An Apple A Day...
This story was related to a group of us during a dinner gathering many years
ago in KL and that individual swore that the incident happened within his own
parish congregation when we ribbed him as to what illegal weed was he smoking
when he made up that story. Due to some delightful special quality of the
wine served during dinner, my memory is a tad hazy as to the finer details in
clearly remembering as to who actually attending that dinner made our hairs
stand on end that night with his extraordinary story.
A couple dated for a year or so and, as the story went, the young man was head-over-heels in love with his fair maiden and proposed marriage. Back in those days, the man had to request and seek his sweetheart's parents' explicit consent. Unfortunately, due to their different religious backgrounds of him being a Muslim and her a Catholic, his heartfelt proposal slammed into a insurmountable roadblock when her parents openly rejected it outright and announced to the dating couple that, effective immediately, they would no longer be allowed to date each other nor maintain any form of communication whether by mail or phone.
Heartbroken, the young man departed in a daze and was never heard from again. She, being the dutiful daughter, honored her parents' commandment and terminated all contact with her former beau. A few weeks later, the poor girl began to turn sickly and non-communicative. Doctors consulted were at a loss in explaining her dramatic physical decline and their diagnoses of her physical condition varied accordingly. Her appetite for food too diminished startlingly quickly and her weight loss accelerated dramatically (no, it's not colon cancer nor anorexia nervosa to you wannabe-doctors out there) over a short period.
In the interim, their local parish priest had learnt of her plight and paid her a visit one evening. Customary with local practice, he brought fruit (apples) as a gift for the household which her mother washed and placed in a fruit bowl on the table. During his visit, he noticed the look of hunger in the girl's eyes, took an apple from the fruit bowl and offered it to her while simultaneously encouraged her to eat it. With a weak smile, she accepted the apple from him. But as she brought it to her mouth for an initial bite, the apple suddenly and violently was thorn from her grasp and flew upwards towards the ceiling of the house where it vanished without a sound.
Stunned and now thoroughly alarmed, her frantic parents begged their parish priest for his guidance and assistance. He requested the mother to fetch him a table knife which she complied with quickly. Taking another apple in one hand, he proceeded to cut the shape of a cross onto the apple and peeled the skin off from the cross design. Placing the apple in the trembling hands of the now-frightened girl, he asked her to take a bite from it. As she lifted the apple towards her lips, once again, the apple violently flew out upwards out of her hands towards the ceiling and vanished. A few seconds, they heard a "thud" as if something had fallen onto the floor of the room. Looking around, they saw a charred object near a corner of the room. Both the parents and the girl were frozen to their chairs and made no attempt to get up to retrieve that fallen object. The priest walked over, picked up the blackened object and brought it to the table. They could see that it was the apple with the cross on it now burnt and charred all over except for the cross on its surface exterior. Witnessing the evidence of this unearthly event, both the girl and her parents were in a state of fright and it took sometime for their parish priest to calm them down and figure out a strategy to deal with this abnormal situation.
This was clearly a case where demonic possession manifested itself in a different form and he informed the parents that he would seek the church's counsel and an exorcism may be the only remedy for their daughter. Eventually, the parish priest requested and received permission from his Bishop to perform the exorcism rites. I cannot remember much about the exorcism-event part of his story for by now that special quality of the Chardonnay was starting to have a pronounced effect upon my senses at the dinner table, especially my hearing, but I am happy to say that I managed to understand the grand finale in which the exorcism rites performed flawlessly according to plan and the girl recovered.
A couple dated for a year or so and, as the story went, the young man was head-over-heels in love with his fair maiden and proposed marriage. Back in those days, the man had to request and seek his sweetheart's parents' explicit consent. Unfortunately, due to their different religious backgrounds of him being a Muslim and her a Catholic, his heartfelt proposal slammed into a insurmountable roadblock when her parents openly rejected it outright and announced to the dating couple that, effective immediately, they would no longer be allowed to date each other nor maintain any form of communication whether by mail or phone.
Heartbroken, the young man departed in a daze and was never heard from again. She, being the dutiful daughter, honored her parents' commandment and terminated all contact with her former beau. A few weeks later, the poor girl began to turn sickly and non-communicative. Doctors consulted were at a loss in explaining her dramatic physical decline and their diagnoses of her physical condition varied accordingly. Her appetite for food too diminished startlingly quickly and her weight loss accelerated dramatically (no, it's not colon cancer nor anorexia nervosa to you wannabe-doctors out there) over a short period.
In the interim, their local parish priest had learnt of her plight and paid her a visit one evening. Customary with local practice, he brought fruit (apples) as a gift for the household which her mother washed and placed in a fruit bowl on the table. During his visit, he noticed the look of hunger in the girl's eyes, took an apple from the fruit bowl and offered it to her while simultaneously encouraged her to eat it. With a weak smile, she accepted the apple from him. But as she brought it to her mouth for an initial bite, the apple suddenly and violently was thorn from her grasp and flew upwards towards the ceiling of the house where it vanished without a sound.
Stunned and now thoroughly alarmed, her frantic parents begged their parish priest for his guidance and assistance. He requested the mother to fetch him a table knife which she complied with quickly. Taking another apple in one hand, he proceeded to cut the shape of a cross onto the apple and peeled the skin off from the cross design. Placing the apple in the trembling hands of the now-frightened girl, he asked her to take a bite from it. As she lifted the apple towards her lips, once again, the apple violently flew out upwards out of her hands towards the ceiling and vanished. A few seconds, they heard a "thud" as if something had fallen onto the floor of the room. Looking around, they saw a charred object near a corner of the room. Both the parents and the girl were frozen to their chairs and made no attempt to get up to retrieve that fallen object. The priest walked over, picked up the blackened object and brought it to the table. They could see that it was the apple with the cross on it now burnt and charred all over except for the cross on its surface exterior. Witnessing the evidence of this unearthly event, both the girl and her parents were in a state of fright and it took sometime for their parish priest to calm them down and figure out a strategy to deal with this abnormal situation.
This was clearly a case where demonic possession manifested itself in a different form and he informed the parents that he would seek the church's counsel and an exorcism may be the only remedy for their daughter. Eventually, the parish priest requested and received permission from his Bishop to perform the exorcism rites. I cannot remember much about the exorcism-event part of his story for by now that special quality of the Chardonnay was starting to have a pronounced effect upon my senses at the dinner table, especially my hearing, but I am happy to say that I managed to understand the grand finale in which the exorcism rites performed flawlessly according to plan and the girl recovered.
