In chapter16 of The Fool's Costume (TFC), I briefly mention an 18-month period of 'joy unspeakable.' This is the rest of that story.
I no longer recall how, but I stumbled across some YouTube videos of young people who were allegedly ‘getting high on God' by doing things like ‘tokin’the Ghost’ where they put their fingers to their lips and ‘took hits off the Holy Spirit’ like they were smoking a joint, took 'bong rips of Jesus' through an empty bong, or pretended to 'chug the Holy Spirit' from an empty beer glass. Being a former pothead, I found those videos very amusing…if not slightly inappropriate.
It certainly appeared to me that those kids were clearly high, drunk, or otherwise intoxicated on something, but was that something God like they claimed? I did not have to look far for the answer in the comment section of those videos because nothing calls the Doctrinal Police on the scene faster than people experiencing the Holy Spirit like they don’t. Unsurprisingly, the Rationalist Pharisees determined that ‘The Drunken Glory Movement’ was ‘not of God.’ It was far worse than that, though. It was downright Satanic and clearly so according to the Bible!
Given my Pentecostal background, I was probably more open to the Drunken Glory than others would be. There were things called ‘holy laughter’ and ‘the joy of the Lord’ in my tradition that I saw before but never experienced myself, and we all know the disciples appeared drunk after they were baptized in the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. I was also familiar enough with the Western mystical tradition to know that God gives some people experiences that can be overwhelming and makes them appear or act strangely to others.
The Drunken Glory Movement was anything but an organized or unified thing, but there seemed to be a few ringleaders, all of them former drug addicts, who the kids rallied around, and among them was a certain character I will call Steve who gave me reservations about the whole thing because of my past encounters with him.
Steve happened to be in the program at New Life when I worked there my first year at Pentecostal Bible College, and he had the worst case of demonization I ever saw. Nothing else even came close, but I won't get into the details beyond the fact that we were instructed to keep an eye on Steve because he had a 'spirit of divination and false teaching' and was constantly trying to impart his strange doctrines to the other students at New Life.
There is more to the story with Steve, but all that matters here is that he made me a bit suspicious that there might be something demonic afoot in The Drunken Glory Movement. Steve said and did some crazy things, but as strange and apparently wrong as some of his teachings sounded to me, there was nothing overtly demonic or dangerous about them in my estimation.
(It has been something of a hobby of mine to check in on Steve’s ministry through the years to figure out once and for all if he is indeed still influenced by a demonic spirit like he was at New Life. He does not exactly make it easy, but I will only say that the jury is still out on that. Apart from that mystery, I absolutely love the guy. His persona is just so funny, you can tell that he really, really loves the Lord, and I appreciate many of the things he is trying to do, even though I would reject some of his teachings and claims, like that he is an apostle.)
There was another figure in The Drunken Glory Movement named John whose teachings were much more grounded in the Word and tradition than Steve’s were. John went around laying hands on people and they would often ‘get whacked in the Holy Spirit’ like he was all the time, being doubled over with laughter, rolling around on the floor in ecstasy, speaking in tongues like a machine gun, stumbling around like they were drunk, looking high as a kite, and other odd manifestations that I had seen before at church or in revival in one way or another.
I remember one video where John and his crew of whacked out friends rolled into a park and happened upon some heathen teens who were probably up to no good. They laid their hands on the kids and some of them got hit with the Holy Spirit so hard that they got whacked out, too. It was so fascinating on several levels, but how fun would it be to have a power like that in order to evangelize with, to lay your hands on people and have them experience God directly for themselves without even having to preach at them first?
John, Steve, and others in The Drunken Glory Movement were going out on the streets and reaching kids who would never step foot in a church and touching them in ways that stuffy, boring, Bible-bound, and Spiritless Churchianity never could even if they had somehow passed through their doors. But man alive, those guys were doing themselves no favors with their strange antics and drug language!
However sympathetic I was, the only person who could convince me if this phenomenon was of God or not was the Lord himself. So, I prayed and asked him to show me if those kids were really experiencing him.
Joy was one of the main teachings in The Drunken Glory Movement, and until that point, I had never really paid much attention to it. So, I began looking at verses like Acts 13:52, Romans 14:17, 15:13, Gal 5:22, 1 Thes 1:6, and praying that Yeshua would give me his joy, the joy he died and rose again to give us in the Holy Spirit, among other things.
At the time I prayed that prayer, I had little reason to believe it would be answered in a discernible way. As you may recall from TFC, my spiritual life along with my marriage dried up two years prior. Never before had my relationship with the Lord been so arid, and life was difficult. We were essentially poor, and I was working as a lowly pizza delivery driver. There was nothing in me or my circumstances that could explain what was about to happen, and I had not ‘the faith to claim’ what some taught was our rightful inheritance in Yeshua that was ours for the taking if we just believed. From my perspective, what follows was nothing more than an extravagant act of sheer grace and mercy on God’s part.
To call what came upon me 'joy' is a severe understatement because it felt like I was higher than any drug ever got me in my entire life. It was as if I was flying in the stratosphere with my feet on the ground at all times. As is expected of any mystical experience, language fails to capture it. (I strongly dislike the word 'mystical' because it is so prone to equivocation, is now too closely associated with renegade mystical mavericks, and unnecessarily obscures or complicates things that are really very simple, but convention demands its use for now).
Drugs are a poor analogy, but they are the closest thing I can compare that experience with. Unlike drugs, there was no crash or feeling of coming down, and although it was quite intense, it was not fatiguing in any way. My eyelids were droopy as if high, but my eyes were not bloodshot. Besides that, my speech was sometimes slurred and my walk off kilter. And although this ‘high’ was continuous, it varied in measure, but for some reason, it always seemed to peak when at work.
