By Nick Bryant
As atheists, agnostics and unaffiliated believers plunge into recovery, the search for a “higher power” mentioned in AA’s second step can take them in unexpected directions. They may explore New Age metaphysics, shamanic traditions and meditation in one of the Eastern traditions. Buddhism, both Tibetan and Zen, seems especially popular with sober free thinkers these days. But it’s also possible to make an existential U-turn back to the religion of one’s youth. Such wandering souls are often called “prodigal sons,” after a parable (Luke 15: 11-32) that Jesus told about a young man who makes the existential U-turn and is welcomed home by his father after years of debauchery.
BLAMING THE NAZIS, THE JEWS AND GOD
Take Josh, for example. He’s been in recovery for the last 14 years of his 60 on the planet, and he’s a classic prodigal son in the Judaic tradition. His parents were Polish Jews who met at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where an estimated 100,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis.
“I was born in Bergen-Belsen after it had been converted into a displaced persons camp,” says Josh. “Both of my parents had been previously married, but the Nazis had murdered their spouses and children, so my mom and dad married at Bergen-Belsen following its liberation. When I was two, we moved to Tucson, Arizona. My parents were orthodox, and they kept a kosher home, but they were damaged psychologically from their experience in the camps. Their rage and impatience made my formative years extremely difficult. As a kid, I blamed the holocaust and my parents’ state-of-mind on the Nazis, but I blamed the Jews for passively laying down on the conveyor belts that delivered them to the ovens.”
Josh attended a Hebrew school in Tucson until he was 12, but the emotional upheavals in his home sowed the seeds of doubt. “One day I was sitting in class, and the rabbi was waxing philosophic about heaven and hell according to the Talmud. I thought, ‘What God would let all these people march into the ovens, and then decide who went to heaven and hell?’ So that started my schism.”
When Josh was 13, he had a bar mitzvah where he was given his tefillin, a set of small leather boxes containing parchment scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah. Orthodox Jewish males are required to wrap the tefillin around their hands and foreheads during their daily morning prayers. The tefillin and continuing orthodox education did not, however, provide any protection from the 1960s.
A NEW DEITY
“In my second year of college, I started drinking and taking drugs,” says Josh. “I completely abandoned Judaism for ‘tune in, turn on and drop out.’’’
The drugs weren’t a problem at first. He moved to New York City, got married, had two children, acquired three rental properties and lived in a large loft near Union Square. He even realized his dream of becoming an auteur by directing two feature films, while acquiring a taste for Hollywood’s drug of choice in those years. “As I waded deeper into my filmmaking career, I also waded deeper into cocaine.”
His wife wasn’t pleased and sprung a divorce on him. He attempted to clean up for the sake of his children, but a new deity came first in his priorities.
“When I started smoking crack, I prayed to God to alleviate the obsession, because I knew I was on a runaway train to ruin. In the morning, I would strap on my tefillin and pray for the strength to delay smoking crack until after my prayers, but in the middle, I’d rip off my tefillin, take a hit of crack, and then strap my tefillin back on to finish my prayers. I couldn’t pray for ten minutes when I needed a hit. I stopped believing in anything or anybody – even my children.”
Josh had squirreled away $500,000 from his various business interests and torched all of it, losing his rental properties, his filmmaking career and all contact with his children.
“I hit bottom when I ran out of money. I knew I needed rehab, but I just couldn’t see spending my last $30,000 for a rehab when I could spend it on crack. When I had nothing left, I applied for and received Medicaid – I then checked myself into a rehab.”
COMING HOME
Josh dusted off his tefillin and brought them to rehab, reciting the prayers he had learned as a boy. Throughout his 14-year recovery, Josh continues to strap on his tefillin before his daily prayers.
“Judaism was the easiest spiritual path for me to embrace once I sobered up, because of my family and schooling. I took the nondenominational tools I learned in AA and applied it to my Jewish faith, using Judaism to find a Higher Power. AA has expanded my understanding of Judaism and allowed me to accept the spiritual legacy I inherited from my parents. I’m no longer fighting my past.”
