A Just Man Fall and Riseth Again

 

I'm not usually one to follow celebrity news, but I heard about Matthew Perry (from the hit sitcom Friends)'s death recently and have been thinking about it the past couple days. The actor was introduced to the painkiller Vicodin after an injury and, like many people, discovered it made him feel good. What ensued from that initial exposure was a lifetime battle with addiction. 

And it was a battle. Perry did fifteen stints in rehab (costing him over $9 million dollars trying to get clean), had fourteen surgeries due to the effects of alcohol and drug abuse, and relapsed more than sixty times. That last part was the one that stuck with me. He wanted to get sober. He wanted to break this vicious cycle. He did everything in his power to do so. He knew he needed help, and sought it out. Every time he relapsed, he got back up and on the horse. Though the autopsy is still undergoing, I wouldn't be surprised if this was simply a battle he didn't win.

For anyone without experience with addiction, it's hard to overestimate it's power. There are a lot of factors at play as well--there is genetic susceptibility (in the case of alcoholism), the incredible power of habit, the chemical dependency component, behavioral reinforcement, and yes, spiritual forces at work. As anyone who has experienced it, addiction is akin to enslavement. There is nothing like those initial highs, but when they wear off and are taken up again and again, feeding the beast over time becomes less about seeking out pleasure and more about avoiding the pain of withdrawal. Even when you want to get off the train at your hometown stop, the train of addiction speeds right by it and locks the doors. At some point, you can't get off even if you want to. 

There are a lot of spiritual parallels here we would be wise to pay attention to. The Devil is the nefarious "pusher," and will supply you with an array of products to suit your pallet and accomplish his purposes, which is to make you a slave. He can use innocuous means (like your smartphone) to lure you away from the good of say, regular prayer. He can disguise things and dress them up to appear as something they are not (like justifying gossip or sloth or wealth or notoriety). He sometimes sends bad influences into our life to influence us (bad company corrupts good morals). He can slip images and clips that tantalize our senses into our purview to try to corrupt our sexual integrity (racy pictures or soft-porn). His intelligence and knowledge of our weaknesses is supreme. 

But the Devil, like addiction, is also boring. He may be smart, but he is also unoriginal. Something Matthew Perry said in an interview about his daily life as an addict stuck with me, "When you're a drug addict, it's all math." You calculate how many pills you need to keep you from "the sickness" in this scenario; how many you need to last you to the end of the week; how many you need to score to last you to this event, and how much money you need to acquire it. For most people, math is boring!

Sometimes, too, you miscalculate. This picture is 2mg of fentanyl next to a penny. 2mg of fentanyl will kill you; it's that potent. That's pretty scary.

The thing is, fentanyl is usually laced and cut into a lot of drugs, and you might not even know it's there. It's both addicting and potentially lethal. 

The Devil, too, will 'cut' our supply and lace good spiritual impulses with impurities. He will slip in lies among the truth like tares among wheat, heresy among orthodoxy, pride in the wake of piety. Sobriety for alcoholics and addicts doesn't work on a sliding scale-- it demands total abstinence. As St. Paul writes, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people" (Eph 5:3). 

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul works his exhortation about the need for vigilance against false teaching ("a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough") in the context of freedom and slavery at the beginning of the 5th chapter of his epistle. Freedom, truth, and holy abstinence depend upon one another in order to work, for "all sin is slavery" (Jn 8:34). Christ set us free from the yoke of bondage so that we might have life and life abundant (Jn 10:10). "For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another" (Gal 5:13). 

When you are a slave, you are no longer the in control of your own destiny; another owns you life, tells you where to go and what to do. This is the nature of addiction, the character of slavery. And the Devil is an exacting slave master that does not easily let his people go. 

There is a misconception about the rite of exorcism, that is a 'one and done' thing. As any exorcist will tell you, when demons have a foothold in someone, they do not always go easily. Oftentimes they require multiple sessions of deliverance, week after week (sometimes for years) and needs to be seen through to the end lest one clean the house and find it overtaken and in even a worse state than before (Mt 12:43-45). 

What struck me about Perry's situation was that he kept getting up after his falls. He wanted to live and didn't stop fighting for his life. He went to tens of thousands of AA meetings. He sought help, and even as a non-believer cried out to God for it.  He also wanted to help others, opening up his own rehab for addicts after he had gotten clean for a period of time. Addiction is powerful and heartbreaking. 

In the ER, my wife encounters patient after patient who struggles with alcoholism addiction, suffering under the yoke of their slavery. She carries with her prayer cards of  Ven Matt Talbot (who beat his alcoholism with the help of grace) and St. Mark Ji Tianxiang (who never kicked his opium addiction, but was nonetheless canonized as a martyr during the Boxer revolution in China) to give to these suffering patients at the hospital as a spiritual lifeline in the black ocean of addiction and prays for them. People in NA and AA know the equation for sobriety does not work apart from God. It necessitates the exercise of the will (which has been compromised, but not snuffed out completely), and a daily commitment not to drink or use (which entails suffering). But the stronghold of addiction is so forceful, those who ultimately get clean know they cannot do it under their own power alone. 

And so it is with sin. We must be vigilant and watchful, because the Devil prowls like a roaring lion seeking those whom he may devour (1 Pt 5:8). Sin is the snare, fentanyl the lethal hook, and damnation the end game.  We cannot outsmart the Devil. We cannot out-fast him. We cannot trick or out run him. Our only hope to escape the yoke of slavery is complete surrender to God in the safehouse of Divine grace. Christ is our ransomer who hears our cries from the depths of the drug den and rescues us from the miry pit of destruction and despair (Ps 40:2). When we are delivered, we are instructed never to go back there, never to flirt with that which enslaved us in the first place, for our own good lest we encounter demons seven times stronger than the first. When we confess our sins in the Sacrament of Confession, we must remember the resolution to firm amendment of life, for this is our commitment to heed Christ's warning. 

Do not flirt with sin, for it is a matter of life and death. Attune your nose to the sulfuric odor of heterodoxy lest you be corrupted. Keep your inner circle uncorrupted, and your mind pure. You are weak by nature, made susceptible to falls by concupiscence. It is the mark of a future saint to persevere with fortitude in the face of his weakness. "For a just man fall seven times and riseth up again" (Prov 24:16). Just don't let your most recent fall be your last.