Awful, but Fascinating

A perspective on addiction, and spiritual health.

I recently learned of the disassembly and planned reconstruction of Wayfarer’s Chapel in Palos Verdes, CA. Wayfarer’s is a stunning glass chapel built by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank, on a hillside cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, on a peninsula south of Los Angeles. It was built in 1951 for the Swedenborgian Church, a Protestant denomination based on the writings of 18th century scientist and philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg, which emphasize the harmony between God’s natural world and the inner world of mind and spirit.

I visited the Chapel once, last year, and found it to be a breathtaking building on an enchanting campus. Wayfarer’s is about an hour south (on a Sunday morning with no traffic) from where I live, and was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the National Parks Service in December of 2023.

Now, thanks to local land movement otherwise known as the Portuguese Landslide, Wayfarer’s is rapidly twisting, torquing, and cracking under the increased momentum of the landslide. In February, the campus closed to the public; all masses and weddings were canceled. A team comprised of Wayfarer’s Leadership, the City of Rancho Palos Verdes, the National Park Service, and preservation experts at Architectural Resources Group stated in a press release:

“It has been determined that the immediate deconstruction of the chapel is the safest and most viable preservation action to take at this time and will prevent further irreparable damage to the chapel’s structure and materials. The team will begin the careful disassembly of the chapel, which includes cataloguing and documenting each piece, preserving as much of the chapel’s original materials as practicable, and relocating all component parts to a temporary safe location until they can be reassembled.”

I find the disassembly of Wayfarers Chapel to be awful, but fascinating. To see something so beloved and historic suffer such damage is almost painful to contemplate. But I studied art history in college, so I have a curiosity for this stuff: how indeed do we preserve art, architecture, and history? One of the very few clear paths from an art history degree is into conservation - this did not turn out to be my bag, as there is so much chemistry involved in the case of paintings; engineering, in the case of buildings.

So here I sit, a powerless but curious observer, finding this whole state of affairs awful, but fascinating.

And then I thought: being diagnosed with a life threatening illness is awful, but fascinating.

How awful that this incredible building, Wayfarer’s Chapel, has already suffered so much damage, that it may never be the same again. But it was created out of nothing to begin with (in 1951) so we still have it, even if in a different form. It is fascinating to watch as it is disassembled and reconstructed into that different, but one day again usable form.

When I was diagnosed with a life threatening illness, I was fascinated, but grief-stricken: how awful that this incredible body has already suffered so much damage, that it will never be the same again. But it was created out of nothing to begin with (in 1985) so I still have it, even if in a different form. It has been fascinating, at the best of times, to witness my own reconstruction, under my own hands, my own efforts. And, not least of all, to inhabit this once-again usable form.

Again, I was a powerless but curious observer. I was powerless in the face of the relentless march of an incurable illness, but I was (usually) curious about the inner workings of my now-different body. I also managed, on rare occasion, to even be curious about the now-different future that was starting to stretch out in front of me.

Like the conservation crews at Wayfarer’s, the insulin I inject reconstructs what’s been damaged in my pancreas. One contrast is that I must reconstruct my own body every day. The disassembly starts every time the insulin in my body runs out; I must reconstruct again, and again, and again.

This can be awful. This can also be fascinating.

As both Wayfarer’s Chapel, and my experience of living with an illness, present a challenge of the spiritual sort, my thoughts naturally travel to the Addict: it is my contention that the Addict needs medicine, and represents human spiritual health. She seeks her own best remedy - whether it be amphetamines or opiates, caffeine or alcohol, Netflix or retail therapy. Each remedy has a time and a place, each drug has a valid use.

The question of when and how to administer such remedies is one that I think of as relating to spiritual health. How does one heal? Where does healing start, and where, if anywhere, does it end? These questions can only be answered with deep reverence to the human spirit.