In the beginning, my boss at the pizza place tried sending me home fearing I was intoxicated. My defense of having a mystical experience did not seem very convincing, so I challenged him to call the police to give me a breathalyzer and to have me tested for drugs. He did neither of those things and let me work in that condition, which didn't impair my ability to drive at all, but I don't know if he ever really believed my explanation.
I worked the day shift with two other delivery drivers I will call Bill and Bob. Those two were coldblooded masters of the cut-throat delivery game. They were always watching for the big corporate lunch orders that came with huge tips and pulling all kinds of stunts to make sure they got those deliveries. I never bothered playing that game with them because I was already living according to my own primitive discipline of abandoning myself to Providence long before the joy of the Lord arrived. If God wanted to give me a good tip, then he could arrange that for me in spite of Bill and Bob's constant maneuverings. And he often did.
After receiving the joy of the Lord, the huge orders began falling to me almost constantly, but instead of taking them, I just gave them to Bill and Bob. They were surprised by my behavior initially, but it did not take long for them to then factor my generosity into their unending chess match against each other. I found it rather amusing, but also kind of sad. I cared even less about money in that state than I normally did. Besides joy, I had peace beyond words, faith to move mountains, and other things beyond my wildest dreams. It was utterly surreal.
This spiritual experience went on day after day and night after night (where I dreamed dreams like never before or after) for a solid year before it even occurred to me that I had not intentionally/consciously sinned the entire time. It was effortless holiness, and I knew it was not me. It was Yeshua. The whole thing was him. I was somehow experiencing something of his life through my being is the only way I can explain it.
While peaking at work, I drove all around town delivering pizzas while praising the Lord to worship music, just whacked out of my gourd and laughing continuously in complete awe of Yeshua's power and sense of humor. It was a sanctified repetition of how I used to cruise around high on weed jamming to tunes as a pothead, only this was way better. So, there was no doubt in my mind that many in The Drunken Glory Movement were genuinely experiencing God that way, although I am not very comfortable using intoxicants as a metaphor for it personally even though I understand why others do.
(This particular experience did not fix or change the most pressing issue in my life, which was my marriage, but it certainly made it easier to handle. It made everything very easy to endure. Our first child was conceived while in that state, which is a pretty funny story, but that one will be told in another post.)
Like TFC recounts, after that 18 months of joy unspeakable, I was plunged back into a night so dark that it made my time of being whacked on the Holy Spirit seem like a cruel joke. After about seven years of intense desolation, I was on the verge of giving up on what I believed to be my mission, which included writing TFC, all the independent studies I was doing in preparation for future ministry, and living in total abandonment Providence, but Providence prevented me from doing that as soon as my first step was taken in another direction, but that is another story for another time.
It was the writing of Catholics, most of whom lived hundreds of years ago, and not contemporary snakes like Richard Rohr who peddles literally the oldest lie in the book, who guided me through the darkness. According to them, entering a dark night after a season of 'infused contemplation' was to be expected and embraced. From my understanding, infused contemplation is the exact same thing as The Drunken Glory, only interpreted though a different tradition, mainly from a different time, and minus much of the intoxication language (but not completely so, obviously).
Bringing the dreaded Catholics into the conversation is difficult because I do not have the time to defend it properly. I will only say here that, besides the false doctrines and obvious evils of the historical entity known as Catholicism, there were countless faithful individual souls whom the Lord was able to reach in spite of all the things that now ruffle Protestant feathers. The mystics proper, although helpful in ways, were not nearly as edifying as a certain Catholic spiritual director who influenced me the most because the mystics were afforded much more time and focus on the spiritual life than most of us will ever have. John of the Cross's writings, for example, are simply too specialized and complex to be of much use to the layman.
According to my Catholic teachers, infused contemplation, or The Drunken Glory, is a grace that only God can give as a gift, oftentimes to seemingly the most undeserving. No amount of virtue, prayer, discipline, or intelligence can attain to it. Besides that, with much practice and discipline, those 'called to the contemplative life' can experience 'acquired contemplation,' which is basically just a lesser version of the infused variety. I strongly dislike the term ‘contemplation’ because it is really nothing more than being ‘in the Spirit’ in the Biblical sense, which you can be in without feeling or sensing anything, but it is certainly a whole lot cooler when you do. So, even the lesser version of contemplation is still contingent on the divine action. Only God can grant whatever experiences we have in prayer, but as the Catholics teach, we should not pray looking for or expecting any special experiences at all.
Unfortunately, the Lord must detain me in some way in order to make me pray because I always find something else to do instead, like write this post. I enter into the Spirit most often at work because I am fortunate enough to have a job that does not require much concentration on my task. Last night, as I was welding in the presence of God and thinking about the numerous posts in the works, the Lord granted me a much more intense experience of acquired contemplation than usual, and I was able to perform a certain inward movement that I will call ‘giving myself a shot of joy’ for lack of a better term, that I was only ever able to do during that time of joy unspeakable. I interpreted that as a sign that this post should be completed before any others in the works.
I was inspired by some goofy kids to look into what the Bible says about joy and to ask the Lord to give that joy to me. It did not happen right away. I think I prayed for about a month, but maybe you will be inspired by this strange post to do the same. Who knows? You may get whacked out of your gourd. I pray that you do and that you will be spared the desolation that followed for me but was absolutely necessary in my case.