"Addiction"
February 8, 2009
Thanks very much for inviting me here today. I hope the Reverend Tom-I've known Tom since we were in college together, and he taught me several swears in French, and that's all I'll say about that-I hope he coached you before I arrived that I come to you not as a person of the cloth, but as somebody who believes, someone who loves both the sacred and the profane, someone who finds it just as daring to believe in God and His Word as it is to question His Authority-and I have done both. It couldn't have been a better situation to have heard the story of the Prodigal Son broken into two parts-one part about the Prodigal, and another part about the son who stayed home, because I have been both those kinds of people, and I want to speak to you, both those kinds of people.
I Am the Prodigal Son
All storytellers, said Walter Benjamin, are descended from two tribes: the mariners and the peasants. We listen to the mariners for "the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home," and to the peasants for "the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place." I have always wanted to have both kinds of knowledge. I wanted that knowledge the way only an impatient single-minded adventurer who travels best on foot, nothing to pull him down, on his own. Papa was a rolling stone, and all he left you was alone. Here's a man who lives a life of danger. Everywhere he goes, he stays a stranger.
I don't need to tell you that after a while, alone becomes lonesome, single-mindedness becomes selfishness, and impatience becomes anger. I wanted to conquer all my fears. There are reasons we have fears, I learned. Fear keeps us from destroying ourselves. But still--wherever I have traveled, the great moments worth writing about seem to come to me when I am unhomed, alone. I do think it's important for people to know how to be alone, alone with God, alone with the wisdom of the road or of the past. But alone is different from lonely, just as much as grief is different from grievance. It's the difference of saying "I am interested" and saying, instead, "I am interesting." This is where the self-absorption of the Prodigal Son resulted in wasting his substance with riotous living.
Dante put Ulysses, the man who took his time coming home from the Trojan war, in his dank oubliette called The Inferno-deep down, even, at the eighth circle, among the hypocrites, thieves, and schismatics. I've felt defensively respectful of Ulysses, the role model of prodigal travelers everywhere, who always stopped to have a nice meal, even when his pals turned into pigs. There's actually a reason for this misdamnation. It seems that neither Dante nor any of his middle-ages contemporaries had the complete text of The Odyssey, and as far as Dante knew, Ulysses never bothered to get home to Penelope, and Dante believed Ulysses to be a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy:
"Not fondness for my son, nor any claim/ Of reverence for my father, nor love I owed/ Penelope, to please her could overcome/ My longing for experience of the world,/ Of human vices and virtue."
Ulysses' journey, like Dante's is often considered a fable about the soul's journey toward education; the return home is symbolic of the soul's deliverance. And aren't mariners supposed to give us the lore of faraway places, share their knowledge from the open road? The ants are morally superior to the grasshopper. In the Book of Job, Satan wanders about the earth and God stays put. To ramble on, partying hearty and cruising the avenue and shirking responsibilities of family-that is what the Prodigal Son did, and that, according to Dante, will put you deep in the bowels of H-E-double-toothpicks.
When all the money was used up on long trips to Europe, on pleasure cruises and spooky disappearing acts, I found myself after 9/11 a bit stuck. My income was halved by taking a new career, it was harder to be anywhere else in the world, and just the hassle of taking off my shoes every time I went through airport security slowed me down, quite a bit. I had to find new ways to disappear. I had heard people took drugs to check themselves out. In my addled brain, trip trips and drug trips seemed to have a lot in common. My research backed me up. Here's Thoreau in his journal about a boat ride from Boston to Portland in May, 1838: "Midnight-head over the boat's side-between sleeping and waking-with glimpses of one or more lights in the vicinity of Cape Ann. Bright moonlight-the effect heightened by seasickness." The effect, the intoxication of travel, is always heightened by sickness.
I wasn't afraid of drugs, because I wasn't afraid of anything. I'd tried lots of them, and they didn't really interest me-I walked away from one puff or drink or snort of anything, mostly not liking the feeling of not being myself. Coffee, okay, coffee. If you had told me five years ago that soon I would be putting methamphetamine into my arm, I would have laughed at you. But a fellow addict told me one day: "there's a perfect drug out there for every person. Lord help you if you find it."
