I've recently found two writers whom I can relate to and sympathize with greatly: Heather King, author of "Redeemed" and John Zmirak of "Bad Catholic" fame.
King's book is chockful of the sort of thoughts that I tend to think but not say aloud. And Zmirak struggles with Jansenism (note the high-larious title of his post, which I still chuckle over: "Nearer My Dogs to Thee"):
Theology figures into this, because I adopted Susie on the advice of a spiritual director, a Catholic shrink I was seeing who hoped to banish my Jansenist image of God. “You wanna know pure and unconditional love, the kinda love God has for every human soul?” he asked between mouthfuls of pasta. (The doc looked and dressed alarmingly like Joe Pesci, and scarfed down Italian take-out during our sessions.) “Get a dog.” At least that’s what I think he said. His mouth was full….
Zmirak also wrote a more recent Lileks-like gem of a post. I savored it and then read it aloud to my wife to guffaws; she says I have his same lack of filter between brain and mouth. (Though I’m not at all into expletives.) A recent example: I’m in a meeting with my boss and bosses’ boss and various & sundry other big shots. My boss started it all by getting a little vaklempt and saying how in a previous meeting he could feel the bonding and how it was a “Kumbaya moment”. I jumped on this to say how I was glad the forced corporate Togetherness Days were over (the last one was about five years ago) and how I’ll never forget the trust-building exercise in which Heather F. sat on my lap while I squatted. Heather was a looker and this immediately seemed a bit unseemly, what that this particular memory should rise to the surface. I broke the ensuing awkward silence by saying, “Well THAT was off-topic”, to which everyone assented a bit too enthusiastically, including my boss who later said he couldn’t believe I went there.
I tend to think Zmirak’s singleness creates the right condition for humor (wasn’t Keillor funnier when he wasn’t in love?). A lack of sex tends to supply the requisite desperation. Married men who practice NFP can, fortunately, share it. But I think he’s in the sweet spot age-wise for his perfect word choice - being 30-ish years old means never having to consult a thesaurus.
What follows is tongue-in-cheek, but I’ve long been disappointed by my lack of hard drinking. I can’t hold a shotglass to my forebears or probably even C.S. Lewis or Chesterbelloc. (Certainly not Belloc.) Regardless whether the poetic imagination is nourished by Guinness it’s a sure thing that all my ancestors drank more alcohol than they did water and it’s a middle finger to evolution for me to drink so much Sprite rather than beer. Grace builds on nature and all that.
But there’s another reason for wishing to be a “modern drunkard”. Could alcoholism be a feature, not a bug? If the focus of it is changed towards its proper end it reflects the radicalism of the gospel. Heather King in “Redeemed” lays out what I knew without knowing I did:
I have a theory that all addiction is, at bottom, a search for God. Think about it: the blackout—a crude form of mystical union; the willingness to sacrifice reputation, family, money, health, one’s very life—a twisted martyrdom. Sometimes I think anyone as drawn as I am to suffering would have had to become a Catholic. But truly, it’s a gift to have seen the depths to which I’ll fall, the extent to which I’ll compromise myself, the lengths to which I’m willing to go to avoid God. The problem with avoiding God is that next thing I know, I’ve latched onto something outside myself, established a substitute God; and he, she, or it is holding me in complete bondage...Alcoholism is an interesting phenomenon. It’s the universal perverse tendency toward self-sabotage, except taken to the nth degree. Normal people look at an alcoholic and think, She drinks like me—just more. But it’s a difference in kind, not degree: for the person predisposed to alcoholism, the very first drink begins setting up a mental obsession and physical craving—in essence, a form of insanity—that is entirely beyond the normal drinker’s ken. Alcoholic drinking is only a symptom—of a soul divided deeply against itself; of mental, emotional, and, above all, spiritual conflict. The conflict is of a soul in which the universal human thirst for connection, meaning, love has gone terribly awry—a soul in the grip of a compulsion that has seized upon a substitute for love and made it into a god. Everybody’s spiritually sick to one degree or another, of course, but what’s interesting about alcoholism is that if I don’t tend to my spiritual sickness, I’ll die. I’ll pick up a drink, or a crack pipe, or a Xanax or three million, and die. Or I’ll kill myself. Or I’ll get so crazy someone else will kill me. It’s a condition that, over the years, has tended to grab my attention. As one of my sober friends says, “I’m not on a spiritual path because I’m so spiritual. I’m on a spiritual path because I’m so not spiritual.”I admire people who burn out rather than rust out, like Ham. They have a singleness of purpose that if turned to religion would result in sanctity. Ham is frugal to the point of insanity. He would easily drink himself into madness or liver disease, whichever comes first. He works 70 hours a week and spends another ten studying for a certification exam. He writes entire screenplays All of this is unthinkable to me, for most addicts don’t seem to have a mediocre bone in their body. By definition, if you drink to excess you’re quite aware of the “God-shaped hole”. You don’t need to be convinced that pleasure isn’t the primary aim of life since you see it doesn’t work. He who drinks tepidly and moderately, prays tepidly and moderately?
