ARTICLES

Ransomed from the Darkness

Mary Brings Back Local Guru

By Moira Noonan as told to Donna Steichen

Editor: This is the second of a two-part story. In last month's segment, Noonan described her journey through New Age programs -- from Silva Mind Control to Reiki.

When I first started ministry training, I used to take Malia to Sunday school at the Church of Religious Science. But before she was six, she refused to go anymore. "Mom, this isn't right," she said. "I don't like what they're teaching me."

I didn't know what to do, because I had to be there every Sunday. It didn't occur to me to send her to a Catholic Church; I was sure they would never accept the child of a fallen-away Catholic New Ager like me. But I believe the Blessed Mother took a hand in what happened next to her little protégé. Just before the beginning of the school year, at the neighborhood swimming pool, a woman I barely knew, walked up and asked, "Do you have your daughter in Sunday school?"

She was a Lutheran, and she said she made it part of her Christian mission to invite children to Sunday school. I didn't know much about Lutheranism, except that it is Christian, but it seemed possible to my divided mind that God might prefer to have her there rather than at the New Age church. So I said, "Oh, yes, she can go. It is kind of you to ask."

"If you can have her completely dressed and ready to go by 8:30 every Sunday morning, I'll take her to church with us," she said. So for the next five years, Malia went with our generous neighbors to the Lutheran church in Encinitas.

She even went to First Communion there. I was still in the New Age ministry at the Religious Science church in Del Mar, but by then I had starting reading about Our Lady visiting at Medjugorje, and I knew something was missing from Sunday School books she brought home to prepare for the Lutheran First Communion.

"Malia, I don't want to offend our good neighbors," I said, "but I know that what you were taught is different from what I learned when I had First Communion. So would you be willing to go to First Communion at the Catholic Church, too?"

I called a nearby Catholic parish (St. John the Evangelist in Encinitas), and told the religious ed coordinator, Cindy Combs, about our tangled situation. I said I was a New Age minister at the Church of Religious Science, but I really wanted my daughter to make her First Communion in the Catholic Church. With great kindness, Cindy took Malia under her wing and enrolled her in the Monday night CCD program. Meanwhile, she continued to go to the Lutheran Sunday service.

About that time, my grandmother died, and among the things she left to me was her Miraculous Medal, on a chain. I began to wear it, and I also started saying the "Memorare" prayer of St. Bernard that was printed on a card that came with it. That was the real beginning of my conversion, though it took me several years to come all the way out of the New Age world. Later, when I had come back to the Catholic faith, Malia said, "I really owe a lot of thanks to our neighbors, because they saved my soul from all that New Age stuff."

Ciera, a teacher from Lemon Grove's Church of the Inner Christ, with whom I had discussed the Medjugorje apparitions, called one day and told me excitedly to watch Joan Rivers' television show, because her guests were two priests and a woman who was receiving messages from Mary. I watched the program, and my interest rose even higher. Afterward, Ciera and I looked in the telephone book for a Catholic bookstore where we might be able to learn more about it. We found the address of a "Catholic Charismatic Center" in La Jolla. When we called and asked whether anyone there could tell us about the apparitions, and the possibility of visiting Medjugorje as tourists, we were told, "Come right over. A speaker is going to talk about it this very day."

We listened eagerly to what the speakers said about the apparitions, and bought a beautiful Medjugorje poster. But when the talks ended, and they invited us to stay on for a Bible study, we said, "No, thank you." For years, we had been studying the Bible "metaphysically," and we thought we knew more about it than they did. So we decided to go off by ourselves and do some crystal work instead.

As we came out of the Charismatic Center, headed for the beach, we met Beverly Nelson, a lay missionary with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Beverly proved to be an important guide in my journey back to the faith. That day, she asked whether the meeting was over. We said it was over for us; we had found what we were looking for. We showed her our Medjugorje poster and told her that we were trying to figure out how we could go there where Mother Mary was appearing.

"You don't have to go all the way to Yugoslavia to get to an apparition site," she said. "There are Marian apparitions being reported right now from Scottsdale, Arizona, just six hours from here."

That was exciting news, because we could drive to Scottsdale anytime. We went on to the beach, and as we settled onto our towels, Ciera took out her crystal pendulum, to channel her spirit guide. But when she asked it a question, she couldn't get it to respond; it hung motionless in the air. At last she held it out toward me and said, "You try it; you're always good at this."

I reached for it, but I could not touch it. It was as though there were a glass wall between me and the crystal pendulum. I was still clairvoyant then, and I looked down and saw a beautiful rosary lying across my hands. At the same time, in my head, I heard a voice saying, "Pray the Rosary. Through prayer all is answered."

"Ciera, I need to pray the Rosary," I said. The next morning, Ciera called to tell me that she had already gone out to buy a rosary. I still had to get one of my own. Then we learned that a group of New Age friends were arranging to drive to Sedona, just north of Scottsdale, to sit in the vortexes and watch for UFOs. That was how it happened that I found myself not long afterward in St. Maria Goretti Church in Scottsdale. We learned that the evening service was not going to include an apparition, but a fifteen-decade Rosary and a healing service, followed by Mass.

