of hard liquor, both of which were a tremendous healing for me. [Al was an alcoholic by the time he was seventeen, and drank until the fifth year of his ministry.]
After that, I began to learn about inner healing or healing of memories. I learned that over a period of time from people like Agnes Sanford, Virginia Lively, and Ruth Carter Stapleton, and find it very helpful in dealing with people who have past trauma, past bondage. I used to have trouble at diocesan convention when the people there would argue. One time, when they are arguing about something, I tried to say something and got so upset that I couldn't talk, was incoherent, and ending up sobbing. I asked a friend in my parish, Lillian Updike to pray for my memory of living at home as a little boy, when the adults were fighting with one another. I literally saw Jesus come to the little boy, and he did not stop the argument, but he changed my perception of history, so that I was not torn up by the argument. After that, I could go to the diocese convention without reacting to the arguments on the floor. I had taught Lillian most of what she knew, and I had been prayed for by various notable healers, but Lillian, who was just getting started, was the key to my healing.
In the first ten years of my ministry my prayer life was not very disciplined. I found someone who also wanted to improve their prayer time, and we decided we would meet every morning and do morning prayer and take time to listen to see what the Lord said to us. After doing this for several months, the Lord revealed to me that the love of Jesus is Abba's love. The other thing he revealed to me was that when I listen to the Lord, it doesn't do any good unless I do what he says. After that, I started making a list to check off that I had done what Jesus told me to do.
Not too many years ago, I got colon cancer and read a book that said to look back eighteen months to two years to see if there was a cause. I looked back and remembered a vestry retreat in which the vestry did their own long range planning instead of asking Jesus what he wanted us to do. At that point, the congregation was growing too fast for the building. I wanted to leave the parish but the bishop didn't want to offer me anything else as the parish was his cash cow and he wanted to keep milking it. I had surgery, forgave the people I felt had rejected me, and have had no recurrence. I thought they had rejected me, but they hadn't. It was not perception, not reality. I think if someone has cancer and they keep on doing the same things, it depresses the immune system and the cancer can reoccur.
In the middle of 1988, the Lord told him he wanted me to get out of the parish ministry, and work with Order of St. Luke and Camp Farthest Out. By the end of 1989, I was unexpectedly the North American warden of the OSL where I served for five years.
This adventure with God all began with checking out the Scriptures, walking with Jesus, trying to find out about him. As a child, I had grown up the common southern evangelical image of God as a ogre, a mean old man, just waiting to throw me into hell. When I found out about Jesus, I believed he loved me, so that my God was a schizophrenic. I could see God the Father making bad check marks and Jesus going along behind him with whiteout. Then one day, in my quiet time, it came to me, revealed to me, that the love I saw in Jesus is Abba's love. This happened after I had starting praying each morning.
Further Comments
After Al had finished talking, I asked him a couple of questions. I found out what follows.
1. When doing counseling, Al regularly asked people if they would like to receive laying on of hands for exorcism. None have turned him down, all felt better afterward. [I am convinced that virtually everyone is subject to evil spirits in some form, and that exorcism is good for everyone. It was the normal custom of the church of the first few centuries to regularly exorcise their catechumens before baptism.]
2. Al has prayed for many hundreds of people. [Many, many people have been healed and delivered of terrible things. I know this because I've known Al for over thirty years and was myself delivered from hell through exorcism when I first knew him.
3. Al moved 7 times between 1st and 6th grade. His dad had a drinking problem.
4. Necromancy is forbidden in the bible, lots of people are inadvertent mediums. [Al never converses with spirits of any sort, except to send them to Jesus. Some might find his belief in ghosts rather odd, or quaint, or even wrong. In his view, they are mentioned in the Bible, and the Bible accepts at face value that they assist in divination. This is strictly forbidden, and Al has helped those involved in divination to get rid of them.]
5. When Al received exorcism for his spirit of anger, there was no physical manifestation. He had no idea whether or not he had been delivered. Only later did he discover that he had no compulsion to drink, nor to hit his children again in anger. Most people have some physical manifestation when exorcised but not all.
6. In regard to inner healing, healing of the emotional and spiritual wounds we have received over the years, Al thinks Ephesians 5:16 is relevant, speaking of redeeming the time. [In the end, inner healing depends upon forgiveness and the fact that Jesus is present to all time, although he has yet to fully manifest his active presence in all times, past and present. As Christ said in John's gospel, "When Abraham was, I am." On another note, I think inner healing has always spontaneously occurred when people received the gospels narratives into their hearts. As that happened, old wounds were healed, and times of rejection and hurt were taken up into the forgiving, protective love of Christ. I have more thinking to do on this subject, and need to sort it out theologically.]
7. Finally, a result of past conversations: Al thinks exorcism is a negative, not positive ministry. It sets people free but it doesn't force them to be free. Being free is a matter of choice. Freedom requires walking with the Lord, worship, prayer, repentance study, fellowship, ministry, all the ways we learn to live the Christian life. But having said that, it is often difficult for those afflicted by evil spirits to freely choose the things of God. But God helps us choose him, giving us the Holy Spirit and delivering us from bondage.
A Final Comment
When I was in seminary, 1973 6, my New Testament professor, Dr. Albert Mollegan, said that secular therapy was a modern form of casting out evil spirits. I do not believe this. It is doubtful that Mollegan had ever received an exorcism. The Lord Jesus, in a matter of seconds, can set people free in ways that therapy can scarcely do at all, if ever. Plus, in exorcism, there is the wonder of knowing Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, as one who actually loves, a love that sets you free. Secular therapy and exorcism are not the same. They are very, very different. Back in 1969 when I first accepted Jesus Christ and received exorcism, I do not think secular therapy could have helped me. They may well have drugged me, talked to me forever, analyzed me without end. What I needed to do was forgive, and once I forgave, Jesus had the rights to me. He cast out the devil and his angels. The Church needs to learn this immediately and put it into practice. This is not to say that counseling cannot help. I often refer people to Christian counselors so they can sort out their relationships. But I also pray for them, praying that the risen Lord Jesus set them free of every spirit contrary to the Holy Spirit. This sets people free to live, while counseling helps them learn how to live.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
