Only as Sick as my Secrets

Notre Dame’s Minor Basilica, the “Basilica of the Sacred Heart,” could be distinguished as such only because it sat atop a Crypt Church: the basement community of Sacred Heart Parish.  In its time-softened pews, I fidgeted my way through my formative years. 

Fr. Jose Martelli was not the first pastor of Sacred Heart I could remember. The Pastor before him had been Bill Simmons, whom I recalled being nothing but kind.  Fr. Martelli was unique in one way though: at a point when life got hard for me, late one October night, he was the witness to my adolescent life’s first genuine catharsis.  Kind enough to disregard the fact that I woke him, he set himself to saving my life.

The precipitating incident was simple enough.  A date had gone badly. Dates after that went badly, and in worse ways.  But on a deeper level than I’d previously experienced, this date had gone badly because something dark in me had awoken, at the cost of someone else’s emotions.

The first option occurring to me was to drive my car off a bridge.  It was the first time the possibility of self-termination had breathed its hot breath in my face, and I was terrified.  I went with option two: I drove to Fr. Martelli’s second-floor rectory flat.  To this day I am certain the strength for the choice was a mercy, coming from something beyond me.  Providentially, the outer door was unlocked.  Providentially, his television was still going, making me think he was still awake.  Providentially, he was too kind not to respond to my knocking.  For the first time in my life, I man-cried on his couch for hours.  He sat in the chaos of my choices, and picked, with me, through their terrifying implications.

It was the first time in my life that I knew I had willfully alienated myself from others.  It was the first time I’d put myself at arms length.  It was the first conflict mature enough to require a mantrum (a grown-ass man’s total meltdown) and the ear of another to fix.

That was October 17th, 1997.  At the end of the night, which couldn’t have been before 2 a.m., Fr. Martelli placed his hands on my head in absolution.  I grasped the significance of the gesture immediately.  His hands were bridging the distance mine had created, restoring the intimacy I’d shot at and missed.

Two things occurred to me, after that:  one, I was still alive, and two, my life was no longer my own.  I would never again take suicide as seriously as I had, though it would periodically present itself as an option when life got hard.  And after that, until the exigencies of adulting made my read of the situation less certain, I would live a life whose choices were buoyed upward by the sheer force of redemption.

Saint Paul said Satan masquerades as an angel of light.  It had led the man to persecute Christians, thinking himself an exceptional Jew.  It led me, that night in October, to get caught up in my own God-given uniqueness, rather than how similar I was to the ass-clowns we all are, despite ourselves.  My life was not my own.  But also, I was awesome for it.

Timing is everything.  My late-night blunder had been in October, and in late December of that year, my parents announced their intent to divorce.  Their reasons were solid, but on a deep level my foundation was shaken, and I turned to God and religion for stability.

First I studied obsessionally.  In college, I had the singular focus of someone so deprived of a foundation he forgets he has clay feet.  As a senior theology major, I’d taken a lower level course about the Catholic Worker, as well as its higher-level equivalent, offered by the same professor.  Spurred on by 9/11, which had occurred that year, I ate peace studies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I protested ROTC with Pax Christi ND, and generally tried to be a big hippie.

Then I worked obsessionally.  I joined a Catholic Worker, which the influential professor had started, falling quickly into the patterns of overwork common to those whose goal is to eliminate homelessness, rather than serve the homeless.  I burned out, and attributed my loss of energy to lack of an interior life.

Then I prayed obsessionally.  My psyche did enough summersaults to feed my drive for exceptionalism, and I entered Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, hoping the acrobatics would continue.

And then, they didn’t.  Due, in part, to the routine use of sleep deprivation as a spiritual practice—I gave myself 5 hours per night—I began to shake when I sat to pray.  After a providential run in with the Big Book of AA.  I made parallels to delirium tremens: I was addicted to consolation, and as it happened less and less, my shaking smacked of withdrawal. 

That began happening in 2010.  As patchworked as my identification as an addict is, it was too true to ignore.  This too, was true: I had not felt my feelings in 13 years.

