Interview with the Exorcist

Wednesday, May 27, 2026. 6:18 am.

The exorcist arrived twenty-three minutes late carrying a paper cup of coffee and the exhausted patience of a man accustomed to hearing modern people confuse spirituality with branding.

Outside, October leaves scraped across the church parking lot in nervous little spirals. The sky had gone the color of old bruises. Across the street, a pharmacy glowed with the soft fluorescent despair unique to suburban America, where entire civilizations now appear to operate beneath the emotional atmosphere of a waiting room.

“You’re late,” I said.

“I was blessing a woman’s house.”

“Demonic infestation?”

“Squirrels.”

He removed his coat carefully. Priests past sixty move with a certain caution, as though gravity has become less a law than an ongoing negotiation.

The office smelled faintly of extinguished candles, radiator heat, and old books that had survived multiple generations of panic.

There are rooms inside old churches that seem to exist slightly outside ordinary time. Rooms where people have whispered fear for more than a century. Rooms where wallpaper absorbs grief the way curtains absorb cigarette smoke.

This was one of those rooms.

Books climbed the walls in dark leaning columns:
Theology.
Psychology.
Addiction studies.
Neuroscience.
Demonology.
Several alarming volumes about spiritual warfare written by men photographed in lighting usually associated with hostage videos.

“You expected someone theatrical,” the exorcist said.

“I expected at least one raven.”

“You’ve seen too many movies.”

“No,” I said. “Americans have seen too many movies.”

He smiled faintly.

The exorcist himself looked disappointingly ordinary. No burning eyes. No medieval jewelry. No dramatic black cape lifting in unseen winds like a count returning to his ancestral castle after a disappointing plague.

He looked instead like a retired literature professor who had once frightened sophomores by speaking too calmly about death.

Which, frankly, is worse.

We sat across from each other while the old church settled around us with creaks and sighs. Pipes knocked somewhere deep in the building. Wind dragged bare branches across the stained-glass windows with the dry scratching sound of something trying politely to enter.

“Tell me,” he said, “why everyone suddenly cares about exorcists again.”

“Because modern life already feels haunted.”

This interested him.

“How?”

“Well,” I said, “people now carry tiny glowing rectangles that monitor desire, amplify envy, destroy attention spans, encourage narcissism, destabilize marriages, track their movements, and occasionally order paper towels.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“So you do understand possession.”

This is the difficulty with exorcists. Every so often they say something genuinely unsettling and you cannot decide whether they are profound or simply old enough to speak slowly.

The exorcist believed modern people misunderstood evil entirely.

Not because they rejected religion.

Because they rejected corruption.

Modern people still believe in dysfunction.
Trauma.
Conditioning.
Neurochemistry.
Algorithms.
Systems.
Attachment wounds.

But corruption?
Actual moral and spiritual deformation?

That language embarrasses us now. It sounds old-fashioned and judgmental, like something muttered by a disappointed grandfather while repairing clocks in a basement workshop.

“We prefer clinical language,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “Clinical language often removes responsibility.”

Outside, wind pushed leaves through the courtyard in brittle spirals. Somewhere down the block a dog barked with the weary outrage particular to suburban existence.

The exorcist leaned back slightly.

“Most evil,” he said quietly, “enters the human personality as relief.”

There are sentences that sound heavier in candlelight.

The room seemed suddenly colder.

“You think people consciously choose destruction?”

“No one chooses destruction,” he said. “They choose appetite without interruption.”

This, unfortunately, described modern civilization with depressing precision.

People now interpret every impulse as identity.
Every craving as authenticity.
Every appetite as revelation.

Americans especially have become convinced that self-control constitutes oppression unless attached to a wellness subscription and sold in tasteful beige packaging.

The exorcist believed this had consequences.

“Human beings require limits to remain coherent,” he said.

Now here is where contemporary people become nervous. The moment anyone discusses restraint outside a therapy office, Americans begin reacting as though Puritans have emerged from hidden tunnels carrying gluten-free torches.

But the exorcist was not talking about repression exactly.

He was talking about containment.

A civilization cannot survive if every impulse becomes sacred.

“You’ve confused freedom with permission,” he said.

“Same thing.”

“No,” he replied softly. “Freedom is the ability not to obey yourself.”

Outside, dusk deepened across the churchyard. The stained-glass saints darkened into silhouettes. Somewhere nearby a train whistle drifted through town, lonely and metallic, like memory traveling through fog.

The exorcist believed modern people had become spiritually porous.

This was his phrase.

Spiritually porous.

As though contemporary life had transformed human beings into psychic sponges absorbing every panic cycle, sexual image, ideological fever, grievance ritual, conspiracy theory, advertisement, and algorithmic hallucination drifting through the culture like industrial smoke.

“People no longer guard their attention,” he said.

Now this interested me.

Because attention has quietly become the central crisis of modern life.

Everyone distracted.
Everyone fragmented.
Everyone interrupted.

Children cannot sit still.
Adults cannot tolerate silence.
Couples stare at phones across restaurant tables glowing blue like aquarium exhibits while claiming to be “more intentional” about connection.

