“God does not and cannot exist,” Iris Murdoch once wrote, “but what led us to conceive of him does exist, and is constantly experienced and pictured.” You could hang that sentence—epigraph, baleful blessing—over Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir, “Will and Attention” (Doubleday). In some ways, it resembles a conventional addiction memoir: an alcoholic in her twenties, O’Gieblyn got sober, flourished for more than a decade as an essayist and critic, and then started drinking again during the pandemic. She vividly recounts her year of secrecy and collapse, followed by rescue and restoration. The fractions of fall and rise are in order: the book’s existence attests to the recovery.
But “Will and Attention” is more complex and surprising than its form suggests. An anguished engagement with theological and philosophical texts, above all the writings of Simone Weil, it is closer to an unfinished spiritual diary than to the familiar sort of sculpted redemption story. O’Gieblyn was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community on Lake Michigan and intended to enter the ministry. She lost her faith in her early twenties, relatively late for a loyalist. (Losing one’s faith, like discovering an aptitude for music or sports, tends to happen early or not at all.) You may wonder whether she only mislaid it. She certainly does: “I want very much to live a good and virtuous life, without alcohol and drugs, which have made my life miserable. And I still long to believe in God, despite the resounding silence that suggests that he does not exist, or is not interested in us, or in me specifically.” Perhaps her book is really a memoir of her addiction to God. More anguishing, to a God who does not and cannot exist.
A sentence of Weil’s provides the book’s title. On the wall above her desk, O’Gieblyn tells us, is a line from the French thinker’s notebooks, collected in “Gravity and Grace”: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” O’Gieblyn is in pained and plaintive agreement with Weil, who goads her throughout the book. She shares Weil’s suspicion of the will, but has doubts when it comes to her own powers of attention. Her account opens with an acute examination of the paradoxes of willing (an example of how boldly this memoir follows its philosophical interests). Experience has taught her that you cannot will yourself out of addiction, or into religious faith. At twenty-eight, she started treatment for alcoholism, but only when she had reached the very bottom—she was living out of her car, having “lost basically everything and having refused the interventions of everyone who’d previously tried to help.” This turn to sobriety felt less like determination than like surrender, a failure of will. She notes that “will” means both desire (to want something, to will it) and the faculty used to control or cancel desire (will power). So “the will is both the problem and the solution to the problem.” O’Gieblyn considers her alcoholism and her loss of faith to be failures of will, yet she grew up hearing worshippers testify that their conversion to evangelical Christianity came through a surrendering of the will, a submission to God’s grace. At the wooden tabernacle where congregants gathered on summer evenings beside Lake Michigan, the pulpit bore a sign that read “LET GO AND LET GOD.” She remains “fascinated with this idea, despite having no metaphysical beliefs to support it.”
If O’Gieblyn’s self-diagnosis is right, the collapse of will that led to her loss of faith is awkwardly close to a collapse of will that might lead to her return to faith. A failure of will is not quite a surrender of will; a voluntary submission might be seen as some noble version of willing, a willing away of will. Nevertheless, we seem to be in a strange twilight realm in which religious success may resemble secular failure.
In 2018, this former evangelical Protestant, who had studied at the Moody Bible Institute, in Chicago, found herself wandering into the Catholic St. Mary’s, “a large and beautiful church on our side of town.” (O’Gieblyn lives in the Midwest but does not name the town.) She is winningly honest about classic conversion narratives that somehow fail to persuade, and modest about her ability to account for her own urgings. So she cannot say exactly why she started attending Mass, except that she remembers being “overcome one spring with an inarticulate but decisive need to worship something.” The nature of the object wasn’t especially important; she simply wanted to kneel before something beautiful, to lose herself in it. The large Catholic church was drowned in golden light, and she was transfixed by the priestly mummery (her word is “pageantry”—a moment when the author and a certain kind of reader may diverge at supersonic speed), by “the senseless, hexlike redundancy of the Nicene Creed.” This worship began to take on the shape and the dynamic of her former alcoholism: she kept the visits secret, as if they were shameful, from her husband and her closest friends. By the fall, these services became “the most intensely sensuous experience” of her week; “there was nothing more desirable, more perfect, than to lose myself in a trance of senseless movement.” There’s a deliberate hint here, I think, of Emma Bovary’s secret raptures, her own wayward Catholic sensuousness.
