I’ve met many priests, some good and some not-so-good. People criticize priests because they’re athiests or they’re angry about the sex abuse scandal. Father Dennis Nason made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.
When a priest is able to lay his own flaws bare for all to see, I think it takes an extra level of courage, since there has to be a lot of pressure around the lofty standards they are held to.
Father Nason rose to the occasion.
I met Father Nason about 11 years ago. He took over our parish, All Saints, when several other churches were closed down and consolidated into the All Saints Community.
He had a lot of angry people on his hands. One’s church becomes home, and when you close it and force them to go someplace else, trouble is inevitable.
Then the priest sex abuse scandal burst open like an infected sore, shaking the Faith of a lot of people like never before.
At one point over the summer, Father Nason vanished. Few knew why.
Then at one Mass, the deacon read an open letter from him.
In the letter, Father Nason revealed that he was in rehab for alcoholism. It would be several months before he emerged from rehab, and while he was there the sex abuse scandal really began to explode. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also happened around that time, and people’s souls were tested like never before.
Once he did emerge from rehab to rejoin his parish, there was a new sparkle in his eyes. It was like a weight had been lifted. Then another weight dropped on him. It turns out one of the priests in our parish was one of those sexual predators we had read about in the papers.
Something like that would test the sobriety of anyone forced to come in and deal with the mess. Father Nason met it head on.
He was angry with his archdiocese over the fact that pedophile priests had been enabled for all those years; cases swept under the rug like dust. You could hear the anger in his voice and see it in his eyes. He would rage about it in more than one Homily.
His reaction is a big reason I stuck with the church instead of bolting.
Around that time we also had trouble hanging onto the other priests. One left after less than two months, apparently freaked out by the amount of work this parish demanded of him.
Through it all, Father Nason kept it together and brought his parish through the storm.
I don’t always see eye to eye with him. Sometimes I think his administration is disorganized and that his Homilies are all over the place; though when he nails it, he really nails it.
But those are trivial things. When he came clean about his addiction, it hit me deep in the core. At the time, my own addictions were bubbling in my skull and preparing to wipe out what was left of my soul. I just didn’t know it at the time.
Seeking and giving forgiveness is essential to my faith and ability to fight my addictive impulses. But it’s often seen as a green light for more abuse.
Mood music:
For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order:
1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
There’s a recurring theme that bleeds all over these steps: Forgiveness.
To truly heal and grow, you have to be able to ask others for forgiveness. People like me have to do that, because you hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways when your addictions and mental disorders get the better of you.
I became a nightmare for co-workers, especially during The Eagle-Tribune days, hovering over page editors and treating reporters more like a disease than the wonderful, talented and hard-working souls they were.
I’ve asked for and gotten a lot of forgiveness along the way, but for those of you out there who suffered in my wake over the years, I’ll say here that I’m sorry and ask you too for forgiveness.
Along the way, I’ve done my share of forgiving. I long ago forgave family members I clashed with because of abusive relationships. Unfortunately, giving forgiveness isn’t always enough to end estrangements. I have mine still, and I know I have to work on them. But as a priest once told me, forgiving doesn’t mean you permit someone to flog you anew. You have to do what’s necessary to protect yourself and your immediate family, even if it causes other people additional pain along the way. Obviously, I’ll have to seek more forgiveness from people as time moves along.
Much has been made of the evils that were allowed to take place in the Catholic Church for all those years, horrendous wrongs that blew up in the Church’s face by 2002 with the priest sex abuse scandal.
I’ve been asked more than once how I could be a devout Catholic given what’s happened. My answer is that my Faith is in God directly. There will always be bad seeds latching onto religious and governmental orders. We all sin. The resulting hurt and anger causes people to abandon their faith.
My direct faith in God doesn’t hinge on the politics that swirl around religion.
I also believe that those who have done wrong deserve a shot at redemption like the rest of us. They need to seek forgiveness, and we need to be willing to give it.
