When it comes to sins of the flesh, hubris, envy, pride, and all of the other things that churches and religious organizations pass out tickets to hell for, we all fall short of the "Glory of God" in some way. If your gut reaction is to deny this fact, feel free to add "lies" to the above list. While churches like to advertise themselves as the archetype for recovery, or even just a beacon for lost souls, it's not always the best place to go looking for help (that's another topic for another day). So what are the alternatives? What will actually help you sift through the wreckage of your soul and help you rediscover that limitless potential you thought lost? If you're struggling with addiction, this is where your basic recovery programs come in, which can be found through various organizations in urban and rural areas, and ironically, there are even some you can find online. I guarantee you if there's a place populated by people, they have their fair share of vices, and where there's vices, there's addicts.
In the case of the church, who has always made a point of claiming to be above all of the societal struggles of the common man, addiction is tricky ground that one must tread carefully, because unless you're bolstering the number of attendees in their recovery programs, they have a tendency to not be as understanding as you'd think. I've seen it happen, and I've heard disdain for the suffering directly from the mouths of pastors. After all, darkness begets darkness just as addiction begets other issues. And if my time in church employment has taught me anything, it's that if something (or somebody) makes the church look bad, it has to be removed as quickly as possible. Jordan Peterson says in his book 12 Rules for Life, "To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that they have become is now real. Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration. And then comes the flood. I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract someone from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep. And there's not much left of the body at the bottom." If this is the case, do you not think that it's the job (and responsibility) of the church to show compassion and offer as much help as that person is willing to accept? If somebody you know was slipping into a "chasm" would you not throw them a rope? It's up to the person at the bottom to decide whether or not to grab hold of it. And churches aren't the only people - or organizations - who do this. So when you find yourself ostracized by the structures you rely on, where then do you turn?
Before I move on, let me just clarify so I don't get a bunch of angry emails and comments: I don't hate the church. I've had some bad experiences with the church (especially during my time as a church employee). I'll talk about it eventually, but I don't see any benefit in setting fire to crops that yield things for people. I absolutely believe in God. If your experiences are good ones (and I hope there are good churches out there) let me know. I would honestly love to hear about it.
As for my earlier inquiry "Where then do you turn for help?" I picked up a book called "Recovery" by Russell Brand after hearing him talk about it on his podcast "Under the Skin." For those of you who don't know who Russell Brand is, he's been in a lot of movies, particularly ones written, produced, or somehow associated with Judd Apatow. To name a couple you've probably heard of, he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, in both of which he played the drug addicted, dim-witted rockstar Aldous Snow, the lead singer of a fictitious band called Infant Sorrow. Anyway, if you've seen him in the movies or heard about some of his exploits as a real life drug addict or attempts at political commentating, you might assume he's an idiot, but after his time in rehab and hearing him speak on various podcasts, and eventually reading his book, I discovered that he's actually very brilliant. To say that his book Recovery has helped me in my own life would be an understatement, it's not just a self-help book for the self-medicated, it's a very transformative look into the human psyche. And in a world where everything is skin deep and left to float on the surface, we could all use a little help looking inward.
As soon as you open the book, you're hit with a powerful (and devastating) fact, "Today, we may awaken and instantly and unthinkingly reach for the phone, its glow reaching our eyes before the light of dawn, its bulletins dart into our minds before even a moment of acknowledgment of this unbending and unending fact: You are going to die." As dark and tragic as that sounds, it really makes you wonder about your priorities, your issues, your emotional baggage, and every other aspect of your life that has (or still is) bringing you despair in some form. For me, it's been my struggles with religion and mental health. My inability to be the perfect "christian" child that I was always expected to be, constantly left me feeling a lack of the things a child needs to thrive and grow into the individual they're meant to be. From childhood, that lack avalanched into various forms of mental illness, and I don't use that term in the broad spectrum it's used today. I was in and out of therapy, I was on various medications, I was diagnosed with depression, I constantly had high levels of anxiety. In fact, the anxiety got so bad that I was out of school for nearly two months when I was a junior. I barely ate, I barely slept, I was terrified of leaving the house. I couldn't function as a teenage human in the world in which I existed, and that led to an eventual desire that took residence in my mind daily to stop existing. I don't need to go into that part, just know that it was a long period of darkness in which I was I constantly at war with myself. And the fact that I was attending a Christian high school, where they took a very legalistic view of God didn't help matters, either. I was caught in a cycle that I would be spinning in for years, unable to pull myself free and become the person I was meant to be.
Growing up, neither my friends or family really understood what I was going through. My best friend used to make fun of me for being depressed and "emo." My family used to say that my depression was "an absence of God in my life," and that if I went to youth group (or a young adult group as I got older) I would be cured. Maybe they were trying to help in their own - possibly selfish or misunderstood - ways, because that's what we do, right? It's a biological need to ease our own conscience, because Humans are and always have been uncomfortable with the pain of other humans. This is why we go to funerals and try to assure the grieving that "everything is going to be okay." And people who suffer like to think things are going to be okay, because modern social and societal structures have made us afraid of looking inward or reflecting on our emotions, or really just the idea of vulnerability, unless it serves a political purpose of some greater ill-conceived narrative. Because of this, I believe that many people who suffer or live in grief, get used to it, and it becomes ingrained in them, much like the individual with an engineering degree applies for a retail job to pay their way through college and ends up staying there long after graduation because it's become comfortable. Or how about the man or woman who stays in an abusive or miserable relationship because they feels like they don't have any options or they don't deserve better? Russell Brand tackles this topic in his book. He says, "We simply adapt to living to pain and never countenance the beautiful truth: there is a solution." Yes, there's always a solution for those willing to look, but - much like everything else in life - it leads to more questions. How do you find it? How do you get there? Where do you even start the journey? And how do you keep the mindset as you go? Frodo knew he had to destroy the ring, but without the Fellowship of the Ring or any idea how to get to Mordor, the chances are high that - even fueled by a desire to get there - he would have been destroyed or consumed by the ring long before he made it.
