Recent personal and societal events have me thinking about addiction. Alcohol and drug addiction are the most visible forms in our society, but it seems clear to me that we’re all addicts in one sense or another.

If you think I exaggerate, consider how many times each hour you reach for the phone in your pocket. Simon Sinek even has a short two-minute video on phone addiction, showing how easy it is to let this device run our lives.

Richard Rohr’s recent A Counterintuitive Wisdom was timely as well as expansive of my thinking around this question. While I have never personally worked through a twelve-step program, a number of friends have experienced this life-altering facing of reality. I appreciate how their commitment has changed the way they see themselves and the world. Rohr, a Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, suggests that the twelve-step program parallels the Christian gospel “but without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future world.” 

Human beings, suggests Rohr, are addictive by nature.

“Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called ‘sin’ and medieval Christians called ‘passions’ or ‘attachments.’ They both recognized that serious measures or practices were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments.”  

We are all addicted to our own habitual ways of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking and processing reality. Our institutions, societies, and nations are also addicted, as the events of this past weekend illustrate once again. Political violence is wrong, yet America is a country with an addiction to guns and violence as the way to solve problems that predates our founding. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote, we should be careful about jumping too quickly to conclusions in this case. And beware the coming chorus of righteous pity and finger-pointing, as historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has noted, given the authoritarian’s addiction to dwelling on victimhood.

In his meditation, Rohr also addresses these types of addictions.

“All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions. We have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and unaware of the same problems.” 

Verbal acknowledgement of the addiction is one of the twelve-step program’s breakthroughs. “While our attachments and addictions are at first hidden to us; by definition, we can never see or handle what we are addicted to, but we cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge,” Rohr writes. 

Some form of “alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies.” Simple acknowledgement may be the first step, but it cannot be the last. The damaged lives of those addicted to drugs or alcohol are only the most visible form of the powerlessness that overtakes us all when we succumb to personal and tribal addictions of thought and action.

And here again we find the reality that truth is paradox standing before us.

We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it. 

We have to let go.

That is so very hard for us personally and as a nation. We like to think of ourselves as exceptional and able to handle anything.

In his reflection to the beautiful poem The Bright Field by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, Malcolm Guite speaks of what he calls the gospel paradox:

. . . about losing to find, giving away to gain, giving everything away only to find it given back in a new and more beautiful form . . . it is not about giving up for its own sake; it is about making room for something wonderful.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro has also seen the paradox of powerlessness:

“The fundamental and paradoxical premise of Twelve Step recovery as I experience it is this: The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be… [and] the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life. The less you struggle against the flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it.“

We are all spiritually powerless, suggests Rohr, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. “Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments.” 

Join me during this time of turmoil and trauma in thinking of what passions and attractions drive our personal addictions, and how we can begin to move past them.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash