A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase “burn like a red hot iron.” Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren’t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven’t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron’s Darkness Visible or Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon.)
In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for reasons outside their control. I still think God speaks to them, but it’s trickier to suss out the still small voice from all the other voices in the case of some mental health disorders
One facet of Latter-day Saint soteriology that I find fascinating is the idea that in Gethsemane Christ literally suffered every possible pain, mental and physical, known to man. Or, as Stephen Robinson put it in a classroom lecture. No matter how deep a pit you think you are in, there are pits ten stories deeper than that, and He has been through them all. The scary corollary is, of course, the idea that if we too wish to be deified we have to go through something similar. I know at this point we are entering into very speculative theology, but on the face of it it makes sense. If we are going to become masters of the universe we have to descend both above and below all things.
In our own life we get a small taste of the total range of pits. For the really gratuitous experiences it hurts so bad that you would rather just let that cup pass even if it might be great for your personal development, but reading about others passing through the experience provides a more comfortable kind of educational insight into the experience even if it isn’t a replacement for the real thing. Of course, even reading about some things can be emotionally draining. When I was in a more comfortable stage of life I was really into heavy Russian novels, but once you have kids in a hospital life is close enough to a Dostoevskian novel that sometimes you just want to watch Dumb and Dumber.
Still, the aforementioned subgenre can be useful and provide perspective. A book I recently read Addicted:Notes from the Belly of the Beast provides a compilation first-person experiences of a variety of different addictions (gambling, sex, alcohol, drugs) from people who have suffered through them and who know how to write about them. IMHO this and the memoir Beautiful Boy provide the best written accounts of addiction, and the people they affect. It’s not pleasant, but it’s reality.
There are weaknesses such as narcissism that are easy to attribute to the person’s own personal failings, and there are born-this-way weaknesses that are easier to bracket. I don’t know how valid that distinction will be in the hereafter, but for people in the throes of addiction, it is easy to bracket it and see them as victims when reading about it from afar.
In the Latter-day Saint context, we are often quite spiritually hierarchical about people, but with things like addiction you realize how much of living an elite gospel lifestyle (supposedly) could probably really just be attributable to not having a certain set of dispositions.
I doubt there are a lot of bishops that have had a public history of addiction. Is that just because they can grind their teeth harder and exercise more self control? Or do they just not have the addiction gene? This is one of those things where earlier in life I thought it was the former, but as you get older, you realize how hard it is to transcend deep-set dispositions, and increasingly I lean towards the latter in cases where they simply don’t struggle with addiction at all. And this, of course, has all sorts of implications about where people will land on the scales of justice and mercy in the hereafter once predispositions beyond their control or taken into account.
One of the ironic things, of course, is that some of the most deep and profound spiritual journeys wrestled with very significant, fundamental sinful weaknesses. as I’ve mentioned before, without a gambling addiction, we would not have Brothers Karamazov or Dostoyevsky. And I sometimes wonder if we would not have Joseph Smith as Joseph Smith if it was not for his family’s dysfunction. Ironically, the Smiths very much were not that family in Cedar Hills with the million dollar home, harp-playing kids, and the dentist Stake President father. God had something bigger for Joseph, so he gave him an impoverished, alcoholic father instead.
Of course, with addiction it’s easy to go too hard in the other direction and glamorize it. The hook that gets a lot of artistic types into drinking and drugs is the idea that they too can become a Hunter S Thompson or Alan Ginsberg with the right chemical cocktail, but in the accounts in Addicted it’s hard to find a writer, artistic type for whom the pros outweighs the life-disrupting cons. So in this world, when psychedelics in particular are becoming quite popular, I appreciate the Church’s just say no stance.
In the “Psalm of Nephi” Nephi sings (or soliloquies) about his own wretchedness and weaknesses. While we typically read these unnamed weaknesses as being some banal failing one we almost all fall prey to, I think it would be more deep if this unknown shortcoming was less along the lines of “I sometimes get angry with Laman” and more along the lines of a deep addiction.
Very interesting—I agree that suffering through addiction can make you more sympathetic for people who are addicted. I do think our LDS community could be more compassionate as people deal with drug and alcohol addictions. On the flip side, I think sometimes we take what is a bad habit or compulsion and blame it on addictions too much, like with pornography. I’ve heard anecdotal stories about a teenager confessing occasional pornography use to a bishop and getting sent to the addiction recovery classes. Studies have shown that can be detrimental to recovery—labeling something as an addiction conveys to a person that quitting is much harder than it is.
