It has been eighty days since my last drink.
A friend emailed me this morning, asked whether the restlessness was easing up. The restlessness is there, always there. Just under the surface, it is there. I’m an achy, longing mess of a man, there is no doubt. I feel the taint of things, greasy as they are. I feel the acute sting of the world. See how it glitters with false salves, how it offers coping mechanisms as presents?
In the Advent season, this restlessness is most acute.
It is my first Christmas season without cable television in some time. There is no spiritual or financial reason for this; we have opted to stream our entertainment from the internet. Even still, the commercialization of the Christmas season is almost unbearable. There are mailers in the mailbox, advertisements promising satisfaction from the perfect holiday gift. Social media is littered with Christmas banter too. A friend posts a Facebook coupon for a deep discount at a big-box electronics store, writes in the post, “The perfect discount for the perfect someone.” It chafes at the heart. Perfection is an illusion, a glittering plastic package of false hope.
Karl Marx was wrong: it’s the illusion of perfection that’s the opiate of the masses.
There are so many distractions, I think. Commerce, materialism, entertainment, the endless chase of perfection—aren’t these also ways to avoid the restlessness rattling in our bones? Aren’t these just another way to numb? Aren’t these another sleight of hand? We become entranced people, zombies longing for the stuff of earth without thought of the truest perfect—the unity of home.
Yes, materialism promises to numb the restlessness, the pain. I wish I were exempt, but I still see every liquor bottle on every wall in every restaurant. Today, I noticed them at the Vietnamese restaurant. I’d come only for the pho, but the bottles called from behind the counter like jilted lovers, batting eyelashes like Grey Goose models. Bottles, bottles everywhere, and not a drop can I drink! I am always reminded of my desire to escape the restlessness of my spirit.
The restlessness in this hard-cornered world—it will always be shut up in me to some waxing or waning degree. It was shut up in my grandfather and grandmother. My mother had her own struggles with the family energy, as do my uncles and cousins. We are anxious doers. Maybe you have this same kind of anxious, nervous energy. But I’m finding that it wanes as I submit to the bending of my will to the mysteries of my own history, to the mysteries of faith. As I walk with Emmanuel—God with me—into the cave of the soul, as I stretch into forgiveness, there is relief from the restlessness.
Perhaps this is the process my therapist calls the mastery of the pain. I’m not sure whether I’ve mastered anything, but I know the old ghosts have become little more than shadows of doubt these days. They are caricatures of things that once afflicted me.
These days, I’m finding a present, abiding God. And doubting Thomas as I was—show me healing and I’ll believe!—I’m finding God to be the healer of the soul, if not the healer of my sick son.
With his help, I will learn to extend forgiveness to those in the past and to make peace with God. I will learn to forgive and forgive and forgive, and to heal.
Today, I will go back into my interior space of prayer and contemplation. This is the cave of the soul, the place meant as a refuge for God and me. I’ve allowed other voices to make their home in the cave, though, allowed them to invade every dark corner. I’m grateful for the light of God, able to penetrate and expose the dark corners, the light that drives the voices in the darkness away.
The desert fathers of our faith had their caves of prayer and solitude. They fled city life, holed up in desert caves and prayed. This sort of cave dwelling wasn’t without its challenges, though.
Yesterday, I read of St. Anthony, one of the desert fathers who retreated to caves for prayer. It is said that in one cave, he was plagued by so many little demons (oh, those voices that sought to undo him) that his servants believed him dead and carried him out. St. Anthony was revived and demanded to go back into the cave to face the evil spirits. There he challenged the spirits to come again, and just as they returned to torment him, a bright light exploded into the cave, scattering them all. In the quiet of the cave, finally left alone, St. Anthony asked God where he was when the demons first attacked him. God replied, “I was here and watched your battle. Because you didn’t give up, because you fought well, I came.”
Today, as I move back into quiet contemplation, I hope to find an interior space still free of the demons that haunt.
I hope the fight is near its finish.
Today, though, I see the dark river. There is poison there. What started as a simple question born of a faith healer’s misplaced word—why didn’t God heal me?—has grown into a channel of sickness with tributaries of bitterness, doubt, anger, and apathetic resolution. I can still feel the sting of his words.
