Understanding and Addiction
"Understanding will not deliver us from addiction, but it will, I hope, help us appreciate grace."
--Gerald May, Addiction and Grace, p. 4
Addiction and Grace
I am reading Addiction and Grace by Gerald May, a leading Christian psychologist who passed away recently.
Some of these quotes are just too good not to share. So I'm going to post them... hope they provoke some good thought.
"I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being...
"We are all addicts in every sense of the word. Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies. They enslave us with chains that are of our own making, yet paradoxically are virtually beyond our control.
"Addiction also makes idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another...
"Yet still, in another paradox, our addictions can lead us to a deep appreciation of grace. They can bring us to our knees."
Jesus is My Lover, #1
I have gotten a lot of feedback from my sermon on Revelation 19. It seems like God gave words to share that a lot of people needed to hear and process. Me too. Understanding (and feeling!) the passionate heart of Jesus for us is so important and so difficult. So I'm going to keep processing it here with you all. I want to be intentional about giving this attention regularly, because it seems we all need it quite a bit. To start, I want to share a verse from Song of Solomon that I am turning into a breath prayer. Breath Prayer We generally think of prayer as a way to ask God for things that we desire or need. Or, perhaps, a way to express our hearts to Him. While these are both certainly important components of a prayerful life, I think we need a fuller definition of prayer. Simone Weil wrote that prayer is essentially paying attention to God. I think this comes closer to the mark. To attend to something means that we look on it, gaze on it, with our full energy and concentration, in order to see it as it really is. A good student will attend to the problem set before her—she will consider it carefully until she sees it clearly, rather than rushing forward and bungling it. Prayer, then, is at least in part an effort to see and know God for who He is, rather than reducing Him to the size of our preconceptions. Prayerful attention to God most certainly will overflow into praise, adoration, as well as asking for His help. But it will also involve listening, waiting, beholding Him. Breath Prayer is one form of prayer that focuses especially on waiting for the presence of God, listening to His words. In this prayer, we choose a short sentence, and repeat it over and over again with the rhythm of our breath. For example: "Abba / I belong to you." "Daddy / let me feel your love." "I am yours / save me." "You are worthy / of my praise." We select the sentence based on what we need at the moment, as best we can tell. Then we find a quiet place to sit in God's presence, or go for a walk, and focus on the words with every breath. After 10-15 minutes, I find that the prayer becomes a quiet background and I am ready to move on to whatever I need to do with my day. But as often as I can, I return my focus to the words of the prayer. In fact I often find myself repeating them quietly without realizing I was doing so. Breath prayer reminds me of God's continual presence, that He is closer than my breath and just as necessary. It also allows truth to shape my mind, rather than lies—I find it easier to resist condemnation or temptation when I have been meditating on truth all day. I am my Beloved's Here, then, is the breath prayer I am drawing from Song of Solomon: "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me." (7:10) The church has long read Song of Solomon as, at least in part, representative of Christ and His Bride's love for one another. Here the Beloved sings that she belongs to her Beloved, and relishes the fact that His desire is for her. This is as good a place to start as any. Today (and as often as I can in the near future) I am going to pray these words, again and again: "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me.". Hard to feel? Yes. Hard to believe? Yes. But it is true. Nothing is more true. So I'm going to say it again and again, and underneath those words the prayer: Let me feel it. Let me know it. Let us all feel it, so deeply that everything in our lives finds its proper place. My prayers are with you all today, brothers and sisters, and in a special way with those who are hurting to feel God's love. You are your beloved's. And his passionate, matchless desire is for you.
Cognitive Therapy & Community
I suspect the main shortcoming of cognitive therapy—the attempt to identify and replace false, harmful stories about ourselves and our lives with truth—is that it mostly is done independantly. I try to tell myself what is true, when I find myself believing lies.
