In God's Likeness, Judas and the Partridge Family
Daily Gratitude List 2.28.23
I’m grateful for a snowy night. I’m grateful for pretty nice pajamas. I’m grateful for serious Lab weather today. I’m grateful for kind of liking the accidental coffee. I’m grateful for deep breaths. I’m grateful for cupping the flame when necessary. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I’m not sure any of you appreciate how close we came to a complete Partridge Family apocalypse last week. Like many things in my life, I’m not exactly sure how it started or what I was initially trying to accomplish, but I was listening to a fair amount of Partridge Family music last week. I was jotting down observations about how odd it was for a band comprised of five kids and their single mom to sing the song “One Night Stand,” how seventeen-year-old band front man David Cassidy knew an awful lot about heartbreak and loss, and even tracing back my hopeless romantic vibe to the 6th Grade and “Sound Magazine.”
But I was having a hard time figuring out how to connect that up with the kind of stuff that is often discussed here. Perhaps you dodged a bullet.1 Here’s what I’ve been thinking about instead—Why are there alcoholics?
I was a smart-ass kid, perhaps that shines through from time to time. I didn’t hold my fire in Sunday School and I remember having an animated discussion in my 4th Grade Sunday School class about how the first part of Genesis seemed to suggest God was actually some form of plural alien life:
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
Genesis, 1:26
There’s some explanation for that weird, sudden use of the plural, but the other point is the idea that we are created in God’s image. That’s a weird concept at many levels, but as I think about it, it’s kind of a core concept of Christianity—that we are made in God’s image. When God thought it was time to get a message across, he sent one of us. Someone who is described as the “Son of God.”2
I don’t think the title of “alcoholic” is something I necessarily earned. I’m a lone alcoholic in a family of moderate, stable drinkers. I think that “alcoholism” is a weird stew of genetic predispositions, maladaptive emotional development and trauma, some pretty common negative thinking patterns, a high tolerance for alcohol and the secret sauce: The ability to tell stupendous lies to yourself.
I struggle with the line between an all-powerful, omniscient God and predestination. I spend a lot of time these days wondering about my role—what am I really supposed to be doing? It doesn’t help that I sometimes view the world as a computer simulation presided over by a slightly-sadistic thirteen year-old. That worldview provides a more coherent theory as to why there are alcoholics—because why not? They do some crazy shit and create a lot of drama. That’s pretty popular on tv these days.
Why does God want alcoholics? He comes down on them pretty hard sometimes, but then he goes and gives a pretty big (and pretty insane) job to Noah. It’s worth noting that the first “big” miracle in the New Testament is the water into wine thing at that wedding,3 and I'm guessing that among Jesus's pretty dodgy entourage, there had to be a couple of us.
I always felt sorry for Judas. The Big Guy’s plan was pretty harsh; sending the Son down there to deliver the message, which unfortunately required him to be betrayed and then executed in pretty horrible fashion.4 This plan requires a "Judas;" you can't have a betrayal without a betrayer and Judas was apparently God's choice. I always thought that totally sucked. I mean God not only created Judas in his image, he gave him the to-do list. Judas was the triggerman--without him doing his job, there's no Easter miracle, no story of salvation and redemption.5
I think the idea of “Bodhisattvas” in Buddhism is somewhat similar: Individuals who’ve achieved some enlightenment, but postpone their own entrance into paradise in order to shine a light for others. There’s a great Steely Dan song, but I’m not quite sure it captures what I’m thinking about today.6 I guess what I'm saying is that if you really believe in things like life has a purpose and meaning, that "nothing happens in God's world by mistake," then don't you kind of have to view the whole alcoholism thing as maybe not inevitable or predetermined, but pretty f***ing likely?
That’s how I’m coming to look at my own alcoholism. I’m not saying there was a purpose to it or a justification for the pain that it caused, that I caused. I’m saying it was the hand dealt me and from there it was up to me to figure out how to play it. Let’s just say I didn’t do a great job for a pretty long time. But I see that I’m capable of changing that. This is a period of some pretty intense personal doubt for me and there are some decisions that need to get made. I realize this is kind of binary. You either believe or you don’t.
It’s easy to talk about faith, it’s less easy to act on it. Bill W.’s first steps to sobriety were paved by the “willingness to believe in a power greater than myself.” Fortunately, having faith does not require knowing the final purpose, but that’s also the hard part, I guess. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I wasn’t an alcoholic, and I really can’t even fathom it. That bothered me at first, but then I realized, my whole life has always been entwined with the forces that produce alcoholism. There was no threshold for me to cross, I like to joke that I had all the makings of a really classic og alcoholic from the very beginning. But there’s some truth to it.
The path back is different for each of us. Just like the disease model of addiction helps relieve some of the shame and guilt, so does coming to understand that maybe God had a hand in this? It all gets so confusing and it’s so hard to delineate where I stop and where God starts. Those are questions that can’t really be answered and they don’t need to be answered. We get hung up on absolutes sometimes—if you can’t answer all of the questions, then what you’re saying can’t be true. That attitude keeps a lot of people away from the program. Dr. Silkworth, a patron saint of alcoholics, expressed it exactly correctly when Bill asked if he thought his mountaintop, wind-whipping vision was true:
“Whatever it is, you’d better hang on to it. It’s better than what you had before.”
What I have today stands pretty starkly against the Me-centric universe I inhabited for so many years. I don’t know if I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know where I’m headed. I don’t know if I’m just plain crazy. The good news is I don’t have to know any of those things. I just need a willingness to believe there might be a power greater than myself, a power capable of restoring me to sanity, capable of transforming my life. I don’t need to know all the details around that Power or what the plan is. I just need to hang on to it, because there is no doubt it’s better than what I had before.
Also, maybe I just said everything that was worth saying on the topic.
The Lutheran Church was not great on explicating the role and responsibilities of the Holy Ghost. I saw him as kind of a Space Ghost Wingman, or like Doc Holliday in Tombstone. Sorry, that’s weird.
I do tend to see this miracle as a product of maternal hectoring: “They’re out of wine and you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do to help? Seriously?”
It kind of makes you wonder about the plans that were rejected.
If I was making a movie about Judas, he would be much more like Alain Delon in Le Samourai. Or Forest Whitaker in the great remake, “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.”
“I’m going to sell my house in town.” What?
This reminds me of something I think I picked up from Mary Karr's "Lit" -- that faith is not a feeling or idea it is a set of actions.
I guess for me, acting in a way that aligns with spiritual principals is more important that understanding what god is or isn't.
I appreciate your post, Made me consider where I currently stand in relationship with that idea ...