That doesn’t mean freeing molesters from prison. Priests who preyed on children must be punished. Forgiveness and justice are not the same thing.
Susan Atkins and Charles “Tex” Watson, two of Charles Manson’s most ardent followers in 1969, participated in the murder of Sharon Tate and four others. Tex, in fact, got the most blood on his hands. Both of them eventually renounced Manson and their own deeds and turned to God in prison, as did the other key murderers. Watson has run a ministry from prison. Atkins died last year, and in her final weeks sought a release from prison so she could die at home. Her request was denied. That was appropriate. She could be forgiven for what she did, but in the end she helped commit a savage crime. Justice means she had to die in prison, regardless of forgiveness.
Now, going back to the Church, I read something this week that really hit me in the gut. It was an open letter from Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik, read as part of a “Service of Apology.” It was the most powerful request for forgiveness I’ve seen in a very long time.
I end this post by sharing it with you:
I stand before you tonight as Shepherd of the Church of Pittsburgh and embrace the presence of each of you, women and men, who come here tonight showing by your presence that somewhere, sometime in your life you have been hurt by someone who was entrusted to represent Jesus and His Church, but failed to do so. Some of you have already expressed your hurt; for many others of you, you do so this night by your being here. You call me, as leader of the Church of Pittsburgh, to not only not forget the sins of those who have hurt you, but you charge me with the need to continue to work to secure that the sins not happen again.
As I stand before you, I see also the face of Christ, the Jesus who met Peter on the seashore, confronting Peter’s betrayal. Your very presence here tonight both painful and trusting, confronts the need for the Church to ask forgiveness from you and the opportunity to renew your trust in the Church as Jesus renewed His trust in Peter.
To those of you who looked for the compassion of Christ in the sacrament of Penance but found only scolding and harsh judgment in return—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who found sacred moments in your life and the life of your family (baptisms, weddings, funerals) met with callous, heartless, unfeeling, un-Christian-like attention to your need—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who are here tonight who have in any way been the victims of any abuse, sexual or otherwise, whether as a child or as an adult, or as a parent, or sibling, or friend who shared in the pain of that someone you love—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who came to the Church, rightly expecting her to help you understand the rich tradition of our teachings and traditions, but met with a less than half-hearted response—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who have been hurt by the poor judgment of others entrusted with leadership—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who believed in the Church to be a voice against prejudice but found, rather, a deafening silence—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who looked to the leaders of the Church—lay, religious or ordained—to give good example but met, rather, with a philosophy that said: “Do as I say, not as I do,”—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who needed the Church to be with you in sickness, in grief, in trauma, in turmoil, but found her representatives to be too busy—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
To those of you who have offered your talents for the mission of the Church, but experienced an injustice in the Church’s workplace—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
For whatever ways any representative of the Church has hurt, offended, dismissed, ignored, any one of you—I ask you, the Church asks you, for forgiveness.
For any ways that I personally, as your Bishop, whether in speech or deed, by omission and commission, have disappointed, not heard, or dismissed you, I ask you for your forgiveness.
I don’t know these people very well, and I never met the woman they are now grieving over. But given the road I’ve traveled, I wanted to say something that might be helpful. Here goes…
You’re probably feeling kicked in the guts by this. You may have known your friend was depressed, even suicidal, but it never really clicked in your brain that this friend would actually DO IT.
Now you’re beating yourself over it because you’re certain that you saw the signs in hindsight and should have done something to help this person. You feel you weren’t the friend you should have been. Or brother. Or sister. Or parent.
Your brain is spinning like an old record, skipping as you replay the last few months in your head, over and over again. “How could you have missed the signs?” you ask yourself.
As everyone in your circle second guesses themselves, tensions and hard feelings bubble to the surface.
It can be too much to absorb. And the hurt will be there for a long time.
But things will get better. They always do.
Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the nearly 14 years since my friend’s death:
–Blaming yourself is pointless. No matter how many times you replay events in your mind, the fact is that it’s not your fault. For one thing, it’s impossible to get into the head of someone who is contemplating suicide. Sure, there are signs, but since we all get the blues sometimes, it’s very easy to dismiss the signs as something close to normal. When someone is loud in contemplating suicide, it’s usually a cry for help. When the depressed says nothing and even appears OK, it’s usually because they’ve made their decision and are in the quiet, planning stages.
–Blaming each other is even more pointless. Take it from me: Nerves in your circle of family and friends are so raw right now that it won’t take much for relationships to snap into pieces. A week after my friend’s death I wrote a column about it, revealing what in hindsight was too much detail. His family was furious and most of them haven’t talked to me since. They feel I was exploiting his death to advance my writing career and get attention. I was pretty screwed up back then, so they’re probably right. In any event, I don’t blame them for hating me. What I’ve learned, and this is tough to admit, is that you’re going to have to let it go when the finger pointing starts. It’s better not to engage the other side. Nobody is in their right mind at this point, so go easy on each other. Give people space to make their errors in judgment and learn from it.
–Don’t demonize the dead. When a friend takes their life, one of the things that gnaws at the survivors is the notion that — if there is a Heaven and Hell — those who kill themselves are doomed to the latter. I’m a devout Catholic, so you can bet your ass this one has gone through my mind. What I’ve learned though, through my own experiences in the years since, is that depression is a clinical disease. When you are mentally ill, your brain isn’t firing on all thrusters. You engage in self-destructive behavior even though you understand the consequences. A person thinking about suicide is not operating on a sane, normally-functioning mind. So to demonize someone for taking their own life is pointless. To demonize the person, you have to assume they were in their right mind at the time of the act. And you know they weren’t. My practice today is to simply pray for those people, that their souls will still be redeemed and they will know peace. It’s really the best you can do.
— Break the stigma. One of the friends left behind in this latest tragedy has already done something that honors her friend’s life: She went on Facebook and directed people toward the American Association of Suicidology website, specifically the page on knowing the warning signs. That’s a great example of doing something to honor your friend’s memory instead of sitting around second guessing yourself. The best thing to do now is educate people on the disease so that sufferers can help themselves and friends and family can really be of service.
–On with your own life. Nobody will blame you for not being yourself for awhile. You have, after all, just experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. But try not to let it paralyze you. Life must go on. You have to get on with your work and be there for those around you.
Don’t take what I’ve just said as Gospel. It’s based on my own experience and no two experiences are the same. But if there was something in there that’s helpful, then I’m grateful.
The author has learned that it’s damn hard to like yourself at the beginning of sobriety and abstinence. The feeling will pass. Eventually.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/TP06kxW_M3I
A friend and fellow 12-Stepper just hit a major milestone in her recovery: 90 days of abstinence. In the world of compulsive overeating, think of this as 90 days of back-to-back sobriety.
She worked hard for this and has every reason to be bursting with joy. Yet she’s uneasy.
She doesn’t feel quite right in her skin.
She’s going through something a lot of us go through when we kick our addictions. To call it self hatred might be a stretch. I don’t think she dislikes herself. But now that her mind is clear of the intoxicating haze, she sees things about herself that she doesn’t like. She’s suddenly aware for the first time that she has some flaws that are tough to look at in the mirror.
For a lot of people, it can become a matter of self hatred. It certainly did for me.
Truth be told, I disliked myself way before I cleaned up.
I hated how I looked. I thought I was the crappiest son/sibling/friend on the face of the Earth. Certain relatives would tell me just that, and I believed them. There’s no question that I was a lousy friend when my best friend, Sean Marley, was sinking into depression and I was too worried about my career to notice.
Even though my mental illness included a lot of fear and anxiety over getting sick or dying, I did a pretty good job of trying to kill myself. Not in a suicidal way. Not deliberately. But in the end, addiction is a compulsion — an ache — to repeat dangerous behavior even though you know what the likely consequences are.
