I remember reading this when he posted and thought now that would be one hell of a open talk.
Hope you found everything you expected leaving this planet.

Death and religion Mood
Sunday, November 28, 2010

For me it all came about in the experiences I had in hitting bottom with alcohol and in early recovery. In the Fall of 1988 I was making six dollars an hour as a greenskeeper at a golf course, and winter was coming. I'd been evicted from four places to live in the previous two years. I wanted to stop drinking whenever I was dry-heaving, but twenty minutes later I was ready to start up again. By mid October I was living on unemployment and drinking around the clock. I couldn't stop and I wanted to die.

But at the same time I had become obsessed with the idea that if I died in that state of mind, I would only have to come right back and clean up the mess in another life. In other words, death wouldn't be the end of the show at all, but merely a postponement of some unfinished business. Prior to that, the whole notion of reincarnation was simply incomprehensible to me in any factual or doctrinal sense, and I can no longer re-evoke the terror that it held for me then. But in the face of imminent death, it was as real as jug of Scotch and I was terrified to a degree I've never known before or since. There was nothing warm, fuzzy or comforting about it. It was as if I could no more kill whatever "I" am than I could put the electric company out of business by turning off a lamp. The closest I can come to describing it in verbal terms is that it was some sort of wired-in genetic imperative that beckoned insistently without forcing or overwhelming, if that makes any sense.
So my own drunkalogue as a Christian and my experience with being "struck sober" are such that I can't begin to retell it in a way that validates any theological system that I know of. What have always gotten my attention most, though, are those highly improbable and apparently random coincidences when something happens outside myself that speaks directly to what's going on inside me, and especially if I'm confused and vulnerable when it happens and the rational boundary between inside and outside just evaporates. Here's the most compelling and, as it turns out, enduring such experience I can recall.

Late that summer I got the idea that if I could reconnect with my lost faith, it might spark a real desire to stop for keeps. I bought the thousand-page edition of Thomas Merton's Collected Poetry, but it sat unread for months. Now Merton had been a huge influence on me when I was younger, so much so that in my twenties I spent five and a half dry years in his Order of monks, the Trappists, and left on January 6th, 1965. Finally, on Friday, January 6, 1989, I took my last drink and on Monday the 9th I checked into an AA drunk farm in Kent, CT. In my suitcase, just in case I got really bored, was the Merton poetry book.

As he checked me in, Tom Steel the Director regaled me with a couple of stories about how he and my uncle had been onetime drinking buddies, and how they would check into High Watch periodically, dry out for a week or two, and then go paint New Haven red to celebrate. Tom said they both used to bring their monogrammed croquet mallets to the Farm so everyone would know they were true-blue gentlemen!

This at once made a strong impression on me, because this uncle had distanced himself from AA in favor of a late ordination to the priesthood. After secretly doing the four year program for older guys at the Beda College in Rome, he held that AA's real function was to get people into church where their addiction problems would be permanently solved. He was quite the celebrity of the moment because he had been quite visible as a trend-setter in the New York clothing trade, and his ordination was the top story in the Religion section of Time magazine in March of 1961.

Yet he had many embarrassing drinking episodes after that, and during his last illness in 1974-5, he would beg his more trusted visitors to sneak a bottle into his hospital room. This was in sharp contrast to both his pal Tom Steel and his more iconoclastic and s skeptical younger brother, who had gotten permanently sober at High Watch in 1944 and died so, of cancer, in 1978. Again, the timing of my getting this information about the monogrammed croquet mallets was another one of those coincidences that seemed to warrant my attention, and I took it very much to heart.

Tom then turned me over to a staff member who showed me my room and told me to put the suitcase on the bed, explaining that they would rifle it for contraband during lunch. An hour later I was in a tiny non-sectarian chapel with forty two fellow gin lovers, where the only icons were the original black and white glossies of some of AA's pioneers. While he was speaking, Tom pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read from notes he'd made the night before. And as he spoke, I felt a strange new energy surge through my body, a sharp tingling sensation I've never had before or since, starting in the solar plexus and spreading out through the torso and into my arms and legs and lasting perhaps a minute.

For against what seemed incalculable odds, the man was quoting Thomas Merton. That apparently random coincidence was my first glimpse of what I call the mosaic or, even better, the tapestry-- one of those unpredictable moments when the frayed and irregular threads on the back of the fabric of our lives suddenly weave recognizable and meaningful shapes when you turn it around and look at it from the other side. It was the beginning of what Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" called a paradigm shift, a compelling new perception of reality that simply dissolved the validity of my old assumptions about life, death and the limitations of the human experience.

Four and a half years later (in '93) and sober, I was in an ICU with what turned out to be severe congestive heart failure. They had even pulled my bed up near the open door of my room so they could watch me during the night from the nurses' station. Strange to say, there really were no ideas of heaven, hell or any of the usual religious conundrums that occurred to me at all. Then a nurse came in and asked in a quavering voice if I wanted a clergyman. I gave her offer about five seconds of serious consideration and then, quite to my own surprise, I said, "No thanks. I'm OK." It was an incredibly liberating moment because I really felt as safe as a toddler in his mother's lap. For if I didn't need a theological system or any concretized salvation scenario then, then when else might I possibly need one?

So there was nothing a clergyman might have said or done to make my impending death any easier to get through. There was no longer the slightest thought of what might become of "me" in some future, post-mortem scenario. Instead and quite involuntarily, my mind quickly reviewed my past, and only two questions mattered at all. First, how did I stand with the people in my life, and second, had I at least tried to do the best with what I had to live up to my creative potential as a human being? Greatly relieved that there was no longer any serious unfinished business behind me, I promptly fell asleep.

I suppose those who've "been there" will get this with no further elaboration, while those who haven't won't, even after several weighty and duly referenced explanations. It wasn't that the "riddle" or problem of death and what comes after had been alleviated by adopting a better grade of hope for the hereafter, but merely that the boundary between life and death wasn't nearly as distinct or problematic as it had been before. It's hard to put into words, but I felt as if I was already talking to that nurse from the other side, and I literally pinched myself to make sure I was still "here."

I'm now convinced from many similar but less dramatic experiences since then that the human psyche is programmed, if that's a good analogy, to handle everything life hands us. All the spiritual resources we need to get through each rite of passage will be there the day we need them, and any presuppositions we have about them now are limited by our experiences up until now. But in both scenarios, the drunken terrors and then later the sober peace of heart, my mind didn't rivet on the future the way it normally does if I think about death. Instead it was the past that compelled my attention, and I found in the drunken episode an urgent sense of unfinished business, and in the sober sequel a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of a job well done.

And of course the Hiawatha Story