Here, I’ll show you the anatomy of an undoing.
Drink yourself to sleep for eight days straight. Drink at the first inkling of doubt, of pain, of upendedness. Drink until you feel like a slave to the couch. Drive to Austin and shack up in the company of good Christian people; occupy yourself with alcoholic mathematics; count drinks for two days while others around you are sharing life; try your best to get ahead of conversations, to catch yourself before you utter the drunk stupid thing that seems so brilliant in the moment; sit against the rails on the front porch with a bottle of tequila in the small of your back; wake late on the third day and rely on Tsh to bring you to the conference venue; hope she doesn’t smell tequila on your breath when you thank her for the breakfast tacos she’s brought, because she is among the circle of people who might catch the stiff scent of hypocrisy like a coyote does roadkill.
I breathe out of the side of my mouth, and we enter the Methodist church together. We are latecomers, and the morning speakers have already taken center stage. Before I make it through the lobby, though, I meet a prophetess.
Heather King is a new transplant to Austin, a born-and-bred Minnesotan who carpetbagged to the Lone Star State with her husband, children, and accent in tow. I’ve known Heather for years, she being a writer who swims in the same streams as I. Years ago, Heather wrote about her own bout with alcoholism, wrote about her process of finding sobriety. She served as inspiration for more than one sobriety story, and yet I never expected she would serve as any sort of catalyst for mine.
She approaches from the far side of the foyer on that throbbing Saturday morning, her eyes the shape of my grandmother’s, her smile echoing that same grace. She turns her head sideways, asks, “How’d you sleep?”
If a man’s lucky, he gets a shining moment of clarity, a veil-splitting moment. This is mine. Before I can lasso my words and tug them back, they escape into the Austin Methodist foyer, bronco-wild. I am the most accomplished Christian fraud, yes. But this time, I am caught on the very threshold, before I can ever enter the sanctuary.
“How did you know you had a drinking problem?” I ask without context.
“Oh, Seth,” she says. “You know, don’t you?”
I’ve described it since as a moment of one thousand epiphanies. The corners of the room pull taut, the ceiling lifts, the floor drops, and Heather speaks the truest question I’ve heard in a long time.
There’s no voice from heaven, no fanfare or bright light, but the familiar Spirit-whisper is unmistakable. “You can take care of this now, or not,” I hear, “but if you don’t, it’s downhill from here.”
There I am standing in the vertigo induced by human confession, and I search for the words to put it all in perspective, to justify it all. But Heather’s eyes are too much like my grandmother’s, and she won’t let me run.
“I’ve not hit my wife or my kids,” I say. “I’ve not lost my job.”
“You know that doesn’t matter, right?”
“No, I don’t. I was actually hoping you’d say that means I can’t have a problem.”
“How many drinks do you have per night?”
“What do you mean? I suppose it depends on the pour.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Do you lie to Amber about it?”
“Do I lie? I don’t necessarily tell the truth, and she doesn’t necessarily ask,” I say. “I snag a drink at around four most days. I grab a drink as soon as I get home so she’ll think the smell of liquor is fresh, so she won’t suspect me of drinking at the office. I top off drinks when she goes to the bathroom. I use too much liquor in my mixed drinks. But lie?”
Her slight frame straightens. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you whether you have a problem, but you know, right? In your heart of hearts, you know?”
She is pushing into truth with only questions.
This is the beginning of an awakening, the genesis of one thousand epiphanies. I couldn’t stop them if I tried. “Now what?” I ask Heather.
“It sounds cliché, but it’s the best I have,” she says, and then adds, “You have to take it one day at a time. This is day one.”
Later, we meet the housemates on the front steps of the church for lunch. We walk the streets of downtown Austin looking for some quaint lunch dive that doesn’t peddle food from an Airstream window. While the others forge ahead discussing the morning sessions together, Heather and I lag back, talk in lower tones about dependency and addiction. She keeps me in the tension, won’t allow me to turn the conversation into convenient excuses. Then again, I don’t really want to.
She tells me her story, and it sounds too familiar. She tells a story of a sick child. She tells a story of nervous energy, of anxiety, of unstoppable feelings. It sounds like my grandmother, the escape artist. It sounds like my uncle too. (He was, they say, a raging bull of an alcoholic.) It sounds like my burning, like my unhinged desire for something less Spirit led and more led by the spirits. It sounds like kin, like me.
In this conversation, I see myself in earnest. I am the Spirit avoider, the feeling number who does not want to consider the sickness of his son any longer. I see the liar, the Adam who in his shame avoids his evening walk with God. I see the truest me, the self-medicator, the mathematician who counts shots instead of remaining present; I am the secret emptier of all the best tequila bottles. I am these very empty people and not the Christ-filled man I’d rather be.
I barely remember the wind in the Texas mesquite trees, but the Austin humidity is raising memories like Christ raised Lazarus. There was a time when I heard the God of one thousand epiphanies, plain and sure. Was I a child? Yes. But I know what I heard. It is September 21, and I am hearing it again. He spoke in the still small whisper, and he did it through a woman who shares the eyes of my grandmother.
“I have never left nor forsaken you. There is healing if you let there be,” he says.
In that moment, Heather is a conduit for the Spirit of God. I’ll not soon take these words back.
This journaling is a hodgepodge, a mishmash of thoughts as they come. It is a stream-of-consciousness whirlwind, maybe, but I’ve been fighting for a thread running through. I’m finding the thread, tugging it free.
