It’s a blur now, the season after Titus is released from the hospital. I remember it now like the ghost of a memory.
Titus meets me at the door, arms raised. The plastic snake still runs up his nose and into his belly, though he is not connected to the feeding pump at the moment. He runs bowlegged, belly bloated, smiling straight into my arms. He is a boy with unexplainable energy considering his calorie-deficient diet. I hold him, feel his heart beating through his shell of a body. I can count every rib.
These are the days when I first notice my nerves are unraveling, fraying from the inside out, first in my stomach. I can feel an ungluing of attention. I avoid prayer like frogs or locusts, like a death angel. Instead, I slow unorganized thoughts, fear, and grief with a drink or two or three. I have become a secret imbiber, pouring doubles from my stash at the office before I leave. I pour a drink when I hit the door too, a scalding gin and tonic, always more gin than tonic. When Amber goes to the bathroom, I double back to the cupboard, grab the bottle, and top off my drink. I keep multiple kinds of liquor in the house so the emptying headspace is less noticeable.
These are the things that are the hardest to confess: I am, by nature, a sneak and a thief. I’d steal a drink sooner than I’d steal a kiss, and what’s worse, I’d excuse it in the name of Christian liberty.
I tell myself it’s all just petty theft; it keeps the nerves at bay. But this is gunpoint robbery. I play worship music over the house speakers and feign that the music is salve to the soul, as if I’m Saul, the playlist a harp-strumming David. But the worship is much less about personal devotion; it is a cover-up.
In the later years of his life, my grandfather practiced the discipline of crucifying Gordon and his gin for the Lenten season. He’d shelve his survival kit and drudge his way through the cycle, his temper as terse as a Bengal tiger’s. “I suppose this proves I don’t have a problem,” he’d say after a few Sundays. Then he’d laugh and add, “Think God would mind if I took a nip, just to keep the malaria at bay?”
The mosquitos on the bayou were, after all, quite a scourge.
My grandmother, on the other hand, came clean with all the devotion of a disciple set free. In her later years, she was a principled woman, a woman who did not suffer religious artifices easily. To her, the stuff of God was real and active. It was a thing not to be invoked willy-nilly. This, I suppose, had to do with the fact that she’d have died a drunk were it not for her belief in an ever-present, always-abiding Jesus.
I could have learned a thing or two from my grandmother. After all, a drunk who’s found herself sobered up by interaction with a higher power deserves a bit of extra attention. My grandmother was spiritually awakened and, for the most part, could have given two cow pies about the religious Parcheesi played by the more pious.
It was my unfortunate luck, however, not to have learned the proper lessons. If I’m honest, I judged my grandmother as something other than a saint in my younger days of faith, she with the sordid history. I suppose I thought her some sort of second-tier believer.
Now here I am. A lay worship leader, a faith writer, an editor of a website titled Deeper Church (how much more religious could that sound?), and I have been playing my own games with devotion.
Ah, what a false face.
This morning, I read the fourth and fifth chapters of Luke. There is Jesus. Do you see him? He is there to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, recovery to the blind and those who are oppressed. Do you see him? There he is healing the man with the demon, healing Simon’s mother-in-law (Matt. 8:14–15). There he is healing the leper and the paralytic (Matt. 8:1–3; 9:1–8). He is the cure personified.
I’ve been sober for almost one month, but I still feel the creeping sickness. It’s hiding in me, as if under a rock. I can feel the house-burning nerves. I still crave the drink. I think about liquor less, but still often. Sometimes I consider that if a tragedy occurred—if Amber died or I lost my job—I would have the perfect excuse to turn a bottle up. Could anyone blame me? And though these fantasies of drinking myself through tragedy are abating, I still have them. There is no complete relief.
I am a man of unslaked thirsts.
Today, I decide I’m finished with feeling like a fraud. I ask for the coming of real freedom: Liberate me! Heal me! Give me good news!
As sure as I ask for liberation, I am swept into the cave, and I feel the flames. There is the faith healer. There is the sickly me of anemic faith. All relics that remind me that my best prayers for healing have only ever gone unanswered—at least, so it feels. My tongue burns; the heat in this house fire of a cave brings everything to a blistering point. Here is the need to see an upward trend in Titus’s growth chart. Here is the reminder that the far side of the river I most hope for is wholly outside my reach.
The heat is sickening, and I want my escape hatch.
I want escape from these thoughts and from the supposed safety of drink.
This is what it means to face the pain, and if you were to ask me how I feel in the quickening moments, I’d tell you that I feel abandoned, empty, sick. I feel false, a lay minister adept at the forms and structures of a Christlike faith, but lacking in power.
There are hollow prayers I’ve considered not worth uttering. Today, I’ll pray them.
Liberate me! Heal me! Give me good news!
At first, my requests for relief only rattle and echo in my stomach. So I ask again and I hear. What? The coming of something quiet?
Yes.
I am the Lord your God; I will never leave you nor forsake you.
I hear a smaller voice too, a younger one. I tune my ears with the faith of my five-year-old self in his mesquite sanctuary, the boy before the wrecked mechanics of a well-meaning, systematized adulthood.
He is the Lord your God. These other things—they are mirages.
Yes. I hear this fresh.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Make me unafraid to pray for healing.