Ever since I first stumbled upon the story of the nineteenth-century Chinese martyr Saint Mark Ji Tianxiang, a month or so ago, I’ve been unable to get him off my mind.

Not only because he’s the patron saint of addicts & those in recovery, so a patron of mine automatically, and because his feast day, July 9, happens to be a very personally significant day for me (some sources say his feast day is July 7, but it’s officially July 9; he died on the 7th, but is celebrated in the new Roman liturgical calendar with his fellow Martyrs of China on the 9th), which is of course just a coincidence and nothing particularly meaningful in and of itself, but still grabs my attention… but also, because his life story, which is unlike that of any other saint I’m familiar with, shines some real light on a nagging Question That Keeps Me Up At Night (and has done so for years).

You can read about his life story here, but the tl;dr is: St. Mark was an opium addict who was never able to quit. He struggled for 30 years to get clean, and at the time of his death was still actively addicted. Because he was unable to stop, even while fighting valiantly against it by frequenting Mass and Confession, his priest denied him absolution and Communion, seeing as how he didn’t seem to have a firm purpose of amendment. So St. Mark lived without the Sacraments for 30 years. But he didn’t give up his faith. He died a martyr during the Boxer Rebellion, executed for refusing to apostasize.

And he’s a saint. Canonized by Pope St. John Paul II the Great in the year 2000. A canonized saint who died actively addicted, and hadn’t even been able to receive the sacraments!

Reading this kinda flipped my whole understanding of everything on its head.

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“But for the Grace of God” & “One Day at a Time”

How does any addict get and stay clean/sober? I’m almost seven years sober myself. I don’t go to meetings anymore, but early on I went to a ton of them, and became quite fluent in AA. And one thing that I always heard at their meetings was the slogan: “but for the Grace of God, there go I”, meaning: when we see someone relapse, we must know that we too are vulnerable; no one is ever safe from slipping. We mustn’t trust in our own strength.

Only the Grace of God keeps us sober — only one day at a time. I heard that over and over and over, and tbh it always annoyed me a bit and I never understood it.

Because what do you mean it’s God keeping me sober? If that were true, wouldn’t it be easy — wouldn’t it feel like the work was being done for me? Instead of me working so hard to do it myself? Avoiding booze was hugely difficult, early on. It was strenuous. It would have been nice to feel like Someone Else was taking care of it for me, but it didn’t feel like that.

Only one day at a time: I kind of understood this then. Early on, it makes more sense to focus on twenty-four hours (or even the next hour, or half-hour, or five minutes…). If you try and think about staying sober forever, it’s way too daunting. But the next five minutes, I can do. The next twenty-four hours, maybe I can do.

But “one day at a time” begins to mean more than that, almost seven years in. Around the 3-5 year mark, I felt pretty invulnerable: “I’ve got this! I’ve figured it out. Welcome to the big numbers! I’m free! I really don’t need alcohol any more.” — But then, sometimes, I realize how easy it would be. I think about going back, and I know I’m still the same person, or even worse. A slight inconvenience and I’m thinking how nice it would be, all the sensations of the old routine. What’s stopping me? It’s like the feeling of standing on a very tall building looking over the edge. You could just do it. Nothing’s stopping you.

But for the Grace of God.

I think I begin to understand now, how it’s only grace that keeps us sober. People in AA talk about willingness — it’s another one of their keywords, along with humility, service, surrender, etc. Willingness is, obviously, crucial. You have to be willing to not pick up the drink. (Easier said than done.)

And from where do we get this magical thing, this Willingness? How do we find it? Some of us never do.

The thing is, I think only God can give you willingness. Not just to stay sober, but to do anything at all. People always applaud themselves for accomplishing hard things, for their motivation and drive and energy; but where did they get those attributes from? Everything that we think we worked for, is really a gift. That doesn’t make doing the work easy. It just makes it possible.

