What if you discover that I’m a fraud, a false flower that, for all its layered colors—the yellows on reds on fluorescent pinks—is made of molded plastic? What if you pluck me from the vase to smell me, find that I’m unrooted, an artifical imposter shoved into a vase of glass marbles?
There are things more strident Christians do not confess within the church house walls. Even if your church is a safe place to out your addiction, your own particular mud pit, here’s a confession that’s less acceptable even there: I sometimes doubt the very existence of God. I sometimes wonder whether he’s nothing but the figment of an overactive imagination. And God, if he were God, could cut through the doubt and speak. Couldn’t he?
This thought gives rise to the house fire in my nerves. Here’s the thing that drives me to drinking.
Allow me to share a secret.
In 2013 the question begins to creep: do I have a problem? Amber has asked me time and again whether I’ve considered cutting back on the bottle, but I tell her with a wink and a smile I’m no quitter. Anything worth doing is worth doing well and all of that. In secret, though, I consider giving up alcohol for Lent in an effort to prove something to myself. I keep it a secret so that if I recant, my hypocrisy will pass unnoticed. After three days of abstinence, my nerves begin to fray. A bout of shingles attacks my torso. I suspend my Lenten devotion and I am five again, wearing my Sunday best to the mud hole. I resurrect my drinking habit within seventy-two hours of Ash Wednesday.
It would be embarrassing, except I avoid the truth. My friends ask about my Lenten commitment, and I tell them it’s been a Lenten year already, a year in the ashes of Titus’s sickness. I tell them I’m taking Lent to celebrate the life of Christ. I’ll break bread and drink wine without regret! I tell my friends I plan to be well-acquainted with the mechanism of celebration come Easter morning.
In earnest, the year with Titus has set me to wondering whether the Lenten season is an exercise in frivolous devotion. The Jesus who made his way to the cross, who rose from the dead—he has not seen fit to bring a resurrection miracle in our hour of need. We’ve struggled for answers to Titus’s sickness, and the pain of the absence of resurrection miracles is too much; I dare not feel it. And so I drink it under the table.
No, I will not spend forty days observing the pain of our own mortality. Instead, I’ll skip to the celebration. I’ll take the feast of Easter without the lamentation of Lent. I’ll drink and drink and drink, and substitute platitudes for rhythmic devotion.
My mother calls me on Easter Sunday. “He has risen!” she says over the phone on Easter morning. “He has risen, indeed!” I say, hungover and head throbbing. I am relieved that all charades, Lenten or otherwise, have a summing up at one point or another.
But the day—or the charade—isn’t over yet.
It’s Easter morning, and I lead worship for the two or three thousand at our church, all hungry for the spectacle of celebration. It’s an ambitious music set with too many turns for a fogged-up musician. We sing a creed and some spruced-up hymns. Then I embark on a modern resurrection song, and as the congregation is worked into a celebratory frenzy, I climb the scale and sing, “The man Jesus Christ laid death in his grave.” As I work my way into a precarious key change, my head threatens to explode, dislocate, and crash onto the stage in a grand fainting spectacle. In the end, I cut the note short, but the congregation bellows on, none the wiser.
After the service, a charismatic couple comes to me, puts their hands on my shoulder, says, “You have a special anointing.” Anointing—so that’s what they’re calling it these days.
This morning, I sat in a chair in the corner of the living room and tried to coax myself from sleep with a cup of bad joe. The good-coffee tin had run empty, and I was forced to resort to the coarser-grained stuff that was good enough for my grandpa. Putting off the first sip, I sat as the scent of the Best Part of Waking Up wafted from the side table. There, in early morning grogginess, I fell into a dream.
I was a magician under the hot spotlight. The people were there with their best expectations and their darling children, whose mouths were stained with the pink and blue sugar-residue of cotton candy as they waited to be mesmerized. A circus-suited announcer called my name. “The Great and Powerful,” he said before a flash of light and a puff of smoke, before I sprang from the trapdoor under the stage. They gasped. The children laughed as their parents reached to cover their eyes.
I was naked, without my trick deck, my dove, or my “watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat” hat. I was standing there with my words. Only words. I prayed that you’d buy them as some sort of magic, that you’d see them as miracles. But you and I both knew the truth: words are often poor illusions. No matter how I might have hoped otherwise, my words were translucent tricks, cellophane shenanigans unable to hide or otherwise distract you from my nakedness. And you and I both knew this wasn’t the man you’d paid good money to see.
Over this last year and a half, I have been searching for God while pretending to have it all together. I’ve been working in illusions—celebrating Easter when I should have been in Lenten repentance, leading resurrection worship while steeped in a hidden death—and wondering whether God would swing low. I have floundered in this season of Titus’s sickness, cried out like the Sunday morning preachers of prosperity tell the congregants to do, all the while wondering if there is a God who will answer, who is not occupied elsewhere, who has not indeed walked away. I have cried out standing, sitting, and kneeling. I’ve given it a go in my house, at the go-to-church meeting, in the supermarket, at the prayer meeting with good friends, and once (though only in thought) in the middle of an airport. I’ve found precious little comfort in this cry, and though from time to time I hear the voice that some call the still small voice, I haven’t seen the mountains unhinge themselves. I haven’t seen Titus healed.
I need some mountains to unhinge.
Do I not have the faith of a mustard seed? Do my pleas fly on a void passport?
Let me be clear: I am never as sure or as strong as my best words might lead you to believe. Are you? I am here now, naked, and I’m not trying to convince you that I am anything other than what I am—a self-medicating, alcohol-dependent straggler, listening the best I know how for the faintest whispers of a God I think I remember.
About the coming clean, about such a naked confession, I can say this: it is an awkward moment. It is a nude plunge into cold water while the women and children watch from the shore. It is the exposition of one thousand embarrassments, the big moment before the crowd when one wishes to recite epic poetry, and nothing but thick-tongued gibberish comes stuttering out.
About the coming clean, though, I can also say this: confession seems like some sort of magic. Not the kind that will garner applause through the mysterious workings of a black top hat—something stranger, something other. Confession by confession, I’m finding who I am and who I am not. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll find a good God who will weave a better suit of clothes for me. Maybe I won’t soil this set.
I’m not sure if these are the shakes, but my fingers tingle and burn. I can’t seem to quench the thirst for a drink, and I’m considering sneaking a nip. I know I need sobriety, but I’m not sure how to go about it.
I know a therapist, dialed his number. I might have a drinking problem, I said, and asked whether he could help me untangle myself. He asked me a few pointed questions. Had I quit drinking? Was I drinking to passing out? Did I have the shakes? Had I been drinking and hiding the evidence? Was it starting to interfere with my law practice? And then he said, “Okay, you’re bad enough off. Come on in tomorrow at eleven.”
I’m bad enough off. Tell me something I don’t know, doc.
Today, over my lunch hour, I met with him for the first time. I told him that I have a drinking problem, though if I had come even a few weeks earlier, I might have admitted only that I have a knack for holding a great deal of liquor. He asked me what I was covering with the alcohol, what I’d been masking. I told him that my son was still struggling, that he needed to be healed and God wasn’t answering. I am afraid, I said, of being found out, anxious that the good folks in the good church will think me a fraud because I don’t always believe in an active, present, healing God. I don’t have enough faith to muster a healing. Sickness, I fear, is the permanent plague of my son’s life, of my life.
“That’s the fear that leads to questioning God’s existence,” I said, “and on top of it, my nerves are unraveling and I feel unhinged and half crazy.” Gin deadens the nerves, seems to rehinge everything, I told him.
He looked at me with firm, kind eyes and said, “No wonder you have a drinking problem. I don’t blame you.”