Story: Compulsion

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On the subject of compulsion Father Sam, our beloved Father Sam, talked to us just a week or 2 before his departure from our church.

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On the subject of compulsion I am painfully well informed (he said). Most compulsions are private and even secret, now why is that? Is it that even as children we feel ashamed to be in the grip of such a thing? How do we decide to be ashamed? And do we think we can hide it, even though probably everyone, except most likely ourselves, can see it plainly?

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And then when we do see it, we maybe talk about it to our dearest friend and that friend says: Just step out of it. The friend doesn’t understand that if we could just step out, it wouldn’t be compulsion. In that case we would have shucked it off a long time ago.

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On the subject of compulsion. On the subject of compulsion. The urge to break out (until perhaps you finally do) can feel like just one extra step in the endless cycle that compulsion follows. And this is your nightmare.

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There was once a would-be believer who asked his buddy: how do I take the final step and believe? And the buddy said: just trust Jesus. So the would-be believer said, Yes but how do I learn to do that? And the buddy said: well, first of all, you just trust Jesus. In the same way the compulsive one, during his darkest days, sees the breaking into freedom as itself a small enclosed circle that he can’t seem to penetrate. But faith is not like that and neither is freedom.

The break is a miracle, right? One that we hope to repeat every day after it first happens.

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On this subject that compels me.... I remember walking the sidewalk as a little child. It seemed to me so important to balance everything out. I don’t know why but I had to equalize the most trivial things. If I stepped on a crack with my left foot, I had to hurry and step on one with my right foot as well, in order that the number in heaven would be equal.

As to what divine tragedy my feet were averting, I didn’t have time to think about that, I had to focus all my energy on walking. This was not a fun disease.

If I trapped a shadow under my right foot, I had to hurry hurry, find a “rhyme” with it using my left foot. Every shadow had to balance. And when I disturbed the equilibrium I would be in absurd pain. I sought to relieve this pain, to lessen it somehow.

To lessen, to relieve, I was compelled and felt compelled. I would say to myself: if only I can find a shadow quickly with my other foot, I will be all right. And these thoughts excluded everything else until one day I asked myself: wouldn’t the true relief of the pain be to stop playing this miserable game? The relief would be not to step on the shadow but not to care whether I did or not.

From that day I was cured. Well, sort of. But you all know how that is.

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You all know how the cure is relentless and how you can never let it go.

You all know how the disease continues to reside in its timeless space, ready at any moment to become embodied in one’s life once again. It is never vanquished in a way that lets us boast and rest. Our weakness is always latent. And God has give us this mysterious gift: that we can never quite relax.

So that every moment in our life is like a step upon that dangerous sidewalk, filled with cracks and shadows. In other words, our compulsions do represent, to our terror, something that in its way is true.

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You all know that the Internet porn or the bright smiling casino or the opened bottle – they all remain waiting for us in the outer demonspace we have renounced. We can’t destroy that space on our own. We just pray to be protected from ever going there again.

How? Just pray. How? Just pray. How? Just pray. And the poor person says: oh, there must be something more I can do to protect the world from me.

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After that week, Father Sam left us to go dry out and get well again, even though (as he did know though pretended not to) his presence and perhaps even his sickness had been for us like a gift from God. manna from heaven, quails, water, honey.

Our recovery group never recovered from his leaving and now why is that? If healing comes from God, why were we so dependent on a single given person? Was it that we’d fallen in love with him? And had our recovery been a form of sin?

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