I should have known better the first time I tried it-I liked it too much. It made me feel twenty years old again. It made me uninhibited. It made me ferocious. It made me feel careless. It made me not care about what others thought of me, my overwhelming daily responsibilities, my feeling that life was both too short and too long, my friends, my students, my bank account. I didn't care. I was gone.
From where you stand-from where I stand-my addiction must really bother you. And I know I wanted to get back home. I did, I'm sure of it. But I couldn't face my friends or family or even my poor dog. When things go wrong, they just keep going wronger. You stumble on one rock, and having lost control, you stumble over the next one, never regaining control, until you fall, you lower your standards. And just when you need help the most, you are the most unwilling person to ask for help. The prodigal son needs forgiveness, and gets it only when he returns home.
I will spare you the gory details of what is, in the addict world, a relatively swift plunge downward. What I will tell you about his bottoming out. Every addict has his own personal bottom. The last straw for each Prodigal Son is not what you'd ever guess. It's not always running out of money or losing a job or friends or spouse or family. It can be the simplest thing. For the Biblical prodigal son, pig food will do. For me, it was when my best of lifelong friends, Gwenan, said to me one day, "I am not comfortable with you around my children." This was not a curse, but a stony, painful blessing. I begged her to drive me to rehab, and she did. She did, and that was a thorny forgiveness. The rest has been work. I won't give you a workalogue, any more than I will give you a drugalogue, but I do want to say, gleefully, that I now babysit-for free!-Gwenan's three children twice a week while she and her husband go out to dinner together, have their own little prodigal party.
I am not looking for sympathy. I already got it. At a certain point, if one is lucky enough to be able to grow older, one realizes that one does not want to be an epic hero any more. One wants not pleasure, souped-up, snake-charmed, drugged-out pleasure, but something on a smaller scale. Call it, "Delight". Delight is a sissy word, not manly, not about strength. "Delight" is looking into an old Viewmaster for the stereopticon depth of old stories; somebody giving you free tickets to a play they can't attend. Grilled asparagus, maybe. Going barefoot the first day it's warm enough. Poetry that rhymes and yet is also written for adults; the sound of a baseball game on the radio. Like that. Inconspicuous consumption: winning a game of solitaire on the first deal, being surprised by a friend meeting you at baggage claim at the airport, reading Shakespeare in the bathtub.
I Am the Elder Son
A friend who is a Buddhist told me that you should treat your own body as well as you treat a dog. As a Catholic, this made me feel very guilty about how she must perceive the way I treat my own dog. When I told this guilt-inducing theory to a friend Brad, who grew up on a rural farm in a Calvinist Presbyterian family, he told me to shake it off. "Nobody should treat their own bodies the way we treated dogs," he said, lighting up the sixth cigarette of the morning.
Dogs don't like surprises. The way life ought to be, dogwise, if it's done right, is to have the same day over and over and over. Excitement, when I come home at the same time every day, rises from the paradox of expectant surprise. I think the joy a dog gets from the sameness of the world is approximated in the joy one gets when examining Russian nested dolls. The top babushka comes off, revealing an identical babushka within; off comes the top, revealing another; top, babushka; top, babush; top, ba. And that, yes, is the whole problem, for each is not the same, but smaller and smaller, the dwindling of the joy, ever smaller the dolls. In the 12-step program, people like to sling around Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Dogs are heroes. Lassie, Scooby-Doo, Rin-Tin-Tin. The world is always changing, because that is what it must do. A hero fights to keep the world the same. Over and over and over. In my prodigal son days, I got confused between heroism and insanity.
Oh, let's face it: we hate travelers. They slip out of all life's responsibilities. They send you postcards of the sandiest beach under the bluest sky, they bring home useless trinkets that will never fit around your wrists, they are gone, and have taken your heart with them, and if they come home, they are jetlagged and complain about how they are simply exhausted and what a drag it is to be here, back at work, back with responsibilities, back with you, you loser. We travelers are always looking away from you, or over your shoulder, at the next horizon. And we are always eager to distinguish ourselves from the others, the quick from the dead.
