The horror that changed my life

I, Daniel Pilecki (P-ee-letsky), cannot apologise well for anything in my past life – being
as I am guilty, in so much ingratitude to Providence, of waiving and disregarding so many higher
impulses from heaven; no dirty apology of mine would ever stand the test of eternity, and this is
no exaggeration, although outwardly my former life may have appeared decent. I don’t remember
who exactly said that, whether Samuel Johnson or else, but indeed, ‘hell is paved with good
intentions,’ and more so, I believe, with nice appearances. I had not been caring to realise that my
life was too priceless a gift to be so reckless in my actions that would take me to that dark hour
when all the stifled clamours of my conscience that I had withheld would come into the fore and
inundate me.
Of necessity I need to forgo many suggestions and explanations of this relation, though
some I must needs retain for at least a degree of clarity; because, should I pursue all the occasional
meditations that the events here presented yielded, it would have to comprise a volume of serious
literature that has never been my vocation to engage in writing – though, should it please heaven
so, things might change in this respect – nor has seen any substantial opportunity to do so. Any
truncations or inexactitudes should be wholly ascribed to myself since, moreover, the lamp of my
memory has been bedimmed as to many elements of the story.
Another remark I need to subadd is that there is not a single figment in the narrative save
any of the accruing imprecisions that I state as my weakness of mind; where abler wits might have
escaped reefs and boulders, there I am forced to take another track altogether. Please, look with
lenience at this essay of my pen.
I had lived a pagan life up until the centrepiece of the narrative, though the existence of
God was never, as far as I can remember, a moot point to me; indeed, doubts did make their assaults
against my brain and heart, much having to do with the general infidel climate of our days; yet,
the inner voice would always have this ‘don’t!’ that would so often save my day while all else may
have been conspiring to ruin it. I felt uplifting when I spoke to Him; when He gave me joys of a
good present, or kind encounter, or tender communion with someone; or when there was a
sequence of gracious moments and occurrences that I then as yet had not learnt to see as so much
of the hand of the Almighty. As I say, although I inly admitted His existence, I yet was a waif
tossed around, without foundation in my living, but ever so often carried wherever the wind of
vicissitude would rush me.
Early did there take place in me that noxious and revolting manifestation of the character
of Jekyll and Hyde that back in time I might not wish to disclose; today, though, I may speak
openly on these issues, although for some discretion I would not give the hardest words of it to the
reader. I entered the waters of sin very early on in my life; I would do certain things clandestinely,
things related to the sins of the flesh, the lustful uncleanness. I would gloat and seek that kind of
cheap gratification by watching suggestive TV films and programs, and become steadily involved
more and more in incontinence of senses – so that swear words and foul thoughts would soon
invade and take abode in my delicate frame. I quickly felt the divisiveness of sin, whereby one half
of me would reach out for things of heaven, while the other would inexorably drag me down to
those of hell.
I have but recently defended my MA thesis; I skip much of my former life, although I
daresay unduly – because not merely the dark, but also the bright elements of it convicted me of
highest treason which would surprise me in a fashion that I aim to convey. At the time of the
pivotal events, I was twenty years of age, and was into my third year of studies in English philology
at the local university; I provide this circumstance, for it also is partly significant.
The studies had been telling more and more negatively on me; while I was of a dreamier
nature than earthly life so often allows, I faced in the curriculum what I could not overcome:
formulaic dryness, some academic nonsense, departure from better veins of older education and
the influx of modern and postmodern ideals that are actually a complete negation of ideals and
values as such: this was a debacle on a desire to study and learn valuable and beautiful things of
knowledge, the ones that would always be of use in life. And hence, my excitement with study life
had been on the constant dwindle, and what with the added brunt of term paper preparatives and
different undersides of campus goings-on, I would with ever greater frequency seclude myself in
the lavatory and cry, and sometimes beat, myself into oblivion.
Because my whole life was, frankly speaking, a mess. I had been on the downward ramp
of sin which so tangibly and voraciously eroded my heart, stole and wrested the life out of my
soul; I understood something was terribly amiss about me, in me, but I could as well make out that
I was unable to lay hold of any means of escape from the current state of affairs; it was either
gloom or doom – and it was more surely than before nearing the latter.
A sinner’s life often looks like a rollercoaster: now up, now down; now sin, now some
good would glimpse through into the darkened room; yet I felt all along that with my disobedience
to the precepts of purity I landed in what was abnormal. It simply was not as it should have been.
That much I could well lay my hand on my heart to tell. Although, in those convoluted spoilt days
of mine, I would not have dared. A load of sin stifles man’s courage as much as it kills the soul.
It all began with a cold when I had to meet my then supervisor on the issue of my hectic
trials and failures to rig something up for the term paper admission deadline. I was returning back
home, not feeling quite well, with something like a cough or runny nose or both when, as I was
riding home on the trolley-bus (of my hometown Vilnius), a weird thing overtook me. I suddenly
saw things in eerily distorted colours; not like a Daltonic would, I guess (although that much I
cannot aver); yet in my case the hues were truly sickening and such that I hardly reached my place
to hurtle on my bed and lie, with fits of moans and some thoughtless comments of my brother,
who may have not realised what was happening, for company. Indeed, neither could I myself
construe what was with me, since the experience, so jarring on my senses, was novel and of its
own kind.
My condition deteriorated over the days – it caused my mother worries and pains which
still do not equal what befel all of us later on – and, being in a cul-de-sac as to my term paper
writing, as well as in a very uneasy state of health, I went to sleep one of those autumnal nights.
Now, I can say that sleep for me would so often prove a consolation and a boon when things just
wouldn’t hold on my life’s journey: even though no dreams might come to visit me at nightfall –
the very respite I would derive from Hypnus’s caress would grant me a charge to live the
forthocoming wakeful hours in a better, and sometimes much better, strain.
And this time, also, I felt an excitement and relief when the darkness of sleep drowned me
in its soft folds. My mother switched off the light, and I started into another, so much more
preferable realm than the one that by mishap of my erroneous ways I did not grace, but rather haunt
as an obnoxious apparition: ‘the slave does not continue in the master’s house for all time…’
But this dream was agreeable; it was revivifying; waste in studies, waste in life – but here,
even a rejuvenating torrent appeared to gush forth from above into my head; I was re-kindled,
fresh; all the loads of my difficulties appeared like one light feather – or at least, there shone a
hope of a solution to all those problems somewhere, waiting to enclose me in its fond embrace…