Either way, to no surprise, it’s not something our community as a whole seems to be on top of.
I think if we were to take that template Nephi gives then we could in fact overcome all sin, all addictions. I tend to believe that Nephi was exceptionally harsh on himself in all things. He was a perfectionist. At the same time, I believe he was also more righteous than everyone else around him because of his nature, his wisdom, and his ultimate trust and faith in God. Everyone around him saw it and experienced it to. Nephi was in many ways an ordinary man afflicted with the same temptations as anyone else. But it’s his acknowledgement of that fact and his desire to overcome it that sets him apart from his brothers. This makes Nephi extraordinary even so much that an entire civilization lasting a 1000 years names themselves after him.
I don’t think Nephi had addictions, not like we have today. He performed many miracles and did many miraculous feats. One must be cleansed every whit to be like that. Perfectionists often amplify things others can’t see or notice and work on them until they overcome that thing. Alex Honnald is a perfect example in free solo climbing. He’s the only one ever to climb Yosemites half dome without a harness. How did he do it? Because he is able to amplify his weaknesses and turn them into strengths with great patience and faith.
I do find it something of great significance that there is both a temporal and spiritual plea in Nephis writing here because he is not only asking for escape from the spiritual enemy but also the temporal enemy (Laman and Lemuel) and what do we know, immediately following this psalm or prayer if you call it that, the Lord prepares his escape from them and they leave to settle in a far better place.
Anonymous: I’m of two minds on “pornography addiction.” On one hand I recognize that we sometimes overuse the term (for example, putting the occasional pornography user in the same category as sex addicts who use it 12 hours a day) and that it doesn’t technically meet the definition of a chemical addiction. On the other hand I feel like some people use that fact to downplay its power. If there are people who have very strong values against it, it’s hurting their family, and it’s still hard for them to stop then, well, even if it’s technically not an addiction like crystal meth it’s still something powerful and serious that is worth our time and research attention.
Kiba: Yeah, Nephi’s shortcomings were probably along the lines of what you outline, but still, I think what I was trying to get at was that a true recognition of all of our sinful natures would collapse all distinctions into Christ versus everybody else, whereas my comment about Nephi and the bishop not having a public addiction was trying to get at the idea that we tend to frame sins in terms of minor good people sins and serious bad people sins; and that while there is a continuum of sin severity I don’t think it’s quite so bimodal as we sometimes make it out to be.
Stephen,
Yes, we look at sin severity so much we have made up a tiered heaven doctrine for the different levels of sinners.
“God had something bigger for Joseph, so he gave him an impoverished, alcoholic father instead.”
You hear this a lot.
Philastus Hurlbut and others who were looking for dirt on the Smiths collected statements from former New York neighbors that Joseph Smith Senior was a drunk. These statements also allege that the Smiths were lazy and shiftless and dishonest and that they gambled a lot and that they stole a bunch of stuff and a lot of other allegations. It is obvious that these sources are extremely biased and cannot be accepted uncritically. But we do have one good source on this issue of alcohol: Joseph Smith Senior himself. His patriarchal blessing to his son Hyrum Smith states: “Thou has always stood by thy father, and reached forth the helping hand to lift him up when he was in affliction; and though he has been out of the way, through wine, thou has never forsaken him nor laughed him to scorn.” It kinda sounds like Joseph Senior got drunk and that he did so on more than one occasion, but it isn’t at all clear that he was always that way. As George Jones once sang, “a man can be a drunk sometimes, but a drunk can’t be a man” (“A Drunk Can’t Be A Man,” track 1 on Alone Again [Epic, 1976]). [Yes, I know that Jones was an alcoholic, but back to Joseph Senior:] Joseph Senior apparently got drunk on at least one occasion, and it seems like it was more than once. Maybe he got drunk several times. Or, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was drunk a whole lot of the time and he was in fact a drunkard. Or, maybe he wasn’t. Since we just don’t really know for sure, let’s stop saying that Joseph Smith had an alcoholic father.
@ Kibs: I’m not saying that there isn’t a continuum of sin severity, just that it’s not bimodal between the two categories of the kind of sins the good people have and the really bad, disqualifying sins.
@Mark Ashurst-McGEe: Thanks for the added detail. I was always under the impression that the data tipped towards him having a drinking problem, but I concede to your deeper knowledge base on this.
Everyone who is saved from the eternal hell in tge end will have overcome all addictions/sinful desire. That’s comforting to know.
I should mention that I enjoyed the post. Thanks for posting.