Psalm of the Addict in the Ditch by Jeff Callaway

Psalm of the Addict in the Ditch

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord." — Romans 7:24, Douay-Rheims Bible

I.

There is no clean way to begin this.

No incense. No proper throne room entry. No Davidic harp tuned right and candles lit and vestments pressed and everybody standing like they know how to be in church.

This one begins in the ditch.

Specifically: a gas station bathroom somewhere off Highway 31 in Henderson County, Texas, 2:47 in the morning, fluorescent light buzzing like a wasp in a jar, mirror showing a man I do not recognize, both of us unsure there is a reason to leave.

The floor is cold. My hands are not clean. The words keep breaking before I can finish them.

Lord, I have nothing to offer You tonight but this ruin.

Not a clean conscience. Not a reformed biography. Not the version of this I rehearsed standing outside the door of confession before I lost the nerve again.

Just the ruin. Just the wreck. Just a man who knows Your name the way a drowning man knows the surface of the water — by which direction his lungs are pointing.

II.

Let the record show what this is before I go any further.

The doctors call it a disease. The pamphlet people call it a struggle. The ones who have never been inside it call it a choice, a weakness, a failure of character, a thing that happens to other people's families.

I call it by its real name:

A war.

Not flesh and blood — I have not forgotten Ephesians 6:12 — not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the world of this darkness, against spirits of wickedness in high places.

I am addressing you now, enemy.

You, who came to me in the years before I knew enough to call you by your function. You, who handed me the first one through the hands of someone I trusted. You, who knew — you always knew — that I was not looking for a substance.

I was looking for God.

I was scratching a God-shaped itch with whatever was available, the way every addict does, the way Saint Augustine scratched his for thirty years before Monica's prayers and Ambrose's preaching finally broke through the noise —

You knew the hole was real. You knew the restlessness was real. You knew it was carved out by the hands that made the stars and carved for a specific purpose that nothing you were selling could ever fill.

You sold me the lie anyway.

You told me the bottle was a language God no longer spoke to people like me. You told me the pipe was a mercy for the ones the Church had written off. You told me the needle was a door to something better than the one I'd already slammed in Christ's face.

You are a liar. You have always been a liar. The Father of Lies. And I am calling for blood.

Not mine. His. The blood already paid. The price already set on the skull-hill outside Jerusalem on the day the sky went dark at noon and the veil split from top to bottom and every chain that ever was heard its own sentence read out loud.

Lord God — in that blood I stand. In no other. Not my virtue. Not my effort. Not even my repentance, which is a broken thing and always has been.

In that blood. Only that. Curse this enemy, Lord. Not with my words — I have no standing left. With Yours. Which are the only words that put things where they belong.

III.

Here is what I know about the inside of the war now that enough smoke has cleared to see it:

Saint Paul wrote Romans 7 not for theologians. Not for the seminary classroom. Not for the man in the third pew who has it together.

He wrote it for the man on the gas station floor.

For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do.

I have read that verse a hundred times. Every time it reads like a missing persons report with my name at the top.

There is the man who kneeled at the foot of the bed and meant every word of the Our Father — and then drove to the ditch anyway.

There is the man who held his mother's rosary in his palm in the dark of the truck, the beads still warm from her hands, weeping real tears — and still could not stop.

There is the man who stood in the back of the church at his nephew's baptism, watching water poured on an innocent head, and felt the full weight of what he'd become pressing him into the floor — and bought on the way home.

Saint Paul says: it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

He is not making excuses. He is making a diagnosis. There is a difference.

And the Catechism knows it — the Church that baptized me knows it — that addiction confuses the mind, twists the will, that a man in chains is not a free man even if he put the chains on himself in the first place.

Not an absolution. A starting point.

Because you cannot fight what you will not name. And what we are naming is not weakness. What we are naming is captivity. And captivity requires a liberator, not a lecture.

Augustine — the Doctor of Grace, the greatest mind the Western Church produced between the New Testament and Aquinas — wrote from inside his own chains: I wanted to be free, but I was not able to free myself.

Do you hear that?

This was not a small man. This was not a man who lacked willpower. This was the man who would write the City of God, who would argue the nature of the Trinity with a precision that still holds a thousand years later.

And he could not break his chains alone.

None of us can.

This is not an excuse to stop trying. This is the beginning of trying correctly. This is the moment the prodigal son comes to himself in the pig pen — returning to himself, as Luke 15 says it, coming back into possession of the only self worth keeping — and says:

I am perishing here. My Father's house has bread enough. I will arise.

Not arrived. Not recovered. Not healed and whole and ready for the brochure.

I will arise.

The movement precedes the arrival. The decision precedes the restoration. And God does not wait for the restoration to begin running toward you.

IV.

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine.

Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord.

Psalm 129. The sixth penitential psalm. The prayer Catholics pray for the dead.

I used to think that last part was coincidence. I do not think that anymore.

Because the ditch is a kind of death. Every addict knows which kind. Not the one with a funeral — not yet — but the daily one. The slow one.

