Addiction
Nine years ago this month, the fifth member of our family was born. Her name is Daisy and she is the most beautiful golden retriever in the world! Daisy has an incredibly sweet temperament and melts everyone’s heart. In dog years, she is 63! Now, you would think a 63 year old would have things figured out. Right? Most of her vices would be under control, she would be perfectly behaved and completely understanding how to act in the best interest of herself and others. You would think so but in fact, Daisy has a fatal flaw. She loves to eat.
I’m sure none of us can relate to this flaw. And those of you who are 63 and beyond probably have complete control over your appetites. To be honest, this is what I expect of a mature lady like Daisy. However, as I was working on this sermon the other day, I heard rustling around in the upstairs bedroom and went up there to find her in my daughter’s garbage can, trying to find a few morsels left behind. In her excitement, she had closed the bedroom door and was now stuck in the bedroom. When I opened the door, she looked at me with hardly any remorse and with that wild delirious glance that she had gotten away with something perfectly sinfully delicious!
For nine years, we have gone through the cycle of counter surfing, a penchant for dirty socks, a few chocolate-induced trips to the veterinarian, lots of reprimanding but Daisy still is guided by her stomach.
It’s hard to get very mad at her when I am well aware that I also love to eat and there have been those late afternoons when I’m working in my office and the church cookies are just too hard to resist despite the consequences to my hips and my energy level. Hm. Daisy and I may have more in common than I’d like to admit.
I’m sure no one else can relate.
Well, maybe the Apostle Paul.
Listen to this from Romans 7, verses 15-24…
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
There is hope here at the end going into chapter 8:
Rom. 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
So, all week I’ve been hearing, “Wow, you’re speaking on addiction on Sunday. Good luck with that!” So, here we go…
Addiction has become a part of our worldview in American culture. We talk openly about addictions of all sorts. We talk regularly about all sorts of addictions: to alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, gambling, food.
In church basements all around the world, including our own, people meet regularly to get support and help for their addictions. They find community and companionship and the strength to face their struggles from each other. Alcoholics Anonymous and all of its off shoots have revolutionized the understanding and treatment for addiction and have given millions of people hope and freedom since it began in the 1940’s with two men who found that in their friendship and in their reliance on God, they were finally able to break the devastating cycle of alcohol abuse in their lives.
But it’s so easy to leave our understanding of addiction at the externals… drugs, alcohol, food…
We usually think of addiction as something bodily, something we do, an externalized overuse. Addiction is only about what we do, not who we are. And so for those of us who don’t struggle in that way, addiction is about those people in the basements of the church or on the street corners, not about us.
In Western Christianity, we have separated our body from our soul. We have made good religion mean good behavior. So, as long as you’ve got it together, show up to church fairly regularly, and don’t drink too much, dance too inappropriately or go with girls who do, you’re doing pretty well.
Two weeks ago, I was at a conference with Richard Rohr and he reminded us that Jesus talked a lot more about sins of the heart than sins of the flesh. Jesus didn’t think it was good behavior that was at the heart of a godly life or even just a good life. He and the early Christian tradition were concerned with the condition of our hearts… the early Christians called them our passions – envy, anger, lust, sloth – the tilt of the heart to anything that blocks us from experiencing union with God.
Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
We are made for love – for complete union with God. What breaks God’s heart in the story of Eden is not disobedience but that shame and distance has entered the relationship. It breaks God’s heart that Adam and Eve attached their happiness to an apple instead of Divine Love.
So Jesus says, it is out of the heart that our actions come and he set his intention on the internal life, on restoring that connection that we are made for, rather than checklists of behavior.
Paul’s dilemma is our dilemma – we want more than anything to know love and be love but we act against love so often.
Most of us were brought up with a religion that set out a code. Sin was about our wrong choices and our wrong actions. And yes, of course, we all make bad choices. But it is so much bigger than that. We are all born into an imperfect world, born into imperfect families where we can’t find that love and that connection that we are looking for. It seems to be lost in a world that doesn’t work the way we always want it to. So we start to look other places. We don’t get the love we desperately need and so we find easier ways to fill that longing: pride, cheap intimacy, anger, being in control, trying to acquire a much knowledge as we can, perfectionism, gaining more possessions, getting as many temporary hits of adrenaline of pleasure that we can, being right, judging others.
As many people as are in this world are as many ways as there are of seeking to fulfill that longing for love.