I have a friend, a good friend, who described the awakening from the alcoholic haze as a tornado of mental activity. It’s a swift, disorganized wreck of a storm. There are quite sudden and very real pains that must be accounted for. These pains flood in from all directions, and on some evenings, that feels truer than others. This is one of those truer evenings.
I’m sitting with my journal in bed and remembering Austin. Amber reads a book beside me, glasses on and looking studious in her pajamas. We’ll talk about my journaling before we turn the lights out, but for now, she’s engrossed in another world. From time to time, she reaches out and rubs my arm. This is her silent encouragement to keep doing the interior work. This is her way of saying she is with me.
The pain, it seems, is easier to count on than the prayer. And this is mine: I’ve been sitting with Titus’s sickness and the lack of a healing, and asking an abiding God to come near.
“How does it feel? The emotion, that is,” my therapist asked me this afternoon.
The question brought me to the darker places of the cave. There was tingling, shortness of breath, numbness in my fingertips, I said. I described the feelings, and they manifested on command.
“Do you feel it now?” he asked.
“Oh boy, do I,” I blurted.
“Good, let’s go with that. Describe the emotions.”
“I feel alone, hopeless. Maybe like a fraud. I’m supposed to know the truth of a present God, and in these moments I feel a sense of intense lostness.” I closed my eyes, felt the velvet blanket folding over me, covering my eyes, leaving no space for light breaking through. The velvet blanket came first, then the sense of cawing passerine birds descending in a murder, their voices unraveling my nerves. My skin prickled as if being pecked apart.
This is how I felt.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“Of what?”
He typed a note in his laptop. “If you aren’t afraid, then what are you?”
“I don’t know how to say this—and please hear what I’m saying—I don’t want to kill myself, but sometimes I wish it were all over. I don’t feel like there’s any relief from all the sickness. I don’t feel like there’s anything real and whole here. Maybe I’d like to stretch into the other side and see whether it gets made right. Maybe I’d like to see if there is any healing from all this.”
He considered my comment, responded, “You know this is not uncommon, right?” His question sent a wild, almost shameful shot of hope running through me.
“No?” I asked.
“You’re the fourth person to say this to me in the last week.”
The thought brought easier breathing, but only for a moment. The smile of relief seemed sadistic, so I bit the inside of my lips.
“So let’s ask God some questions about this and listen. Let’s see what he says about it all.”
This, of course, sounded a lot like the charismatic notions of my youth, the sitting and waiting for the magical voice of God. My skin chilled at the thought of having my faith put on the spot again.
“No pressure,” he said.
“Sure,” I mustered, but the pit in my stomach was opening up, splitting wide like a fissure running from a fault. My nerves started to fold, shrink away.
“Tell me what you hear, and if it’s nothing, or if it’s only your own thoughts, no big deal. We’ll distinguish voices later. Let’s start.”
He bowed his head, asked God to show me the first time I felt this sense of empty loneliness, the first time I felt the resolve to see what is on the other side of living. I did not tell him, but this was a question I didn’t need the Holy Spirit to answer. I remembered the closeness of God in those Texas fields. I remembered the wonder and excitement in the dancing of nature. I remembered the rumble of thunder like the coming of chariots, the flashing of lightning like the word that spoke the world into being, the rain that came blowing across the plains in a wall of grace. I remembered these things, how God spoke to me: I am big; I have power; I can quench your thirst.
Then I remembered the faith healer.
He broke the silence. “It was the healer? Right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Before that, my experiences with God were so visceral. But after, I felt like maybe my faith wasn’t good enough. I felt like I was straining toward a God who was distant at best, or who wasn’t there at all.”
“Let’s go there,” he said, and he launched into an impromptu prayer in which he asked God to reveal the truth of my childhood. That’s when I heard the still small voice say it for the first time.
Go back to the mesquite trees.
I tried clearing my thoughts, and I reckoned it as only the ramblings of a unhinged mind.
Go back to the mesquite trees.
“What do you hear?”
“Go back to the mesquite trees,” I said.
“Do you feel like God is taking you back somewhere?”
“No, it’s more like he’s sending me.”
Clouded scenes from memory came into focus. There I was, a boy with windswept hair. I had lost something of great worth.
“It’s like I’ve lost a treasured coin. That coin is the essence of who I am. He is sending me back to the mesquite trees to find it.”
I was sobbing, and I realized the dirty truth: I’d lost the essence of who I was at the altar with the faith healer. He had put the onus on me, had put my faith on the spot, and when my mustard seed didn’t transform into the tree of life, it turned into a cannonball that blew my young faith to smithereens.
For thirty years, I have held fast to this memory. For thirty years, I’ve been angry with the healer who harmed instead. For thirty years, I have not forgiven him.
I hear the gentle whisper—it’s time to forgive—but I do not tell this to my therapist. It’s not time yet, I don’t think.
“The mesquite trees are the last place I had the faith of a child,” I said. “I want to go back there.”
Over the last few days, I haven’t thought so much about alcohol. Sure, I was not a lunatic of a drunk; I had not been a binge drinker for fifteen years. Nonetheless, I will record it this way: I can feel the coming of the desire, and if I stop, if I pray something simple like “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” I can sense relief. And if I turn in to the anxiety that brings the drinking need, if I name it (I am counting Titus’s ribs again, for instance), if I confess the feeling (hopelessness, for instance), if I release it to God and ask him to fill the empty space, then there is a quiet, small peace. Some might call it serenity. This is the hope that I might find the Spirit of those mesquite trees again.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Go with me back to the mesquite trees.