Identifying as an addict changed prayer. Thinking about God in meditation helped me make conceptual connections that left me insight-drunk; by and by, I distrusted them.  

The times when I would experience a quiet mind followed a pattern.  I would become, over a course of weeks, increasingly anxious.  God would seem absent more and more often.  Then, fed up with the fruitlessness of it all, I’d happen on a brief and true statement of what I was feeling.  Then I’d throw it toward the abyss, divine absence be damned, and only then would calm ensue.   Gradually I was learning:  God hid in the crannies of myself I didn’t want to deal with.  He was only to be found when I faced myself.

By year two in the monastery, I had faced and forgiven, dealt with and detached from the pain of my parents divorce.  But I was just beginning see that I was predisposed to addictive behaviors—that they could, through no fault but my own, repeatedly run and then ruin my life.

I was not an alcoholic, neither were my parents, but we all shared a common dysfunction, and it was fucking up my adult life.  I found my way to another church basement, to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings.  Going my first time was intimidating.  Over the course of my years at that meeting, I'd switch identities.  My initial, monastic self identification—“Hi, I’m Dismas, Adult Child”—yielded over time to “Hi, I’m Josh, ACA.”  One thing remained true: if I can voice what I am most afraid of to a room of similar, safe strangers, I am all the more healthy and connected.

Adult Children of Alcoholics is a gathering of plagiarists.  What is true, they sum up in pithy sayings, and what they borrow they don’t bother citing.  There are the popular ones, ripped off from AA: Let go and let God.  One day at a time.  One of my favorites is: You are only as sick as your secrets.  

From church basement to church basement, from mantrums on couches to shouts toward abyss, such sayings have truths to tell.  In better moments, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Often I’m simply sick and tired.  Somewhere in the midst of it, though, when my higher power is kind, I just am.  

And that is enough.

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Zeal for the Lord's House, Egg on my Face

At 2:30 a.m., before the church bells rang, before the shuffle of quiet men—before the day bowed me for the first time, my alarm clock sounded.  My window was open, and a chorus of South Carolina’s bugs sang me awake.  I rose, splashed some water on my face, then threw on my house robe.  

Monking-it-up was a choreographed experiment in mindfulness and letting go.  Throwing on my habit, I used to try to recall the specific symbolisms of each part, to stay engaged: the white house-robe was a symbol of purity.  Once my head and arms had found their respective places in the garment, the rest was just a matter of gravity.  I imagined being pure was just that easy.  The scapular went on next.  A symbol of the cross, the scapular was a hood that covered head and shoulders, extending long dark strips of fabric down the front and back of the body.  When I’d been given the habit, I’d taken the name Dismas, the name of the good thief crucified next to Jesus.  The scapular was, for me, an important reminder of what I was about. The final piece of a full habit was a leather belt.  It had to be leather: it was a symbol of “the death of the flesh” and of obedience, and it was the piece that I donned with most difficulty.  I always felt too alive and unwilling to make the gesture easy.

At first, I tried to recall the symbolisms.  At best, I wanted to be a good monk.  But at worst, my 5 hours of sleep had been woefully insufficient.  All I wanted was a bigass cup of coffee and few minutes to myself before the first call to prayer.  I pinched each side of my hood, so it would fall neatly against my back, opened the door of my room, and walked out into the dark.

At least in theory, the monastic dark is quiet.  During grand silence each day, from 8 at night till 7:30 the next morning, monks were supposed to be able to count on a silent house.  But closing one’s mouth is a funny thing: as soon as it happens, the environment’s noise amplifies.  Handled uncarefully, this dynamic makes life miserable.

I reached our industrial percolator and Fr. Patrick, the monastery’s abbot emeritus, was up getting coffee.  He had not fully dressed…he had donned only the rattiest of his two house robes, not bothering with scapular and belt.  Regarding monastic particulars, Patrick was the picture of indifference: he’d be apt, some days, to go even to church half-dressed and disheveled.  But as a former monastic superior and a 97 year old man, Patrick was practically uncorrectable.  On top of that, Patrick was chatty, and it flew in the face of the monastery’s more hushed ideals.

