The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  I wanted to learn all about the rituals associated with drug use—the hunt, chopping, sealing, cooking, hot-knifing, rolling bills, cutting straws, and using pens.

  I even learned a new language—Drugspeak. New words rolled off my tongue—snow blow cola, a fine white teenager, “Do you want guns or roses?”

  I became willing to do anything required of me to experience a deeper level of devotion. I was drawn to those who had made a total commitment to drugs—full-time “ministers” or dealers. I was becoming more and more willing to give it all. I did not become one of the “ministers,” but I did join the choir.

  UNDERSTANDING IN THE MIDST OF CRAZINESS

  Jim’s saga of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll ends like that of many others in the entertainment industry. He ran out of money, out of gigs, and out of chances. He ended up in a jail in Washington State. He will tell you that prison was a horrendous way to go through detox—no tranquilizers or soft mattresses to ease the pain. All that his holding cell offered was a single torn page from the Bible. It was a page from the Old Testament, and the words on that page were not particularly meaningful, but he held on to it for dear life. In his trembling hands that held the page of Scripture, in his fuzzy thinking, and even in his debilitating shame, he was reminded of his childhood cravings, longing to know God and hoping that knowing would give him answers about his place in this world.

  During the lonely and agonizing days in that jail, Jim acknowledged that for his whole life, he had been trying to satisfy an insatiable part of his very being. His childhood pursuit of an escape from hell, his attendance at seminary, his ministerial position, his drug use to escape the hell on earth that he was experiencing, the formation of his band, and his musical career—all were attempts to feed his soul.

  I understood Jim’s thirst. I too can look back to summer-camp experiences and years of exceptional performance—never missing a chance to be listed in the National Honor Society or in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities—and to years of saying, “I can’t keep doing this anymore. It isn’t satisfying.” Like my brother, I found a quicker and easier way to experience a few moments of escape and relief from the deeper cravings of my soul. Through it all, I’ve always sensed a longing, a longing that often felt like emptiness, and an emptiness that I interpreted as thirst. What I didn’t know was that my thirst was for Love. Instead I discovered liquor, and I began to crave the power of alcohol. The way it burns. The way it burns away fear and disappointment. Liquor seemed better than love. It was very reliable, and it wouldn’t leave me. But like Jim, I was still thirsty.

  Soul Thirst

  This craving that Jim and I both experienced is rooted in our inner human nature. Psychology has been called “the study of the soul.” The root word psyche is the Greek word meaning “soul” or “breath.” Psychology studies human experience apart from the physical, tangible, visible world. If bread and water feed the body, what feeds the soul? What feeds the part of us that yearns for faith and that longs for hope?

  Quite simply, it is love. We are designed to be driven by love, driven to love. Perhaps the purest form of love that we experience comes when we are babies, when we are loved for simply being. Jesus said, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get it.”4 The soul never stops thirsting for more of that experience. Sadly, however, painful human experiences drive us away from love. We learn that love comes with strings attached, that love is dependent upon our performance, that love can disappear without warning.

  When Jim began his spiritual journey, the messages he received were not about love and acceptance, but about fear and condemnation. He moved from the simplicity of a child to the complexity of the adult world, believing that spirituality comes from what you do on the outside. Jim was taught that our résumés prove our spirituality and guarantee our place in the kingdom. In other words, Jim’s deep need for love became a legalistic matter.

  When Jim heard the southern preacher proclaiming the good news of Love—that you can’t save yourself and it’s not up to you—something awakened within his spirit. He found fellowship with God’s Spirit that came from the inside. But it’s hard to rest and stay rooted in a spirituality that is not based on our efforts. We are vulnerable; when life falls through the cracks, we are back to the dilemma of the last addiction: It is up to me, and I can’t do it.

  When we are seduced by the last addiction, to the treadmill of performance and accomplishment, our souls become parched. When we are hurt or betrayed, the pain of our souls’ thirst feels unbearable. We are drawn to anything that might quench our thirst, even for a while. We clamor after people, behaviors, or substances that promise to meet our spiritual need for love. We crave the control of believing that we can meet that need from the outside in, through drugs, alcohol, food, people pleasing, work, or gambling. These things steal our hearts with promises that seem too good to be true, and eventually we discover that they are.

  Jim told me about lying on his thin, smelly mattress in the jail cell where his addictions had taken him. There he returned to the truth that had first promised refreshment for his soul, that a spiritual life was not about his performance, good or bad. When he had no other place to go, the paralysis of his soul began to heal as he dared to believe that God loved him just for being. Jim was in a harsh place, but a transformative one. In a similar experience of helplessness, the Jesuit Pedro Arrupe composed a powerful prayer after he suffered a debilitating stroke. His physical paralysis compelled him to surrender to the only hope for his soul. I return to his prayer as I consider my own addictions and those of others I love. Arrupe knows the gifts that come in addiction: being freed to acknowledge our deep thirst and our inability to satisfy it:

  More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.5

  COMMUNITY IN THE MIDST OF ISOLATION

  Many communities of support are available to those recovering from drugs and alcohol, especially in Twelve Step meetings. But finding community is not easy for a recovering fundamentalist. It takes a great deal of humility for a recovering minister and rock star to sit in a church basement with other addicts and acknowledge the painful truths of his life. Perhaps it just takes an insatiable thirst. One of the gifts of addiction is that we addicts know that we have a thirst, a hunger, a desire that cannot be satisfied, no matter how hard we try. This unquenchable thirst can take us back to the liquor store or it can push us to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, attend a church worship service, call a friend for coffee, read a book of prayers and meditations, or pay a visit to a suffering fellow addict.

