The Unsettling Spiritual Revelation That Saved My Life
My life consisted of smoking and drinking like the characters in Westerns (half a bottle of cheap whiskey a day and no less than 60 Luckie Strikes) and eating like latter-day Elvis (disturbing amounts of carbohydrates day and night). I have already said it, sometimes, but I could have been, ideally, Victor Mancini, the protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke. It occurred to me that if I had a Catholic moral system installed in my head since I went to school as a child, maybe that moral system would act like an antivirus program in my mind’s computer and clean out all the Trojans that lived there.
And I discovered that 2000 years of Christian thinkers who invented, among other things, the modern university may have something wise to teach you. So, I saw the teachings of this spiritual tradition as if they were archaic technology, a kind of primitive psychoanalysis. I did the so-called spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Lollola and started to purge all my shit. I should have done it with the faith of a devout Christian. But I didn’t. I did it like someone who goes to a healer to have his aura cleansed or the evil eye removed with tobacco smoke and spitting rum at the spirits.
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