Waking up not knowing what you said, what you gave away, what you broke while the chains were driving, who watched you become something they did not recognize.

Your children's eyes. That particular wariness in them. That listening-for-the-truck-in-the-driveway silence that a child's face should never have to know but yours taught them anyway.

I have been in those depths. I do not speak of them theoretically.

Out of the depths I have cried.

Not from the mountaintop of my better days. Not from the Sunday morning pew where I wear the face that works. Not from the version of my life I present to the people who still believe in the version I present.

From the depths.

From the actual floor. From the place no one comes looking anymore because I have told too many lies and used up too much goodwill and the people who loved me learned the hard way that hope has a cost and they've been paying it since before I knew.

Lord, hear my voice.

If Thou, O Lord, shalt mark our iniquities — Lord, who can abide it?

No one. Not one soul on this earth.

Every man alive is banking on the mercy clause. Every last one. The addict in the ditch just knows it more clearly than the man in the third pew who hasn't looked lately.

I am not offering You my better behavior. I have no better behavior left to offer.

I am offering You the inventory.

Every burned bridge. Every broken promise made and broken again and made again and broken again until the word promise means something different in houses that contain me.

Every morning I lied to the face in the mirror. Every night I chose the chain over the key that was hanging right there. Right there the whole time.

Take it. Take all of it.

I cannot carry it. I was never meant to carry it. That is the one thing the enemy never told me — that the weight was always meant to be given away and the only reason I kept carrying it was because I was looking for the wrong hands to put it in.

V.

Augustine prayed — in a voice that still sounds like a man talking to someone who is actually in the room —

Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.

I burned through thirty years looking for that rest in every ditch this state has to offer.

I looked for it in the high. I looked for it in the numb. I looked for it in the dark hours when a man stops being specific about what he's reaching for as long as it fills the hole.

It was never there. Of course it was never there.

The needle cannot do what only a nail already did.

The bottle cannot fill what was carved for a purpose by the same hands that scattered the Pleiades and named the morning stars and breathed life into dust and called it good.

Every man and woman I have ever seen in a folding chair in a church basement at 7 AM with bad coffee and that particular exhaustion that only comes from fighting yourself for years without a truce —

every one of them was trying to scratch a God-shaped itch with something too small for it.

Not because they were evil. Because they were human. Because the hole is real. Because the restlessness is real. Because the enemy knows the restlessness is real and he does not need to destroy you outright if he can just keep you looking for God in the wrong places.

Keep you almost. Keep you reaching. Keep you close enough to the door that you can smell the bread from the inside but never quite turn the knob.

Lord.

Lord, that strategy ends tonight.

I am returning to myself. I am in the pig pen. I smell like it. I know exactly why. I know exactly what I traded for the husks the swine were eating.

And I am coming home. Not arrived. Coming. Moving.

Wretched and moving toward You. The wretched part does not stop the moving. That is the thing the enemy never put in the brochure.

The Prodigal did not clean himself up before he went. He went filthy. He went rehearsing his apology. He went with absolutely nothing to offer but the fact of his return.

And the Father —

The Father saw him a great way off.

The Father ran.

He was watching the road. He had been watching the road since the moment his son left. He had not stopped watching the road.

And when the running Father threw his arms around a son who smelled like a pig pen and had nothing — nothing — to his name but the ruin of the life he'd chosen —

there was a robe. There was a ring. There was a feast.

There was a Father who called the dead son living and the lost son found before the son had finished the apology he'd been rehearsing in the ditch.

That is who I am dealing with.

That is the God the enemy has been trying to convince me gave up on me.

He did not give up on me. He has been standing at the end of the road in the dark watching.

Closing Prayer

Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Father of the Prodigal, God of the Desert Fathers, Savior of the woman taken in adultery, Caller of the publican from the tax booth, Healer of the man at the pool who had been thirty-eight years in his infirmity —

I am coming to You the only way I can:

Through the mud, with chains still on my wrists, with the smell of the ditch on me and a prayer that keeps breaking before it is finished.

I ask You for nothing I have earned. I have earned nothing.

I ask You for mercy — which is the only currency any of us ever really had — the plentiful redemption, the forgiveness that does not keep a ledger, the grace that cannot be manufactured by willpower or self-improvement or promises made at 3 AM in fluorescent light.

I ask You to fight this war in me because every Church Father who ever prayed over a broken soul agrees on this: the grace is Yours to give and mine to receive and I cannot wrestle free of these chains without hands that can break iron.

I ask You to curse the enemy in this house — not with my words, which are used up and hollow — with the Word that was in the beginning, the Word by which all things were made, the Word that the gates of hell cannot prevail against on the worst night the enemy ever had.

I ask You to remember that I am dust.

And that You love dust.

You are the only One who ever looked at dust — at the ruin of a thing, at wreckage on a gas station floor — and saw someone worth dying for.

Receive this. It is everything I have.

It is enough to begin.

Amen.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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