It’s the weirdest irony there is.
But when you start to fight your demon head-on, you do become super-aware of your own vulnerabilities. For awhile, I became paralyzed by mine. Then I figured out how to get beyond it. But it took a lot of dirty work.
In his book, “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” Christopher Kennedy Lawford writes that after he kicked drugs in 1986, it still took him awhile to actually become a good person.
Those around him weren’t always happy he was sober, especially since that meant he couldn’t make the cocktails at family gatherings like he used to.
He writes about having to learn how to be a decent human being and be clean at the same time. You would think it’s easy. But it’s not.
In the book, Lawford writes:
“There is another great fiction of recovery — that is, once you stop using your life becomes a bed of roses. Anybody who has stayed sober for any length of time knows that living sober is about learning to live life on life’s terms and a good part of life is painful. When I got sober someone said to me that I would get to realize all my greatest fears in sobriety … You know what? He was right, and it’s not half as bad as I imagined.”
The man speaks the truth. And, by the way, I highly recommend his book to anyone struggling with addiction as well as the clean up:
I had a lot to learn, and I’m still learning. Learning how to be completely honest with my wife and drop my emotional wall was hard. I’m much better at it than I used to be, but I still have a lot of work to do there.
Being more disciplined with money is something I need to be better at. After all, spending is also an addictive behavior.
The list goes on.
But while the work goes on — and will continue to go on — there’s an important point to be made.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to like myself.
Today, I can honestly say I’m happy with the man I’ve become, even if I’m still pretty damn far from perfect.
But then perfect people don’t exist. If they did, they’d be pretty boring.
I’ve seen interview after interview where musicians describe their drug habits and how being on the road made them so much worse.
One of the best examples was Motley Crue on the Girls Girls Girls tour, where the four band members’ addictions were well past the point of manageability — not that an addiction is ever really manageable. That was the tour where Nikki Sixx kept a diary chronicling his increasing heroin use.
In fact, sit in front of the TV and watch a “Behind the Music” marathon and you’ll see most bands tell a similar story.
It’s a similar tale for any businessman who nurses an addiction while doing a lot of travel. Every city is flowing with whatever material feeds one’s vice, whether it’s drugs, alcohol or, in my case, binge eating.
I can tell you from experience that it’s true. During my travels to San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas and points in between, the opportunity to binge on free junk and alcohol is limitless.
But here’s what I’ve also learned: You can take your recovery everywhere, too.
In all of the cities I mentioned above, I’ve been able to hold firmly to my 12-Step program and related plan of eating. I know what I can eat, how much, and which ingredients are essentially my cocaine (flour and sugar).
There are 12-Step meetings in every city and town, whether it’s OA or AA, and there are phone meetings available around the clock.
And, if you’re like me, you’ve told enough people about your challenges that they’ll watch out for you. That was definitely the case for me in San Francisco last week.
It really comes down to what you want. If you want your junk, you’ll always be resourceful enough to find it.
If you want recovery, same deal.
I’ve found it also helps to read blogs from others in recovery when I’m on the road. One of my recent discoveries is a great blog called “Conquering Crazy” by Greg Dungan. Like my OCD Diaries, Greg’s blog is a recent start-up. He focuses like a laser beam on the core craziness as he experiences it. It reads more like an actual day-by-day diary, whereas mine is more a collection of longer narratives with a lot of focus on the byproducts of my affliction.
Like me, music is important to him, and he is also a seeker who is trying to find the core of his spirituality. I especially love his first entry, “OK, So I’m Crazy.” Here’s an excerpt:
“I have exhibited symptoms of OCD for as long as I can remember. Recently, these symptoms have intensified. What used to be the “things that make me unique” have become the “things that make me crazy”. This blog is about my struggle with this demon. This is where I will record my day to day thoughts and struggles – my defeats and my victories. I have two choices at this point in my life – roll over and die or fight my way out. I’ve never been one for rolling over and I’m not about to start now.
