“Spiritual cleansing isn’t supposed to feel good”

“Spiritual cleansing isn’t supposed to feel good” is Father Benson’s justification for the suffering imposed at the conversion camp, and a sentence Colton recalls after fleeing it. Its calm, instructive tone turns pain into supposed proof of a necessary cure, revealing how the camp’s coercion has entered Colton’s own account of himself.

Origin and Wording

Father Benson speaks the line to Colton just days before Colton runs from the camp. He acknowledges that the process hurts, then presents that hurt as compatible with—and even expected of—spiritual cleansing. The sentence does not offer relief or a way to refuse; it gives suffering a purpose defined by the person imposing it.

Addressing Colton as “boy,” Father Benson speaks from a position of authority. The assurance that cleansing “isn’t supposed to feel good” makes discomfort sound like a lesson rather than evidence of harm. In this logic, pain does not challenge the camp’s premise: it is absorbed into the explanation that the camp offers for continuing its regimen.

Colton’s Recollection

The line returns in Colton’s thoughts while he sits in a cold cell after traveling from Arizona into Colorado and being taken to juvie. Cold, exhausted, and separated from his bag and clothes, he struggles to recognize his own life. He imagines that an otherworldly being has burrowed under his skin and given him desires and weakness; in that self-accusing account, the being is what fled his parents and the camp, which he describes as hell.

Colton’s recollection exposes a conflict between what he has experienced and the explanation he has been taught to apply to it. He has escaped a place he recognizes as hell, yet he repeats the camp’s premise that its process could burn away what is supposedly infected and reveal healthy skin underneath. Father Benson’s sentence persists not as neutral advice but as an internalized rationale that makes flight appear to be a failure to accept help.

Narrative Significance

The expression’s metaphor of cleansing gives the camp’s treatment a moral and bodily vocabulary: suffering is framed as purification, while Colton’s desires are cast as contamination. The juxtaposition is stark. Colton has run from the camp, but its language still structures the way he understands his escape and himself. The remembered maxim therefore reveals the psychological reach of the camp’s coercion at the moment Colton is physically beyond its walls.