My Spiritual Autobiography - Part III

The "purgative phase" is a term I use to describe the part of my spiritual life where I got serious about bringing my actions in line with my beliefs. My initial motivation was somewhat self-centered. My pursuit of vices had slowly made me, for lack of a better term, miserable, and I wanted to change. I was in what some might call a "seeker" mode. I was definitely seeking something better than what my life had become at that time.

The early part of this phase was schizophrenic in nature. I got back to attending mass every Sunday, but I was still prey to the usual vices on Friday and Saturday night. I was carrying around a lot of guilt because the discrepancy between who I claimed to be and who I actually was kept getting clearer and clearer.

I remember, in particular, a homily I heard during this time about the inconsistency we modern Americans have in our lives. The gist of the homily was that Americans are willing to spend untold hours on physical fitness, sweating on treadmills or stationary bikes that go nowhere, but we will only spend one hour a week on one day of the week on our spiritual lives. The point was that it shouldn't surprise us if the spiritual results we see are analogous to the physicial results we would see if we spent one hour a week on fitness. That really resonated with me. I decided to try praying on my own. A priest I admired recommended that I make it the first thing I do when I get up in the morning to make sure that it happens. I took his advice. My early attempts at prayer are a little funny to recall. I would sit on my couch first thing in the morning with my eyes closed and my eyebrows furrowed, as if I was trying to stare holes in my eyelids. I don't know what I expected to happen - maybe an out-of-body experience. I found the old rosary my mom had given me when I graduated high school. One Lent I resolved to pray it every morning and I did.

But my struggles with vice continued. I was perplexed. What happened next was a little unexpected.

At the time, I was a Barnes & Noble "junkie". What this means is that I used to go to Barnes & Noble and shop for books on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and sometimes both. On the surface this might appear somewhat normal. In truth, I was avoiding boredom. In some instances the books I had bought the week before would still be sitting in the bag at home while I was out shopping again the following Saturday. I was generally interested in books about unusual topics - I'm a sucker for books with formulaic titles like "Ancient Anomalies", "Great Achievements of the Mesopotamian River Basin", "The Complete Works of Emmanual Kant". They all looked good on my shelf. Gradually, I migrated toward Catholic books. There was one book, in particular, that stands out in my memory. It was called "The Call of the Ages" and it was a summary of all the recorded miraculous appearances (called "apparitions") of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was fascinated because, first, I didn't know these things were going on and second, because they seemed like a "status report" that God was giving the world. And the picture they painted was that mankind was continuing to drift further and further away from God and that this had very serious consequences. The urgency of the messages made an impact on me. I remember sitting in a coffee shop reading the book and looking up from time to time at the people around me and thinking "Does anybody know about this stuff?". (Mind you, my point here is not to argue for or against Marian apparitions, rather only to convey the effect the book actually had on me at the time.)

It was about at the same point that I had a life-changing experience in the confessional. More backstory... The Sacrament of Reconciliation was something I loathed because of the natural embarrassment I had over my vices. Curiously enough, and against a stereotype I have heard a lot, my experiences in the confessional had all been very smooth. I never once had a priest say anything harsh to me in regard to what I was confessing. In fact, in general the priests would make no specific comment about my confession in any way and would simply give me the usual small penance. On one occasion I even had a priest ask me why I thought some of the things I was confessing were "sins". It was weird that I couldn't really articulate why, but I knew they were. But this particular time the priest did something a little different. After I made my confession, he simply and sincerely said to me, "Do you know that these things are mortal sins?". I was silent. After a few seconds I just said "I do now". His question initiated a paradigm shift in my thinking. These vices I was struggling with weren't just bad habits that I should try to give up. They were things that were "killing" my spiritual life (hence the term "mortal"). Ultimately, I realized, they had the potential to kill me, forever.

It was in the days following that I resolved that it was better to die fighting against these vices, than live with them. I went back to the priest who had asked me the question and received good practical spiritual advice - take it one day at a time, come back the following week and see what you actually have to confess. He also suggested that I look at the circumstances that would lead to falling into vice and try to change these. I took that advice too. It was at that time that I realized that the crowd that I was hanging around with socially wasn't interested in making a change. And their influence on me was more powerful than my intention to change. I came to see that these relationships, unfortunately, had to go until I was stronger in my direction. Video games were another issue. While they weren't vices per se, I could spend days (literally an entire day - sun up to sun down) playing a game. And I noticed that the games increased my overall level of boredom, which was then followed by greater temptations to vice. I got rid of the television. At first it was just the cable television. I will always remember the look on the woman's face when I drove to the cable company with my converter box in hand and said I was returning it. She asked why. I said it was too good. She asked me to explain. I told her there were too many interesting programs on and that I couldn't handle it. She told me she would just mark the "other" box as the "reason for return" on the receipt. Finally, I weaned off of the television altogether. I stopped listening to coarse talk radio in the morning. I noticed that the show contributed to the foulness of my language. The silence was challenging. I tried listening to MPR. Someone mentioned that they prayed the Rosary in the car. That seemed like a great fit. It was, is, and will be.

With all these things being driven out of my life, I recognized the need for things to fill up the void. I volunteered at a homless shelter and started attending a "young adults" group. I found that these things provided a much needed, spiritual "shot-in-the-arm" mid-week. In retrospect, these things helped me to take my focus off of the bad things about myself that I was struggling with and instead focus on the good things that I could do. I learned that it isn't possible to help someone else without being helped yourself in the process. I started to gain ground spiritually. The vices were losing their grip.