So the priest in his homily during the Assumption Mass tells us that he was staring at a woman the other day. Not out of lust but disgust. 76 years old and she wore leather showing her aged mid-drift and having a low-cut halter. They were the clothes of a 20-yr old, he said. She flirted with 20-yr old men. He called it pathetic and said the difference between her and the Christian is that while she was terrified of aging, we shouldn’t because we believe in the Resurrection, including our own. But isn’t it also possible that the reason this is sad is not that she fears death but that she fears being ignored. Is it that she feels she won’t have worth? In this society, looks are so overvalued that I’ve often felt sympathy for how women must suffer from being treated one way when they were 28 and another when 68. A man doesn’t have to go through that. Now you can say, rightly, that she should seek her worth from God instead of other people. But isn’t that too neat and leave us off the hook, in just referring everything to God when we are the vehicles of God? I say there but for His grace go we all.
I stared like a smitten schoolboy at the farm scenes in front of me while on a recent bike ride. They were impossible to fully asssimilate given the infinity of viewing angles. I longed to drink in the scene in the Quixotic attempt to be able to draw from it in lean winter.
The weather has been freakishly good for the past six weeks but that’s not unexpected since July and August are the king and queen of months. They are to weather what Fred Aistaire and Ginger Rogers were to dancing. July begins with the crisp Sousa marches of the great PBS “A Capitol Fourth” followed by bright eye’d lightning bugs torching the night. It continues with midsummer’s own midpoint: MLB’s All-Star game. August kicks off with the Irish music fest and is followed shortly by the arrival of huge quantities of tasty fat red tomatoes on the vine. There is no scarcity principle in our tomato crop. All through August the days burn like bright candles while the apples adorning the trees next to the old railroad track ripen. The months of the year are so distinct as to be geographic: April is a foreign country compared to June.
While I'm still in "grateful mode", at least until mid-September, I do feel an element of sympathy in the editor of the "Catholic Times" recent piece:
“When I was a boy and we got a spell of August weather like this my dad would always proclaim, “Well, summer’s over. Better start getting ready for the snow!” My mother always hated that. She knew that there was still plenty of hot weather to come. But my dad loved the summer heat and dreaded the onset of winter so much that all it took was a couple of cool mornings to set him into an ill humor.”While on the bike ride I pondered the glee to be “onto something”. Intellectually that is. Too often I denigrate being onto something as mere mirage. The only onto something one can be onto is love of God and neighbor. Words & thoughts are cheap, actions dear. It's so easy to think God is only interested in our production. It’s so easy to think that our neighbor needs us to fix his material or physical needs more than he needs our smile. It’s easy to think that God wants our obedience more than our love. Our technology tends to change us in its direction, such that we become more computer-like, more robotic. That is, more intolerant of error in ourselves or others, more emotionless, more focused on solutions to suffering rather than love.
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