Former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared his unique journey to finding faith in God. Speaking to former ESPN commentator Sage Steele, Kennedy explained how the lows of addiction and a series of synchronicities drove him to believe in something greater than himself.
RFK Jr. found himself embroiled in a troubled childhood when his father was assassinated in 1968 when he was 14. Kennedy would then battle heroin addiction for the next 14 years during the most formative period of his life until he was 28. However, when he picked up a book from Carl Jung, RFK Jr.’s eyes were opened to the realities of God.
“Within a year after my dad’s death, I was addicted to heroin. I was addicted for 14 years. I went when I was 28 years old, and during that period when I was in early recovery, is when all of these things started to make sense to me,” he said. “My Catholic upbringing, all of this confluence of philosophy and theology and self-examination and pain that you go through, we grow through pain.”
RFK Jr. also noted that enduring and overcoming pain serves as a catalyst for deepening one’s faith. “Pain is ultimately the touchstone of spiritual growth,” she said. In light of this, he explained that addicts are given a unique perspective on life if they overcome their habits. “And addicts have a unique opportunity for redemption because they’ve been to hell. It destroys your life and it destroys your relationships, and it hurts everybody that you love, and it makes you into a liar whenever you’re living against conscience, which you’re doing, if you’re addicted, you better push God over the periphery of your horizons others, there is, you know, a complete disconnection.”
He further explained, “I feel like I was like a one-dimensional human being, you know, that was a collection of appetites that needed to be fed all the time, and that becomes a full-time job. When I finally got this over, I came in, you know, my life wrecked, and I came into my knees, and I made the decision, I knew I needed a spiritual realignment.”
Kennedy recounted how reading a book by the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung completely changed his life. “And then I picked up this book by Carl Jung called synchronicity. It was a kind of synchronicity that it was sitting on a table,” he said. “And synchronicity is a coincidence. It’s like one of those things that happens all about when we start noticing now that happens more often.”
“And Jung saw those as interventions by God, who would reach through the universe and break all of his own rules, the rules of mathematics, particular percentages of chance ahead of time and space would reach through and do these little things to touch us on their shoulder and kind of say, you know, I’m here. You’re looking at a miracle,” Kennedy continued.
Furthermore, RFK Jr. explained that when he read Jung’s testimony that his patients who believed in God had miraculous recoveries, he was motivated to believe in God in the midst of his struggle to overcome drug addiction. While he didn’t acknowledge Jesus Christ or Christian doctrine, Kennedy said he employed a “fake it til you make it” mentality in believing in God.
“And then I’m confronted with a dilemma of, how do you start believing in something that you can’t see or smell or touch or taste or hear or acquire with your senses? And young solves that problem by saying, fake it. He make it, act as if. And he said, the faith will proceed, the evidence that there will be evidence that will be overwhelming,” he said.
“So I’m just gonna start pretending there’s God up there, that he’s looking at me all the time, and that life is kind of a test, and that, you know, we’re supposed to do the right thing, and I’m supposed to behave myself, even when I don’t have an audience, so even when nobody’s watching me,” he said.
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