Spiritualized

Cuz ya gotta have faith, faith, faith.

Sometimes (most times, I find), writing stuff down and sharing it with people (it has to be both) is largely about forcing myself to commit to a thought or idea—to throw a bunch of unformed clay onto the wheel and shape it into something that hardens and becomes fixed. As Joan Didion said: I write to find out what I’m thinking. A couple posts ago, I wrote about the Buddhist term maranasati, and since then I’ve had this nagging feeling of, like, Oh shit, I did a religion. Are folks gonna judge me for that? Should I be judging myself? This illustrates my point: I committed to a thought, or string of thoughts, and that act forces me to sit with those thoughts, to consider and reconsider them. And this is good, because the fact that this commitment has been bugging me is itself an indication I should unpack and explore it. And the nice thing about writing is that clay is cheap material.

Something similar happened when I was admitted to the hospital after they discovered masses in my abdomen. As part of the standard list of admission questions, the attendant asked me my religious affiliation, and at first I said, “None,” then I reconsidered and said, “Buddhist.” Danielle was caught off guard. She knew I meditated and listened to the occasional mindfulness podcast, but to say out loud, for the purpose of entering it into a record, that I was a Buddhist? That was a first, for her and for me.

Why did I do this? Partly it was out of fear, a smidge of the old no-atheists-in-foxholes thing. With a potential cancer diagnosis hanging over my head, I felt less naked with the designation than without it. But it was also for the sake of experimentation: How often do you get to declare your religion? I’d been dabbling in Buddhist and Buddhism-adjacent readings, podcasts, and lectures for years. What would it feel like to shift the meaning of these pursuits from an intellectual hobby to my official religion, at least as far as some hospital paperwork was concerned?

It felt weird then and it feels weird now. There's the old saying about how it’s impolite to talk about religion in public, and the numbers bear this out. According to a recent Pew study, “17% of U.S. adults have unfollowed, unfriended, blocked or changed their settings to see less of someone on social media because of religious content the person posted or shared.” This pairs nicely with a study from 2016 that found roughly half of US adults “seldom or never talk about religion outside their family.” I’m guessing these numbers are heavily skewed depending on your demographic, meaning those of us predominantly blue state-living Substack-readers are way more secular than our counterparts weighing down the other side of such surveys.

This is all noteworthy considering that at least a few people in the former demographic have asked me if I’d had any spiritual epiphanies as I stared down death during the early and bleakest days of my cancer adventure. I guess it’s OK to talk about spirituality in the context of a brush with death, but rarely outside it, and I’m here to tell you that’s back-assward: Contemplating and exploring one’s relationship (or lack thereof) with the G-word is something that should be done well in advance of one’s physical expiration, so as not to be caught flatfooted, as I was. Trust me, a hospital is no place to start experimenting with this stuff.

Clearly, part of why we don’t discuss these things—spirituality, faith, God, etc.—is because of the fear that accompanies such a discussion, the perceived social cost—which apparently exists! I wish I could say I was any better at confronting this fear than most, but I’m not. I do have a lot of direct experience with it, though.

As of this writing, I’ve been sober for six years, eight months, and 24 days. Prior to that, alcohol owned my ass. I’ll spare you the details (for now), but suffice it to say by the time I finally stopped drinking I was physically and psychologically broken. AA eventually saved my life, but the thing that kept me out of those rooms for at least a decade—once I knew I had a problem but couldn’t bring myself to address it—was the G-word, the dreaded higher power, the stigma that AA was a cult whose strict if unspoken condition for membership was lip service to a deity you didn’t believe in (for the record: it’s not, and no such condition exists, although I acknowledge that depending on which room you walk into, it may not always feel that way).

Only when I discovered the Atheists and Agnostics subset of AA meetings did I feel comfortable enough to “keep coming back.” Once I had some time under my belt, I found things to appreciate in the more traditional meetings, and now I view the entire big tent of AA—from the bible-thumping meetings in exurban Texas where my wife is from, to the beachside expat meeting in Phuket where I marked six months—as a true and sturdy miracle. And what’s interesting is that it was over the course of this gradual softening and opening up, amid a mindset of ostensibly full-throated agnosticism, that I started to have what I now understand as a slowly unfolding spiritual experience, one that was subtle enough to sneak past my finely tuned alarm system for detecting such things.

Looking back on it now, I can see that, like so many addicts, I was so damn headstrong, so confident I could crack the code of my suffering without having to compromise anything, least of all this sense of self I’d spent all my life attaching myself to. What I can tell you about spirituality, at least as I understand it, is that it’s the silver bullet that kills this monster. This gradual loosening of the grip on self—like unhinging a dog’s jaws from a chew toy—is what spiritual work is all about. That work can be practiced in all manner of formats, discerned in all manner of texts. And the more we talk about our own personal experience of it with one another, the better we become at recognizing what resonates and what doesn’t.

To the extent this even qualifies as wisdom, it was hard-won. I’m someone who’s been in therapy nearly all of his adult life, had cancer twice now, and spent close to seven years in recovery, but when it comes to concepts related to spirituality, I still feel like a kid playing with blocks, or like an adolescent trying on different identities to see which one I wanna stick with. And that’s fine. There are, after all, no rules in this game—no time limits, no points. But it’s a game we’re all playing, whether we acknowledge it or not. Talking about spirituality may be impolite, but it sure is helpful for figuring out something we all have to wrap our heads around eventually, hopefully before it’s too late.