After being away from the Sacraments for twenty years, I stayed in church for more than four hours that night. At Communion time, I had the audacity to go forward and receive Our Lord unworthily. Instantly, with scalding conviction, I recognized my sinfulness and my desperate need for Confession.

When the Mass ended, I rushed to the sacristy and asked to speak to a priest. "Father has already left," an altar boy said. "You might be able to catch him in the parking lot if you hurry." So I dashed out the door and searched the parking lot for the priest. When I found him, he was getting ready to leave.

"Father, I've got to make a confession really fast!" I said to him. So right there, standing in the lot beside his car, he heard my twenty-year confession.

Meanwhile, some of my New Age friends, unfamiliar with Catholicism, had decided they would be uncomfortable in church, so they chose to wait through the long hours of the services in the Eucharist Adoration Chapel. They were so entranced with the peace and grace they experienced there that they were all reluctant to leave for Sedona.

Back home in San Diego, I began saying the Rosary daily, and visiting all the parishes in the area, looking for a Mass and a homilist that seemed right. At last I settled at St. Francis parish in Vista, and enrolled in their RCIA program. People kept advising me to get a spiritual director, so eventually I went to Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine Abbey in Oceanside where everyone I met seemed to go for spiritual direction. The first time I went there, I was strongly attracted by the name of the abbey.

"Who is 'The Prince of Peace'" I asked my friend Gary. "That's a name for Jesus," he said. "You surely must have learned that in Sunday School or somewhere!"

But I hadn't, or if I had I could not remember it. I went into the chapel and prayed without moving for two hours. "Oh Jesus," I said, "If you are the Prince of Peace I really need you, because no one has been able to give me peace." My head was like a metro train station at rush hour, and I could not sleep, because the clairvoyant visions would not leave me alone.

God in His infinite mercy had guided me to exactly the right place. The spiritual director I found was a priest who grew up in India, and his familiarity with Eastern religions gave him penetrating insight into the spiritual errors I lived by for so long. He advised me what to read, taught me how to pray, introduced me to St Therese's Little Way, and led me through my personal history step by step in an ongoing healing of my memories. With the help of friends, I spent days clearing my house of thousands of dollars worth of New Age books, tapes, videos, tarot cards, crystals, pictures of gurus and other artifacts.

Finally, in the Sacrament of Penance, I had to renounce by name, one at a time, each of the occult practices I had used. That deliverance took a cumulative sixteen hours, with one single session lasting eight hours. Healed by this minor exorcism, I lost my psychic skills and abilities. The voices in my head fell silent. It was a tremendous gift of peace.

After my conversion, I began to see the world from a new perspective, as if I had just emerged from a Kansas cellar after a tornado, or perhaps as if scales had fallen from my eyes. It was startling to recognize how deeply New Age ideas have penetrated into secular society. The environmental movement, for example, is riddled with New Age concepts and glamorized with the vocabulary of New Age mysticism, leads the unsuspecting toward pantheist idolatry.

But the biggest shock of all was discovering some of these same elements in Catholic institutions. Since returning to the Church in 1992, I have felt impelled to warn Catholics about the dangers of the New Age practices in which I was involved for so long, and which I now, unexpectedly, see infiltrating even some Church retreat houses, parishes, religious orders, institutions and activities.

Reiki, for example, has become so popular among Catholic women religious that large display ads for Reiki massage treatments at a "Marianist Spirituality Center" appear regularly in The Valley Catholic, the official diocesan newspaper in San Jose.

At St Francis Church in Vista, books and tapes by Marianne Williamson, promoter of A Course in Miracles, were centrally featured in a Friday evening program series for divorced, separated and returning Catholics.

In the short years since my re-conversion, I have become an ardent evangelist, especially to New Agers. Seven New Age friends have come out of the darkness since I did, and I have been privileged to sponsor several of them in RCIA, including my former husband. Another was a Caucasian practitioner of Oriental medicine, who once noticed, after treating a patient with acupuncture, that a mysterious dark presence had begun to follow him everywhere.

"Something is following me," he told me with growing anxiety. "I think it's a demon, and I don't know what to do. I prayed to Buddha, but that didn't help. It's still following me."

"Buddha can't help you, " I told him. "Pray to Jesus. He is the only one with the power to command demons."

So he prayed to Jesus, and when the presence disappeared, he was so impressed that he started going to Mass, eventually joined an RCIA class and became a confirmed Catholic.

God has poured His graces on me with unimaginable mercy, and I am certain it was the Blessed Mother's maternal intercession that brought me these treasures. She also seems to have preserved my daughter from the consequences of my own sins. Now in her teens, Malia hopes to be a nun in an orthodox order, where she can praise God and transmit His glorious truth to young people.

To all those who want to escape from the despairing darkness of the New Age, I urgently recommend the Rosary and the consecration of St. Louis Marie de Montfort. Take one step toward Mary, and she will come to where you are, and lead you to her Son.

This is the second of a two-part article condensed from a chapter in Donna Steichen's Prodigal Daughters (Ignatius Press). Moira Noonan is available for speaking engagements and can be reached at P.O. Box 231732, Encinitas, CA 92023, email: moirnoonan@aol.com.

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