“You’re welcome to walk this valley with me. If you are living with OCD or if someone you love is, take heart. There are brighter days somewhere, and we will find them together.”
Brighter days ahead? You bet your ass there are.
I’ve experienced it. I’ve been to the valley and the mountaintop.
I started blogging about it after I had been on the journey for a few years. Greg is blogging his journey from the start. That’s courage.
And like addiction, depression, Faith and recovery, courage is portable, too.
The following was written one winter in a moment of absolute clarity.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:27xIf7tzHPQFX068pFYlAh]
Today was sunny and warm in San Francisco. After the never-ending winter back home, I got what I needed today: A walk all over the city with my good friend, Rob Westervelt.
We started by walking along Fisherman’s Wharf, then Golden Gate Park and covered a lot of ground in between.
It brought back memories of when I came here with Sean Marley in 1991. We flew into San Francisco, rented a car and spent the next 10 days driving all over California, sleeping in the car, going days without a shower and eating pasta from cans. We went as far north as Eureka and as far south as L.A., where we spent a weekend before driving back to San Francisco. Too bad I spent half the time letting my fears get the better of me.
It was especially good to spend the day with Rob. We’ve been friends for a few years now, having worked together at Searchsecurity.com. We were a potent team, creating a lot of great podcasts and video together. We’ve gone on long jaunts through San Francisco and Las Vegas. When we worked in the same building we’d get together for morning workouts in the office gym.
We’ve kept the friendship going strong since I left to be senior editor at CSO Magazine, having lunch frequently, sometimes once a week.
He used to be Catholic and converted to the Jewish Faith. I did exactly the opposite.
He’s one of those guys I can truly be myself around. We laugh a lot.
One of the many friendships God sent my way to help me through some of my greatest trials.
I truly believe that The Holy Spirit manifests itself in the people around you, those who stick with you when your spiraling downward and when you’re on the way back up.
There have been times in my life where I didn’t have many friends. Good friends moved away or died, so for a long time I was afraid to get too close to people.
Doing so in the last three or so years has been a big leap of Faith.
It has helped me recover and find a new happiness.
Tomorrow the RSA security conference begins and I’ll see many more friends from my industry.
The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:1Qdnvn4XlmZANCVy3XjrQo]
A couple friends have asked why I “outed myself” in this blog. Wasn’t I afraid people would blackball me at work? Don’t I worry that I’ll be defined by my struggle with OCD above all else?
I’m doing this more because the point arrived where, for the sake of my own sanity, I had to start being myself as openly and honestly as I can. Honesty can be tough for people who deal with mental illness and addiction. [More on this in “The Liar’s Disease“] But I decided I had to do better.
Admittedly, some of the motivation is selfish. We OCD types have overdeveloped egos and tend to go digging for attention. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s the truth. Being open about that forces me to keep myself in check. It’s also an invitation for those around me to call me out on acts of ego and selfishness.
The biggest reason for doing this, without question, is my Faith. I realized some time ago that when you rip the skeletons from your closet and toss them into the daylight, they turn to dust. Big sinister stigmas become very small indeed. Then you can move on.
I didn’t arrive at that viewpoint easily. It took many years of dirty work.
With my Faith comes a need to do service for others. In this case, I accumulated experiences that might be of help to other sufferers. Sharing wasn’t exactly something I wanted to do. It’s something I HAD to do.
We’re all in this together. Many good people have helped me along the way. Trying to help someone else is the very least I could do. In the final analysis, we all help each other.
Getting it all out of the head and into this blog has certainly been helpful, so thanks for indulging me.
Was it a risk to my career to do this? I don’t think so.
I don’t think I’d be doing this if I still worked for The Eagle-Tribune. The culture of that newsroom wouldn’t have allowed for it when I was there. I have no idea if the culture has changed, but I suspect not.
