Upon release from jail, after posting a hefty bail, I had a frantic sense of urgency to tie up loose ends. The timing of this event seems nearly providential in hindsight, as I had just volunteered to coach my first youth sports team, and the first practice was that same night. I had not eagerly signed up for this coaching job, but as I waited in jail the importance of this position swelled into a symbol of my responsibility and thus the need to fix my behavior. The vanity of my reputation needed a fresh coat of paint and here was an opportunity. Suddenly, I wanted to be there for my kids, more than anything, and my grumbling about volunteering turned into a must-have, because I wanted to save face and give the appearance of a good father. Aside from my drinking I did give all to my children, but now the shine was off the penny. Redemption was my real motive, not goodwill. For my children had never seen me stumble so publicly and spectacularly. Knowing that my image had fallen dramatically stabbed me, as I thought of the children’s disappointment and confusion. I felt as if I had taken a pin to a beloved balloon and popped it right in front of them. Actually, the metaphor of me as a balloon full of air sounds about right.
With only a few days left with a valid driver’s license, I scrambled about the city taking care of errands, one of which included purchasing gear for the team I was to coach. Preparing for coaching became a focus, because it was something positive amid the guilt of returning home, where I had to face the music of my best friend, my wife, who I knew I had failed.
I had entered into marriage half-heartedly and because of that, I never elevated marriage to be the centerpiece of life, where it belongs. We had not married in a church and the idea of sacredness around marriage did not even occur to me. Yet she always remained my best friend and even in times of strife we overcame our differences to come back together. We could not live apart, without each other, because we share a real love that has foundation in our roots of friendship. How she ever put up with my nonsense will be the great mystery of my life.
But irresponsible drinking and the predictable unpredictability of the bad nights loomed over the marriage. This arrest and jailing was a breaking point. Even without an ultimatum from her, I had already declared a do-or-die demand against myself to stop drinking once and for all. My shame cut deep and I resolved to change. This turning point in my life and our lives together put pressure on the marriage, for which I am forever guilty of and sorry for.
Five years later, I am beyond grateful for these events. Without this arrest and turning point, no progress would ever have been made. The experience of “hitting bottom,” which I thought had happened many times before, finally and truly slammed into me. In prior fiascos, I must have only scraped the bottom because somehow I always forgave myself and returned to old behaviors. I typically scoffed at the cliche stories of people who quit drinking, considering them hypocrites, especially those who became moralizing holy rollers and “Bible Beaters.” Wouldn’t I be like any other hypocrite after spending twenty years partying only to become a teetotaler? So I was careful to quiet my resolve to quit drinking without becoming a denier of others, always thinking of this Kahlil Gibran line in The Prophet regarding hypocrites:
…who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers?
I needed to clean up my side of street and let others worry about themselves. So I started coaching with fervor and attending AA meetings once again. I attended an Evangelical church several times only to find the hand-raising and concert-style service too foreign to my senses. I couldn’t embrace the Evangelical way even though I appreciated the people. I sought books on Eastern philosophy, but AA became the refuge for a time again. Through AA, once again, I had allowed God to exist, but without belief in miracles. That was a bridge too far. But in accepting God I at least had a handlebar for life, something to hold onto in this struggle of re-learning how to live. That’s truly what it is. For anyone who is replacing the substance or being at the center of their life, an entire re-training must be undertaken in learning how to live. While this process took place, doubt was never far off, often creeping in, challenging every step toward change.
I remember one of the first times that prayer proved to me that it worked. Yes, I said prayer - that action that elderly people partake in, and sometimes those crazy young adults that you try to avoid. Yes, actual prayer, as in folded hands and looking up to the heavens and feeling a surge of the heart - that kind of thing.
A friend asked me to go see a movie, Transformers 2, and since I had enjoyed the toy as a kid, I agreed, thinking that a night out would be fun. But the Transformers movie proved so horrible, and so unnecessarily long, that I felt like would writhe out of my skin. The non-drinking and stress of trying to keep my depression under control came to a climax in the movie theater, spurred on by the absurdity of the movie. So bad was the movie that I said the Our Father about ten times to outlast the cinematic torture and to avoid insulting my friend, who loved the movie.
I realize this is a ridiculous anecdote about the power of prayer. Watching a movie is not any kind of hardship, but in the moments when we discover things about ourselves, it’s not always poetic.
And in all seriousness, all Transformers movies should be destroyed.