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 And then, something strange started to happen. Unlike usually, a thing which had never
occurred previously in my sleep – I began ascending some aerial space – though blindfold, seeing
but darkness, my eyes closed, and I in the land of dreams. It felt as though I was being carried up
by a force, as though two spirits had taken me up and were steadily lifting me higher and higher,
not just above the ground, but also above the cosmos, above the world. I knew not how long this
unconventional movement would take.
But a still stranger event happened. I felt a restraining force this time, arresting me on one
spot, so that I could not just barely move, - I could not budge a finger at all. At first this was
received by me with a surprise in which you would normally raise an eye-brow, as who should
say: ‘What, ho! shouldn’t that be stopped and somehow explained?’ But it became obvious to me
that the forces I was dealing with were far superior to any such remonstrance of mine – which was
already proving most inept. I strained and strained, yet release myself I could not.
I felt that I stood Somewhere. Where that was, I could not say. But it felt like a tall and vast
hall – all darkened with the blackout of my sightless dream. I felt I was in a Presence.
I was in chagrin at first; now, though, more and more, panic entered me. I felt I cannot
handle this; this is beyond me; all I could think of was to offer some lame excuses, some words to
the effect – ‘I am sorry’ – ‘but why’ – ‘o please don’t’ – but much or all I would utter in my mind’s
eye would turn out even to myself as such one huge resultant vanity and filth of an effusion from
the mountain of iniquity that I had reared with sinful labours all my vital years.
I expected nothing precise, although I somewhere understood it was all for a purpose that
I should thus be found withheld and secured to witness or experience I knew not what.
Finally, I heard.
I heard one word only.
It was uttered with a voice of majesty and power, and in a tone of love and wrath at the
same time; I know of no human that is capable of such pure modulations and combinations of the
opposites of a spectrum.
‘Judas!’ resounded in the Hall of Presence and Admission.
I knew it was He – it was Jesus.
But the most heinous of horrors it was to realise, belatedly, that I had come to receive from
God in a time of my worst unpreparedness ever – and then receive nothing else, accordingly, than
the word of ire and disaster. My own disaster.
To think that you have lived your entire life only to face God, blindfolded, and hear
‘Begone!’ is enough not only to raise your hair on end. It bathed me in sweat; in sorrow untold; in
so many things of mutest panic; yet one moment here prevailed as well. I had understood that the
One Who spoke had Power – and now I came to receive its impact. It was a discharge as of
lightning – a thunderbolt – that like a circuit of electricity entered me and coursed through my
nerves, having first hit me crashingly on my head.
I awoke, livid and perspired.
[…]
My days, and even more so nights, of horror, had set in. I was not driven by ambulance to
hospital, but by taxi to the monastery to be exorcised, so that demons might come out of me. Slily
they hid, and pretended, and then when we would return back home – as I would oftentimes be
looked after and accompanied by mother, brother and uncle – the symptoms of possession would
resume. No, so many people have not a bare idea of what this life is about. If only they did!.. Sin
is death; and I learnt on my own untanned hide that same hard lesson – that there is a payback for

