Junk Sick
“A Junkie spends half his life waiting.” — W.S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs died at the age of 83 and I think that’s one of the more astounding things about him. He spent a lot of his life living abroad, some of it in Mexico City (where he thought he was William Tell and accidently shot his second wife in the face while she was balancing a glass on her head) where he eventually developed a book-sized appetite for narcotics noteworthy for the sheer length of his heroin addiction. He once cut off his finger and gave it to his boyfriend. He failed many rehabilitation attempts and conducted an impressive breadth of work.
He ultimately wanted to end his life by organizing his own personal exorcism because he believed he was possessed by a demon. Which makes sense, I guess, because I can’t think of any other reason you’d plan your own exorcism. Friend and equally prolific American author Alan Ginsberg watched the whole thing.
The transcript of their supernatural time together, the real hotwash, if you will, is a fantastic read. In it you’ll learn of Burroughs affinity for the Diné shaman who led him through a long series of questions and answers, and also learn of an unrelated spiritual insufflation of his, in which “[a] spirit leaped on [a] priest and fucked him up the ass.”
He told this story before noting that the presence of a psychiatrist in any kind of very spiritual matter can cause great harm because a psychiatrist: “…Fucks everything up. Cause they don’t know what they’re doing, or what they’re up against. They think it’s just some Goddamned complex.” And he explained this in some detail before comparing demonic oppression to “bum trips” on acid, or psilocybin on which he saw skulls with no eyes floating around the room.
The entire thing is wild and reads like you might expect, given that it’s sourced from two late-term drug addicts who found themselves at the center of religious commentary — on Christ, Catholicism, butt-fucking demons and applied theology. It’s an outstanding read.
I spent time in graduate school split between authors like Burroughs, who wrote as if they had their heads inside Satan’s own pencil sharpener. I also read authors like John Edgar Wideman, whose writings were altogether more meaningful to me and to my physical world and the people in it. Wideman’s prose was prettier in almost every way. But, I fell in love with the addiction novel because of the way William Burroughs wrote his.
“The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.”
I don’t think this particular kind of composite negativity is class-specific. I think it’s understood by a lot of people. Burroughs didn’t want an American uppermiddle-class life. He was an addict who loved being high and talking crazy shit and I think he would’ve loved the Charismatic Church.
There are two main thoughts regarding the literal presence of God inside of the Protestant Evangelical church and lot of church practice is based on a view of — in so many words — how God demonstrates Himself. As a matter of revelation, most Charismatic churches believe in the inerrancy of the bible; that it’s perfect. Some Charismatic churches believe in the supremacy of the bible; that it’s priority and authority over the church. Some Charismatic churches also believe that God speaks to people outside of the bible. In fact, some people believe in a very talkative God. It’s important to map your steps at this point because a lot of religious thought and practice stems from how these ideas stack atop one another. I want to make myself very clear here, so as to unload such a high-inference idea. Either God talks to you or he doesn’t.
When I talk about Charismatic churches, I’m talking about churches full of people like who hear God talk. I’m talking about people who believe God talks, who believe waiting on extra-biblical instruction is a matter of theological principal and existential necessity, and who believe doing the church stuff is to participate, first-hand, in the revelatory character of an action sport God. If God says sell all of your shit and move across the country to start a new church, you do that. If God says stay in the church you’re attending, you stay there until he tells you to leave. If God tells you to give more money than you have to the church, you give more money than you have to the church. Your participation in all tings is a required risk. The only predicate to God’s power here, to God getting what he truly wants — in this model — is you. Will you risk looking like an idiot while acting on behalf of Him?
Because not so much that you live in a world full of wrong, of sin and death. It’s that you live in a world full of opportunity. God heals sick and raises the dead. What, then, will you risk in the face of such opportunity to change the material reality of God’s people?
Given the full taxonomy of their beliefs, these people who listen to God have to tell you that hell is hot and that forever is a long time and that doing the stuff keeps you on the right side of things. There’s no hedge on this position. It’s life or death, heaven or hell, light or dark, angel or demon, sheep or wolf, plenty or famine, wheat or chaff, fertile or barren, hot or cold, for or against, open or shut — all life or death cased in eternity. You’ve probably never taken a position like this, especially if you don’t like risk. So misunderstand these people if you need to, but I’m telling you that — the people inside of the Charismatic churches I’m talking about — some of them are very, very sincere. The listening and the talking and the doing, it all happens like that. Sometimes in short order and sometimes out of order, but it all happens like that and it all requires a very particular reading of faith and calculus of risk.
