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.