But most—if not all—of the lies we believe are about ourselves as relational beings. And so they must be replaced, not with an abstract idea, but a concrete experience of love. I cannot just tell myself the truth. I need my community to tell me who I am. This is why love is central to the church. Not sentimentality, but speaking the Gospel to one another clearly. When I have forgotten who I am in Christ, I cannot force myself to believe a Bible verse. Not usually. Nor, I think, does God prefer such autonomous devotion. Instead, I need other Christians to look me in the eye and speak grace. I need them to remind me of the Cross and resurrection life, of my new identity as Beloved. They speak truth, and that is important—but with the speaking is the very experience of what is being spoken. This is also why we must have chrurches where it is safe to struggle. If I cannot be honest about my fears and failures, my community can never speak the truth and restore me gently. They can never help me replace lies with truth if I must wear a mask in order to be accepted. But a community where grace is the rule opens space for tremendous healing. Even in the knowledge that I can speak honestly about failure and doubt, I find the beginning of belief that I truly am accepted and welcomed by God.
On Self and Soul
"In our current culture, 'soul' has given way to 'self' as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. Self is the soul minus God. Self is what is left of soul with all the transcendence and intimacy squeezed out, the self with little or no reference to God (transcendence) or others (intimacy)."
—Eugene Peterson, "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places"
There is a startling shift in the way we see ourselves in relation to the world at the end of the medieval age. It is a complex process which writers like Charles Taylor have tried to trace (his magisterial "Sources of the Self" is a sprawling work with fingers working into every corner of Western civilization). However it came about, "soul" gave way to "self." And there is much more in that shift than a simple secularization, a step away from God.
As medieval philosophy gave way to Enlightenment thought, the individual human agent became the center of all meaning. The self—an isolated subject, a single mind looking out through the tunnel of his senses—gathered perceptions, made sense of them, constructed in his mind an image of the world, etc. He assigned words to the images, gave them meaning by identifying them.
It did not take long for an ugly problem to raise its head: how could the self ever be sure that he was seeing what was really there? The fact that we can make mistakes, be deceived, haunts modern philosophy. If we are selves—radically individual, alone in our minds looking out on a world that is entirely other—how can we "check" what we are perceiving with what is really there?
This gives rise to a pile of hypothetical situations which the self can't handle. What if you are, in fact, a brain in a vat, being stimulated by electrodes? What if this is, actually, the Matrix? A question which makes sophomore philosophy students wild with excitement.
The problem with the self is solipsism—the chance that you might, in fact, be the only real person, or at least you can never actually connect with others. You are radically, entirely, alone. Because you can never step out of your "self" to check, to know, that any one is really there at all.
The fact that this problem comes up is not a fault of our human existence. It is a signpost that we have articulate our experience badly. "Self" does not do the job. Rule one in philosophy: when your abstract hypothesis forces you to make silly conclusions that contradict everything you knew before you started doing philosophy, ditch the hypothesis. Start over.
"Soul," as Eugene Peterson points out, neatly sidesteps the problem of solipsism. "Our core identity comes out as persons-in-relationship... 'Soul is a word reverberating with relationships: God-relationships, human-relationships, earth-relationships."
To reclaim the term "soul" is not just to inject God back into our discourse. It is a sensible move, philosophically speaking. One cannot speak of "soul" without overtones of relationship to something Other than the self—something outside, which cannot be reduced away. A soul cannot be alone; its very breath is given by God.
I want to point out that the shift between "soul" and "self" is not neutral; it is morally charged. To be a "self" is an assertion of radical independence and freedom. The self is defined in contradistinction to an Other who would try to limit it; the self is the locus of Rights, and must be defended. It is inevitable that the self with eventually claim the ability to define what is right and what is wrong.
To be a "soul" is to admit, from the start, dependence. A soul receives life from the outside, and with it a responsibility. Souls must come to understand what has been given them and their place in a greater whole. They must accept the bounds drawn for them, because relationship always includes limitation. To be in relationship in, inescapably, to yield and let go of control.
There is something attractive to us in "selfhood"—that radical freedom and Right and independence. But it comes with a cost. The self can never enter true relationships; it remains forever bounded from the Other, protecting its precious freedom.
To be a soul comes at the price of self-definition and independence; but one gains intimacy, knowing and being known, harmonious engagement with the Other.
