Whenever demons are around, so is the vastly more powerful force called the Holy Spirit. So are Christ and the angels. So is Mary.

I have had any number of confrontations with evil spirits, too many to recount here, too ugly to want to recount, but I had just as many or really many more overwhelmingly pleasant experiences. Most of them were simple feelings. I was happier when I came back as an active Catholic in 1983, while living in Manhattan. I was less tense. I felt waves of Grace as I attended daily noon Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel on East 90th Street or simply prayed or read the New Testament.

There were little manifestations that seemed to be giving me clues or sending me messages. They were little treats. Most of the experiences, for whatever reason, came in dreams. Or in the sweetness of a heavenly coincidence. I began to realize that there really are no such things as “coincidences.” Oh, a few here and there, but many of those we meet, many of the situations in which we find ourselves, are for hidden reasons.

Right after a little incident in which the crazed guy with the beard growled and lunged at me on Third Avenue, I was walking up the east side of the avenue. It might even have been on the way home that same day, and when I got to the front of my apartment, moving in the river of pedestrians at rush hour, an old woman suddenly stood in front of me.

She was right in my path. I had to stop. I didn’t see her coming. She stood there facing me and, smiling a terrifically sweet smile, she made the sign of the cross—as if blessing me. I felt a beautiful wave of grace move through my being, completely dispelling the antagonisms of the day.

This unusual woman said nothing, just smiled and then disappeared into the sidewalk crowd.

She was about 70, and I think she might have been one of the women from church, but I never was able to spot her again.

I just know she made me feel that someone was watching over me.

I don’t like relating these personal experiences but feel I must when they are pertinent and have meaning. I don’t want to relate them because I’m certainly no visionary and because I know some of you will have difficulty with such manifestations.

Besides, I am myself skeptical of many such claims.

But it would be dishonest to ignore my own personal observations. You discern their veracity. I’m simply reporting what I believe I saw, what I believe came from somewhere other than my subconscious.

One night I couldn’t sleep, which was unusual for me. I rarely have a problem falling off to slumber. I pray myself to sleep.

But this one night I couldn’t get there, and so finally I gave up and went into the living room. It was about half past midnight on a weeknight, I think a Wednesday. I was sitting on my couch looking at the dark skyline of New York when I noticed what seemed like a small pale blue light, a globule of luminosity, amidst the apartment buildings between Third and Lexington.

At first I thought it was a distant television. Maybe it was. It was unsteady light, flickering. There are so many buildings and windows in Manhattan, who knows what it might have been? I couldn’t exactly place it. The light seemed to be nearly a block down 90th, on the north side.

It was moving around that part of the neighborhood against the backdrop of six-story apartment buildings.

I struggled to define its origin. Was it first one television, then a television in another apartment, and was that what made it seem to move about? I couldn’t tell. The important point is that as I looked into that flickering blue light I saw a frontal etching—just an outline—of the Virgin Mary.

This was no apparition. It wasn’t even a vision. If anything it was a manifestation. It was nothing like what I had seen on Good Friday in 1984. It was vaguer, like a distinct etching, but there was no question it was a veiled head that resembled the Virgin. The chin, cheeks, and eyes were all very distinct, and so was the mouth.

I blinked and looked and it was still there. I looked away and looked back and still I saw her in an azure globule that continued flickering.

I walked to my kitchenette and probably got a glass of water, and when I looked back over the dark, mean streets, she was still in the small wavering light.

I used to smoke and did the logical thing: I lit a cigarette, took a puff, and convinced myself it was a television set. It seemed to move, first at one apartment building, then at another, and I decided it was because there were still folks up watching TV.

At night, when most other lights are out, you notice television sets flickering from the skyscrapers in New York. They take on excessive optical prominence because they are generating light from dark rooms. Staring at such a light can play tricks on the eyes and brain.

Whether or not that’s what it was, it seemed to be moving around, first at a height of six stories, then at the level of, say, a third floor. In it, filling the luminous bubble, was the distinct womanly face. I watched the luminous bubble, was even cowed. I was astonished. I watched it for at least 15 minutes. I watched until she faded out of sight.

Soon after, in the same light, as if shoving her image away, I saw, to my surprise, the defined face of a malefic entity—the devil, or one of his demons.

No way had I expected that. I looked away. I wasn’t terrified, just very concerned.

I wondered if it indicated that the entire manifestation, including Mary’s face, was a demonic counterfeit — if the whole thing wasn’t an evil little charade.

I don’t think so. I think it was a little clue as to spiritual warfare. At the time it didn’t mean much, but as I look back it was showing me the nature of a raging battle, one that we’re all called to join, on one side or another. Mary and the demon, vying for the place in the little flickering globe of light, the demon trying to crowd her out of view, even if it was just my imagination. I watched this little contention go on for another ten or fifteen minutes before going back to sleep.

How meaningful that little display would become when I began researching Saint Mary’s apparitions. It was just a tiny example of manifestations erupting throughout the world during the 1980s. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Blessed Virgin Mary had already been appearing for several years at Medjugorje in the Bosnia-Hercegovina republic of Yugoslavia. Medjugorje! She was appearing to peasant teenagers there, admonishing that peace was in a state of crisis (although at the time there was absolutely no indication that soon there would be a civil war) and dispensing warnings about the future of the world.

–Michael H. Brown

[resource: Prayer of the Warrior]