It’s The End of The World as We Know It

A lesson in separation

Proverbs 20:1 Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.

I feel fine.

That’s what I was telling myself when I was really very sick. I just didn’t understand the sickness.

I’m an alcoholic. Alcohol is toxic. I’d been poisoning myself with booze for over a decade and even though I was no longer drinking all that booze had permeated my whole body and soul. Every cell of my body was pickled. My mind was pickled with the sickness. It took at least a year to get to the place where I really felt good. Good in a way I didn’t even recognize anymore.

What I knew was that I couldn’t be around booze anymore. I couldn’t. I’d been so imprisoned by it that even the short time without was such a freedom as unimagined as one could get.

My friends, good people who had for so long been an important part of life even though I’d done a lot to push them away were about to be even more separated from me. I didn’t do it on  purpose, but somehow they just disappeared from my life. Whether it was because I wasn’t going to bars or maybe the cause was that they didn’t want to be around me. I don’t know. I know that for a time, an important time they were gone. When we finally were together again I was free enough of the booze and full of enough “church” that it became a little weird being together.

I approached the pastor of the church one Sunday after the meeting and told him about my alcohol problems and legal issues. I just wanted to know what the bible said about booze. The bible had become something of an inspiration to me.

He gave me some verses to read, but I mainly only remember the ones in the Book of Proverbs about how booze takes control and how one should really avoid, not seek after it, separate from it. I took that to heart and when the time came for me to pay the piper and go to jail for the DUI I had that with me. I’d been sober for a year by then and I was full of God and the Bible. I tried to study with some of the other believers in jail, but even though they were real nice guys, they were different. I was becoming a fundamentalist and they weren’t. The difference was obvious.

One guy who wasn’t a believer told me in a meeting that he’d seen dozens of guys like me and he knew he’d see me again. Its been 17 years and I’ve not yet seen him again.

I’d been separating myself from things that were bad for me. I was discerning things that were not spiritually healthy for me. I didn’t see that in these guys.

Separation. Love not the world, neither things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Strong words. Bold words. Words not to be taken lightly. But not words to be used to judge others. I was really getting good at using words like these to make judgments about others. I was becoming a bible-thumping, right-wing, ditto-head, fundamentalist Pharisee.

But I was sober. That was good enough. I was being a father. I was trying to learn to be a good Dad and husband. That made me better than I was and better than those who weren’t. All the while pretending not to judge them, I was becoming all that I had once despised.

I was separating and I was becoming isolated from people outside the church. It was the churches fault I don’t think. There were some who warned me, but I didn’t see it because all I could see was that I felt better about myself. That was becoming my god.

The band U2 has a song titled Bad and the Lyrics include these words strung together; dislocation, separation, condemnation, revelation, in temptation, isolation, devastation.

Those words fairly well describe the years of fundamentalism for me. Even though I was freed from the bondage of booze and given strength to overcome my bad choices. My world ended as I knew it. Replaced by something better, but still beggarly…in the end my spiritual life would end up eventually in temptation, isolation and devastion.

But that is another story.