I’ve gotten a ton of support from those I work with now. I’m definitely lucky to work with the folks in this office.
Does that mean everyone should put their demons out in the open as I have?
Difficult to say.
It’s not going to be the right decision for everyone to make. There are a lot of honorable reasons for people to keep their demons private. In many cases, the veil is what you use to protect others as well as yourself.
But my veil blew away in the storm that was my life. Walking forward without it was all I could do.
Every now and then, it’s useful to look back at who I used to be so I can appreciate who I am today.
I do it partly to laugh at how — in many ways, despite the progress I’ve made — I can still be as stupid in adulthood as I was 20-plus years ago.
As I write this we’re halfway through Lent — a time to sacrifice habits you love — or, in my case, habits you’re addicted to.
Giving something up always brings back acute memories of some of the dumber things I’ve done in the compulsive-obsessive drive to feel good.
Indulge me as I take inventory.
Mood music:
Age 18: I’m living off 8 cups of black coffee and a mug of Raisin Bran a day in an attempt to be rock-star thin. I discovered an after dinner drink — Haffenreffer Lager Beer. There were little puzzles on the underside of the bottle caps, and your ability to solve them would steadily decline — or increase — depending on how drunk you were. Being addicted to instant gratification, I’d suck down three bottles in quick succession so I could immediately enjoy feeling like I had just absorbed half a keg of lighter beer.
Age 21: I’m pacing up and down the driveway of the old Revere house in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. I’m freaking out because I’ve just consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
We partied a lot in that basement. It was the scene of many impressive and entertaining mood swings.
I called my friend Danny Waters and asked him to come over. He did, and found me pacing up and down the driveway in my bathrobe. He took me down the street to Kelly’s Roast Beef and got me an order of chicken fingers to munch away the anxiety. Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Age 29: I drop 100 pounds of fat I packed on while binge-eating my way through the middle 1990s. I’m inspired by the quadruple bypass surgery my father has recently had. I lose the weight by pigging out Thursday through Saturday and starving myself Sunday through Wednesday. The binge eating continues through the next few years but I manage to keep the weight down, fooling most people.
Age 33: Around this time, the binge eating gets a new playmate in the form of red wine, which I decide I can’t live without.
Age 39: No more binge eating — not today, anyway. No wine. I work the 12-step program of recovery.
Age 44: I’ve had my slips along the way, but I continue working to give up my bad habits for good.
I wanted to be in the office today plowing through some work. But another winter storm forced me to work from home.
Some would say it’s great I can do that, and it is. But when there’s a lot on the plate, I prefer to be in the office. Especially when the kids are home from school for February vacation. At least in the summer I can write from the back deck while the kids play in the field behind the house.
This time of year we’re all indoors and the kids are loud.
A few years ago the snow, the change in schedule and the kids in my workspace would have unhinged me.
I’d get a story written. Maybe three. But I’d be a puddle of lava by day’s end, good for nothing except sleep.
Not so today.
I’m enjoying the cozy chair by my living room window, watching the snow fall.
I’ve gotten as much writing and editing done from here as I would have from the office.
The kids were indeed loud and distracting, but I enjoyed that, too. What used to be stress is now comic relief, especially when Sean tells Duncan he looks adorable when he cries and Duncan responds by pouncing on his older brother, yelling, “Who’s crying now?!”
I smoked one last cigar before Lent begins tomorrow, since that’s one of the things I’m abstaining from until Easter. It was a Cuban stick at that. Thanks to my friend Bob Connors for parting with it.
The coffee is French-pressed and bitter. Just the way I like it.
A much different day than what it would have been five years ago, before I gained the upper hand over the OCD.
Days that don’t go as planned are especially difficult for people with OCD. We do, after all, crave control over everything we can control. And we badly want to control things we can’t, like the weather.
