By Milo Haskour –
The Police brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to God. The Police, as in, the music group.
“I picked up this book by Carl Jung called Synchronicity because there was an album by The Police that had just been released and it had the same name,” Kennedy explained on the Sage Steele Show. “I didn’t know what the word was. I picked it up out of curiosity.”
The thesis of Synchronicity is that sometimes “chance occurrences” are not chance at all but God’s intersection in time and space overriding the laws of nature.
At the time, Kennedy, who was in the early stages of recovery from heroin addiction, wasn’t sure about God’s existence. But the book and some chance occurrences in his life pushed him over the edge into faith.
Today, Kennedy is Donald Trump’s controversial pick for leading the Dept. of Health and Human Services. His admirers hope he’ll put in check the powerful pharmaceutical industry and outlaw harmful food additives. His detractors believe he is unfit for the role due to his embrace of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Kennedy was 14 when his father was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Jordanian man, after Kennedy’s father won the California primary in a run for president of the United States. The assassination was the first major incident of political violence in the US stemming from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Sirhan carried out the attack on the first anniversary of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War),
“We were all crying,” Kennedy remembered. Today, Kennedy doesn’t blame his father’s untimely death for his addiction. He says he had an addictive personality.
At 15, his first encounter with drugs came when he was invited to a party for his older brother who was going into the military. Kennedy was offered LSD and, in his own words, had a great trip for 12 hours.
Afterward, he was walking home, fearful of the punishment his mother would mete out for having broken curfew. But before he made it home, he saw some guys in the woods and went over and asked them what they were doing. They were taking the drug crystal meth (methamphetamine) and offered some to Kennedy.
Later, Kennedy’s drug of choice became heroin.
“The most demoralizing feature of addiction was my incapacity to keep contract with myself,” he explained on a djvlad interview. “This compulsion was impervious to willpower. I would tell myself at 9:00 in the morning I’m never going to do that again and at 4:00 in the afternoon I’d be doing it.”
Ironically, not everything spiraled down with his drug use. His grades improved, he says. Without drugs, he was hyperactive in class and couldn’t concentrate. He only wanted to be in the woods, hunting and fishing.
Methamphetamine can cause a temporary boost in alertness, energy, and focus by increasing dopamine levels in the brain. But long term the drug leads to severe cognitive decline, memory loss, paranoia, and psychosis. Chronic use damages dopamine receptors, making it harder to experience motivation or pleasure naturally.
Methamphetamine and heroin are two of the most addictive drugs, causing a rapid spiral into dependency and destructive behavior.
Had the short term positive effect of the drugs continued, he says he would probably still be taking them today. But it didn’t. The longer he took drugs, the darker his world became, the smaller the circle of friends.
“Addicts have been to Hell. It destroys your life, it destroys your relationships, it hurts everybody that you love, and it makes you into a liar,” Kennedy says. “If you’re addicted, you push God over the periphery of your horizon. There is a complete disconnection. I was a one-dimensional human being. I was a collection of appetites that needed to be fed all the time and that becomes a full-time job.”
Kennedy, even though he belonged to a powerful political family, says he didn’t know how to get help. He kept his addiction a secret because he didn’t want to embarrass his family.
He decided to pursue sobriety alone. He traveled to a friend’s cabin in the mountains and rode a motorcycle for days in an attempt to shake the addiction.
On the way to the cabin, he bought his last hit. Someone saw him using drugs in the airport bathroom in Rapid City, South Dakota, notified police, and he was taken into custody.
His arrest and subsequent conviction of felony possession of heroin exploded in the news.
The public shame turned out to be a good thing, however. It gave him the freedom to be open and honest in the 12-step group that was mandated as part of his sentence.
At 28, he was desperate to overcome his addiction.
During the 12-step program, he read the book Synchronicity, wherein Jung said if one pretends they believe in God, then the evidence will flood in and prove that there is a God.