The big issue we face today, as people who live in 2018 - unless you're living on an island without internet and other humans - is that we're all addicted to something, whether it's an acknowledged thing or something that's been attached to the ever-changing definition of "normal." Technology is a pendulum slowly lowering itself onto our necks. Addictions don't just come in the form of alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling. Our vices are now as numerous as the hours we spend indulging them. We love social media, relevance, Netflix, selfish acts of kindness, attention, video games, YouTube, and all other manner of escape, digital or otherwise. So, what exactly is addiction? According to Brand, "Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation, or status, become prioritized to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic." Knowing this, it's no wonder we get so caught up in our positive feedback loops. We create our own hell, and society - through social media, marketing, or human interaction - makes us believe that's the place we want to be.
"What happens when you don't follow the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need to eat, and purge? The only way to find out is to not do it, and that is a novel act of faith." This is an interesting idea. Who does fulfilling these needs serve besides ourselves? Very few people can stand up and say that they're not impulsive, and a major problem with being impulsive is that our need to satisfy that impulse often results in all kinds of rationalities that require a connect-the-dot-like thought process to make any sense of. Take, for example, the stressed out employee who needs to consume alcohol or drugs to "manage his (or her) anxiety" or the millennial who justifies an inability to live in the moment because of the pressures that come with maintaining a social media presence and keeping their "followers" happy. They're always on the lookout for the next best Instagram picture or thinking of an idea for their next YouTube video. These practices (of which I am guilty, as well) remove us from intellectual concepts of being and limit our thinking to shallow ideas of self. Perhaps it's not all your fault. After all, we do live in an age of consumerism. But as I'm starting to discover in my own life, reconnecting to the concept of being after living a lifestyle of self-importance and enacting the many formulas that requires, is incredibly difficult. And in some cases, both the body and mind find ways to reject it. On top of that, once you start slowly peeling that veil back, all of your monsters start to surface and - in some cases - you discover that those issues are what caused such faithful indulgence in the first place.
An interesting concept Brand brings up in the intro to his book is that in order to cope with the world around us, we develop two different forms of consciousness. One of them is the one we use to go about our daily lives, our routines, and social/familial interactions. And the other one is our darkside, the one we let loose occasionally so that the other "good one" can still function on a daily basis within the realm of our sanity (or what we understand those limits to be). Brand dives deeper into this thought with a series of profound questions. "What could it be, this other consciousness? Just the sublime accompaniment to my growing nails, pumping heart, and rushing blood? These physical and discernible bodily phenomena, do they have a counterpart in the world less obvious? Are we addicts like the animals that preemptively fled the oncoming tsunami, sensing some foreboding? Are we attuned to prickling signals that demand anesthesia? What is the pain? What is it? What does it want?"
What are we all trying to escape? In politics, social movements, schools, jobs, churches and even our family lives, vulnerability is considered weakness. Vulnerability disrupts comfort and hierarchies. It removes our ability to manipulate and control. Because of this, we stop looking inward. We stop connecting to our true self, and instead we create a false self, one that helps us maintain the "reality" that we've constructed from our ideas and the ideas of others. Today, instead of working in harmony and encouraging intellectual thought and independence, we've become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect, or the need to always be right about everything, even if we don't know anything about it, even if it's unresearched, even if the need to be right and socially dominant ostracizes and isolates family members and loved ones. After all, who cares, right? As long we're relevant. This behavior has consequences, not just for us, but also for the people we interact with. Influence, while it certainly has its positive aspects, is very dangerous. Because human beings need interaction with other human beings to thrive, we try to force ourselves into molds and tribes, even if that involves changing our beliefs to do so. And those who don't, end up falling into the howling loneliness of being an outcast. And then, much like the wizard in J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts films who is forced or taught to smother and ignore his magical gifts resulting in a destructive, dark mass called an obscuras, we create all sorts of self-destructive behaviors (or monsters) to cope with our circumstances. Addiction, mental illness, relevance, escape, on a psychological level, they're all connected with roots that run deep into the human psyche.
Where am I going with all of this? Until I really jumped into these ideas and concepts, I didn't realize exactly how devastating of an effect we have on one another. I've lately developed this mindset where I don't like to do or take part in anything that puts down another group of people. While I won't hold back in being completely open and honest, I don't like to take part in prideful or arrogant behaviors. When I picked up Russell Brand's book, it wasn't to address any addictions or self-destructive practices (at least not any in particular) it was more in search of a new way of thinking. For several years now, I've been experiencing this disconnect, like my life has become robotic, and I'm nothing more than formula and programming. I looked for hope in my family, I looked for hope in the church, I looked for hope in self-destructive behaviors. None of those things worked. In fact, they only perpetuated the numbness that I was feeling on a daily basis. Then I met some people (through one of the churches I was employed at) who mentored me and opened my mind through intellectual conversation, podcasts, and written works by brilliant minds like Peter Rollins, Richard Rohr, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand and many others. And I can honestly say - to my friends/mentors - that I owe you a debt I can never repay. If only you knew how dark my life felt before I met you guys. That being said, this is just a look at the introduction of Russell Brand's book Recovery, and why it's a significant work in my eyes. I hope to write about all twelve chapters/steps in the book, but you know how time goes . . . always the antagonist at your back. Hopefully somebody out there can pull back the layers of this rant and find something useful. Then again, I don't exactly have all - if any - of the answers, and I'm certainly not free of my own afflictions. I just know that there's an infinite possibility for discovery in the search.
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