Very soon after I started insulin, it became abundantly clear that my health, healing, and ongoing wellbeing were entirely dependent on not using too much of it. Too much, and it can take me down; police and first responders are trained to recognize that a person on insulin may well be slurring, stumbling, or even passed out as a result of the insulin, if too much has been administered.

How much is too much? The Addict will find the answer to that question in her own spiritual health - an awareness of what she needs, while keeping a discerning and compassionate eye on what she wants.

So.

The scourge of addiction takes hold when when the drug, the remedy becomes the object of fascination. Only THIS will help me. THIS, and only this, will take my pain away, regardless of the collateral damage wrought by it. Addiction, after all, is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure¹. Or, I might say, relief.

To those in the throes of addiction, the drug is awful, but fascinating. Again, it could be any drug; at some point the drug becomes harmful, and then the drug will slowly disassemble your life, body, relationships, all of the above. But we are wholly convinced at an atomic, even subatomic level that the drug is the only remedy to our pain, the only salvation to what ails us.

This conviction is a grisly fascination with that which is awful.

And let us not forget that the addict needs a remedy because something is wrong. Something like a broken bone, or a broken heart, or a broken attention span. Something like the broken, cracked, and twisted structure of a beloved Chapel. Something like the broken pancreas of diabetes mellitus type 1.

At some point, we all need medicine. We all need reconstruction. It’s part and parcel of being human, or of being built by humans.

So what of a solution to these ills? If drugs are necessary, and addiction is easy, how is a human to navigate the inevitability of needing repair?

Let’s come back to Wayfarer’s Chapel; to that sense of finding something awful, but fascinating.

The problem that precedes addiction is awful, which is why we don’t want to focus on it, and why we, as mere humans, want so desperately to focus on finding relief instead. It’s incredibly hard to look directly at the problem, whether that problem is why your life is falling apart, or why your body is falling apart.

But what would happen if the team at Wayfarer’s could not, by nature of their grief, look directly at the problem? The Chapel would crumble and slide into the Pacific, lost forever.

What would happen if I could not look at the withering away of my body, and never walked into a doctor’s office, to eventually be diagnosed and prescribed a treatment? Well, I’d be dead by now. Lost forever.

So the spiritual remedy to the spiritual problem of addiction is to find the problem awful, but fascinating. Not the drug.

Let’s say the problem is grief; an intractable and hard-to-talk-about problem if there ever was one. Grief over a breakup; grief due to illness; the grief of losing a loved one. Let’s first admit that the problem is awful. Looking at grief — that life will never be the same, that the future you planned on and looked forward to is effectively gone — is painful beyond measure. So we turn to something, anything, to relieve that awful darkness, that intractable heaviness: booze, Netflix, Ben & Jerry’s, other people’s bodies, heroin, retail therapy. Maybe all of the above.

But can we possibly find grief - even the most grievous of losses - just a little bit fascinating? When we find ourselves powerless, can we remain curious?

The concept of common humanity is helpful here. Grief happens to all humans. Loss happens to all humans. The need for medicine happens to all humans. Seeing grief and loss and the need for comfort and medicine as a core component of being human — rather than as a pervasive sense of isolation, that “I” am the only person in the world having this painful experience — reminds us that we are just that: human.

And being reminded of our humanity is scaffolding to spiritual health. It’s why 12 Step meetings are often an effective way to get clean: you can see, right in front of you, a group of people who struggled with the same problem.

Then can reconstruction begin.

The building is the body is the Addict. The conservation crew, the medicine, the drug.

We use medicine and drugs as the steel and concrete and glass to reconstruct ourselves. But inevitably, if we are using these construction materials, we must be as well versed as possible in that which we are disassembling and reconstructing. We can hire outside contractors and experts with letters after their names, and in many cases very well should. But we must be our own reconstruction crews. In our most vulnerable states - which is what we’re in when we need medicine - to avoid for-profit pharma, and for-profit prisons, and the inherent exploitation therein, we must be our own conservationists. That's what we're meant to do here.

1. https://x.com/hubermanlab/status/1584250484293980162?lang=en