The exorcist regarded this with visible alarm.

“Attention,” he said, “is where the soul learns what to love.”

Again with the lines.

Priests should not be allowed lines this good. It gives them entirely too much authority in dim lighting.

He spoke about pornography next, though not in the sweaty alarmist tone Americans associate with religious people. He discussed it almost clinically.

“Pornography trains dissociation,” he said.

“How?”

“It separates appetite from encounter.”

Outside, wind rattled the windows a bit harder now.

The church seemed old in the animal sense. Not merely aged. Alive with accumulated memory. Old churches absorb centuries of human panic. They become reservoirs of whispered bargaining.

The exorcist believed modern sexuality had become increasingly disembodied.

People no longer experience one another as souls.
Or citizens.
Or mysteries.

They experience one another as stimulation delivery systems.

Endless novelty.
Endless display.
Endless consumption.

“We’ve converted eros into content,” he said sadly.

This was difficult to argue with while half the internet appeared devoted to choreographed thirst traps filmed beside indoor plants and explained using therapy language.

At one point I asked whether he literally believed in demons.

“Yes.”

“Like actual entities?”

“Yes.”

“With horns?”

“No one with real power needs costumes.”

That sentence landed in the room like a dropped knife.

Outside, leaves scraped violently across the church steps.

The exorcist explained that genuine possession was extremely rare.

Most people seeking exorcists were frightened, lonely, compulsive, unstable, addicted, narcissistic, traumatized, or spending fourteen hours daily marinating inside digital environments specifically engineered to inflame desire and destabilize attention.

“So what’s the real problem?” I asked.

“Disintegration.”

He said it quietly.

Disintegration.

Not wickedness.
Not rebellion.
Not degeneracy.

Disintegration.

The slow collapse of coherence.

The inability to distinguish appetite from meaning.
Stimulation from intimacy.
Performance from identity.
Exposure from connection.

The exorcist believed modern culture rewarded fragmentation at industrial scale.

“You think people are becoming more liberated,” he said. “Many are simply becoming less integrated.”

The lights flickered suddenly.

I looked up immediately.

“Electrical issue,” he said.

“You said that too quickly.”

“Experience.”

This did not improve matters.

The exorcist stood and crossed slowly to the window.

Outside, the churchyard trees twisted in the wind beneath the darkening sky. The town beyond looked small and fragile, pools of television light glowing behind curtains while unseen families microwaved dinners and ignored one another in perfect contemporary harmony.

“Do you know what frightens me most?” he asked.

“What?”

“That people no longer recognize appetite as something capable of enslaving them.”

This was the heart of it.

Modern culture assumes more desire equals more freedom.
More exposure equals more authenticity.
More stimulation equals more aliveness.

Meanwhile everyone grows anxious, exhausted, distracted, lonely, compulsive, and spiritually malnourished while pretending this is empowerment.

The exorcist believed evil rarely appeared dramatic anymore.

No spinning heads.
No Latin shrieking.
No levitation.

Just gradual diminishment.

Attention erosion.
Compulsive comparison.
Humiliation rituals.
Contempt.
Isolation.
Vanity.
Emotional exhibitionism.

“We imagine evil announces itself,” he said. “Usually it just anesthetizes.”

The room had grown almost entirely dark now except for the small green lamp on his desk, which cast both our faces into strange shadows.

At this point I began noticing the church noises.

Old buildings speak constantly.
Pipes ticking.
Wood settling.
Distant footsteps that may or may not exist.
Radiators exhaling like exhausted livestock.

Every ancient church sounds mildly haunted after sunset.

The exorcist noticed me listening.

“You’re uncomfortable.”

“Old churches sound judgmental.”

“No,” he said. “They sound old.”

Fair enough.

I asked whether he believed modern people secretly longed for religion again.

“No.”

This surprised me.

“What do they long for?”

He folded his hands carefully.

“Relief.”

Outside, rain began tapping softly against the stained-glass windows.

The sound filled the room.

The exorcist believed modern life had become spiritually exhausting because people were no longer allowed interior privacy.

Everyone existed under constant visibility now. Permanent performance. Permanent commentary.

Social media had converted ordinary consciousness into theater.

“Human beings were not designed,” he said, “to experience this much audience.”

Again: impossible not to notice the accuracy.

Every person now behaves like a tiny unstable monarchy managing public-relations disasters from bed.

People announce boundaries to strangers.
Curate grief.
Monetize vulnerability.
Broadcast nervous breakdowns beside affiliate links for skin-care products.
Confess emotional exhaustion into podcast microphones while drinking mushroom powder named after Viking concepts.

The exorcist found all this deeply ominous.

“Attention,” he said quietly, “has become predatory.”

Outside, thunder rolled somewhere beyond town.

The church lights flickered again.

Then went out completely.

Darkness swallowed the office.

For one long second neither of us moved.

The old building creaked around us.

Somewhere below, a door closed softly.

I felt every muscle tighten.

Then the exorcist sighed with immense irritation.

“Fuse box,” he muttered.

“You sure?”

“No,” he said calmly. “But if it’s demons, they’ll still have to wait. The electrician comes Thursday.”

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.