As O’Gieblyn started going to church, she stopped going to the recovery meetings that had sustained her for years. She collapsed back into religion and then into drinking. When she eventually tells her husband, Barrett, that she has started drinking again, he calls her secrecy a kind of “infidelity.” Attending Mass had been the first infidelity. The “success” of religion led to the “failure” of alcohol. She now sees that the return to church “was just a veiled desire for intoxication, that the experiment with Catholicism served as a gateway back into drinking.” She was returning to “the things that had ruined my life before: alcohol and institutional religion.”
As in “Madame Bovary,” the priests are a mite disappointing, even if the cloaks and swirling stoles enchant. O’Gieblyn starts talking to the church’s pastor, whom she calls Father Aaron. He is intelligent, well read, respectful of the writer’s doubts. Shrewd, too: he gently parries her desire to become “a Catholic atheist,” and asks, “Why would you have a desire for something that doesn’t exist?”—the very question that O’Gieblyn can’t stop asking herself. It’s a version of C. S. Lewis’s insistence that an unappeasable yearning points to the existence of something beyond this world. O’Gieblyn concedes that this “shapeless longing for nothing I could locate, which I took to be a yearning for God,” has intermittently possessed her all her life—“and religion has never cured it.” Nor does religion offer a cure at St. Mary’s. She and Father Aaron get bogged down in orthodoxies both doctrinal and political (he asks her about the Catholic sacraments, and why she hasn’t had children), and the fever slowly cools. She confesses her secret churchgoing to Barrett, who calls it “addict behavior.”
This particular “addict behavior” is a heart murmur against the turbulent pulse of the actual addict behavior. Unappeased by religion, O’Gieblyn’s “shapeless longing” restlessly seeks its familiar object, its proper location, its old home. Soon, the pandemic brings its own kind of turbulence, vitally evoked here in bold Didion-like strokes: “I remember thinking that we were all slowly losing our minds. I remember the day that the heat broke and the entire city was loosed into the streets . . . . The evening when all the businesses downtown simultaneously boarded up their storefronts and tacked BLM posters to their doors, as though it were calf’s blood, hoping to be passed over.” In 2021, she publishes a book, resumes travelling, gives talks and readings. Airport bars, foreign cities, lonely hotel rooms: the sour reek of temptation. In Helsinki, she falters; at the Nashville airport she goes under and drinks three white wines, followed by vodka at O’Hare. The degradation is shameful, and shamefully compelling to read about. O’Gieblyn falls back into old tricks that come as easily as “riding a bicycle.” Drinking at home, she knows how to disguise her flushed cheeks and the smell of booze before Barrett returns: she takes a hot bath. One night, while he is sleeping, she slips out of the house to find another drink—or thinks she did, because the next morning she can remember only standing at the door, about to leave. But Barrett heard her, and he asks what’s going on. The culminating scene of confession and forgiveness is at once domestic and utterly religious. She’s on the threshing floor, saved and abased: “It is the only moment in my life when I have felt loved so completely, loved in the depth of my wretchedness and failure.”
One fascination of this brave book—brave in its disclosures but more so in its demands, its spiritual rigor, and its ardent intellectualism—lies in watching the eloquent, intelligent sufferer steadily entrapping herself. I don’t mean the obvious entrapment by her twin poisons, alcohol and institutional religion. I mean something more fundamental and less fathomable: her theology of alcoholism. The association of intoxication with religious ecstasy has a long history; its terrible force here comes from O’Gieblyn’s sense that the substance that has ruined her life also grants the surrender she was unable to achieve through worship. When she was young, she writes, she could never relax into God’s presence. The bustling ego, the barging will, always got in the way. “Alcohol is the only thing that has ever allowed me to rest happily in the presence of God,” she writes. Her drinking days in her twenties, and their morning hangovers, “were the closest I have come to the experience of enlightenment.” Her recent relapse, despite the secrecies and shame, was also a time of bliss. Alcohol offers her mystical release. Drinking, she can annihilate the self as the ancient mystics did, and as a modern one, Simone Weil, commands. The will recedes, peace and freedom suffuse her soul, and she glimpses the “nothing”—the God, the absent God—that her “shapeless longing” is always seeking. She experiences not the warm secular blur that most of us feel but “a bolt of religious rapture that makes you want to sell all your possessions and hole up in a cave with your one precious pearl.” In this theology, alcoholism represents not just fallen addiction but also religious application; she reminds us that “addiction” descends etymologically from the Latin verb addicere, to devote.
