Our Death Penalty

I have been permanently trying to kick my addition to nicotine for over two decades. I know it says in scripture that a just man falls seven times and rises again, and that is true, but it is also indicative of the kind of stronghold such pernicious habits can have on us. Matthew Perry, the Friends actor who died recently, spent over $9 million dollars on his recovery and was in and out of rehab fifteen times. That is a testament both to a relentless desire to be free and an indication of just how deep the claws of addition can sink into one's spirit. 

Nicotine addiction is relatively innocuous in the grand scheme of things. It isn't psychedelically compromising and doesn't typically lead to succumbing to a life of breaking-and-entering. I know guys who use smokeless nicotine to hone their concentration and give them a little carrot during their workday. Some are able to keep it at 3mg a few times a day; I was never able to regulate with that kind of self-control. I was regularly ingesting over 100mg/day however I could get it in my system. 

I always hated the effeminacy of this chain of addiction, like a baby who can't live without his paci to soothe him. I also took to heart over the years the words of St. John of the Cross who related our attachments to a string--even the thinnest of threads--that keeps a bird from flight. I knew when SHTF during the end times, I did not want to be chained via detachment, because as Fr. Ripperger notes, it is our attachments during the Chastisement that will brutalize us when everything is taken away from us. 

It's always an interesting interplay between the work of grace and the effort of the will when it comes to these attachments to the world, the flesh, and the devil. St. Augustine countered the Pelagians, who downplayed the role of grace, on this very topic in the 4th century. I knew I wanted to be free of this habit and chemical dependency, but I didn't know how; I had fallen so many times--even when I had gotten free of it for upwards of a year--and always fell back into it one way or another. So, my will was resolved, but I needed grace to make it stick. Thanks be to God, I was able to go cold turkey two months ago off the drug and haven't been back to it since. It was brutal, not something I want to repeat, ever. Each day I have to not smoke, not dip, not chew--that is the will at work. But it was grace that saved me. Unfortunately, our memory of our slavery often fades the farther out from the fleshpots we find ourselves. Which is why we pray for our daily, not our weekly or yearly, bread.

I cite the chain of addiction during this holiest of holy weeks to highlight the fundamentals of our Christian faith during this season: our death sentence due to the Fall, our irreconcilable separation from God due to that disobedience;  the necessity of Christ's death on the Cross as atonement for our sin; his ransoming and redeeming of our fallen nature. 

It's hard to really comprehend that for those years from the Fall to the Resurrection, our ancestors were in a great darkness. There was no light, for the light had not yet come into the world. There was hope, but it was just that--hope that the Mashiach would return to bridge that divide and redeem Israel. It was a true slavery to the virus of sin which had not yet received it's antidote. 

If you know what it feels like to be enslaved--whether that is to a substance, a behavior or habit, or even literally as a human being--you know that your being saved comes from outside the self, for you literally cannot free yourself from your bondage--whether because of the strength of your captives or the weakness of your own nature. It is easy to lose hope, and to give in to the overdoses because, well, you will never be free, the Devil whispers to you. There are stoics among us, and the human spirit has an incredible capacity for perseverance, but even the most resolute of will have their natural and supernatural limitations.

Christ was not bound by such limitations, nor by the bonds of death. He subjected himself to the bounds of human flesh, humiliation and subjugation, but it was by Christ and only Christ alone who could be our "Superman," our savior, on whose divine integrity and human will the fate of all humanity depended. We were dead in our sin, with no hope--NO HOPE--of being reconciled back to the Father apart from Christ. That kind of debt, that Christ paid with his blood, can never be repaid. All you can do is marvel, shudder, and weep at the gift of a new lease on life that has been given you. 

Easter is the triumph of the cross, but it can only be arrived at via Golgotha. When you know the depths of your depravity, and the tenuous thin line that keeps you from the worm that never dies, you learn to lean on the strongman who conquered death by death, rather than your own strength. That is faith, prayer, trust in the God who does the impossible, who stooped so low to enter into our dark prison and take our place to free us, who paid our ransom with the highest cost of his life. We had no hope apart from him, for there is no other name under which we are saved. Christ came into the world, and we know how the story ends. That is the substance of our faith, one we have to go back to again and again to tell the wonderful story of our redemption.

But that story is not over. We are always walking that tenuous path, dodging thistles and arrows and traps to derail us from the narrow path. We have to keep our blinders on to see the Cross, always, or we are completely lost in the dark. We have been set free, but it is US who often wander back to our prison cells out of curiosity or longing. The horror of the door clicking locked behind us can lead a man to despair...but it is the WILL which we must exercise to continue to say YES to God, and NO to sin. Sin is slavery and death. The law of God is light and life, and a life that God desires us to have in abundance. 

This Holy Week, remember your death, your slavery, and the ransom paid for you to have life. Do not forget, but constantly recall the slavery you were saved from and which constantly calls you back to itself. Your Easter will be that much sweeter for it when you remember the dankness of the cell that held you.