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a life of wickedness. And now, my days were hued and tainted HELL. Hell started to manifest
differently.
When one night I was lying in my deeply worsened condition in bed and my mother was
reading from the Gospel of Matthew from an Church Slavonic New Testament gifted to us by
Father Ephraim, the elder who was consulted to help cast demons out of me, I sensed something
approach me; my sensations could pass off for morbid; yet it was just that the portals of the
underworld stood more ajar to me than to an ordinary individual, and hence my quickened sense
of the devilish abroad and about.
This time, as already seemingly countless times within this compact spell of my unnatural
disease, I felt something new was to develop – although from what quarter, figuratively speaking,
I could by no means predict. Predict I could or would hardly anything – because my plight was as
of one who was on a stormy night buffeted by waves in a lean boat – without compass or sense of
direction. Doom puffed through its nostrils on all sides; it was terrible.
I was staring blankly at the wardrobe, being part of the wall unit, that stood adjacent to the
foot of my mattress-bed. Did I listen to my mother reading, I cannot say for sure; I may have been
saying something in my mind; or nothing at all. But then, I saw something.
Observe that I was wide awake – and for all that occurred to me – I was perfectly in my
senses. It was no less strange to me – so much of it – than to those who are utterly alien to any
such experiences; yet also well did I see the consistency of such my visitations.
This time, though, as I have pointed out, - it meant to be yet different in a new fashion. It
appeared as though the wardrobe became void near the foot of my bed; that is, a spiritual portal
actually manifested, and in through it, in a fiery ambience of that strange otherworldly tunnel – the
serpent wormed in, ever so slowly, but surely; the size of me, was the serpent.
It, or he, had a human face with glinting green eyes and fangs; it was a sadistically grinning
face, as of a one that might say, ‘Got you finally!’
It was heinous; with the worm, I sensed with every inch of its approach, its sidling to, its
squirming near, its sliding up, the approach of the whole army of hell.
And I could not screech, not even squeak; I was paralysed in absolute confoundment and
fear; it was the fear of hell; earthly fear can poorly represent it; that was the fear of doom, where
all exits are closed and there is no escape.
Yet more heinous than anything was that satan, for it sure was he in person, didn’t stop
there; it was providentially allowed for him to do more than just approach me.
He entered me.
O how can I ever be able to convey the horror of utter filth and wrong entering you – when
you never in your sane mind would permit it to!.. how ever can I utter that silent hell that I felt
there and then, upon my couch, in darkness, by poor lamp-light, and under still worse axe of
retribution for my unrighteousness!.. how I can strive to express that which I would then let forth
to my mother, on her inquiry as to my strange petrification, when too I heard those lines read in
the Gopsel, I am Legion?!!..
It is a longer story than I can put into these poor and scant phrases.
This I can state, and witness, and aver: that it was God who opened my eyes to my reality
while my flesh was closed in darkness and oppression; it was He who appealed to my reason; it
was Jesus who showed that there is no way out except in Himself.
I saw more and other manifestations of the demonic; some of them I saw, others felt; others
yet smelled; heard; and experienced; but all those fearful visions and horrors, where they could
have broken, - there did build; where they could have seen me cast down for aye, - served my

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turnaround; where they convicted me there and then, and had all the right to condemn – combined
with Jesus’s grace to change my life; and, as a foil against His light, that awful darkness, too, did
point – that only Jesus can save your life – if you come to Him and obey Him, forevermore.
I lived through a horror to relate it – so that he who has an ear to hear, may hear, and have
reason to turn – and not burn. ‘For the fire there never ends, and the worm there never stops’…

2017-06-15 nighttime
Vilnius, Lithuania