“I tried to pray, nothing happened.”

I am reading a book, The Recovering, Intoxication and its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. When it came I did not remember that I had ordered it. I thought had ordered a book about how scientific papers had all become corrupt, and when this one came, I thought that was it. It was not. The one I ordered, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, is frightfully boring, so I am stuck now with two bad books … I’ll hang on with the Recovering, if only because I know the ending of Unreliable.

Books by recovering alcoholics can be tedious, self-involved, and boring. But I read a few pages in, and liked that she was talking about famous writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who were also famous drunks. My own take is that these men, along with my own favorite, Edward Abbey, were crooked to begin with, so that both drinking and writing suited them fine. I seek no meaning in the fact that they drank, only the fact that they wrote. The same internal force that made them write might also have driven them to drink, but so what? That does not begin to explain all of the great writers who were not drunks.

Sidenote: This morning as I read she recounted reading the Stephen King book that became the Apollo 11 movie, The Shining. She’s not aware that with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, Stanley Kubrick, and not Stephen King, is using the word “All” to take the place of “Apollo 11”, where Kubrick was deeply immersed.

Jamison has the main character in The Shining, Jack, merely fighting off sobriety. He’s a deeply committed drunk. That’s a factual rendering of the book, I was not aware. Wrote King, “… I was writing about myself. … I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging.”

That’s new and insightful. I will stick with this book now, for a while. Prior to that passage I was in that part of the book where Jamison is out of mindless drunkeness into recovery, and indeed it was getting tedious. But I did come upon one passage that I liked:

That winter, after months spent in an adult, zombie dream, I eventually went back home to Los Angeles and sat in a chair in the middle of a psychiatrist’s office. He asked me if I ever felt like I was seeing everything through shit-colored glasses. I said: Always. He gave me a prescription for an antidepressant and said I should dose up slowly and watch for a rash. My mother and I drove to a convent where the trimmed glass was sliced into pieces by the gray ribbons of concrete pathways. We wrote our wishes for the year and burned them to make them come true. I tried to pray, nothing happened. It was like I was trying to edge my way into a conversation that had already begun without me.

The line, “I tried to pray, nothing happened” struck me, as that, throughout my life, has always been my experience. I grew up religious, a product of both Catholic grade and high school. I sat through countless Catholic masses, sat in circle’s and held hands as others prayed. My older brother became a priest, and I sat in a car as he and two of his fellow seminarians prayed. This is only reflective, as at the time I was just uncomfortable. I felt they were attacking me and my shallowness. I did not yet know the expression “passive aggressive.” They were talking about people, gossiping, making comments intended for each other and about others, but addressing them to God. Passive-aggressive is such a nice weapon, giving one the ability to launch attacks while at the same time denying it. Those bastards!

I cannot think of a time in my life, all those masses and circle jerks, where I ever felt I made any kind of connection with God. Praying has never had any effect on me. It has never moved me to do anything but wish well on others, for their benefit and mine, and without any godly involvement. Religious faith makes people happy, I know. I don’t begrudge them happiness in any way they can get to it. But for me, religion does not get it done.

By the way, Jamison has chosen antidepressants over alcohol. But antidepressants don’t cure depression, and usually don’t work very long, if at all. She’s changed pathways, but is still on the wrong course, as I see it. Antidepressants do create a sense of hollowness in living, as when you deaden the nerve endings for pain in the human experience, you also deaden those that bring joy. You flatline. So I expect that this book is going to get worse. Will I finish it? Probably not. She’s not so terribly insightful as she is honest in her observations in the mirror.

When I was 22, I did attend Catholic seminary for one year. I hid my real motives from myself, and for years thereafter blamed myself for wanting to be more like my brother than me, thereby following in his hallowed footsteps. I did not belong there, and knew it maybe two days in. My classmates and teachers knew it too, like me, right away.

But I did it, and only on honest reflection now have I remembered that at that time I was not in college. I had been transported on a bus from Billings to Butte, Montana for my Army physical. It was 1971, and I was afraid of being drafted, as it was breathing down my neck. I was not tough enough to be a good soldier, even as I stupidly thought that Vietnam was a righteous cause. So I also lacked courage of conviction. Ah, despicable me.

I also know, looking back, that if I were in Vietnam, I surely would have drank a lot, and perhaps become a heroin addict, as happened to so many. Those poor schmucks over there, I later learned, had too much time on their hands, and easy access to booze and drugs. (I also learned that most who were addicted to heroin recovered on returning stateside. It’s not as addictive as we are led to believe, at least for regular Joe’s. Not that I want to test that hypothesis on me.)

Entering the seminary made me “4H”, meaning I could not be drafted. While in the seminary, the Pentagon held the first draft lottery, and I drew number 345, meaning that I would not be drafted, ever. I left the seminary feeling I had made a few friends and misspent a year of my life, and still not knowing how to pray. However, I would never again have to fear the draft, and that was an important change of outlook in my life.

Alcoholics cite what is known as the “Serenity Prayer,” authored by Reinhold Niebuhr, a minister and theologian: “O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

I like that. I would drop the “O God, give” part, and change it to “I must find in myself”, as after all, I am all I have. It’s nice to think that my thoughts are being transmitted to a higher power, but really, I don’t buy it. Who’s got time to listen? Here I agree with Jamison, that prayer is a fantasy, a wasted effort, a way to fool ourselves into submission to a higher power that only rarely reveals itself, and then only in mysterious ways.

Wait! She doesn’t say all of that. I do. All she said was “I tried to pray, nothing happened.” I probably have made too much of that, of her, and of her book.