When I was a young man inside of the Charismatic church, I didn’t have a taste for its history. I didn’t care and no one spent time talking about it locally or on any level. It wasn’t prerequisite knowledge. I didn’t care that Charismatic Christianity is widely understood as being strung across three historical instances; the catalysts for three “waves of holiness”. In 1906, the Azusa Street Revival. In 1959, the charismatic outpouring of Episcopal vicar Dennis Bennet. And in 1983, John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner’s MC510, a course on “Signs and Wonders” taught at Fuller Theological Seminary. I should’ve cared. Had I cared more about how history always informs practice, I would’ve cared more about the one man in particular who became famous for doing all the stuff.
I would’ve anticipated the consequences of understanding God as a fluctuating experience and I wouldn’t have listened to half the shit people um, yeah, just felt like God was saying.
John Wimber was a founding leader of the Association of Vineyard Churches. In his own words, he drank a lot of beer and did a bunch of drugs before converting to Christianity 1963, whereupon he was confronted with, what he believed to be, two irreconcilable truths. The first truth was that New Testament Jesus did a lot of stuff. He performed a lot of miracles. He healed sick people, he livened dead people, he rebuked natural order (nature, weather, etc.), he held dominion over anything and everything God created. Wimber loved the New Testament Jesus stuff. I do too. The second truth was that the church services he attended were “boring” and absent of any power (i.e. miracles. At the intersection of these two truths was something of buyer’s remorse for Wimber. After hearing a local church elder explain how churches didn’t understand New Testament Jesus as a miracle-working, faith-filled exemplar and “do stuff like that” any more, Wimber responded classically: “You mean I gave up drugs for [this]?”
Whereas Burroughs’s had Benzedrine and heroin, and other consciousness-expanding drugs, Charismatic church people have the voice of God and the religious experiences that result from it.
They consume religious experiences with hardly any control and absolutely no limit. They understand experiences as receipts of God’s presence in their lives. And at the point these religious experiences become a necessary vehicle for their faith, they become junk. The religious experience is the action. Now, they aren’t late-term Burroughs, but they’re under the influence and in search of the next fix.
It’s always about the next fix. Everything’s a telescope down to your next fix. Which, I get it — I really do. But in this analogy, God is flush with junk and an everlasting source of narcotics. Left unchecked, people go tilt-a-whirling under to influence of a ginned-up gnosticism. People end up junk sick. Wimber understood this end result and eventually distanced himself from such a focus on “intense manifestations” and revival meetings (see: the Toronto Airport Vineyard’s Toronto Blessing) because, to his credit, he didn’t have a stomach for mesmerist bullshit. Upon his split from the revival tent department of the Charismatic movement, Wimber was shy about Neocharismatic label and — by and large — thought it was a pejorative.
Understanding this history has helped me understand the Charismatic church’s orientation to spiritual things. Especially the permutation I was most familiar with. As I’ve said before, I’m learning to rearrange the distance between people who believe in a very talkative God and in themselves as part of his messaging. At their best, these people are focused on the world’s problems — sickness and death, heartbreak and loss. At their worst, they’re useful idiots, professing a belief in a God who can heal the sick and raise the dead, and driving by a scenery of hospitals and graveyards on their way to church. At their best, these people understand themselves as imprecise but willing to participate on God’s behalf as best they can understand it. At their worst, they have their own junk receipts, raised hands, flushed faces, fluttering eyelids and are teaching toward experiences, insomuch as telling you exactly what to look for as physical evidences of spiritual manifestations.
Certain charismatic churches teach toward spiritual experiences in such a way that arms shaking, hands trembling, voices cracking —are all evidences of God’s polite power. And even these little theatrical parts are made for compulsory consumption. Unfortunately, when your appetite for the stuff gets greater than the supply you start to get sick. And Burroughs was right about us at the point of sickness — we don’t know what we’re up against. We’re just waiting for more of it.