Forget about the small stuff, like checking a doorknob seven times or tapping your feet to the count of 60. A carefully crafted schedule in shambles is the big stuff; hell for a sick mind.
That’s when someone like me turns to the food or the booze to comfort the troubled mind.
But the food is well under control today, and bottles of wine that once taunted me from a kitchen counter rack have gone unnoticed in the corner.
I’m not the same man I used to be.
Credit the therapists, the Prozac, the religious conversion or all of the above.
Yesterday at All Saints Parish Father Michael Harvey delivered one of those Homilies that sent my mind and soul all over the map.
I like Father Harvey. I wasn’t sure about him at first. He had the massive shoes of Father Mark Ballard to fill, so the deck was stacked against him from the start. He’s very conservative, and sometimes I wonder if his collar is stuck to his neck with thumb tacks. He tackles the most taboo of topics — politics — when he delivers a homily.
Truth be told, I like how he goes for the throat in his Homilies without fear of offending someone. One Sunday he gave a Homily about Natural Law, otherwise known as the “contraception is bad” talk. After Mass, we got in the car and Sean, the 8 year old, blurted out, “Gee, I guess Father Mike wasn’t expecting there to be any kids at Mass this morning.”
The larger message of the Homily was that the pursuit of power takes a person further and further from God, because when one is spending all his or her time groping for attention they’re too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about God.
He then brought up “a politician from Rhode Island” who decided not to run for office anymore. “Oh, great, here it comes,” I mumbled to my wife.
He brought up the fact that the Bishop down there had asked Kennedy to stop taking Communion because of his pro-choice stance. The Bishop tried to handle it in private, but Kennedy took it public.
In the end, Father Harvey speculated aloud, Kennedy was probably coming around to the decision that it was time to leave public life because holding onto power had corrupted his soul. I’m not sure Kennedy would share that exact assessment, but I think he would agree that power isn’t worth having when it plunges the rest of your life into a dark, unhappy place.
So I walked away with mixed feelings. I am pro-life but get incensed when someone paints a pro-choice person as evil personified. I don’t think it’s so simple. I know a lot of people who hate abortion, but believe it’s between a woman, her doctor and God. They are pro-choice but NOT pro abortion. They are the types that vote for someone based on a wider range of issues than abortion alone. But they are told they’ve voted against God if they vote the wrong way. [See also: The Better Angels of My Nature]
I have a lot of trouble with that notion.
But in the larger picture, there’s no question that the pursuit of power is a tricky thing, and the longer one wields it the worse off they are.
I see myself in all this. As I’ve admitted before, I have a fairly big ego that comes with being a writer. The ego is frequently driven into overdrive by the OCD [See: The Ego OCD Built]. It’s painfully true that this ego carries a certain level of attention seeking. After all, it’s the writer’s goal to make sure people are reading their work, and that involves a lot of self promotion.
I’m guilty as charged.
It’s a double-edged blade, really. I don’t write with the idea of sticking the papers in a drawer for someone to find after I’m dead. I’m a journalist whose goal is for people to see what he’s writing today, not 30 years from now. Social networking makes it all the more dangerous. I’ll let this illustration drive home the point for me:
At the same time, I have a faith that has deepened with time, and my Religious beliefs often come into direct conflict with my profession. In the end, it doesn’t have to be that way. I just have to find my way on this twisted path.
That’s why I keep coming to Church. It’s ultimately about my relationship with God and how to strengthen it. People can get uptight about church politics and get angry because their beliefs have been challenged by the priest. But to me those things are distractions that are as big as any shiny object that distracts us from our core Faith. I think that’s why Confession is my favorite Sacrament. It forces me to come clean with God on a regular basis. It keeps the emotional trash from piling up and stinking too much.
In this particular case, the priest gave me something to think about. He zeroed in on an unpleasant truth.
And so, he did his job.
It’s up to me to ultimately reconcile it with how I live my life. I think I’ve come a long, long way. But I have a long way to go yet.
