Recovery / Church
Back
A friend of mine remembers, even into her twenties, how her grandfather would sometimes visit unexpectedly. Yet as soon as he was sighted or known to be coming, the whole family rushed to hide the alcohol bottles, sometimes even having the kids hide them outside.
A very smart man, Ph.D. in physics, one of the key designers of the nuclear submarine, strong of body, but never sober for more than a couple of years. My friend remembers him even at 93, in the middle of the night, scabbling through the basement, desperately trying to find something to drink.
My friend's grandmother had raised her two girls largely alone, as the disorder of living with this man had been too stressful. Up and down, fantasy and disappointment, fury and shame, grief and guilt. So many of you in this room know stories like this; some of you have lived them, and may do so even now. Or perhaps we are on the edge, unable to relax or sleep without a little something to soothe us, calm us down, black us out sometimes. How many of us tiptoe around that proverbial elephant in the living room of denial, even when the creature has gone to sleep?
This sermon is not about alcoholism, but about the spiritual lessons for all of us from the recovery movements. There are other substances and behaviors that can be addictive, hooking parts of our good instincts in compulsive and destructive ways. (Gambling, food, shopping, sexual addictions, etc.) (Some also speak of cultural addictions, to cheap energy, violence-based views of justice, and the isolation, insecurity and inequality that contribute to higher and higher levels of addiction). However much those applications of the concept work, the 12 step movements, I will maintain below, are very close to one form of the Christian spiritual journey. Why pick the recovery movement as one of the models for all of us to learn from?
The four Advent sermons each start with an R: recovery, re-discovery, resistance, and re-awakening (also a metaphor much used in recovery work). Back in September, I was planning the teaching of The Confession of 1967 as a way for us to put our faith in modern language. That Confession, or declaration of faith, is based on the great text from II Corinthians 5: 19, that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself..." Reconciliation, redemption, restoration, regeneration, renewal, repentance... so many more common "Re" words reward and refresh us in worship. Yet for us to grow spiritually we need to tell our stories in our own words. So recovery may not be the root metaphor for your journey, but I hope it will help you recognize and recount how God's grace has been active in you.
Once I had settled on recovery as the theme, I tried to focus on the key spiritual problem for which the recovery movement provided the cure. I believed that problem was emptiness, the feeling of having nothing inside and hence a desire to drink or otherwise numb oneself of this inner insufficiency. Hence this meditation on Communion Sunday, when we do eat and drink-in the fullness of God's presence. (Even other addictions may be driven partly by emptiness; Nancy Mairs-in an illustration unused-speaks of the need for excitement and passion that led her to infidelities even at the cost of "moral vacuousness," or emptiness: Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal (Boston: Beacon, 1993), pp. 122-125).)
I am not now as certain that emptiness or even cosmic loneliness is the key problem. When you go to most meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (or AA), you get exposed to a prayer that has become the motto of AA. It was written in 1934 by Reinhold Niebuhr, the great 20th Century theologian who taught at Union Seminary here in New York, though he wrote it almost as a throw-away to go with a summer preaching gig for a small church in Heath, Massachusetts. The original prayer reads:
"Oh God, Give us serenity to accept what can not be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." (Now often paraphrased "the wisdom to know the difference").
This prayer is called the "serenity prayer." The thirst for something that is not nourishing is a kind of desperation, and the answer is serenity. Serenity, the positive content of sobriety, is a form of salvation.
From what conversation with God did Niebuhr compose that prayer? He himself was constantly busy. But his brother, also a fine theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, who taught at Yale, often suffered from depression. There is a situation that we can be sure they sought to change many a time, and perhaps their family's toughest work of acceptance.
A possible influence on Reinhold Niebuhr was Harry Emerson Fosdick, the pastor of the Riverside Church, right next door to Union Seminary. Fosdick was the pastor to John D. Rockefeller, and in the 1920's, after fundamentalists in the national Presbyterian denomination forced Fosdick to leave the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Rockefeller built Riverside (a short-lived Park Avenue pulpit wouldn't do). Fosdick and Rockefeller both had considerable influence on the early Alcoholics Anonymous movement, not so much with money, as with visibility and acceptability. A researcher friend of mine (who is also in recovery) tells me that Fosdick considered leaving the church at one point to do a contemporary version of First Century Christianity, focused on experience more than doctrine. But such a movement was already growing, forged in the desperate trials of people searching through medicine and religion for a cure for an incurable affliction, undefeatable addiction.
