Thought for the Day, 17 December 2010
Rt Rev. Lord Richard Harries
The question of whether or not drugs should be decriminalised, which was raised yesterday, is one of the key issues of our time. But there is another question which we think about less often, and that is: why do people get into drugs in the first place? I don’t mean just the social reasons, peer pressure, dysfunctional families, long term unemployment and so on, but the personal ones. Two words come to mind.
First, oblivion, the desire to block everything out: not just the ordinary difficulties and worries of life, though of course they can make things much worse, but the perplexity, the anxiety, of existence as a feeling, thinking being rooted in a body that is limited, finite and mortal. Other animals don’t have this angst, nor do angels, but we are conscious animals; as Disraeli said, half ape, half angel.
The other word that comes to mind is the word ecstasy, which unsurprisingly, is the word given to one particular drug. Both oblivion and the experience of ecstasy enable us to escape from ourselves, the one by blocking everything out, the other through taking us out of ourselves into something else, often a combination of music and dance.
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”, wrote T.S.Eliot, but for him this phrase did not in the first place refer to the hardness of life, or even what I have just been suggesting. It appears towards the beginning of “Burnt Norton”, part of his great poem The Four Quartets. Here he is remembering an experience near an empty swimming pool when he is aware of what he describes as “The heart of light”. This is turn reflects a mystical experience he had as a young man in America, before he became a Christian. The reality he is referring to, which is present in every single moment„ which is at once stillness and ecstasy, is something he suggests and hints at all through this long poem. That, for him, is the reality which human kind cannot bear. Yet for him, and many other religious believers in the ordinary experience of prayer, they know, however faintly and fitfully, a reality in which we are indeed taken up into something other than ourselves; but one in which we do not so much escape from ourselves as find our true selves.
People who try to blot life out or get taken out of themselves through drugs, take a path that is both tragic and wrong; and we need to make that clear especially to young people. Yet paradoxically, I sometimes think they may have stumbled closer to the edge of a hard and troubling truth than those who skim along on the surface of life because they don’t want to feel the real dilemma and anguish of being human.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thought/documents/t20101217.shtml
