After living many years as a serious drug addict (amphetamine and hash), one night in the beginning of September I fell on my knees in my living room. I lit a light and prayed: God, if you are there, take me from this hell!

The morning after I did not think much about the night that had passed, but kept on as usual, hash as morning-drug, combined with amphetamine. As a rule I got too dizzy from only hash and I had to get my brains and the physical mechanisms working properly. These days I took drugs to be able to function as a physical entity — human being (conduct my bodily needs, eat talk, think etc.)

Fourteen days later the house where I was living was surrounded by policemen. The longest travel of my life started at that time and spot. I was captured and arrested, and shortly later taken by flight to Gotland to be locked in and crushed. After about one month, when the interrogations had ceased a little, I was lying in my cell and stared at the ceiling. I imagined myself seeing a cross covering the whole ceiling and I asked a guard for soap and a scrub brush. I thought that the cross was formed of dust or something like that. I thought that I could wipe it out… After a few failed attempts, it struck me…. my prayer a few weeks earlier… 

Certainly the hardships in this small society/prison were manifold. There were killers, violent robbers, narcotic criminals, rapists, etc. I had to work for half the day together with them in a vacuous atmosphere and spend the rest of the day in solitary confinement. But there was a presence of something bigger and mightier than I could imagine. The more I prayed or thought about my prayer half a year before, this presence started to fill the emptiness within and outside me.

In a way I was freer, locked in my cell. My spiritual journey started when I realized that the drugs had kept me prisoner and the reasons for my addiction were due to matters I had rushed through and was afraid of dealing with. I needed to look for the keys to my inner closed rooms, challenge my own fear, unlock room after room within me, go through them and try to illuminate them, let the light beam on the ghosts and make them disappear little by little - they are sensitive to light. Even though many years have passed since I was released from prison, my wandering in my own inner landscape is continuing. I am not fully free from my inner prison. 

The most dangerous thing you can do is to pray from your heart, maybe not so much about that Porsche or the million, but from an inner need or because of something that pushes you down, something that captures you… It really doesn’t happen only once, but all the time… something changes your whole situation for the better, into something you haven’t even been able to dream about.

This is the way it is for me. The hell I prayed to be released from is that within me which makes my life miserable, hard to live. Daily I get help to further clean my inner being.

My texts are all about my wandering, with my life at stake, with our Lord as a co-wanderer.

AD 2007
 
 

From Dawn to Dusk

(Text and Musik by Jouni Laukkanen)
  

On my journey between dawn and dusk           
I met faces I didn’t want to see                         
They were ugly, seemed like nothing to trust    
Painfully all of them TURNED out to be me     

My creator whispered, don’t hate what you see....

     The light still reflects, in my eyes,                
     My masks are gone, I’m without 
     Any disguise           

2001