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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