I leaned exhaustedly against the industrial coffee maker while its contents poured into my cup.  In muttered tones, Patrick narrated his inner monologue while chosing a mug.  

“Let see, this is too small, this one’s too big.” he traced his hands over the inverted mug-bottoms. “Aha, this is the one.  Deo Gratias.”  And the old man poured himself a coffee.

Shortly after I sat down, the buzzer sounded.  The buzzer abrasively called us to prayer five minutes before each Church service.  I gulped down my cup of wakefulness and headed to Church.

At Vigils, praying the psalms alternated with listening to the scriptures.  At worst, the coffee had not yet reached my ears, and whole prayer services would pass without hearing a word.  At best, something deeper than my ears, something longing for a wakefulness more open than my eyes, was listening.  And it happened that morning: first, there were the words. It was the book of Genesis, and Rebekah’s parents were debating letting her marry Isaac.  They said “we cannot say anything to you bad or good.  The thing comes from the Lord.”  In a sudden, insightful flash, the scriptures spoke to me. “Some things aren’t bad or good, they’re just from the Lord or they aren’t.  God’s will sometimes suspends morality."  I was fully awake.  My head swam with connection.  This is why I’d become a monk…the fact that I’d been given this kind of insight was only confirmation: The call I felt was God’s gift. I was supposed to be here.  

Breakfast followed Lauds, the 5:30 prayer service.  The time still fell within grand silence, but many of the monks began interacting with the world more, given the stress of spending so long in quiet.

I went to check my email.  Just after I sat down, my Junior Master, Fr. Thelonius, came in to check his.  Great, I thought now I’ll probably get a lecture about keeping grand silence more strictly. What a hypocritical asshole.  He preaches detachment in our classes, then he’s just as much of an email junkie as the rest of us.

Fr Thelonius sat down, and placed his coffee mug beside the computer.  He logged on.  As the computer was loading, he did something that struck me:  he made the sign of the cross.

That moment was a cascade of shocking realizations, one after the other.  I’d been judgmental all morning.  I'd been assuming I knew what was in the hearts of my brothers.  When that realization sunk in, for the first time since my alarm sounded, I was truly quiet.   In that quiet, I promised myself: from here on out, I’d be less hypocritical.

*************

Quite certainly, the above snapshot is a composite.  The names have been changed.  My own responses are accurate.  During my time in the monastery, I was alternately thrilled at the myriad little insights I’d have, and scandalized by the way people embodied the monastery's unrealized ideals.

Over time, I would give it a name.  I was addicted to religion.  For all of religion’s virtues, I like it mostly for the little spikes of brain chemistry it afforded—moments of insight, brief and prayer-induced alterations in consciousness.  I despised others for falling short.  My attention defaulted to their inadequacies, and yet it took providential shocks of self-awareness even to see my own.  The patterns of denial, insight, resentment, failure and resolve are the same patterns an alcoholic has, who attempts to fuel recovery with self-will.

And lest you think this cycle left me nothing but bitter toward the old monks I lived with, I’ll leave you with this small detail.  It reflects the humor I eventually learned was common among the brothers.  Brother Vincent, one day, was working in our “grading house,” where the eggs our chickens laid were cleaned, sorted by size and packaged.  He had just dropped a flat of eggs, and some of the yolk had splashed on another brother’s shoes.  

“Merciful heavens!” He said, overselling the line in typical Vincentian style.  He bustled about, cleaning the eggs off the floor, then fussily polishing the shoe in question.  When he was done, he stood up, placed his hands on the shoulders of the accidentally egged brother.  “I’m sorry,” he said with a similarly typical wink/grin combo, “it won’t happen again till next time.”

https://youtu.be/lqaKyekdAqw

Books, Becoming, and the Devils of Dependency

“That book changed my life.”  If my adolescent and young adult years had a motto, this would be it.  Friends from those eras know the books after whose mention this tagline would come, and they’d smile and tease me for my predictability.