Fosdick saw serenity as part of one of three components provided by faith. In a 1934 sermon-perhaps heard by Niebuhr, "The High Uses of Serenity," he says, "all profound religion ministers to three basic human needs: the need of a great metaphysic, a philosophy of life to put meaning into living; the need of a great morality, principles of conduct, personal and social, to ennoble living; the need of a great mysticism, profound resources of interior power by which to live" (The Power to See It Through, (New York: Harper Bros., 1935, p. 132). So serenity is a practical form of mysticism for us all to share. Fosdick welcomed AA as a kindred (highly American) form of pragmatic, liberal evangelical Christianity, so pragmatic that it did not need to keep the traditional names. (Fosdick also believed that "an indispensable element of great art is serenity," that such peace was essential to a happy home, and to the happiness of the individual, who otherwise ran constantly from sensation to sensation, pulling inner fire alarms...).
Because this is a communion meditation, I can only nod to the many Christian elements in the recovery movement by focusing on the 12 steps themselves. I take them in their original form as drafted by Bill W. in 1939. (These are printed in the history of AA called, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous by Ernst Kurtz (Center City, MN.: Hazelden, 1979; expanded edition, 1991). Kurtz carefully documents the influences of Carl Jung, who urged a "deflation in depth," priests like Fr. Edward Dowling, S.J., who compared the steps to St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, and the fundamental model of sharing personal experiences used by the evangelical Oxford Group, founded by Lutheran campus chaplain Frank Buchman early in the 20th Century).
As Bill W. drafted them, before much of the Christian language was translated:
"Half measures will avail you nothing. You stand at the turning-point. Throw yourself under God's protection and care with complete abandon.
Now we think you can take it! Here are the steps we took-our program of recovery:
(1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.
(2) Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.
(3) Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God.
(4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
(5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
(6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
(7) Humbly on our knees asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
(8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
(9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
(10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
(11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.
(12) Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs." (Not God, p. 70).
In comments on those twelve, the following points:
That in my experience, the most heart-breaking part of recovery is the facing of what damage has been done, what relationships and opportunities have been lost. It is so hard to ask for true forgiveness-that is, in the human and divine dimensions.
That the element of surrender of the will in faith or hope is the core of repentance, but it is also finding sanity. (there may never be objectively rational reasons for choosing salvation, but once chosen, faith makes sense of life and integrates experience).
That confession and self-examination go together, and the role of sponsors or mentors-which the mainline churches have lost. Do our new members and communicants have sponsors assigned? (would you volunteer for such a guiding role?)
That our character is shaped by that which we love, so that changing our allegiance and practice will change our character (this is big!) How much do any of us really want to change those defects we love? Can we do that without communities or groups of great trust?
The role of the community is essential-though these original 12 steps may not say it fully. You have got to go to the meetings, receive the good word from others. How many of us come to church with that same sense of solidarity and dedication?
Another friend speaks of two things that the recovery community does better than most congregations, where we feel too much the need to be dressed up and buttoned down. His recovery group provides "non-judgmental acceptance" and "non-judgmental accountability." Certainly it is hard for any of us to accept criticism and accept the authority of anyone else, even those who have clearly struggled successfully far longer than we have. But the accountability is to what we need to be healed and to survive. The bottom-line is very clear. Do this and you will live.
The purpose of all those moral inventories is systematic ego deflation. It may be that AA and the other recovery movements' foci are too narrow, too self-pre-occupied. But this basic work is personal and very hard. We in the mainline churches may have a fuller picture of salvation, but how intense is our personal devotion to it? And how much can and do we share our good news with others? There clearly is a missionary element in recovery groups-so they are not self-pre-occupied, even if focused on one aspect of our human broken-ness and dream of mastery. And that missionary side is humble in its outreach, anonymous and never claiming to be fully recovered.
Serenity is also a way to deal with the constant possibility of death and self-destruction that can begin with a single sip of alcohol or other drug. When we serve both wine and grape juice on that communion table, we acknowledge the closeness of death and life, the urgency of choice, the powers greater than ourselves that can swallow us up-or sustain us in eternal life. Amen.
Back