On this point, O’Gieblyn is movingly, almost repetitively, adamant. I should say that I’m largely immune to seeing alcohol or drugs as vehicles of religious insight: I think spilt religion should be cleaned up. Shouldn’t we avoid trading in substitutes, in transferences? But, as someone who, like O’Gieblyn, grew up in and came through an evangelical upbringing, I comprehend the longing that compels her to seek a godly non-God, a presence that may be an absence.
Still, the cost of persistently naming these experiences as religious would seem to be very high. If you can encounter God only by drinking to oblivion, every religious success is an abject secular failure. So is drinking O’Gieblyn’s problem, or is God? Which intoxication comes first? O’Gieblyn recognizes this dilemma (though she wouldn’t put it exactly like this) but remains in thrall to the longing that sustains it. Although she presents herself as having lost her faith, she can’t help wanting to return to it. Just when she thinks she’s out, God pulls her back in.
There is a telling moment when she considers her religious youth and ruefully wonders whether she ever had any true faith “in a heavenly Father.” “I had not been born again,” she wittily decides. “I had only been born.” But, a page later, she writes, “A friend of mine who left the church says that every liberatory deconversion narrative obscures a tragedy about failing to believe.” Does it? Can’t it just be liberatory? Surely O’Gieblyn sees that her friend is ruling out what we might call good-faith faithlessness. It’s as if we catch her revising her jest: I had not been born again, but it’s a tragedy that I wasn’t.
A tormenting syllogism seems to grip the author: she longs to encounter God; to do so, she must escape her will; to escape her will, she must drink. Therefore she drinks. Or she drank: this beautifully sober book describes her release from that prison. But her tradition does appear to have bequeathed her a powerful suspicion of the will. As she concedes, Christianity has reasons to denigrate human will, making it the source of disobedience and an explanation for much of the world’s evil. Salvation comes instead through God’s grace, the unearned gift that saves us from ourselves. Assigning responsibility for evil to human will also helps to absolve God. Yet understanding this religious inheritance, as O’Gieblyn so lucidly does, offers little assurance that one can escape its hold.
In practice, she treats the will, even the ego, as a sly old enemy to be outwitted or annihilated: “What I drank for was the peace and freedom from my own will.” Weil offers an extreme version of this hostility to the self. She was a daring mystic, but her pursuit of selflessness assumed the punitive intensity of a kind of ego-starvation: literally and theologically, the self was always too large. “Gravity and Grace” presents an exacting vision of kenosis, or self-emptying, in which an ideally voided ego will learn how to worship an ideally voided God. “To empty ourselves of the world,” Weil writes. “To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time—that is to say, to nothing.”
O’Gieblyn’s memoir ends with a glimpse of serenity in freedom and something like redemption—a renewed sobriety, rooted in attending to the good, to the beautiful, to the world. (She uses Iris Murdoch’s writing about the good to soften some of Weil’s religious ferocity.) “Attention” replaces the feeble or malevolent “will,” as Weil says it should. For O’Gieblyn, “the good” also seems to replace “God.” On holiday in Italy, swimming regularly, alert to herself and to the beauty of her surroundings, she hopes that she is “no longer trying to obliterate my ego,” and begins to doubt “whether this was really the goal of spiritual life.” The reader who has journeyed this far with O’Gieblyn hopes that it is indeed a release and not merely a reprieve, that the old grinding syllogism will not return. Yet this reader can’t help noting that O’Gieblyn’s “attention,” which she and Weil offer as the alternative to will, sounds an awful lot like willed attention: “I was attuning my mind to the good. I was teaching myself, through daily acts of attention, to want it.” It’s one of the many ways that this remarkably honest spiritual journal seems alarmingly open and unfinished. ♦