Take up your cork

I’ve been a reporter at the Catholic Spirit since last June. I’m honored to write a column after seven months on the job, especially one covering topics as important to me as sobriety and faith. This year, every other month, I hope to explore the intersecting points of addiction, mental health and faith and how the Lord works to bring light into that darkness. I’m no expert, but God has given me almost three good years of sobriety. I hope to be a voice for recovering addicts and their loved ones. Prayers go out to the still-suffering addict. 

When I quit drinking two years ago, on July 6, I went into the trash where I’d tossed the cork from the bottle of wine that I drank the night before. I was 24 when I woke up with my last hangover. I was sick to my stomach, brimming with regrets, and my sloppy, spilling apologies to my parents and my then-girlfriend were fastened to the Earth with one promise: I would never drink again.

My parents described my turning 21 as “handing keys to a Corvette over to a 16-year-old who just got his license.” I was a reckless drinker, always smashing the gas pedal and gunning it to blackouts. I woke up most mornings with nasty headaches, sick to my stomach and having to face my own shame and the disappointed, tired eyes of my friends and family who had to take care of me the night before.

I’d grown accustomed to mornings like that. There were too many to count. But even in those moments, my parents never stopped loving me and I knew they’d never leave me out to dry. I’d tried quitting before, but for no longer than a month. When I tried, nothing in me changed. I was just a little more miserable each week.

On the morning of July 6, something felt different. I had made a promise to my best friend that I’d never let her see me drunk, and I had broken that promise the night before. It was the first morning that the worst pain I felt wasn’t in my head or in my stomach. I felt it in my heart. It was the first time I ever felt like my drinking could push people I love and care about away. She didn’t have to stay with me, and I told her so, but regardless of her decision, I made a promise to her, myself and God that I would never drink again.

When I lifted the cork out of the trash, I had to lug it out with all my strength. The weight of sobriety was set firmly in that small, brown wine-stopper. A lifetime of sobriety with only a few hours under my belt seemed impossibly far, like waking up on Dec. 26 knowing there’s 364 days until Christmas again. I needed something to hold onto, something to white-knuckle in the palm of my hand during the difficult nights soon to come, the ones that loomed ahead of me like storm clouds and the smell of rain in the air.

All I knew for sure was that if that promise didn’t mean anything, then the amends and the reconciliation I made that morning would mean nothing, too, and so I took it seriously. More seriously than the other times I said I’d quit.

Whether I knew it or not that day, I pulled out more than a cork from the trash bin. I took out a tremendous cross. It was mine to carry, and it was time to start trudging. I hoisted it on my shoulder and brought it with me wherever I went.

Bishop Robert Barron has said that to people of antiquity, the cross was a horrifying prospect. For Jesus to tell his followers to take up their own cross meant in their minds a brutal, agonizing death. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was under such duress for what was to come that he sweated blood. Such severity, Bishop Barron argued in his article “How Strange is the Cross,” was required to offset the “awfulness of sin.”

“The problem, of course, is that we are the inheritors of centuries of artwork and piety that present the cross as a moving, or even saccharine, religious symbol,” Bishop Barron wrote. “We wear it as jewelry, and we hang it on the walls of our homes as a harmless decoration. But for the men and women of Jesus’ time, death by crucifixion was not only painful; it was brutally de-humanizing, humiliating, and shaming. … We can clearly see why Cicero referred to crucifixion, with admirable laconicism, as the summum suplicium (the unsurpassable punishment).”

Whether literally or spiritually, taking up your cross means undertaking a difficult, seemingly impossible task, carrying the instrument of your own painful self-sacrifice. I hauled my cross to one year of sobriety, then two. Now I’m halfway to three years sober and the wooden beams that felt so heavy two years ago feel lighter. They fit in the palm of my hand. The cork is now an ornate decoration of life that I proudly wear around my neck. Now, it’s nothing more than a cork.

I haven’t been flawless. It certainly hasn’t been easy. There were temptations, there always will be. Just as Jesus stumbled on his way to Calvary, we will, too. But as time went on, life had a way of brightening, like I was awake for a sunrise I’d usually drunkenly slept through. I alone had to decide that this cross was something I wanted to carry. As I work in recovery from alcoholism, it is not being done through self-will and determination, but through faith and a willingness to step out in pursuit of something greater. When I do that, Jesus lifts the heavy wood with me.

Matthew 11:30 says, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

On the other side of the beam, shouldering it with me, is the one who continues to give me new life. It took a long time to be grateful, but now I am, because I get to be so close to the one who carries this cross with me. To make life harder so that it can be better is not an easy choice to make, but sometimes it’s the best one.

Take up your cork and follow him.