By then I had learned to pray a simple way, and I use it to this day. When struggling, I was taught to ask God for strength and direction. Besides rote memorized prayer, I didn’t know how to pray, and maybe I still don’t, but I do know how to ask for strength and direction. This always helps, and I can repeat it over and over if needed. Along with that I can ask God what is the “next right action” and direct my energy toward that, whatever it may be. The third thing that I learned to try and try again was to pray for the “willingness to be willing” to believe. I’m sure these sound silly, as they definitely did to me at first.
Then there is the quote that changed many things for me: “Surrender to win.”
“Surrender to Win” is more powerful than I ever imagined and despite the words sounding like giving up, the reality is that you rarely ever need to win. Most arguments and wants have a pointless foundation. Look at social media or comments sections on websites: do you see anyone winning there? What a mess of egos gone wild. But this saying goes way beyond helping extricate oneself from internet conversations. This touches real life, which is where the surrender to win mantra performs a strange magic that softens, heals, and can even build a fortress of strength.
Once I could see that I personally did not need to win all the time, I started to win in a different way. Surrendering removes desire for the need to be right. Surrendering lessens my ego’s need to be special. The things worth surrendering for are as follows: to allow my belief in God, to elevate my marriage above myself, and to worry less about my wants.
There is a fourth idea that I picked up regarding my struggle with belief in a Higher Power, and that was to start small in terms of a deity. I still remember after attending a meeting, standing outside of a Greek church, a man told me to make the street light my Higher Power.
“For now, just give thanks to that Street Light for everything in your life.”
“Seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
“Ask the Street Light for help every day when you get on your knees. Right now, that Street Light is greater than you are. That’s your Higher Power.”
“Uh, ok.”
Stupid as that sounds, this was a place to start, and I am quite certain there is no organized religion in the world that would suggest this, but I know from myself and various other doubters that choosing something simple works, like a stapler or a plant or lawnmower - or a street light.
If you play this game and allow some object to be your Higher Power, and really pray toward it for strength and direction, that street light will amaze. Comical and ridiculous? Absolutely. But so are human beings and sometimes laughing helps kickstart ideas and change. I recall praying, “Street Light, please help me today. Help me to not drink and to be nice to people and not be the ass that I usually am. Keep me from acting like a moron. Help to be a better father and husband and son and co-worker instead of my typical narcissistic self. And maybe I can try to swear less, too. Thank you, Street Light. Amen.”
If it sounds like I’m making light of establishing a Higher Power or finding God, I am not. Not all people can easily return to believing in God once they have fallen away or become agnostic or atheist. As I lost my faith during my teenage years, I lost the ability to believe or even find a reason to pray. Devoted religious people seem to be unwavering in their faith to the point that they cannot even fathom how someone has doubt. Therefore, those people always seemed unapproachable to the unfaithful like me. If anything I felt this gulf between believers and non-believers pushed doubters away rather than invited us to try, because to have doubt felt like a weakness or a character flaw. Those with faith don’t seem to struggle, or at least don’t give the impression that they struggle, although I know now that’s not the case. Everyone struggles. Faith is usually portrayed as something you either have or you do not. I suspect doubt finds harbor in every mind and heart, even among regular church-goers. This explains why the Street Light faith worked for me - it allowed for the possibility of faith.
What I see happening with addicts and alcoholics is that the best path back to faith is through this wide gate at first, not the narrow gate. The Street Light God works because it doesn’t make one go from preschool to graduate school in a single leap. The idea that someone who has completely rejected God or Christianity could jump back in immediately to religion, to “change and become like children” is not likely or even reasonable to expect. There is an education and processing that needs to happen, and the main reason this education and process needs to take place is because many of these people, like me, never learned why we were really going to church in the first place.
Sure, we learned why on the surface: to save our souls, to be forgiven our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Ok, great. Now what does that all mean? I had no idea.
But surely I cannot be alone in the experience that growing up, I learned all the things to say at the right time in church, but beyond the procedural there was a lack of knowing why all the hubbub, vestments, and stained glass. I spent years attending Wednesday night religion classes, never missed a Sunday, and was an altar boy for six years. I even read my Children’s Bible with fascination, and felt that being Catholic was a real part of my identity.
I just didn’t know why.
While I saw the inside of a church often, I was simultaneously learning a great deal of science and math as the years progressed. Moreover, the teaching of “questioning everything” became a prominent point in education. To search and explore questions about the natural world was a moral good. Science was slowly undermining my faith, not by its own fault, because science is a search for truth, just like faith and philosophy but in a different domain. The problem was this: while I was learning to excel at school and question everything, the Mass and Church was a static part of my life that did not seem to accept questioning.