Christmas is here—still
I stepped into one of our (many) local Starbucks today to enjoy a cup of coffee courtesy of my family. Giftcards for coffee are always a winner with me. It took me a moment to recognize why it looked sparse inside the cafe; after a pause I realized that nary a Christmas decoration remained to be seen.
Now, given that their religiously-neutral red-and-white snowy winterscapes had been up since Halloween, I understand. And anyway, this week America lies sprawling in the wake of buyer's remorse, sugar- headaches and the melancholy that accompanies getting your cake, eating it, and feeling rather ill afterwards. (My friend Steve commented today, "All I want to eat is fruit. No more chocolate!") All the same, as far as the church calendar is concerned, Christmas is only started. For centuries, Christmas was a season. Lasting 12 days, from the Feast of the Nativity on the 25th (Christ's mass), until Epiphany on the 6th of January, the church recognized that meditating on the incarnation was too big a job for one day. Advent prepared us, turning our longing toward the presence of God—and now is the season to rejoice! Emmanuel—God with us—has indeed come. So this year I am celebrating still. My advent wreath is lit each night (the first candle is getting perilously low), the tree is glittering in the window and I am unabashedly playing my Christmas music in the car. But more: I am trying to ponder the mystery of the entrance of God into this world as one of us. Luke tells us of Mary's quiet pondering, treasuring up all the wonder surrounding the birth of her Son and meditating on them within her heart. She is our guide in this season—a time to continue on in quiet, rapt wonder of our God.
Advent, Sin and Attention
Most forms of Christian practice devolve, over time, into a system of sin management. What begins with passion for the felt presence of Jesus, shifts. Generally we become aware of how our sin pulls us into guilt and shame, and makes us lose the sense of closeness to God we had so enjoyed. So, with the primary intent of drawing close to God, we buckle down against our sinfulness. But our eyes are now on us, and the self (to use Plato's imagery) is a burning fire, bright and attractive and even magnetic. Once we attend to ourselves it is very difficult to pry ourselves away. We find ourselves infinitely interesting—even if self-absorption is also stifling and reductive. Eyes on self, our desire for Jesus wanes and wanes and we are left at last win only a terror of sin and enslaved to our need to be better than we are.
Advent is a season to break out of this cycle. We are reminded of the many, many texts in the New Testament that promise freedom from sin ONLY at the return of Christ. It is inevitable; but we are to wait patiently, even with groaning. (See Phil 1:6, Romans 8, 1 John 3:1-3, Colossians 3:1-4.) Essentially, Advent is a time to remember the other half of the Gospel —that Jesus is returning to restore and recreate and heal. And the effect of this, strangely, is to free us more from sin now. Because if our hope is certain that we are both forgiven AND made new, and that we await only the revealing of who we are NOW in Christ, then and only then can we get our eyes off ourselves. My sin or lack of it is no longer the issue. I am reconciled to God so that I can turn my eyes to Him, boldly and with joy—not so that I can leave them fixed on myself. And this means we are free to love. So long as we remain obsessed with self, our "love" is only a reflection of self. We will treasure those people and things that make us feel worthwhile. But if we are assured of God's love and presence—as only the full Gospel can assure us— then we are fully free to begin paying attention to the things around us. We can look attentively at God, at the creation, at others, with loving regard. It is a terrible shame when the Gospel is forgotten among Christians because it is then tha we become self-absorbed and ignore the needs around us; and our lives become as stuffy and stale as a room without windows or fresh air. The Gospel opens the door, airs out our lives with the Fresh breeze of the Spirit and love, draws back the curtains and lets us look outside. All because we need not be concerned with our selves. We are freed from the magnetic pull of self to the far greater pull toward God, who is not only a fire but a Sun.
Ben Barczi
Pastor of Spiritual Formation at First Baptist Church, SLO (www.fbcslo.org). Working on figuring out how a local church community can move toward a healthy, Gospel-centered rhythm of spiritual disciplines, community and missional presence. Sure that, whatever it looks like practically, the mechanism is "beholding the glory of the Lord."