“With enough faith, all things are possible.”
I consider him. Was he a misguided colaborer, a man who thought in earnest he had the gift of healing? Was he a true faith bearer, was he holding so fast to notions of a healing God that his haphazard wielding of Scripture was coupled with all the best intentions? Was he a peddler of cheap tricks for money? Was he channeling Simon’s sin, asking for some Jesus juju so he could earn a buck?
These are unanswerable questions. To know the heart of a man is a privilege reserved for God.
I know now that this could be the place reserved for communion with the light of God, a place not unlike the refuges of the desert fathers. It could be a space of peace and rest just beyond the mesquite trees of my childlike faith. But here, the voice of the faith healer has returned. He’s come with cohorts too. I can see the faces of those who called me while Titus was in the hospital, those who said Titus’s failure to thrive was predestined before the foundation of the world for the purpose of bringing God glory. I know these men to be kindhearted, but their words still burn.
There are real things to grieve here: the loss of childhood faith, the pain that sent me packaging God in a neat cessationist box, the loss of the mesquite-grove closeness, the sense of God’s abandonment. There is also the rising want for justice, for the millstone to be tied around the neck of the one who led the childlike me down the path of doubt. I feel the rhythmic, pounding want: justice, justice, justice.
In this grieving, though, things become clear. It was a setup from the beginning. There are ways to upend faith, and the adversaries of God are well practiced in the art of deception. Take a child full of faith. Introduce the question of the strength of his faith. Allow doubt to creep in. Turn him over to a religious structure; allow the structure to be substituted for God. Allow the structure to grow and grow and grow until the child believes that he might climb it to the heavens, that he might tiptoe teeter on its pinnacle and touch the face of God.
“Yes,” the Spirit confirms, though with the gentleness of a mother, “you were set up.”
Everyone is set up, his words echo.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” I pray, “have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The ever-abiding love of the Father—this is the ultimate bonding love. It bolsters me, gives me strength to push deeper into the secret and dark places of the soul.
“I forgive my accusers, whether well-intentioned or not, whether past or present. Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing. So often I don’t know what I’m doing. Father, forgive us all; we don’t know what we’re doing.
“Father, forgive the faith healer, who hung miracles on the faith of a child; he knew not what he was doing.
“Father, forgive those who promised healing to Titus contingent on our faith; they knew not what they were doing.
“Father, forgive those who said Titus’s sickness is the product of your sovereign will; they knew not what they were doing.
“Father, forgive me my doubt, my angst, my lack of trust; I was doing the best I knew how.”
In the face of forgiveness, all burning wanes and wanes and wanes. In the face of forgiveness, the light of God enters the cave, fills every corner, and drives the darker voices away.
These are the simplest prayers of forgiveness, but in them, I feel the Spirit speaking peace and understanding, empathy and healing. In the moment, I know it: we are all men, all ignorant colaborers here together. The faith healer, the friends of Job, the agnostics, the atheists, me—we all grope about for God, trying to make sense of his character. Some of us fancy ourselves theologians, rest in structures and our practices. Some of us float about on mystic Spirit winds. Others live in doubt or disbelief. But we are all together, bumping into each other as we try to make sense of this cosmic moment we call life. We are sometimes the abusers, sometimes the abused. But even still, we are always loved by God; we are called to love like he loves too.
And for those of us who follow the way of Christ, we are called to forgive as Christ forgave.
I forgive my accusers, the men whose words threatened my faith. To do it, I step into the heart of God; I see them for who they are: broken, misguided, groping children. I am no different, and God has loved me, has abided with me. Why should I not extend the same patience to them?
Forgiveness, I am learning, cannot stand as a single, once-and-for-all event. Every morning brings a fresh coffeepot, and a fresh chance to get back to this messy and necessary work.
So this morning I went into the cave. I found my accusers and grieved their words. I breathed the words, “I forgive you.” I will repeat this practice in the coming days, perhaps in the coming months. I will repeat it over my accusers until the embers of bitterness, doubt, and anger are snuffed. I will repeat it over them until I see them as God sees them. I will repeat it until the cave is electrified and ever lit with pure light, until its black river runs dry, until fresh water springs from every well and I am free.