A major fork in life happened when I asked an adult about the stone being rolled back at Jesus’s tomb. Surely, if someone rolled the rock in front of the tomb to close it, then a person or persons also could have rolled the rock away from the tomb. Even if the tomb was sealed, metal tools could have unsealed it just as easily. And the answer I heard back from a respected elder person was: “Don’t ask questions, just believe it.”
This comment caused an earthquake in me because as science seemed to question and correct itself, religion appeared to not want any arguments. Science, even in its wild tangents throughout history, did seem to right the ship, given enough time, if the findings changed. The response of “Don’t ask questions” shook me because prior to that day I had been coming to faith like a child, because I was a child. In school, having been in “gifted” programs (still not sure how I was selected into these programs) we read books critically. The same notions of reading seemed applicable to the weekly readings at church, but being rebuffed I started to doubt and even secretly laugh at some of the stories. Along with the rock at the tomb, I found many other questions, and if they could not be discussed or took a long time for myself to explore, I didn’t have interest enough for the pursuit. I was of a generation that got a “lite” version of understanding faith, hence the major drift of unaffiliated people today. With a lack of deep understanding, other things took the place of religion. Sports more than anything became a kind of replacement religion. School and parties filled the other spaces. When I began to observe political Christians behaving badly, I conflated them all into one homogenous group of hypocrites.
Obviously, I should have found a second opinion for my questions about the rock at the tomb. All of my doubting would have found the right answers if I had met the right mentor. But in a small town there isn’t a surplus of intellectuals running around quoting Augustine and Aquinas, ready to respond with the words needed to address such things. If Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger could have been cloned in the 1980s and 1990s and sent to each parish worldwide, I have no doubt myself and millions of other kids would have remained within the faith. To be fair, the person who told me not to ask questions wasn’t equipped to answer my questions and I should have asked others, but the river of culture carried me away.
Life became exceedingly busy in the teen years, with sports and homework and jobs and friends and girlfriends and trying to secure beer for the weekend. Church faded into a Sunday event before NFL football. Wednesday night religion class became less relevant as I was so often tired from sports practice and slogging through math problems that I was checked out in religion class, just there to punch my ticket by memorizing Hail, Holy Queen or some other prayer. A sense of the meritocracy in the world started to become clear to me. It was no longer “by the sweat of your face you will get your bread” it was rather “by the firing of your neurons you will get a job.”
A second major event occurred that altered my thoughts on what it meant to be Catholic. Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, each week after church there would be “Bush for President” flyers on our car’s windshield after church. The pro-Life movement took off and without anyone telling me or saying so, it became clear that to be Catholic meant to be Republican. Yet in a farming community, the political choice and leanings of the early 80s trended toward the Democrats. In any case, my point here is not either political party being right or wrong. My point here is that the Church appeared to have aligned with one party, and I became confused as to the purpose of religion if elections were now invading the space carved out for God. In fact, I could not tell if the Church was part of the Republican party or if the Republican party had joined the Church. Conversations around politics became awkward, as clearly the people had split somewhere down the middle, since America was pretty much 50/50 on the two-party system then just as it is today. Even then I saw no way that either party fulfilled what I thought the Catholic faith was all about, and today I know that neither party fulfills Catholic Social Teaching, as each side has different takes that do not exactly fit. Actually, I don’t see how either party can work for any Christian. I guess you just pick the one that seems the lesser of two evils for how you see the world.
These windshield flyers changed the way I saw Church. Such lowly, earthly things as elections seemed irrelevant to the Mass, but now various people in the local parish were stirring up the flock. I knew people that did a lot of charity work but they were not pro-Life. I knew pro-Life people that volunteered and prayed often, and lived holy lives. The divisions made no sense to me, since I knew that not a soul inside that Church on any given Sunday was without sin. Yet some people who seemed to be good, certainly holier than me, were dropping out of the pews. I didn’t realize it at the time but these events began to shape later thoughts on how I viewed the Church, especially once the abuse scandals started seeping out.
In hindsight I can review my history and see my own psychological quirks and problems, but I can also see the starting blocks where the rise of the “nones” or New Atheists began running. By the time I graduated high school, faith became a minor aspect of my life, unless you count my faith in Dionysus, the God of liquor and partying. Still, a flicker of belief remained and I wasn’t ready to let faith go yet, even though in the post-Confirmation years I just thought of myself as Catholic, despite living zero of the values. Prudence flew out the window. Temperance? No, are you kidding me? Faith, Hope, and Charity? I would have thought you were referring to exotic dancers’ names.
