Bless The Name, Part Two: The Story So Far
For as long as I could. I want you to notice that I keep saying it that way, because there came a night when I could not any longer, and I need you to see that the change was not a door slamming. It was quieter than that. It was almost nothing at all. That is the part I most need you to watch closely, because in some form it will come for you too, and it never once announces itself.
It was a Tuesday. I remember that it was a Tuesday and I do not remember why. The house had the particular quiet that a house full of people is never quiet, a quiet with a texture to it, and I had come home from work into it again and stood in the kitchen with my coat still on.
There was a bottle of wine on the counter. Just a bottle, the cheap kind, the same kind we used to open on Sundays.
I poured a glass. I want to be honest with you about how ordinary it was, because you are bracing for something dramatic and there was nothing dramatic in it at all. I was tired in the way that sleep had stopped fixing. The evenings had teeth. I poured a glass of wine the way ten thousand tired men pour a glass of wine, and I drank it standing up at the counter with my coat still on, and the edge came off.
That is all. The edge came off.
It helped. I need you to hear that as plainly as I needed you to hear that the wine was good. It helped. That was the whole of the trouble. If it had not helped I would have poured it down the sink and that would have been the end of the story. But it did the one thing I could not do for myself. It made the quiet bearable for an hour. And a drowning man does not stop to ask whether the thing he has grabbed is a plank or a piece of the wreck that drowned him. He only notices that his head is above the water.
I told you, back at the beginning, that a thing can be entirely good and still become the rope a man hangs himself with, if he reaches for it in the wrong hour, for the wrong reason, in the place where the Giver used to stand. I did not reach for anything evil that night. That is the thing people never understand about the way a good man falls. I did not turn to something dark. I turned to something God had made, something He had blessed at my own table, the fruit of the vine and the gladness it is meant to give. I only reached for the gladness without the Giver. I took the gift down off the altar and drank it alone in the dark, and I told myself it was only wine, and it was only wine, and that is exactly how it got in.
One glass is a mercy. I have no quarrel with one glass. God gave us the vine.
But here is what a habit is, and no one teaches it to you until it is far too late to serve as a warning. A habit is not a decision you make. It is a decision you stop having to make. The first night, I chose the glass. By some night I could never afterward name, months along, there was no choosing left anywhere in it. The glass was simply what the evening was now. I no more decided to pour it than I decided for my heart to go on beating. My hand knew that cupboard the way it knew my own name.
And do you remember what I told you about those years, about dragging myself to Mass on a broken leg, about the five stolen minutes of quiet after Communion that I could not explain to anyone? Here is what the drink was doing that I could not see it doing. It offered me that same quiet. Faster. And it asked nothing of me. I did not have to get in the car. I did not have to kneel. I did not have to sit in the back with my rage and wait on a God who would not answer the charge. The bottle answered at once. It handed me a counterfeit of that peace in ten minutes flat, and it never once asked me to forgive anyone or to wait or to trust.
So I stopped going to the one, and I went to the other.
I want to say this next thing very carefully, because it is the hinge of everything, and because I warned you in advance not to believe the lie when it finally came. It did not feel, from the inside, like leaving God. It never does. I did not shake my fist and storm out of the church. I only found, one week and then the next and then the next, that my hand had learned a shorter reach. God was still there. The lamp was still burning. The door I had been too weak to close was still standing wide open. I simply stopped walking through it, because there was something nearer now, something on my own counter, that gave me a smaller and cheaper version of what had been waiting inside it the whole time, for free.
That is how the grace never thinned and the man starved anyway. Not because the bread was taken from him. Because he stopped going to the table, and began eating out of his own hand, in the dark.
Now I have to tell you the part I understood last of all, the part it took me years on the far side to finally see for what it was. And I have to tell it carefully, because if you take it up the wrong way it will do you harm instead of good.
There came a stretch where it truly seemed that God had gone. The quiet after Communion was a memory of a memory. When I prayed, which was seldom now, the words dropped into a silence with no floor under it. I decided, in the way a drunk decides things, that He had finally looked square at what I had become and turned away. That He had abandoned me. And I will tell you something shameful. I was almost relieved. A God who has left you owes you nothing, and you owe Him nothing back, and a man can drink in peace once he has fired God from the payroll.
There is a passage in the letter to the Romans I could not read for the longest time, because it seemed to describe precisely what I believed had happened to me, and I did not want it named out loud. Paul is writing about men who trade the truth away, and three times, like a bell tolling in a tower, he says the same terrible thing. God gave them up. God gave them up to the desires of their hearts. God gave them up to a mind that no longer worked.
Gave them up. It is the most frightening sentence in all of Scripture, until you understand what it actually is, and then it becomes something else entirely.
I thought it meant God had left. It does not mean that. Listen to me now, because this is the whole hinge of it and I will not let you miss it. To be given up is not to be abandoned. It is to be permitted. God gave them up to what they would not stop choosing. He stopped, at the very last, dragging them by the collar back from the thing they reached for with both hands every single night. You remember the door I could not close, the one He left standing open. The handing over is God refusing, at long last, to haul a man bodily through a door he keeps refusing to walk through himself. It is not the withdrawal of His love. It is the awful respect of it. He made me free, and He did it on purpose, so that my love would be worth something on the day I gave it back to Him, and a freedom that cannot be refused is not freedom at all. It is a leash. And He would not put me on a leash. Not even to save me. Not even to save my life.
