A Shot in the Dark
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil.
If you forgive your fellow men their shortcomings, then your heavenly Father will also forgive your shortcomings. And if you do not forgive your fellow men, then your Father will not forgive you your shortcomings, either” (Matthew 6:12-15)
I’ve been hitting the heavy bag for twenty minutes straight for the past couple of weeks. It’s a good way to flush the poison out of you, like a sun salutation or a good cry.
Jabs, sidekicks, crosses, hooks…
Over and over again.
The poison comes out, but it’s like it fills back up again throughout the day. Like I’m a syringe constantly being dipped back into battery acid once empty.
I’m trying to keep the poison at the bag.
I’m trying.
It’s not really working.
All I can do is hurt the people around me and go inward. Internalize all my feelings and have them bottle up to only come out at the bag… I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want anyone to hurt me.
So, everyone needs to stay away.
Please, don’t hurt me.
Please, God, don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt me.
It’s amazing what we can justify when we’re trying not to be hurt, when we have been hurt—we can bleed hostility all over the floor and shrug it off like its someone else’s problem. We can push others away as if we’re battling hordes of monsters, in our minds we’re Van Helsing, and everyone who gets close has just entered the ring.
The shields go up and anger slides on our skin like a thick suit of armor, heavy and untempered. It’s so burdensome we can barely move in it, we can’t breathe in it, we can’t even see through the visor. We’re blind assuming we’re on a battlefield, swinging at every sound, guarding against every voice.
Surrounded on all sides, choking, sweating, desperate to not be run through by an unseen contender. I’ve kept my guard up since the beginning of Lent, which is when I got sick the first time. I was sick for almost a week with nothing to do but sit with the anger, too heavy to move, and let the poison stream through my veins.
Letting it infect me so it can spread to others.
That is what pain generates: more pain, lashing out, hurting people who let you down even though you love them.
And they love you, too.
That hurts the most, when someone hurts you and you know they love you. It’s hard not to carry that kind of pain with you for a long time. It’s hard to let go of that kind of pain because you feel like you can never trust them in the same way, and you even hate yourself for trusting anyone else.
How stupid can you be?
What was that?
I can’t see anything…
Breathe, just breathe…
Please, don’t hurt me.
Please, God, don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt me.
You always mess up by trusting other people, you think to yourself. You always mess things up by trying to let someone in. They’ll always hurt you. You’ll always hurt them. It’s better if you both just walk away, it’s better if you just walk away from everyone.
When I was a younger, I convinced myself I was better off alone because for all the people that have come into my life who said they loved me, every one of them hurt me in some way.
Every one of them lost my trust, my respect, and my affection.
It was easier to turn that affection inward and claw myself senseless, isolated with self-loathing and regret, than it was to appreciate that we are all just people, and people let each other down. It is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and eventually all you can do is wait… All you do is wait for someone to let you down. You’re betting on it. You halfway want them to just to prove you right.
Because you know they will.
They always do.
Now, though, I feel like this is no longer working. These thoughts are not worth listening to and this perspective isn’t the type of lens I want to use anymore.
I want the poison to fuel me, because it’s worked for so long, but it seems nowadays I just can’t run on the stuff. I think it’s time to put away childish things. For reasons that I don’t yet understand, the more recent pits of despair I’ve fallen into have been shallow and easier to climb out of, while a part of me feels warm in their depths (as cold as they are) it just will not do. They no longer feel like home.
I do not want to be angry anymore. I do not want to infect others with my poison; it’s time for a system patch and update.
March seventh was the three-year mark for my sobriety; in hindsight it was sobriety for about two years and recovery began last year, and maybe it really only started six months ago… Sometimes recovery feels like it’s only starting right now, in this moment, as if every moment leading up to the present was establishing the foundation for it.
Shoot, I think maybe that’s what the past three years have been more so than anything: quit drinking, lose everything, lose your sense of self, go through another round of losing everything, choosing to forego anything so not to lose anymore, and then slowly finding a way back to the self, to others, and to God… all while not drinking, but battling a fierce urge to start at every juncture.
That urge, though, it’s the poison reaching out for more of the same. It’s a pain trying to feel worse. It’s being led to temptation and bound with the evil.
After three years of sobriety, I think I hit bottom. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I do not want to be this person anymore.
Hell, I don’t think I can be this person anymore even if I tried. There’s still fragments of this person rattling around in me, and this person will come out if I am vulnerable or pierced by pain caused by those around me, but… It’s not me. And there’s nothing that is going to stop the pain inflicted on us, intentionally or not, by the people who we love. By the people who love us.
I have been thinking about this all wrong—I will never progress in the Great Work like this; I will never become like Christ if I cling to pain and fear rather than God. The concept in Judaism is known as דבקות (Devekut), in which the mystic “cleaves to God,” attaining union with He Who is a “consuming fire.” The application of this Divine attribute can be understood through the travels of the mystic, journeying through the alchemical stages of purification beginning with nigredo, the burning of dross in chaos before the impurities are washed away in the albedo stages. The burning of this dross occurs because one moves closer and closer to God, their aspiration and inspiration.
We cannot become united with Him if we are still clinging to the things of this world.
The things of a child.
We cannot make progress unless we are willing to risk losing everything.
Again.
This means stepping out of the anger and releasing the poison. Loosen your grip on the sword, take a breath, slowly remove your helmet—but I need it to—You can’t see with it on…
Please, don’t hurt me.
