Sam, I greatly appreciate your candor and courtesy. I too had a church background. In my case, it was Catholic. I felt at times very close to God. Sometimes as a youngster, when I prayed earnestly I would cry from a mixture of self-inadequacy and warm comfort. No one ever knew I did this. When high school started, my life began an inexorable decline both spiritually and scholastically. I became seriously depressed. I blamed it on this new environment that was populated by seemingly hostile strangers. They (classmates) seemed shrewder than the strict but clueless disciplinarians who we needed desperately to maintain peace. There were bullies or elites who went about in distinct cliques. Many of the girls seemed unreachable and some were eager to perpetrate all sorts of humiliations on boys they didn't like. I was an outsider due mostly to my rural home and poverty. I learned the art of "avoision."* But my inner life was much worse and contributed more to the depression. I was consumed with guilt, especially over indulging sexual fantasies of women. It was a pleasurable but frustrating refuge, but it troubled me deeply. I was so ashamed of them that I couldn't even confess them in a darkened enclosure to a priest! But, whenever I was able to do so, I felt enormous relief. However, this and other pressures of teenage life, such as the discovery of alcohol, mounted and I became cold toward religion and God. In a local church, Jesus and the apostles, full of regal saintliness seemed fittingly enshrined in stained glass beauty, their heads ringed with halos. Because of my inner wretchedness I believed that I could never company with them. Even the priests who were allowed within the altar area were unsure of their own destiny. These were my "happy days."
However, I was not always the "oppressed". For example, I treated my younger brother cruelly, much to my deep regret, for I viciously spurned him in favor of friends. And finally, I decided to cut off every personal tie whether family or friend. In 1970, at the age of 19, I joined the Air Force. The challenge of basic training distracted my melancholia. After the elation of personal victory died down when I passed with an overall "E" (excellent), my descent into depression was redoubled -- fueled with more alcohol. I contemplated and even wrote out suicide notes while in tech school.
My self-destructive ways culminated in an evening in late April of 1971. After drinking ourselves into a stupor, my best friend shot me in a friendly game of quick-draw or some such thing, for I can't recall the last 10 seconds prior to the incident. I think my finger was playfully drawn against his fully loaded p-38 semi-automatic handgun. The bullet (the setting was on single, not automatic) entered my throat and exited through the spine at level c-8 and smashed through the plate glass door of his second floor apartment. In slow motion it seemed, I fell to the floor and I've never stood upright since.
While in intensive care, I fought pneumonia. I languished in Demerol and fever-induced hallucinations for over two weeks. A friend who had been with me since basic training came in to visit me and offered to pray for me. I could not have been less interested. I could barely tolerate his words, foreign and meaningless as they seemed then to me. I was farther now from God but I have never blamed Him for the incident, nor questioned Him on it. It seemed foolish even at that time to hold Him responsible for my actions. Well, now I had a new distraction. I went through rehab in the Bronx, New York VA hospital. I came home finally in December of 1971 and fell into mourning that lasted until a good friend from high school named Bill started getting me back into life. He had more than amply forgiven me for cutting him off when I left my "miserable" home for a "real life". To him, I am still grateful.
In 1973, another friend who was opening a business in Atlanta, Georgia challenged me to do something with my life. I took him up on the offer and moved down there from here in New Jersey.
I lived there for the next two years. The heavy drinking began again, and the anxiety and suicidal melancholia crept again into my soul. My fear at that time can be stated this way: I felt as though I were racing downhill in stygian darkness toward the edge of a cliff that overlooked a vast chasm, and I could discern no fence to stop me. My dread was unutterable: My insides spun in a slow, heavy cyclone -- dark, gaining strength and fury.
I was in despair. I would cry out for peace and for an end to this life! At that time I became obsessed with writings about the occult and the supernatural. But the more I read, the more the despair intensified. It simply wouldn't ease. I bought a Catholic edition coffee table size bible. I would read it at times. I thought that Revelation was a drug induced vision. Even a local priest I called one night while drunk agreed with me that it might be! Again, no one knew what I was going through.
But:
Sam, I don't want to wear out the reader. I'll continue next time and allow them to either read it or skip over it in case they've lost interest.
Thanks!
Stan
* a delicious compound of "avoidance" and "evasion" credited to "the Simpsons"). |
