A long-promised review

I promised Mike Barrett I'd review his new book, The Danger Habit , some weeks ago when he sent me a copy. I've been running under the whip a lot since then, and I beg pardon for taking so long. Here's the promised review (along with more personal information than you ever wanted):

This is a tough book to review, because it's hard to explain why it should make such an impression on me. I'm not a surfer, or a rock climber, or one of those guys that spin a skateboard off into the stratosphere to see how few bones they can leave unbroken. I'm terrified of heights, and even getting me on an airplane requires two bourbons and a rosary. I swim in a nice calm lake and my fishing boat is pedal-powered. I have a motorcycle, but it's a little bitty riceburner barely capable of highway speeds, not the sort of roaring mid-life-crisis crotch-rocket a true adventurer would ride. I am, in short, a sit-at-home-in-safety type, a long, skinny hobbit. So at first, reading The Danger Habit reminded me of a manatee reading a book on how to be a better cheetah.

What I hadn't counted on was the varied nature of risk addiction. While it's true that I've never been inclined to climb every mountain (at least since I was old enough to realize what would happen if I fell), there's a lot more to risky behavior than mere danger of physical injury. Some people are compulsive gamblers, risking everything on a throw of the dice or a bare-bones business start-up. Some are compulsive womanizers, slipping out of bedroom windows ahead of one angry husband after another. One is in search of money, another is in search of nookie... there are endless ends for which the means is risk. And one of those that Mike mentions is high-risk relationships. That's where I relate. Much of my relationship history has been, in a word, stoopid. I don't just mean "stupid." I mean stoo-oo-pid.

The story: I've never made any secret that I've been divorced. The marriage was made at an early age under the compulsion of pregnancy, so it wasn't hard for the Church to find it invalid. But the four years I spent being, honestly, not a terribly good husband, set the stage for a lot of years spent chasing a dream of stability. If you've ever been through a divorce (even one that anybody could have seen coming a mile away), you know the feeling that follows it: like Alice falling perpetually down the rabbit hole. And as desperately as the gambler chases his money, and the philanderer chases sex, I chased security.

My favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 4:4, which says, "But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid." Pretty weird verse for a risk-fool to hold dear. But that was a promise I held on to like a leech on a swimmer. I had custody of our daughter (then four years old), which made the need for security more urgent. I went in search of a life in which I could raise her without the insecurities that a child of divorce always has.

For the next ten years, I went through relationships that I thought would bring stability to me and my daughter. Every time I thought I had found myself a wife and her a mother-figure, it would sour and we wound up worse off than before. In the process, she learned that people are temporary and kids are just adjuncts to their parents. It was exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. That vine and fig tree were farther away than ever.

What I was doing, really, was gambling. I kept thinking that if I just took this one chance, if I just went out on this limb, it would all pay off and I would reach a safe emotional haven. Of course, it never worked that way. And naturally, every time I lost, I figured the solution was to gamble a little bit more. We all know what happens when you do that, don't we?

I also had let my faith disintegrate. By the time the Lord pulled me into the Catholic Church (which is a whole 'nother story), I had grown really adept at fooling myself. At the time, I tended to lump church in with the other trappings of stability. In other words, God was a means to an end.

As I went through the RCIA program (or as I called it, PIT – Papists in Training), I began to find that God was calling me back to Him, not so He could set me up with a worry-free life, but so that I could quit looking for one. I found myself doing a lot less stupid stuff. By the time I met Christina (in a Catholic chatroom), I wasn't looking for a relationship to make me stable. I had stopped chasing stability and more or less resigned myself to a disorganized, off-the-cuff life. Strangely, my daughter was better off than she had ever been, and I was beginning to be a significant part of my son's (from one of those failed relationships) life.

This is where I found myself identifying with Mike in The Danger Habit. (You'd forgotten that was what this was all about, hadn't you?) I may not jump off bridges attached to a huge rubber band, but I've said "I love you" to women I really wanted to believe I did, just so they wouldn't leave. I don't climb cliffs, but I've stood on an emotional precipice, hoping that if I fell, somebody would catch me. Ironically, nothing I've done has been riskier than my search for safety. Today, I'm sitting under my vine and fig tree, but it was a long, needlessly dangerous road to get there, and it left me and my kids with a lot of wreckage to clean up.

Jesus said that whoever would save his life must lose it, which is a really scary principle to put into action. It's also important to remember that giving up a life, or an aspect of your life, is not something to be wasted. That's part of where Mike is going in The Danger Habit. Birds gotta swim, fish gotta fly, and adrenaline junkies gotta take chances. The difference, for the extreme sort who also wants to serve the Lord, lies in the stakes. Fr. Damien is my favorite example, but you can see the same willingness to put it all on the line in the lives of Joan of Arc, Thomas More, even Martin Luther. None of those people hid in the shadows, but none of their gambles was wasted, either.

Mike does an excellent job of painting a portrait of this kind of Christian. If you haven't bought this book (and chances are you haven't), you should. Even if you're a safety-clinging hobbit like me, read The Danger Habit and see what God can do with a life that's put on the line.