This is why we offer regular opportunities to explore the Enneagram in this community. The Enneagram is an ancient way of looking at different ways of being in the world. Unlike many other “typing tools, it’s purpose is not to put people in a box or even just for the fun of learning more about ourselves. It is just one very effective tool for helping us to notice what our addictions and attachments are. Some of us get blocked primarily by pride, others by envy, others by fear and when we know what trips us up, we can see it coming, and begin to let go.
These strategies for fulfillment become, in Buddhist terms, our attachments. In the language of recovery, our addictions. In the language of Paul, our sin. But it is all the same thing – it’s anything that blocks us from love. Ironically, we go seeking love in the very places that distance us from love and we become slaves to those inner patterns of being.
It’s actually a neurological reality. The more we think a certain way or perform a certain action, the deeper the grooves in our brain toward that way of being. It becomes a habit and so after awhile, we hardly know how to act any different – it’s just the way we are.
Even when we’re aware of it, we don’t always want to change because we quite honestly enjoy many of our addictions. They have worked to give us pleasure for a long time.
“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
Addiction looks different and yet it has the same root. May says, “Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness.”
So whatever does that in you – and it’s in you, not outside of you. That is your addiction.
The Apostle Paul was addicted, I’m addicted, you’re addicted. We are all spiritually powerless against these attachments in our life that sidetrack us from love. We can’t save ourselves.
Yet the mystery is that it is in our very inability to find an escape hatch that we find grace.
“The experience of powerlessness is where we all must begin.” Richard Rohr
One of my favorite writers of the last 50 years is the Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen. An incredibly tender soul, Henri was a gifted teacher, writer and spiritual director who achieved great success in his life as a professor at Yale and Harvard and a well-know author. Henri also suffered from sometimes debilitating depression and acute loneliness. His dissatisfaction led him finally to live at the L’Arche center in Canada. This well-known man who was addicted to the accolades of his success found his addiction to praise and appreciation remedied by his assignment to a young man with severe mental and physical disabilities named Adam. Adam didn’t care about Henri’s books. He didn’t care that Henri was a magnetic personality. He didn’t hang on any of Henri’s words. But Adam needed to be fed. He needed help with his bodily functions. He needed someone to make sure he didn’t hurt himself when he had a seizure. And Henri was assigned to be that person. Henri’s relationship with Adam broke him and healed him. He could not love Adam perfectly but he stuck around anyways, facing his addictions to success, admiration and relational intimacy with a person who couldn’t give him any of that and yet gave him so much more – the gift of presence. It was there that Henri found the love of God after a lifetime of searching for it in church and in meaningful relationships. His loneliness never went away, but he found grace anyways. God came to him in his vulnerability.
“The mystery of our faith is that we get closest to God when we are wiling to be vulnerable, when we are willing to say, “I need somebody else” and when we show we don’t have it all together.”
We live with our vulnerability. We live with our addiction. We live with our brokenness.
God has not promised perfection but God does offer wholeness, which requires honest vulnerability.
The Apostle Paul speaks of a thorn in the flesh – something that tormented and humbled him. Something that would not resolve. People have speculated what it could be – was it a physical struggle of some sort? A conflict with another person? I think it was likely what we all have – our particular habits and ways of being in this world that block us from love and yet are so engrained, we cannot escape them.
Paul resolves, “Therefore I am content with weaknesses and hardships… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” (1 Cor 12:10)
Here’s the good news: You’re not alone.
The human condition is one of doing what we don’t want to do – of feeling enslaved within our particular attachments and addictions. If someone tells you they are not this way, they aren’t telling you the truth or haven’t told themselves the truth.
Here’s some bad news: Change is not easy
WH Auden said, “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.”
True spirituality and honest prayer is about being willing to change and letting illusions die. It requires us to return to love over and over and over and over again. We have to accept our addictions as our work, our journey, just as an alcoholic must make a minute by minute, daily choice to turn over the control of their lives to a power higher than ourselves. The relapses of heart addictions are more frequent even than the most raging alcoholic and so we live in a constant cycle of grace. Falling into old patterns, seeing them, letting go and around we go. This is true prayer… changing our operating system.
As a wise woman in our church told me this week, “It’s what is hard that makes it great.” The struggle produces beauty.
And here’s the best news of all: Grace – undeserved and never-ending is for everyone.
Rom. 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
It takes a lifetime and beyond to live into that freedom – but God is with us, cheering us on and helping us find greatness in the struggle