This is something I’ve only begun to get my head around in the last year and a half or so. Everything that we have really is from God. As with those other slogans, like “but for the Grace of God,” I used to hear this said, and frown, and not really understand it. Why do you say I can’t do anything without God? Like, sure, my life is a gift from Him, and my health is a gift from Him, but what I do with those are all me, right? I get out of bed in the morning and do my work. That’s no miracle. Because even if I don’t pray or ask God to help me accomplish my tasks, the tasks still get accomplished. Isn’t that me? Didn’t I do that?

I see now how silly it was of me to think that I was anything at all, that I could do anything at all, without God! That’d be like a single blood cell — nay, a single atom — a single subatomic particle! — thinking that it had any capability of accomplishing any real task on its own, independently of the human body.

All of our capabilities and dispositions, everything that makes up our soul and our consciousness (with the exception of sin, which God allows to exist even though He doesn’t like it) — all of this is from God. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” someone quoted. So, if we have the willingness to not drink: that is from God.

And when someone who is addicted to alcohol or some other substance, who is entrenched in that sin, is, through no merit of their own, granted the willingness to not commit that sin anymore — well of course that’s miraculous.

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“It works if you work it” & God’s mercy

Which brings me back to St. Mark Ji Tianxiang.

Addiction is a bottomless pit, a fast track to hell. It’s a black hole. That’s how powerful it is. And whether we as addicts have the willingness to stop indulging is, basically, outside of our control. If we have the willingness, we can nurture it and try to make it fruitful. If we don’t have willingness yet, we can try, in different ways, to acquire it: by making ourselves open to grace. Maybe that’s by prayer or the Sacraments or going to meetings or meditation or whatever it is that you do. We should certainly keep doing all of that, persistently. And if you don’t even try, then that’s your fault. But whether God chooses to grant willingness is entirely up to Him. We can’t understand why He grants it to some and not to others — why some have to suffer so much or even die, and why others make it out relatively unscathed. Sometimes it seems unfair. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

During his life, St. Mark did the right things. He fought courageously against the addiction. God didn’t set him free from it, not while he was alive. But he never gave up.

And now he’s a canonized saint. I’m still trying to get my head around this.

Because in AA, if you keep relapsing, that’s on you. Oh don’t get me wrong, no one’s going to banish you from meetings, no matter how many times you relapse. Even if you never successfully dry up, as long as you have a desire to stop drinking, you’re welcome and eligible for membership (that’s the Third Tradition). (Notice that “desire” is different from “willingness.”) You’re still welcome, you’re still a member — but if you’re messing up, that’s on you, as any sponsor will tell you. And if you keep relapsing, your sponsor will probably even fire you because you’re “not doing the work.” Or they might say something like “I must not be the right sponsor for you.” This is basically what St. Mark Ji’s confessor told him: try harder. As the slogan goes,“it works if you work it.”

But wasn’t St. Mark “working it”? He was devout and sincere. He may not have had a literal 12 Step group around him (which some die-hard AA/NAs will probably say was the problem, the missing piece of the puzzle, for him) — but, imo, as someone who no longer goes to meetings, St. Mark was doing all the right things. The Twelve Steps are really just a secularized, simplified version of the Sacraments, after all.

“But maybe if he’d had the fellowship of other addicts…” yeah, fellowship is another of those AA keywords. I dunno, in my experience you can be drowning in Fellowship and still not have Willingness. But maybe that’s just me. I have AVPD so fellowship doesn’t really do much for me; it doesn’t penetrate my shell, but just kind of rolls off of me like water off of a painfully awkward duck. So, I dunno, I’m not really a believer in the absolute necessity of fellowship, when it comes to sobriety at least. I still think St. Mark could have stayed clean without it, if God had allowed him to.

But so why is it that in AA I was taught that, if I couldn’t stop drinking, it’s because I was doing something wrong — I wasn’t working hard enough? Doesn’t St. Mark’s story tell us the opposite?

Or does it?

We don’t have the details. All the stories say “he fought bravely,” “he kept coming to Mass,” “he prayed diligently,” et cetera… but maybe he wasn’t doing all that he could have. We don’t know! Maybe the lesson here isn’t just that we addicts are completely powerless, but that saints are not necessarily perfect people who get everything right. Sure a lot of them are. Look at St. Thérèse, who never committed a mortal sin in her life. I admit that the first time I read Story of a Soul, I had a hard time relating to her. (Thankfully I’ve grown since then.) But the life of St. Mark Ji paints a very different picture of sainthood. Maybe he could have tried harder. He was human, and a sinner. Maybe some saints really are sinners who never gave up.