Please, God, don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt me.
The poison is believing that everybody else is doing us wrong in some way, that we are right and if everyone could just see things like we do then they would confess their error and apologize for being so blind. They would beg for our forgiveness for hurting us, and we, the virtuous and right-eous, could liberate them from their own darkness through our deep-seated kindness.
That’s poison.
And you know what the worst thing is? A lot of us would lord over someone who was asking forgiveness from us rather than to give it to them freely. A lot of us would take the splinter out of our brother’s eye to hold on to it as a keepsake, a constant reminder, of a time they were at fault and we, their liberator, helped them.
We’re cruel in that way.
The Lenten season invites us to pray, to fast, and to give alms. Personally, this Lent has invited me to pray for patience and a soft heart, to fast from my own poison, and to give mercy by opening up to the people I love and the people that love me.
This invitation stands in stark contrast to who we invite in during our times of hurt, when we’re vulnerable, and when we don’t want mercy nor do we have any to give. We just have poison to inject back into the world. We have pain trying to feel worse—we have demons.
I believe in demons.
I believe they are spirits that maliciously turn toward the void, nonexistence, and influence us to do the same.
And I believe they exist through us.
These are ethereal entities, abstract forms existing in incorporeal states beyond standard perception. I do not know if these forces are local or non-local. I am not sure how they move or why, but they exist, and we give them their power.
Buddhism has the Mara, demons that try and stop us from attaining enlightenment and achieving nirvana. These demons actively try to keep the soul bound to the Wheel of Samsara. The Gnostic Christians have the Archons, demonic rulers of the celestial spheres, preventing souls from leaving the material realm.
The Archons, or demons, keep us from experiencing the fullness of God’s love, they keep us from sharing in the Kingdom of Heaven in this life by causing us to focus on the things of this world. The Christian seeks to become illumined to God and the demons seek to cloud our judgment and our path, prompting us to retain the beam in our own eye, blinding us, and binding us to evil.
They sit on our shoulders, whispering in our ears, convincing us that we are right and others are wrong; convincing us that if we trust, give ourselves over to faith and love, then we will be destroyed. We give them their power by believing them, inviting them in—letting them infect us and staining our interiors with foulness and fear.
Demons are real and I know I am listening to them when I want to pull away from others, when I want to hurt someone, when I want to hoard my pain like a dragon with its gold—demanding someone apologize to me and change their ways.
When it’s not me, but it’s the world that needs to be better—than I am listening to the demons. When I am convinced that I do not need to do anything but wallow in self-loathing and self-righteousness then I am listening to the demons. When I give into fear I give them a foothold, I raise my shields; I speak as a child, and I feel and think as a child.
If I disappear altogether then they have won, suffocated under the untempered armor that keeps me from seeing reality for what it is.
A year and half into sobriety they almost won.
They have almost won a handful of times, but that time they came the closest.
I can’t help thinking that if they didn’t win then… I don’t think they’ll ever win. They had their chance and all they did was show me a darkness so dark that it made the light, flickering and faint as it was, obvious. So subtle that neither I nor the darkness could comprehend it.
The morning after being almost swallowed whole, after almost letting myself be swallowed whole… I was different. I was different and there was no going back. I saw them. I saw the demons, I saw nonexistence, and I almost let them win.
I know how hard it is to fight them. I know how easy it is to let them in.
I do my best to sweat them out at the heavy bag, to purge them in some way. I refuse them every time I walk past a bar. Every time I think of what someone did, or did not do, to me.
The poison will pass, like a viral infection—keep drinking water, keep your chin up, stop flaring out your arms—focus. Keep getting up for the next round, put your trust in God, and for the love of the Divine open up to the people who love you… let them love you.
Believe you can be loved.
Believe me when I tell you I love you.
The demons will come, they will go. They’re like a viral infection passing through your system. Don’t go with them. Stay here and risk your light, no matter how subtle it might be, for “now my insight is incomplete, but then I shall stand in the stream of true insight, in which recognizing and being recognized are one. We find permanence which bears all future within it in the exalted triad:
In faith
In hope,
And in love.
But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:12-13).
Risk love, risk hope, risk faith—They will pull you out of the darkness—and if you risk your light, if you risk hope by hoping, risk love by loving, then that risk will pull others out of the darkness, too.
The demons, the Archons, Mara—they’re real; I know they’re real because I fight them.
We fight by guarding against what will take us away from God and others—we fight by dropping our guard to love, knowing that if we fight everything off, we’ll have nothing. Moving closer to God means softening, becoming lighter and unburdened by the things of this world, so let the poison out, let the dross burn away, and remember that tempering metal hurts, our God is a consuming fire, but we’re tempered for the sake of love, of union—of becoming.
“Cleave to Him and do not fall away,
That you may be honored at the end of your life.
Accept whatever is brought upon you,
And in exchange for your humiliation,
be patient;
Because gold is tested in fire and acceptable men in the furnace of abasement.
Believe in Him, and He will help you;
Make your ways straight and hope in Him” (Wisdom of Sirach 2:3-6).
God, grant us strength to endure; may we be strong enough to resist Mara and drop our guard to Your will. God, grant us courage to trust in love and surrender to You.
Please, don’t disappear.
Please, God, don’t let us disappear.
Don’t disappear.
Si comprehends, non est Deus
Witness, NM 