Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
realm, and by reframing setbacks as spiritual tests. The ultimate goal of the encounter is to achieve a complete break with pre-conversion ways of seeing the world, and to re-people the world with enchanted experiences, beings, and passions. Christian knowledge, then, only is gained through radical rupture with everyday perception.
This concept of knowledge presented me, a non-Pentecostal, with a dilemma of understanding. As Pentecostals are fond of saying, to know it, you have to live it. I could have dismissed their point as a ploy to convert me, but I sensed that it was also correct. The core of what sustained them and shaped their view of the world was not available through books, charts, or scientific instruments; not in the way that I’d acquired biomedical knowledge. To appreciate Pentecostal knowledge, I had to travel new ground.
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The road to Restoration House is lined by wild grasses and mango trees, crossed by chickens and thin, balding dogs. The route passes old Spanish colonials of the town plaza—their boarded windows covered with graffiti, rows of tin shacks with peeling paint—over bridges, through fallow fields, and past shirtless men sipping beers in the heat on the porch. After a half mile on a dirt road up a mountain, I came upon a tall white gate attached to a twelve-foot iron fence. A young man sat in the guard’s booth. He greeted me with “Te bendiga” (“God bless you”). I explained that I was there to see the director, and the gates slowly drew open.
Inside the gate, trimmed hedges, planted flowers, and rocks painted with biblical quotations contrasted with the wild grasses outside. The asphalt driveway from the gate implored those exiting the program in white and blue paint: “Detente, Piensa: Cristo te Ama” (“Stop, Think: Christ Loves You”) (fig. 5). The muraled stucco buildings encircling the grounds read “Cafetería,” (Cafeteria), “Capilla” (Chapel), “Barbería la Fe” (Faith Barbershop) (fig. 6), “Biblioteca” (Library), “Dispensario” (Dispensary). The quiet of midday siesta penetrated the banana grove and the basketball court (fig. 7), as well as the dormitories, each named for a book of the Bible, including “Corintios” (Corinthians) and “Romanos” (Romans). I noted how much the Christian programs resembled each other physically: on a mountain, with carefully groomed grounds and open space for games and gardens. The grit of condemned buildings and abandoned cars in the urban neighborhoods from which converts came was washed away in this bucolic rendition of a home for addicts. No more than five miles from the town center, the small compound nonetheless evoked the pilgrimage of prophets into the wilderness, its elevation conjured Moses on the mountain. The gates might have referenced New Jerusalem had the twelve-foot iron fence that enclosed it not been topped with barbed wire, as much to keep residents in as unwanted visitors out.
FIGURE 5. Gate to exit Restoration House. The sign reads, “Stop, think: Christ loves you.” Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 6. Faith Barber Shop at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 7. The basketball court at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
The guard led me through a glass door to Director Menocal’s desk. Stocky and gray-haired, Menocal was flanked by plaques from the city recognizing his service to the community, and from a seminary in San Juan for his scholarly achievements. His curriculum, he explained, involved three basic steps: Detoxification in the dormitories for six months, recuperation while living on program grounds for up to twelve months, and spiritual growth in the community after that. As residents reached the recuperation stage they got weekend passes to leave the compound. They attended culto, or religious services, Bible classes, and were assigned tasks such as cleaning or cooking. They also learned potential occupations such as frame making, lamination, and barbering.
In the last phase, that of spiritual growth, some took university courses or got married to the women with whom they’d been living before treatment. Menocal pointed to wedding photos of program graduates on his desk. Success, he told me, is that the residents work, attend school, have a family and children, and that they are a Christian presence in their community.
Twenty-eight years prior, Menocal himself was a heroin user, living on the streets of San Juan. He went to prison and was rehabilitated in Silo, one of the original evangelical addiction treatment programs in Puerto Rico. He found the Lord there, and his calling in life; he graduated from seminary in Bayamón, then came to the South side of the island to found Restoration House with the help of local Pentecostal and Baptist churches, as well as a grant from the mayor. He was now a professional administrator, and some on his staff had state certification in counseling, social work, and nursing. For him, though, it was significant that he had been addicted.
There are so many churches in the South of Puerto Rico, but few rehabilitation programs. It’s hard work. You have to have had the experience (of addiction) and feel it in your heart.1
Menocal pulled over a staff member, Juan, a round man with a round face and a closely cut greying afro. “This one is a university student,” Menocal said with a grin. “You have a lot in common.” Juan led me across the compound to a room with plastic flowers framing the doorway and a metal desk in the center. The moist air weighed down on us.
He launched into testimonio (testimony) with no further prompting: this was his third time at Restoration House. The first time he came from jail. His mother was Catholic, and the Catholics let you smoke and drink, they don’t teach that God is against that. Then he heard who Jesus was. Holding up a cup, Juan explained “I was like an empty glass. If you want to change, you have to do it inside,” pointing inside the cup. “When I came, I cried for three days, I didn’t know why. I heard ‘Who wants Jesus? He’ll change your life.’ I said ‘Me!’ ”
Juan saw the events of his conversion as auspicious.
Why three days the first time? Because Jesus rose in three days! . . . I was in the program three days, closed my eyes, woke up on the floor. I wanted [Jesus] from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to talk with God. I read the Bible two times in three years. I learn so much.
Juan explained that what he and the other men who come to the program need is love. When he converted, he asked for God’s love, but did not know he had it until he physically felt God’s presence: “One day I asked Him to raise me. [He] took me by hand and (lifted) me, like a drug, then I said God is real.”
God began to use Juan, to grant him powers to see and talk with spirits. When he first came to the program, someone was selling drugs inside the program. He prayed in a chain with a group of men through the night, each man taking a one-hour shift to lead prayer. With his eyes closed, he saw demons inside the program’s walls. Channeling the Holy Spirit, he called them out and exorcised them.
Since then, Juan had been working with new recruits who were en frio (quitting “cold turkey”), and suffering through withdrawal with chills, aching bone pain, and insomnia. He saw how God was using him with them; when he laid his hand on their foreheads their withdrawal symptoms disappeared.
The first time he graduated from the program, Juan initially did well. “I went home, went to church every day. [I said] ‘God, I want to study.’ ” God answered this prayer, and Juan enrolled in the Inter-American University. “I had [high grades] in the University, I had money. Why? Because I was praying every day. If not I’d lose everything.”
Juan continued to guide others as he had in Restoration House: “I worked as a tutor for the handicapped. I liked it so much. I had to explain the sky and constellations to a ciega (blind person) using a pen.”
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