Need

I couldn’t pay for my health insurance. I had already missed my payment for the month before. I would lose my health insurance, and with it I would lose access to the pills that make my mind work right.

It had been a bad two years financially. The law firm that my brother and I had started was struggling. I had blown through the small inheritance from my father. I probably hadn’t needed all of those vacations.

Clients were hard to come by. In San Bernardino, it seemed that anybody could get a free public defender. Few criminal defendants could hire a lawyer that they had to pay for or thought that it paid to hire one when they could get one for free. The prosecutor who did the misdemeanor plea-bargaining in the downtown courthouse said that even doctors were getting public defenders.

Maybe they had had a couple of years like I had had.

So I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling in the dark. I could barely make out the contours of the ceiling from faint light coming though my window.

1. Remembering the past, fearing the future.

There had been a time when I deliberately had not taken the medicine prescribed for my mind. This was after many hospital commitments had taught me that my brain didn’t work well without chemical help. But I had decided that I didn’t need the pills. I don’t now remember why. Maybe I thought that I’d outgrown paranoid schizophrenia.

For a few months after I stopped taking the pills, everything was normal. But then it seemed to me that people were acting strangely. Then I deduced that they were accusing me of crimes that I hadn’t committed. My persecutors would be in one place; then I would drive somewhere else, and they would be there, too.

I was afraid in that time of renewed paranoia, but my memory worked fine. I knew that what I was then experiencing tracked my past experiences. I could trace the future through the past. First, there was a local conspiracy. Then it would become state-wide; it would become nation-wide; it would become world-wide.

As the supposed conspiracy grew outward, it would also draw close. At first, it would be driven by strangers. Then I would discover that people I knew were part of it – even friends, even family, finally everybody.

I would flee and find no place of safety. Then I would hear voices. I would see visions. They would seek to cut me with my own blade.

Even though the conspiracy seemed as real as anything I had known, I thought of the pills. There seemed to be no harm in going back to them. Maybe, I thought, they would help.

The pills ended the conspiracy like walking out of a theater leaves a frightening movie behind.

So in my right mind, on my bed looking at the ceiling, I dreaded the prospect of losing access to my medicine. It was like a death sentence. But I wouldn’t know ahead of time the day when the guards would come for me, and, unlike a prisoner, I could flee from them across the landscape – in my car until I could not get gas, and then on foot until the executioners caught up with me.

That was a time when I believed that God had rejected me and would not change his mind. I won’t go into detail about that. But in that state of mind, I didn’t have even a faint hope of heaven to cling to.

2. The solution.

In the morning, I did something that I didn’t want to do. I was helping a relative with his son’s legal problem. It had required hours of work and several trips to Los Angeles. He’d offered to pay me, but I don’t like charging relatives for legal work. But I decided that I had no choice. I e-mailed him and asked him for enough money to catch me up on my health-insurance premiums – two months worth. He quickly sent a check.

Problem solved.

Since then, finances have been up and down, but I’ve never since looked over the edge of the long drop like I did on that day. I hope that another day like that never comes.

3. What I learned.

I wish I could say that since then I’ve lived my life in a shrewdly frugal way, always in preparation for future money-droughts. I’m better than I was, but not as good as I need to be.

Over time, I’ve learned the virtue of a modest car and simple meals. I sometimes buy clothes at thrift stores. I bought a sports-coat at Goodwill. I wore it to a Christmas dinner, and my cousin’s husband complimented it by saying that he had one like it.

This learning continues. But disrupted cash-flow, when it comes, drives my thrift more effectively than habit. I suppose that this puts me out of the sympathy of the wise.

But my experience with need gives me more sympathy for those who struggle than I knew before my own hard times. And it makes me more grateful in good times. Remembering hard times makes me glad when I can contribute to the nation and the state. I’m proud to give money to my church.

Some time ago, I heard that a city was proposing to ban from their libraries people who smelled bad. They had the homeless in mind. Because of my past, I can relate to someone who stinks and seeks refuge from hardship in free literature. It could be me. Truth be told, nobody is further from that than from a catastrophe lying in wait. Nobody knows what illimitable mice might inexhaustibly nibble prosperity bare.

God, Madness, and Me

Madness changed the way I see myself and the way I see God.

Madness for me was foraging in dumpsters and looking for places to sleep out of the wind. (Orange groves are bad.  Bushes next to freeways are good.)  It was disembodied voices and a terrible vision. It was lying strapped to a gurney, howling while a hospital staff-member taunted me. It was hard, degrading, and scary.

I’m well now.

I won’t tell much about my life as a homeless lunatic. Not now, at least. Truth is, before today I've told this story to few people, and I've told the whole story to nobody. I worry that people will look down on me.

But if I keep the larger part of the story to myself, I will at least tell you a truth of its effect. This trauma led me to reject some beliefs that I shared with most American Christians. It fundamentally changed my cozy, easy ideas about God. It shifted the earth under me, and it cleared my mind.

My madness did not draw me closer to God. It did sharpen my belief in him. I know that he exists like I know the lines in my hand. But my experience was the opposite of rapture. It brought me no joy.  It deepened me; it sobered me.

My Christianity was not cursory before my madness. I was a long-time churchgoer. I was a deacon at my Presbyterian church. I tithed. I took courses at a theological seminary in Pasadena. I left a career as a public prosecutor to travel to China, where, under an American Christian-service organization, I taught law at Chinese colleges and universities. I spent years absorbing scripture daily, sometimes for hours. I had read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation several times in several translations.

After my madness, I lost my hunger for scripture. Lately, the Bible has seized my attention again. I don’t know where this inspiration comes from, but I welcome it.

I haven’t gone without biblical musings in the years between my trauma and now. Based upon years of study, I could draw upon a pool of knowledge. These musings confirmed an accord between the Bible and what I learned from my season of madness. I believe that still as I test my beliefs by studying the Word.

The Spanish painter Francisco Goya became deaf.  After his deafness, he produced paintings that were literally and emotionally dark, even monstrous.  My theology after my madness became dark like Goya's paintings after his deafness. 

From this dark place, I see a tidal wave coming.  It's like madness taught me to reckon water that pulls back to sea that foretells a destructive wave to come.  I worry for people, that they don't see this, that they don't talk about it, that they don't take steps to live and not to die.

Instead, I sense that America makes happy-talk about God and salvation.  We are an optimistic people, and our theology is optimistic: God is kind, salvation is easy, and Hell is a place for people worse than us.  Our material comfort fools us into a false sense of a benign universe and a tolerant God.  God is tolerant, but only to a point.

This is because the stakes are supremely high.  We want the world to be a pleasure boat, but it's a liberty ship trying to take us to safety through a sea filled with a dangerous enemy that seeks our harm.  A liberty ship demands sterner discipline that a cruise ship.

So I speak out to warn. I feel like the ancient mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. He started on a voyage that seemed at first ordinary. But he and his fellow seamen were swept to a far-away, harsh sea. He sinned grievously. All died on this supernatural voyage but the mariner. He returned to the living to tell his sobering tale. It’s not a perfect simile, but like the "grey beard loon" of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I think my journey gives me something important to tell. I have done this a little in past posts, and I plan to do it more in the future.

And yet:

Come now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into this city, and spend a year there, and trade, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that. [James 4:13-15.]

Still, these are my plans.