And that, in the end, was the punishment. Not fire out of the sky. He simply let the sin be its own sentence. He let me have exactly what I asked for, and what I was asking for was killing me, and He let me have it, because I would not stop asking. The wages of it were paid straight out of it. That is what it is to be punished by your sin and not merely for it. There is no jailer at that door. You are the cell.
And here is the cruelest turn in the whole of it, the part the old writers saw plainly and that we have mostly gone and forgotten.
The drink did not only take the pain. I could have lived with a thing that only took the pain. It took my eyes.
Thomas Aquinas, when he sits down to write about this very sin, lists out the harm it does, and the one that nobody ever expects comes last on his list. He says it dulls the mind. It darkens the understanding. I have never in my life read a truer sentence about my own, because the one faculty I needed in order to climb out of that pit was the very first thing the pit ate. I could not think my way back to the surface, because the thinking itself was gone. The light I would have needed to find the edges by was the light the drink had already snuffed. A sober man can look hard at his own life and make out the shape of what is happening to him. I no longer could. I had drowned the watchman. I had put out the one lamp that might have woken me, and I had done it with my own two hands, a little further down every night, and by the end I could not even call to mind what it had once been like to see.
That is the trap folded up inside the trap. A wound you can see, you can bind. But this sin reaches up and puts out the very light you would need in order to see the wound at all. It takes the pain and the eyes in the same swallow, and it leaves you grateful, there in the dark, to the very thing that has blinded you.
And it was down in that dark, when I could no longer see and had stopped wishing to, that I first began to hear the other voice. But that is the next thing, and it is the hardest thing I have to tell you, so let me sit quiet a moment before I do.
The other voice.
I have gone back and forth for years on how to tell you about it, because I am a modern man and I know exactly how it sounds, and I do not want you picturing something out of a film. It was nothing like that. There were no shapes in the corner. If you had sat down beside me you would have seen only a man drinking alone at a kitchen table, and you would have gone home and told your wife that he was grieving, and you would have been right.
But I will not lie to you to make myself sound more respectable, and the truth is that I do not believe I dug the last and deepest reach of that pit alone. Something helped. Something leaned its weight against the door from the far side, to hold it open, and it had a voice, and the voice was patient and reasonable and it always, always agreed with me.
It never once told me to drink. It did not need to, by then. What it told me was worse, and much quieter. It told me it was too late. It told me that this was simply who I was now, that the man at the Sunday table was a boy in a photograph who was never coming back. And it told me, and this was its masterpiece, that God agreed. That the drink and the dark and the ruin of me were not what I had fallen into but what I had turned out to deserve, the true verdict handed down at last, and that to go crawling back to the tabernacle now would only be an insult to a God who had already, and rightly, written me off.
I want you to hear how gentle that lie is. It does not come with horns. It comes as a kind of terrible peace. It tells you to stop struggling, that the struggling was always vanity, that there is even a dignity in accepting what you are. And a blinded man, a man who has drowned his own watchman, has nothing left in him to test it against. I believed it. God help me, for a stretch of time I believed it all the way to the floor, and belief in that one particular lie is the thing hell wants out of a man more than any sin he could ever commit, because a man who has sinned can still turn around, and a man who has been convinced he cannot turn around will not even try.
That is the whole game. It was never really about the wine. The wine was only the road. Despair was the destination the whole time. To get a man to sit down in the dark and agree with the accuser about his own soul, and to call that agreement humility, and to quietly stop reaching for the one hand still held open to him in the black, not because it had been taken away but because he has been talked out of believing it is there.
I will not walk you down through the bottom of it in detail. Some of it is not mine to hand to a young man three weeks into his own grief, and some of it I cannot say out loud even now. Let it be enough that there was a night, the lowest one, when I had stopped raging at God altogether. And you must understand that this was not peace. My rage had at least been aimed at Him. It had still been, in its own wretched way, a kind of address, a man standing under a window shouting because he believes someone is behind the glass. What came in its place was worse than rage. It was agreement. I sat in the dark and I no longer accused God of anything at all, because I had come around fully to the enemy's side of the table, and I agreed that I was past all saving, and I was almost, almost, done.
And here is the thing you must not miss, the thing the whole of my story has been walking you toward.
That lamp was still burning. Miles away, in an empty church, in the red glass beside the tabernacle, the light I had once fixed my eyes on like a man gone overboard was still lit, and had never once gone out, the entire time I sat in my dark deciding that it had. The door was still standing open. The rope was still down in the water. The grace had never, not for one second of all my ruin, thinned or turned or gone.
I had simply stopped believing there was anyone on the other end of it.
That is the bottom. Not the drink. The dark certainty, all dressed up as humility, that it was finished.
It was not finished.
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