Jung did not hold traditional Christian beliefs. He did not deny the existence of God, but he approached the concept from a psychological and symbolic perspective. He saw God as a deep, inner experience of the psyche, influencing human consciousness, morality, and spiritual life.
When asked if he believed in God, Jung famously replied: “I don’t believe—I know.”
Influenced by Jung, Kennedy made a leap of faith. “I made an intellectual decision: I’m going to start believing in God,” he says.
Kennedy decided to look for a synchronicity, interpreted by Kennedy as an intervention of God to override normal laws of chance. The same day he made the decision, the rehab group was playing volleyball, and someone hit the ball high and hard.
“That ball’s going to get hit by a Mack truck,” Kennedy said loudly for all to hear.
By chance, it bounced on top of the net’s post and rebounded high into the air, headed for a chain link fence. It vaulted off the top and tipped over to the other side. The ball rolled down an embankment 40 yards and out on the street, where an 18-wheeler flattened it.
“How did you know?” everyone asked, their jaws dropped.
Kennedy himself was mystified. He hadn’t prophesied. He had only spoken whimsically. But he was baffled just like everybody else. But he had just finished Synchronicity and was looking for God to perform an improbable action, something just like this. He pondered it.
“I can either just dismiss that as a weird coincidence,” he says. “Or I can just say that this is God’s way of talking to me and I’m going to accept that and I’m going to accept the beauty of it.”
He had just embarked on trying to believe in God. Now God was proving himself to Kennedy.
Life changed overnight. Now every decision, no matter how insignificant, had moral implications. Everything was either right or wrong – even down to getting out of bed as soon as the alarm sounds, making your bed, putting the shopping cart away, he says.
The introduction of morality into every decision was life-transforming. If he made the right decision, it kept him on the right path. It kept him humble and full of gratitude.
One day he was running to catch a plane. He threw a gum wrapper toward a trash can but saw that it bounced out and fell on the floor.
The right thing was to pause, pick it up and put it back in. But because he was late, he ran on.
Forty yards later, he stopped. He walked back, picked up the wrapper and put it in the trash. It was more important to do the right thing always.
Kennedy made his flight anyway.
Since his dad raised him enjoying the great outdoors, Kennedy became an environmentalist lawyer, suing companies that polluted rivers and air. He fought to clean up the Hudson River.
Kennedy went through a painful divorce in 2010 from his second wife, Mary Richardson. His wife, he says, was deteriorating in mental health and had a history with drug and alcohol abuse. There were allegations of multiple affairs, and even his friends called him a “lifelong philanderer,” according to The New Yorker.
Richardson committed suicide four days after he filed for divorce, Before her death, she had apparently discovered Kennedy’s personal journal recording affairs with several dozen women.
Kennedy says the writings in his journal were his Step 5 of his recovery, the owning up honestly and courageously to his mistakes. His wife desperately wanted to see these recovery journals, which he kept locked into a safe, and she finally figured out how to access them. Kennedy disclosed that Richardson passed the journal along “to her sisters with instructions that, if anything happened to her, [it should be] published in the press,” according to a report by New York magazine.
In 2014, Kennedy married actress Cheryl Hines.
In his 40s, Kennedy developed adductor spasmodic dysphonia, an organic voice disorder that causes his voice to quiver and makes speech difficult. It is a form of involuntary movement affecting the larynx, related to dystonia.
“When I got sober in 1983, I had to surrender to my God at that point,” he says. “When the chips are down, God is very, very present for us, if we are willing to invite him into our lives and surrender to his will. Life starts getting good again.”
Kennedy is a Catholic. In 2005, journalist Michael Paulson called him “a deeply devout Catholic who attends daily Mass.” Kennedy considers Francis of Assisi his patron saint and a role model. In a 2005 interview with The Boston Globe, he said he was deeply inspired by Francis’s devotion to social justice, helping the poor, animal welfare, and environmentalism.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here
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About this writer: Milo Haskour studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near the San Fernando Valley.
