I’m trying to tell the story a recovering addict & an amateur mystic, a peaceful anarchist & born-again Christian. As full of ideas about the world & theories about God as I am, I don’t want this to get ideological or theological, denominational or detrimental. I want you to see me through the words, get past my pretentious phrases to the embedded phases of spiritual meaning.
A practitioner of previous extremes, I’m afraid of making this sound better or worse than it is. Loather of the lukewarm, I’ve often confused moderation & modesty with mediocrity. Before middle age, I believed Neil Young’s maxim about burning out before fading away & a host of other carpe diem cliches: “Live fast, die young.” “Burn the candle at both ends.” “Squeeze the toothpaste out both sides.”
Deep feelings in the innocent depths of childhood revealed a profound sense of connectedness to all things spiritual & sensual. A passionate bundle of Whitmanian contradictions, I found saintliness next to sinfulness, looked for spirit in the flesh.
A fully integrated & intuitive notion of divine presence & deviant predilection preceded layers of knowing & unknowing, of practicing impropriety & remembering redemption. But I imagine I was very young when I first realized I was so wondrously wired & easily inspired by premonitions of a sacred path.
Later in life, I’d learn about the letter sent from psychiatrist Carl Jung to Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson that described the precarious relationship of blessing & affliction that wed the addict & the mystic. Like so many of the lightning-rod realizations I’ve encountered in the literature of recovery, these revelations rang true. Jung posed that the “craving for alcohol” resembled “the spiritual thirst” seeking “union with God.” “You see,” Jung wrote, “Alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus’ & you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.” Myself a notorious veteran of an addict’s avenue to spiritually “high depravity,” reading this I was convinced Jung knew me before I was born. With a reassuring certainty, these writings played the notes of my life like a belfry chimes time.
Reading Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counterculture for the first time in my 20s, I’d been warned about the false god of drug-induced epiphany, the psychedelic degrees in “counterfeit infinity” conferred by the church of the “turned-on” & “tuned-in.” I knew that getting drunk or tripping on drugs were not the same as what’s offered by prayer & meditation, but the shortcuts to nirvana lured me nonetheless. Their tragic deaths aside, Jim Morrison & Jack Kerouac & too many like them led me to cathedrals of indulgence, teaching me an addict’s amoral catechism of corporeal temptation, & for two decades, I was an all-to-eager student.
The young hippy-punk hedonist could hardly contain his experiential confirmation of the curious messianic charisma contained in Kerouac’s lusty litany of madness & advertised by Morrison’s burning phallus of fire. The secular trinity of sex, drugs, & rock n roll stole my soul, but so did socialism, surrealism, & psychedelics. Long before I’d discover the 12 steps of recovery, I wanted to take a fearless moral inventory of the entire history of the western world.
Clearly, being born again into Christianity& discovering sobriety are deeply tied together for me. I feel a bit like the prodigal son & a postmodern Saul. From daily Bible devotions to weekly worship to voracious reading of other spiritual texts, getting to know Jesus again has been a deeply mystical & personal but also religious experience for me.
On my third evening of sobriety from alcohol, all alone in the privacy of my apartment, I tried to do the third step of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Made a decision to turn our will & our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Earlier that day, I’d picked up a white surrender chip at an AA meeting & cried my eyes out in a church basement full of complete strangers. As my body detoxed, my brain went wild with hope & fear.
For a long time that night, I did deep breathing, lit candles, listened to mellow, trancey music. The instructions were clear: I needed to pray, offering my powerless self to God’s power & love, with complete willingness & abandon. Sitting on a pillow before my modest apartment altar, I finally mustered the mojo to pray, something I never really did with any humility, consistency, or regularity as a new age pagan. As I sat there nervous & a little superstitious, I looked around my apartment. On the kitchen wall hung a larger banner of Bacchus, the god of wine. “I can’t really pray to you,” I joked.
Near my altar hung a small color photocopy of Alex Grey’s Jesus. Quite spontaneously, I turned to Christ & said, “I guess I’ll pray to you.” I did. I prayed directly to the one I’d read about & sang about & knew as a child as my personal Lord & Savior. He answered immediately, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you to come home." The rest of the evening was entirely magical & electric & momentous & without compare. I’ve been praying to Jesus Christ all day every day ever since. & I haven’t consumed anything stronger than a cup of coffee or an ibuprofen in over a year.
In Sacred Mirrors, the book where my favorite Jesus image (“resurrected, surrounded by golden light") comes from, Grey writes that Christ is “one of the first Western spiritual teachers to realize & activate the essential truth that he was (we are) ‘the word made flesh’--a direct channel for the love & healing energy of God.”
The role of Alex Grey’s art in my Christianity & recovery has been nothing short of shapeshifting. The day I gave up cigarettes in 2002, I practiced “time-line therapy” with a teacher & had a vision of my birth, of life in the womb, & finally of God as prebirth unitive consciousness. That day’s culminating vision profoundly resembled Grey’s “universal mind lattice.” Without the roots of what I would later learn from the 12-steps & corresponding fellowships, without a teacher or self-discipline to keep my ego in check, the mystical currents I touched when ditching nicotine were haphazard & haywire & often selfish & self-destructive. Without nicotine, I increased my use of other drugs & alcohol until entering recovery in 2009.
For me, addiction involves not just alcohol -- my primary substance of no-choice -- but other obsessions & compulsions, to varying degrees, with marijuana & other drugs, food & caffeine, sexuality & pornography, exercise, shopping, work.
