Actor Dennis Quaid is revealing more about his past struggles with addiction and how he found his Christian faith. In an exclusive with People Magazine, the 69-year-old recounted what he called “his white light experience” when he checked himself into rehab, or what he referred to as “cocaine school.”
“I remember going home and having kind of a white light experience that I saw myself either dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn’t want that,” he said.
“I was in a band,” he adds, “and we got a record gig… They broke up the night they got it, and they broke up because of me because I was not reliable,” Quaid noted.
A native of Houston, Texas, the actor told People that what ultimately saved him from himself was returning to his Christian roots.
Addiction forces people “to fill a hole inside us,” Quaid explained. “When you’re done with the addiction, you need something to fill that hole, something that really works, right?”
Recently, Quaid released his debut album of “spiritual songs I grew up with in church” titled Fallen: A Gospel Record For Sinners.
After God helped him turn his life around, the actor also turned away from movies with unbiblical content. He has since starred in faith-based films like I Can Only Imagine, which was released in 2018. He wrote the single, On My Way to Heaven in 1990, and the song was featured on the film’s soundtrack.
Billy Ray Cyrus joins Quaid on the new song, Fallen. Tanya Tucker and Kris Kristofferson are also featured on a new version of On My Way to Heaven.
He grew up attending church in Texas and was baptized, along with his brother, when they were kids. But Quaid said he didn’t really start searching for God and reading the Bible until his 20s.
“I’ve always been spiritual. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, became disillusioned with it as a teenager. I turned to Eastern religions and philosophies,” Quaid told the Chicago Sun-Times.
“I read the Bible twice, read the Koran, went to India nine times. Along the way, I came back to Christianity, and well, finding that it’s really the same all throughout the world,” he added. “People are people with the same sort of yearnings. We’re all spiritual beings whether we know it or not. So that’s what I speak to, one’s relationship with God or non-relationship with God.”
Talking with People about the songs on his new album, Quaid said, “The songs are self-reflective and self-examining, not churchy. All of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.”
Quaid leveled with People about his struggles with addiction but said he finally realized the “joy of life” that everyone is looking for is a “relationship with God.”
“It’s a struggle,” he told the outlet. “We’re all looking for the joy of life, and drugs give that to you, and alcohol and whatever it is for anybody give that to you really quick. Then they’re fun and then they’re fun with problems, and then they’re just problems after a while. That’s really what we’re looking for, the joy of life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have. It’s at the bottom of it, the joy of being alive.”
Achieving sobriety, he adds, “was about getting back to that.”