CHAPTER IV

Incense, Angelus Bells and Rehab

The first six months of life in the monastery was called postulancy. As a postulant, I was being scrutinized by the community, and I was very aware that I had a sales job to do. Surprisingly enough, I did not really crave booze very often, and on the occasions when it was offered I tried as best I could to drink like a normal person (to the extent that I could fantasize what that was). At the end of my postulancy I was accepted to become a monastic oblate of the community at Holy Cross Monastery. But when the prior spoke with me privately, he told me that some members of the community had noticed that I had shown signs of having trouble with alcohol. I was in complete denial, and thanked him and the brethren for their concern, but assured him that I did not have a problem and never did have one--at least to my knowledge.

Life in the monastery was another form of life in the asylum. Nobody enters a monastery to become a celibate monk unless they are running away from something. I met many brothers who were in therapy (to my surprise), and I also met some others who clearly should have been in therapy. A few were clearly candidates for institutionalization had they not been in the protected environment of the community. The emotional tension of being constantly and minutely scrutinized was intense. The day began at 6:00 in the morning, consisting of four prayer offices chanted in common in the church, plus daily mass. The time in between was filled with physical work which included the cleaning and maintenance of a four-story guest house, the feeding of the community as well as a large community of guests who were always present on one retreat or another. I was quickly assigned to house work detail, and to the rotation as cook for a community which varied anywhere from twenty to eighty people per day, depending on the retreat schedule. From the beginning I was also assigned to play the monastery pipe organ--the first time I had played in over five years. By the end of the last office of the day, a prayer time known as Compline, I was so exhausted that I fell into bed, too tired to even think about booze. Instead of compulsively obsessing on booze, I was compulsively obsessing on being accepted by the community. After all, this was the last idea I had to try. I didn't know what to do if this one failed too. I had to be successful.

New York City was only a two-hour commute via train from the monastery, and I soon discovered how the monks managed to get a break from the grueling routine of monastery life. They all seemed either to have a shrink in New York City, or a responsibility at the seminary in Chelsea, or a spiritual director in Brooklyn, or an M.D. on Park Avenue, or some valid reason to hop on the train once a week and split the scene, don "civies", and become normal people for a day. Before long I was able to do the same thing on the pretext of responsibilities at the seminary. In reality, I was working part-time contract jobs in the city in order to drink all the booze I could down for three days each week, while I lived in an apartment at the seminary. Thus began another period of living a double life--four days a week I was a holy man in a white habit playing holy music and working with guests in a holy house, and the other three days a week I was either working in order to get drunk, getting drunk, or recovering from the last drunk. The tension of maintaining a double identity was just too much. I began to break down, emotionally and physically. I hated myself even more than ever before, and all I longed for was the oblivion that came from passing out each night.

By this point the community had begun to require me to go to AA meetings. The cat was out of the bag. The secret was not a secret anymore. That sounds strangely reminiscent of the horrible secret of my childhood which could never be known outside the house--the family "cat" which could not be let out of the bag. To my horror I awoke to the realization that I had become the very thing I loathed the most--I had become a clone of my father, complete with hospitalizations, addiction, and a double life which had to be hidden from view at all costs. But the game was up. I was unmasked at the ball, and everybody knew what was underneath the costume--a very, very sick little boy who had grown up into a very, very sick man, frantically trying everything he knew to put the mask back in place and go back into hiding again. But it was too late. My prior was the first person in my life to love me enough to require me to grow up.

My community sent me to Toronto, Canada, where the order maintained a priory. The prior, Brother W., was a recovering alcoholic with seventeen years of sobriety. He had developed a close working relationship with the Addiction Research Foundation (better known as ARF) at The University of Toronto, and was able to get me accepted into their rehabilitation program for a twenty-eight day outpatient rehab program. I went along with the idea because the only other option I was given was packing my bags and getting out. Brother W. frightened me at first, but in retrospect I realize that he played a large part in saving my sanity and my life.

Brother W. introduced me to AA and the Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous). He told me that this was my last chance. I knew I had already tried everything else I could think of, and nothing had fixed me. I was willing to do anything I was told to stop hurting and I did. I was in rehab all day, and in meetings with brother W. every night. After rehab I stayed at the priory for several months to solidify my recovery program and learn from brother W. After all, he had been sober for seventeen years.

After Toronto, I got back on the train and came home to New York and Holy Cross Monastery. The first year of recovery was a roller coaster of confused and jumbled feelings--feelings which I had not felt for years since I started to anæsthetize them away with alcohol. Soon in my recovery I realized that I had come to the monastic life to run away from my issues, and that I was going to have to face those same issues if I was ever to really recover. I had to face them on the outside, where I had left them. So, after I had been sober for one year I chose to leave the community. It was frightening to go back out into the real world with no job, no local references, no home, and nothing to hold onto except my newly found community of alcoholics in recovery. But I knew I had to do it. There was no other way. For the first time in my life I was willing to take a risk and do the thing I feared the most, trusting that there might be a loving God somewhere. There was only one way to find out.