The Saint Who was an Addict
Our struggles take on different faces, and some of them
are terrible faces that we would find difficult to reconcile with the Christian
vocation. One of these is addiction.
Addiction comes in different forms. It may be an addiction
to alcohol, to drugs, to pornography, to masturbation, to sex, and so much more.
In all cases, it supposes a situation where an individual is robbed of their
freedom. One is only free in the measure that they can always say NO, even to
what is good, but most importantly, to what is bad. People suffering from
addiction, regardless of how it started, often find themselves involuntarily submitting to acts
they know are sinful, and usually harmful to their health and relationships.
Addictions spark off a deeply painful battle in the
spiritual lives of such individuals. We are taught that a cross is that thing
that burdens us. We often want to think crosses are things like diseases,
natural calamities, persecutions—the stuff that saints had to suffer. It
is hard to imagine that something as shameful as an addiction can be a cross.
Much less that it can lead one to heaven. In this state of affairs, it is easy for
one to give up—and many have—especially after praying so hard, so many times,
for it to go away, all in vain.
Can an addict become a saint?
The answer to this is, luckily, yes. And the Church has, in
the number of her heroes, a saint who knew the pain of addiction.
St Mark Ji Tianxiang was born in China, 1834. He was raised
in a Christian family and grew up to become a respected member of the community
and a physician. In his mid-thirties, he developed a serious stomach ailment
and treated himself with opium, a common drug at that time, but also one that was
highly addictive. Within a short while, he became addicted to the drug.
Everyone around him considered it a scandal. In St Mark Ji’s time (and still
commonly in our time despite advances in our scientific knowledge of the nature
of addiction as a disease/disorder), an opium addict was always seen as an intentionally
immoral person.
He frequented confession, always confessing his use of the
drug. His confessor wrongly thought him to have neither sufficient sorrow for the sin nor the resolve to stop using the drug, and so barred him from receiving Holy Communion
until he should stop smocking the opium. But St Mark Ji would never be free from
the chains that bound him until his death.
For thirty years, he lived without Holy Communion. For
thirty years, he prayed for the Lord to set him free. But it never happened. He
didn’t have a support system: his family and community looked down on him. And
yet, through all the shame, and helplessness, he continued showing up to
Church. Even when he was denied the Sacraments, he kept going. For three
decades.
His cross was one of realizing that some battles are not to
be won in this life-time, a hard pill to swallow for anyone who goes through
something they just want to end immediately. He must have wondered, very many
times, why God didn’t hear him as he cried out. He knew God could do all
things. And yet he refused to do this one thing. He must have prayed with the leper,
“Lord, if you will, you can make me clean” (Matthew 8:2). But for him the
Lord did not answer, “I will it. Be clean!”
He must have wondered, sometimes, if God really saw him.
The telltale sign that in the midst of his darkness God was
working, was that he kept doing what he could. He went to Church. He waited for
the Lord’s time, painfully, patiently. He persevered to the end (Matthew 24:13).
And no doubt God’s grace worked and grew in him all those painful thirty years.
This is evident in how he heroically chose to give up his life for the Faith.
Between 1899 and 1901, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in
China. The rebels sought to expel the Western colonialists from China, and
Christianity was considered a Western religion. A persecution broke out against
the Christians. St Mark Ji was arrested in 1900, together with his family. He
was asked to abandon the Faith, but he refused and so was sentenced to death together
with many other Christians including his son, six grandchildren and two
daughters-in-law.
He begged his executioners to kill him last. This way he comforted and encouraged his family members as they were decapitated one by one. Lastly, he too was martyred, and was heard to chant the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary in his last moments.
Christ taught us that “apart from me, you can do nothing”
(John 15:5). This is ever-so-apparent when one has a habitual vice like addiction that
constantly plagues them. There is even more confusion when they approach
the Lord through prayer and Sacraments and still see not effect, no change.
From St Mark Ji, we learn that God’s ways are not our
ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). There are stories of people who have prayed to be
saved from an addiction, and their answer has come in a couple of years or even
months. For some, the answer never comes. St Mark Ji was one of those. He teaches us that even then,
we can still be saints because God can accomplish far more than we can ever
ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). All we have to do is to not make an idol
out of freedom, but to turn our eyes constantly to the Lord, however grueling it may be; to keep showing
up, keep praying, keep hoping, keep doing what we can. The mere desire to
be pleasing to God is enough. It is all he asks of us.
St Mark Ji Tianxiang was beatified in 1946 by Pope Pius XII,
together with over 100 companions (including St Augustine Zhao Rong). St John Paul
II declared them saints on October 1st, 2000, and we honor them each
year on July 9th.
St Mark Ji Tianxiang, pray for those who suffer from addiction; pray for us.
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