Or maybe the big takeaway here is about God’s mercy. God can make anyone a saint — even an addict who couldn’t stay clean.

St. Mark’s story reminded me a lot of another story I’d heard. My late friend “J” (may he rest in peace) knew a lot about Eastern Orthodoxy, and had considered converting — and anyway, he told me about an Orthodox “saint” by the name of Paisios of Mount Athos (1924-1994). Even though he was Orthodox, and as such held some really problematic beliefs, he was a very holy man, and said a lot of amazing and inspiring things.

There’s this story about Paisios and an alcoholic monk who lived at the monastery and couldn’t stop drinking. Apparently, when the drunk monk finally died, all the other monks were like “thank God he’s gone, right?! What a nuisance! What a loser!” but Paisios defended the deceased one, telling the other monks about how he (the dead drunk) had developed an addiction because of his traumatic past, and had worked hard over the years to reduce his consumption just a little, and had been fighting a heroic battle that no one else knew anything about; and how, at his death, Paisios saw a whole battalion of angels come to collect his soul.

I like to think that this story is true.

We hear all the time how no one can enter Heaven with any scraps of worldliness still clinging to them. How you must be free of all attachment to even venial sin. Which at a glance seems contradictory to the story of this drunk monk, and of St. Mark Ji. It’s true that addiction reduces culpability, when it comes to sin. But still — that someone could pass straight from active addiction through the gates of Heaven — that’s wild to me. I have confused/complicated feelings about the whole Divine Mercy devotion, but dang: God’s mercy really must be as ridiculously huge and expansive as St. Faustina told us. It really gives you hope.

The virtue of hope

That’s the the other thing that St. Mark Ji’s story sheds light on for me: hope.

Apparently, as he was being led to his execution, alongside his family members, one of them asked him: where are we going? To which St. Mark replied, happily: We’re going home.

Imagine the confidence! To be so sure that, after living as an addict unable to even receive the Sacraments, you were going to walk right into Heaven.

I never understood before. Faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues. Secretly, I always thought to myself: yes, charity is clearly very important, and I can see that faith is too; but what’s the big deal with hope? Why is it such a sin to despair of God’s mercy? Isn’t that just being realistic?, I thought, considering how many people go to hell and how miserable of a sinner I am. I’m naturally a pessimist, and prefer to set my expectations low, so that I’m always either correct or pleasantly surprised. But apparently that’s not the right attitude to have when it comes to our religion. And tbh I never really understood why not.

St. Mark Ji shows us just how necessary it is to have hope in God. Hope was what kept him going for three decades without access to the sacraments. Even when he didn’t have those, which are the very foundation of our faith life, he still had hope. Hope against all odds — what a cool thing! And joy! To go to his martyrdom with joy and hope after a life that any worldly person would call “hopeless.” St. Mark shows us that hope is actually essential to sanctity. Somehow, no one before him has ever been able to get this through my thick little pessimistic skull.

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In conclusion

So after all, I’m not sure if the life of St. Mark Ji Tianxiang contradicts anything that I was taught in AA; on the contrary, I think it supplements those teachings — it teaches us things that a secular (because make no mistake, AA is secular, even though they make you accept a “Higher Power” your HP doesn’t have to be the One True God, it can literally be a doorknob if you’re so inclined), human-founded organization cannot: about the actual hugeness of God’s power and mercy, and the importance of hope in Him.

Which is why, imo, it’s best to have both. You should at least be a practicing Catholic, but if you’re really in the trenches with addictive behavior, a 12 step group sure can’t hurt either, as long as you don’t get too caught up in the secularism, and keep your eyes on the real Higher Power, as St. Mark did. What a cool saint, what an awesome witness, what a story.

St. Mark Ji Tianxiang, ora pro nobis.