Alone is different from lonely, just as much as grief is different from grievance Since we're talking "One day at a time," this example is only for the moment. At the moment, I'm trying to think of how to give you this talk; it's morning on the last Friday in January, and I'm up early to make soup in the slow cooker for the weekend. There are 3 years between now and the last time I was high. I have learned the wisdom of staying at home, the lore, as Benjamin put it, "of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place." It's hard to be somebody who is pleased enough to know something, rather than somebody who is a know-it-all. I have learned to let God know it all, to let him be the director of my life. I have come to know God that way, to acknowledge that I am not the director, learning to surrender over and over to the Director up there, or, at this moment when I'm making soup, directions, and I didn't follow them. The directions were on the bag of black beans. I decided to go my own way, because I'm better at bean soup than stupid bagged bean directions-spicier, wilder, more creative. I brown a different kind of sausage and add chopped garlic from a jar, being in a hurry. The jarred garlic seems to have turned the water in which it's packed to vinegar, and I think, too late: I've just made garlic sauerkraut bean soup. The vinegar smell stays in my nose as I try to compensate with other, nuttier ingredients (including nuts), and depart further and further from the directions.
Meanwhile, my dog has begged himself outside, and headed to his morning minaret, the top of the stairs of the main house in front of my little coach house. From there, he'll call the faithful to worship-I can't control when he'll howl. He stares at me from between the slats of the railing. Between us is the yard, and the bird feeder set up by my neighbor's boyfriend, called, affectionately and not, "Drunkie". His girlfriend, my friend Kelly, is out of town again, so Drunkie is on a bender. I have to batten down the hatches for what might be called payback, try to maintain control over my little piece of sober earth, lock my doors, watch the dog, latch the gates. Drunkie leaves all doors open, so that my pipes freeze and mice get in my house and the dog goes wandering.
Drunkie is driving me crazy. Now that I have cleaned up my act, I watch him over there, sponging off Kelly, starting up his Miller Lite drinking at 9 am, wrecking my social life and indulged in his habit while I, not for a moment, am not. I figure my own example ought to be enough for him, but he doesn't see himself as an alcoholic. Alcoholics drink HARD liquor. He only drinks Miller Lite. A case a day, starting at 9 am. That's how I, the formerly injuring Prodigal, suffers now the pain of being injured, and that pain, as well as my sense of justice, requires that Drunkie, that OFFENDER, confess and repent to me. For half an hour I slowly grow enslaved again, this time by my own unwillingness to be that one who stays sober, does the right thing; I am the righteous son who asks his father why he's killing the fatted calf for this LOSER. There is nothing more dangerous to my sobriety than justified resentment. We, Drunkie and I, are both enslaved to this upholding and dismissal of the law. Only the father is free, the one "who had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." That's peasant wisdom: I must learn not to let law and tribe insulate me from the needs of my neighbor.
But now, the house still smells like vinegar, the smell of enslavement. I look out and the dog watches me through the slats and then I see it: the bird feeder Drunkie set up and maintains, the one thing he can do, and it has drawn cardinals to the house again. We have cardinals again this winter! The riotous red in the gray trees, the spendthrift headdress, the song that dares me to "Par-TEE! Par-TEE! Par-TEE!" They didn't come last winter, and, as grudgingly as the elder son, I'll have to thank Drunkie. This thanks is, for the moment anyway, a forgiveness I give him. And when I remind myself of that, which I must do over and over and over, I get the same result: I am freed from another kind of slavery-the unwillingness to forgive.
And the moment I forgive Drunkie, I feel lighter. I stand up straight. I see more. I see that my dog is not looking at me through the slats, but at the cardinals, too. He's not looking at me. After what I put him through, his world does not revolve around me the way they say dogs' worlds do. He learned not to believe that sun rises and sets because I make it happen because I was rather neglectful of him when he was a puppy. I am strangely thrilled to know that all this-all of it-could be happening without me, just fine. The only evidence of me is bad soup. I resolve to eat the soup, anyway, because it's MY soup.
I love the Book of Luke most of all because Luke seems to see into the important parts of all the stories. He could have stopped after the father forgave, but Luke goes on, to the more difficult story of the Elder Brother. Luke shows me why I have to show the same compassionate forgiveness of the father, that frees his son from the burden of his own guilt and gives him the strength to confess it: "Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in they sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." Jesus is not discussing the ethics of forgiveness, how I can earn it and under what circumstances I can offer it. He simply shows me that without it I am still in prison-here or there, so I should try to get my forgiveness in first. If I refuse to forgive, I tear down the very bridge I myself will one day have to cross.
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