AA and All of Us (by T)

This is our fifth post in our series on what the Church can learn from AA. Here are the links to our first, second, third and fourth posts. Our prior posts have looked at features of AA’s program that might have been a surprise to many: that it is a seemingly tailor-made response to the King-Jesus gospel; that AA is essentially in the spiritual (trans)formation business, which it pursues through a communally supported discipleship process; that it has, through the shape of its meetings, through the steps and the entire program, prioritized the sacrament of “one-another,” believing that God is most powerfully active and present in people, especially as they surrender to God and love one another.

[SMcK note: T’s posting of these Bible verses needs to be taken seriously; please don’t skip the Bible to read the comments. Let those verses soak in first — he makes a good case for showing how the Bible sees analogies to addiction in a variety of terms.]

But today’s post will finally go where most would expect when we ask the question of what the Church can learn from AA. Specifically, today I want to open up the topic of addiction. And I’d like to begin with a bold claim, but one that I believe is rooted in sound biblical theology and pastoral experience: we are all addicts. I’m not saying that we all use to be addicts, or that we all have the same attachments; but that we are all addicts. But rather than define addiction in a clinical sense, I’d like to look back at some teaching from the New Testament, and consider if these teachings hit on the spirit, if not the letter, of addiction (in all cases where emphasis appears, it is added):

• As I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. [from Philippians 3]
• Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. [from Colossians 3]
• Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. [from I John 3]
• Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this. What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away. [from I Corinthians 7]
• What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from the cravings that are at war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your evil desires. Adulteresses! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the world’s friend becomes God’s enemy. [from James 4]
• If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, they are conceited and understand nothing. They . . . have been robbed of the truth and think that godliness is a means to financial gain. But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. [from I Timothy 6]
• To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” [from John 8]
• For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace. [from Romans 6]
• We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.  So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. [from Romans 7]
• “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. [from I Corinthians 6]
• “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” [from Luke 9]

I think these verses (and more besides) describe the dynamics of addiction quite vividly. I see those dynamics working today in a thousand ways. We are so often ruled by our appetites and desires and attachments to various comforts—whether they center on how we are thought of by others, or on food, power, sex, or other pleasures. We check email, news feeds, and status updates religiously. We give our bodies an abundance of what they want, but often little of what they need. Or we, like Gollum, obsessively stroke our precious phone screens regularly, often first thing when we awake, or as our last act before sleep. And I haven’t even mentioned the growing addictions to substances, often legal or prescribed, that are defining and reducing more and more people’s existence, like rats in cages.

Escaping from fears or chasing pleasures makes us more harmful or absent to those around us, and the damage we cause makes us want to escape all the more. The cycle has us constantly on the run, sometimes more quickly downward than others. Many of us are partially “functional” addicts: we’ve learned how to tread water and get some of our duties done, but we are still hollowing out, as if afflicted by a steady growing cancer of the heart and soul. Has there been a time in which more people had more access to more stuff with which they could try to fill their lives? For my part, while I could (and have) spent entire days playing a video game, these days I tend to be more sophisticated and diversified in my idolatries. If I’m going to cheat on God or shirk my duties to my closest relations, I prefer a dozen passing flings with little games, articles and blogs (even Jesus Creed—Oh my!) than one intense romance. Keeping it light makes it easier to justify, and it takes no special circumstance to feel the pull to take a quick hiatus from my real life in God and others, as if it were possible to find deep rest and peace without a cross.

Some of the passages I did not include, but that bring even more light to these dynamics are the many passages that urge us to make our home in God, or to love him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, or talk of us loving Christ more than anything or anyone, even our own family or our own lives, let alone any possessions, or even those that urge us to find our rest in God alone. This may be the best way to persuade folks to follow Christ in the West: “Find a real rest in the only place it can be found, in Christ!” In light of the incalculable riches in Christ, Paul says, he has counted all things as loss, with the world’s substitutes as dead to him and them to him, so that he may fully lay hold of Christ.

This doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a great many things that God gives, but we need to be aware of how easy and natural it is for us to find our security in the house God gave than the God who gives it, and we need to embrace the truth that grabbing hold of Christ will require letting go, in some real and deep sense, of everything else. We cannot be (or stay) rooted in Christ’s love and simultaneously prioritize other comforts and pleasures, even those that are perfectly “lawful” or even given by God. As just one example, I was raised in a Christian home, church and school. And at school, I was taught more than once that lusting after one’s husband or wife was fine, but lust isn’t acceptable outside of marriage. There is a kernel of truth there, but what I learned from my friends in Al Anon and through almost 20 years of marriage is more akin to Paul’s teaching that we can’t allow even “lawful” activities or desires to rule us. Even the marriage bed cannot withstand lust run amok.

Moreover, it is a violation of our central vocation to love God and others AND it will be frustrating and damaging to me and my spouse, at a minimum. That’s how all idolatries play out—damage to one’s self and those nearby. What is the solution? Not a remodeling of the ugly part of my life, or a repair of that particular desire center that is out of control, but a holistic death to the self-driven life that has led to and continues to power this or that particular addiction. The solution isn’t giving God rule over that problematic area of my life. The solution is to count “everything as loss” or to “deny myself” entirely and follow Christ, or to “lose my life [as a whole] for Christ’s sake” to find it again, in and under God, and in service to him and real people. This is what the steps are designed to do, and they uproot sin at the root: my life for my sake.

The steps help me, not only in my marriage, but amidst the many “goods” in my life as a relatively rich man, to hold them all loosely and gently, not as one entitled to them or overconfident in what they can actually do, keeping my heart and my life rooted in (and drawing my life from) Christ and his love, the only real well. I live as one who must daily embrace Christ’s death to and for this world and thereby my own, in order to have a new life resourced from above. I must daily give up my life with my priorities and attachments here for Christ’s sake, to find it again in him and for him. In my experience, the steps and the surrounding practices of AA acknowledge and facilitate that exact process, and they do it, in part, by keeping me aware of my tendency, as long as I am in this body, to attach my heart and hopes to this world and all it contains, to my peril and to the loss of those around me. Although they don’t use those terms exactly, AA’s program is focused on doing precisely what Jesus said must be done to be (and remain) his disciple: daily entering into death to sin and self-centeredness and giving myself exclusively to him and his life surrendered to and powered by God, for the service of others.

What say you? How much would you say “addiction” is at work in the West? In the Church? In you? Do see sin as a thing you do AND as a power seeking to rule?  Do you see Christ’s idea of discipleship in the AA program? Is some kind of daily death really necessary? Overkill? Legalism? If some kind of “dying daily” is helpful, what kind? I welcome folks to discuss here or to contact me directly at t.n.freemanii at gmail.