For me & for now, non-negotiable daily abstinence involves alcohol, recreational drugs, pornography, & promiscuous sex. I am experimenting though with moderation & periods of abstinence with particular products. For example, I am currently fasting from buying new books, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, & concert tickets. When I put down the bottle, I picked up the spoon & the fork. But I really don’t desire a life as an overeating, overweight food addict. I’m gratefully blessed with an intimate friendship, & we are engaged in a monogamous relationship.
Based on my thorny personal experiences & tentative theories, addiction is an all-encompassing disease of the body, mind, & spirit that’s fatal & progressive. While I’ve always known deep down that I am addict, my best friend denial postponed the healing until after more than 20 years of self-destructive deceit & decadent diversion.
Of course, all those adventures weren’t entirely wrong or bad, but the nature of addiction is an alchemy of obsession that pretends to resist repression & ends up suppressing spirit even as it it cajoles the mind into pursuing even higher highs that lead to lower lows. By the time the addict wakes up, it almost always feels like it’s too late.
For me, the tumble to the bottom of “too late” involved automobile accidents, lies & emotional abuse in personal relationships, the end of a marriage, leaving the intentional community I helped found in 1996. Before I got to the end of that road & the beginning of the new one, I’d had several dark, fearful visions of hell & death. Early in recovery, I tried to describe the disease-hypothesis of addiction to a friend who resisted its logic as relieving the addict of personal accountability. “That sounds like ‘the devil made me do it’,” she said.
Without getting too metaphysical & esoteric here, that assessment rang true. Satan had my soul. The devil did make me do it. I don’t know if I believe in Satan or the devil in any traditional sense, but if the devil exists, it’s in the liquors bottles fondled & suckled by the practicing alcoholic. The morning after my third step prayer, my fourth day of sobriety, I wrote the following poem-prayer in my journal:
How badly I wanted the resurrection
without the crucifixion,
how badly I wanted the life everlasting
without the daily dying,
how badly I wanted the Divine Friend
without a fight with the friendly demon.
I still don’t believe in the devil outside,
but the devil inside is killing & being killed
with a burning that only the loving warrior
can vanquish in the inviolate vision of
His holy sacrifice.
Forgive me, Comforting One.
Comfort me, Forgiving One.
I didn’t have a problem with God,
especially when I thought I was a god &
ever more so with every glass of wine.
I don’t have a problem with God,
but God must have a problem with me
lying, cheating, stealing me,
arrogant, adulterous, stupid me.
I have a problem with
admitting a problem that
exists no further than the
walls of this skin,
the wall of this sin.
If this God that is not sin
will come in & cleanse this dirty mind & soul,
then come on with it. Now!
I didn’t know it was possible
to get so greedy for grace,
for grace without pace.
This grace is fast & slow,
this grace is long,
this grace never ends.
Although an unrepentant hedonist suddenly admitting ultimate humiliation & defeat at the rocky bottom of a whisky flask, beer bottle, & box of wine is not my idea of the perfect party, the crawling then climbing & now frequent flying in the sunlight of the spirit has made the journey into honesty & fidelity well-worth the freight I’ve had to pay. Although I’ve sacrificed all kinds of sensual pleasures & have dramatically altered my social scene, I feel more than fortunate, fully-blessed, & without regret.
For most of my 20s & 30s, I practiced some kind of eclectic neopaganism & studied not just earth-based religions but also Taoism & Buddhism & more general New Age teachings. Around 2005, I realized that Jesus was still part of my pantheon & began an inquiry into mysteries & controversies surrounding the early church & the historically pagan aspects of early Christianity & the Christ story.
For a very brief period, I identified as an interspiritual Christopagan, but really, I am just a Christian, a contemplative amateur mystic, a lay preacher & teacher, a born again bible-reading explorer of The Way, a jazzed-up Jesus follower with a bright light deep inside my core. For a person with my interspiritual inclinations, following Jesus in a disciplined & focused fashion means acknowledging that for me, he is not just one of many great teachers, but the unifying & all-encompassing One. Several specific things set the Jesus story & Christian cosmology apart for me from other teachings & teachers--gospel-flavored radical forgiveness & unconditional love for starters--but ultimately, it’s the deeply personal & authentic nature of my spiritual experiences with Christ that make me a Christian.
From my years out there wandering, I learned a lot that I do not entirely reject, including a relationship with the sacred feminine & a deep respect for the earth where I still seek a sustainable lifestyle to express my solidarity with all of God’s great green creation. Lots about the folly & futility of thoughts & the freedom found in letting go of ego can be learned from a wide swath of spiritual teaching, especially for me in Buddhism & Taoism.
The divine feminine for Christians can take on many different aspects. Some give special status to Christ’s earthly mother Mary or to the friend & disciple Mary Magdalene. Others see the creator as being of both genders or neither; & finally, many trinitarian Christians call on the Holy Spirit as specifically feminine.
I respect the unchurched Christians just like I respect the unschooled scholars, but religion feels phenomenal to me, & I’m already deeply involved in my church, teaching Sunday school & hopefully organizing an alternative Sunday night service. My Christ-centered monotheism is deeply interspiritual, inclusive, & respectful of other people’s prerogatives toward different religions & paths. At once universalist & evangelical, I experience God as God as good as love as peace as everywhere & everything.