I wanted to start this next paragraph with: at first, it was books about knights.  I loved knights, and wanted to be one when I grew up, and if being a knight were a real career possibility, I’d still give it serious thought.   However that, in its turn, had come from my Father’s bedtime stories—he blatantly plagiarized bits of Arthurian Legend and scraps of Tolkien in the service of trying to get me to do what more adult bedtime reading later made explicit: Go the Fuck to Sleep. Mind you, I always fucking did.  From sleep’s darker corners, battle noise made my dreams loud. 

Eli Weisel’s Night changed my life.  All of my reading about chivalry and the sharp edges of principle-driven quests collided with the realities of high school.  Unaware at the time, I was intrigued and repulsed by what the Shoah argued was possible--for the human family, and consequently, for me.  And it was books that I looked to, attempting to work through the upwelling angst of those years with something that felt like order.  Depression found and flirted with me then, and I flirted back, with moon eyes and intent fixed enough to still, at 37, feel its diminished but real pull.

Underneath the surface, I shared the concerns that had made Jews throughout history call into the abyss for a champion:  where is God?  I suppose it’s because my parents divorced during my later high school years, but scripture and Church sources became obsessional objects for me.  Had I not been in complete denial, I might have told you, at that point, that those sources were helping me discover and unravel my need for security and structure.  But I was in denial, and in fact those sources tied the knots tighter.

I was about 17 then, and until I was 32 I read nothing but theology.  Dry as the subject may seem, two books are worth mentioning.  One was Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin.  It scared me deeply and personally shitless.  That an evil, intelligent and personal force could make a moveable meat suit of my mind and body was exactly the kind of thing that, living alone in my dark apartment, I didn’t need to hear.  The fact that he gained entrance to a bloke through the normal turns of psychology—piss poor choices and unhealthy perspectives—well, this didn’t put me at ease in the least.

I’d studied theology in college, so the ancient renunciants—men and women whom whom ancient sexists had dubbed “The Desert Fathers”—became formative for me.  Their battles against the “demons” who vied for control of their heart, head and hands were a source of a hope so needed that I ultimately visited a monastery to acquire it.  Later I sold my car, gave away my possessions and joined up, in hopes of committing, lifelong, to the place.

In the monastery, I developed a personal flaw: by personifying evil and good with my thoughts about God or the Devil, I could offload onto those figures the responsibility for my choices.  I saw myself favorably when I did good, but blamed “evil” when I, myself, cooperated with it.  And so I had built an inflatedly positive self-concept, out of a struggle made more valiant by what I thought was at stake.  On a scale of “Kung-fu master” to “Yoda-calibre Jedi” I gave myself a solid 9.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous changed my life.  As I “battled” with myself, I began to notice emotions: after failures, I was full of resolve to change.  I was full of insight about causes and effects, and then full of resentment about the perceived double standards in the monastic community.  A memoir of an alcoholic priest—read aloud during meals to encourage silence—exposed similar patterns in his own life.  A read-through of the Big Book turned up testimonial after testimonial with whose authors I felt a kinship.

I spent the next several years getting to the bottom of that kinship.  In a letter to a fellow monk, himself a recovering alcoholic, I identified my addictive tendencies.  He wrote back with words that I took too many years to hear for the warning they were:  “Make sure your addictive tendencies don’t become an actual chemical dependence.”  Hindsight was 20/20, he said, and he’d lost his glasses once while stumbling drunk, only to find them in the same street the next day.  Speeding past, the traffic had ground them to powder.

The day I identified my emotional patterns as those of an addict, I stopped reading.  I had been using the Scriptures to whitewash patterns of resolve, overwork, spree, failure and resentment for years.  I had been reading to self-diagnose.  I had been identifying with whatever words were comforting.  But I’d never graduated to reading myself. 

“That book changed my life.”  More aptly put, my life was becoming my book, as it changed.

https://youtu.be/Lyz2RQErc6U