LEAVING THE FOLD
Michael, 53, has been in recovery for 10 years. Raised in New Hampshire, baptized Roman Catholic, he too is a prodigal son, although he gets better publicity than Josh. An advertising executive, he has seen his former swashbuckling lifestyle – top-shelf booze, cocaine, exotic travel, mistresses – portrayed in the hit AMC series “Mad Men.”
“I still remember my first Holy Communion, and I felt very good about being Catholic as a boy,” says Michael. “I even attended a Catholic prep school. After college, I moved to France, where I married a woman who had been previously married in the Catholic Church, so I couldn’t marry her in the Church. I think that was my first realization that I was no longer in the fold.”
Michael made a fast rise to senior partner at his agency, managing to estrange most of his colleagues in the process, despite an obvious talent for the trade. He began to get hammered at the office and verbally assault anyone in the vicinity. The drinking got worse and worse.
“I remember walking up 7th Avenue once on a very cold morning,” says Michael. “I saw a mentally ill woman dressed only in a bathrobe fall down, and as her head hit the pavement I heard a cracking sound. My instinctual reaction was to flee from her, while all of the other people on the sidewalk rushed to her aid. I realized that I had lost my Catholic heritage completely. I had become the polar opposite of the Good Samaritan.”
FROM DENIAL TO RESURRECTION
Michael was eventually stripped of his senior partnership at the agency and required to see a substance abuse counselor once a week. “I eventually confided to my counselor that I thought I was spiritually dead. She asked me what I was going to do about it, and I told her that I would start praying. The way my prayer was answered is that I found myself – against my wishes – telling the substance abuse counselor how much I actually drank and took drugs, and its devastating impact on my life. I began crying uncontrollably, and I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. The counselor said I was experiencing an opening in my wall of denial and urged me to jump through it.”
In addition to attending AA meetings, Michael even dropped in on a church in his Gramercy Park neighborhood, but not the church of his youth. “I’d developed a strong aversion to Catholicism. I couldn’t take the veneration of saints and praying to the Virgin Mary, so I opted for Episcopalian services. I was attracted to the Shakespearian beauty of the Episcopalian liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer, and also the absence of all the Catholic hocus pocus.”
Easter happened to coincide with his first year anniversary in AA, and he realized that the story of the resurrection was his story too. “In my case, it was the death of my previous self, and I was being reborn.” Michael then reread a biography of Thomas Moore, who had been the Patron Saint of the Catholic prep school he attended in the late 1960s, and his reverence for Moore was rekindled. He then questioned his affiliation with the Episcopalian Church, because it was founded by Henry VIII who had Thomas Moore beheaded.
“I had been sober around 18 months when I found myself being prepped for hernia surgery, and a nurse had a litany of questions for me,” Michael remembers. “She asked ‘What is your religion?’ I was taken aback by the question, but then it quickly dawned on me that when you’re put under there’s a slight chance of death. I suddenly realized that if I were dying, I would want a Roman Catholic priest by my bedside.”
SPIRITUALITY & RELIGION: NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
Adapting AA’s suggestion for newcomers of making 90 meetings in 90 days, Michael decided to attend one mass a week for three months. “My objections to Catholicism all melted away – much as my desire to drink had. I realized that it was different to venerate the Virgin Mary as a saint than to worship her as a goddess. I also learned that my aversion to the veneration of Mary lay in part to my disfigured orientation towards women. I gradually ceased to look at woman as objects of pleasure and gratification.”
Michael, like Josh, has found that the spirituality of AA is compatible with his religious orientation. “AA doesn’t offer a specific focus for a spiritual life, but it gives you a set of tools that will facilitate the focus of a spiritual life. When I attend AA meetings, I’m in the company of people who have made different religious commitments than me, but they’re using AA to put some mettle in that commitment.”
Nick Bryant is the author of “The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal” (Trine Day).