  Relief for the thirsty soul requires humility. You must be humble to take a sip of refreshment when you know that you will still be a bit thirsty, if not today, then again tomorrow. It takes humility to learn from others how to find Living Water. In humility, we surrender to the reality that God is not interested in quenching our thirst completely. He intends to be investigated for eternity, which means that we will always remain thirsty for something—for Him. Humility accepts that there is an insatiable longing. In the psalmist’s words, were “the hart pant[ing] after the water brooks.”6

  During the past month I have watched the beginning episodes of this seasons American Idol and thought a lot about the difference between humility and humiliation. What is our fascination with watching untalented people make complete fools of themselves, only to be humiliated by Simon and the other judges? Don’t the contestants know that they can’t sing, that in fact, they are awful at it? Maybe that is why we watch. The competitors may be taking our place. We harbor fears that there is something deeply wrong with us, that we’ll reveal our flaws and experience the shame of being fools. This whole phenomenon explains why we avoid community. We are af
raid that we won’t be noticed, and then that we will be, and that the end result will be more pain and humiliation. Defending ourselves, we become bitter, skeptical, and cynical, which only intensifies the thirst of our souls for love.

  Our thirst for love, and the foolish schemes that we have followed looking for it in all the wrong places, reveal the essential truth that we belong together. Last spring I volunteered to deliver Meals on Wheels in our community. I was paired with a woman in her midfifties to deliver to a route of about twenty-five homes. Most of the recipients were elderly, shut in their homes due to physical limitations. My partner was also a recovering alcoholic, and we enjoyed sharing our experiences as we delivered the meals.

  One house on our route was home to a young family—a husband, wife, and two small children. The husband was confined to a wheelchair; he had been in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. One day when I ran in to drop off the warm meal, I found him passed out in his kitchen. His wife hurried into the room, glanced at her husband in his wheelchair, and explained, “Since his accident, he drinks too much. It helps him get through the day.”

  My heart went out to this suffering man and his family. A few weeks later, my delivery partner and I walked in together with another meal for this household. I had been telling my new friend about my spiritual discoveries in my own journey of recovery when we found our fellow alcoholic passed out again in the kitchen. This time he had fallen from his chair and lay on the floor in a puddle of his own vomit. I called out to his wife, but she didn’t come. Repulsed by the sight and smells of this man, I backed out of the kitchen.

  “I need some fresh air,” I said to my partner.

  Standing outside, I watched through the window as my friend knelt beside the man, gently wiped his face, and cleaned up his mess. I decided I would wait a few more weeks before I shared more of my insights with her. She was showing more knowledge of the love of God than I had.

  We waited for the man to stir, and then we helped him into his wheelchair. He looked at us, embarrassed, and mumbled, “I just needed something.”

  Oh, how he needed love. How we all do! It was so plain to me that all of us are crippled and need someone to sit with us, wipe away our tears, and not be disgusted by our messiness. Often we cannot believe in God’s love until we have experienced human love. That means we have to take risks in order to find community.

  My brother needed to take that risk. A few years into sobriety, he found himself surrounded again by those who believed that spirituality is something that we attain from the outside. It made him mad, mad at the church and mad at God. That is a risk that we take when we seek out others. I don’t write this to be discouraging but to be honest. When we have spent a lifetime energized by shame, we are quickly drawn back into experiences that will put us into a familiar place, once again feeling shame. I think this reality lies behind the questions that I am most often asked in my counseling office: “Why do I keep doing the same kind of things over and over again?” or “Why do I end up in relationships with the same kinds of people?” or “Why do I always end up embarrassing myself?”

  Shame must be dismantled before we can make different kinds of choices in response to our cravings for love. The only way I know to dismantle shame is to accept, to inhabit, our brokenness. Brokenness acknowledges the truth about my life and speaks the truth in love to others. Brokenness does not fear messiness or demand that the mess be quickly cleaned up. Brokenness embraces forgiveness as the only glue to put the pieces back together. Jim had acknowledged the brokenness of his life, but he still believed that the only way to be accepted was to be better than ever. That is the energy of shame. Sadly, this energy attracted him to a group of people with similar beliefs. Many Christians get trapped in this last addiction, believing that forgiveness is a one-time event and that, after that conversion experience, the rest is up to us. It creates terrible pressure: we need to work to keep ourselves saved.

  FORGIVENESS IN THE MIDST OF SHAME

  Our church supports a group that goes into impoverished third-world countries and provides sources of clean water. I have learned from these engineers that you don’t find water simply by tapping into a flowing underground river. Instead, they carefully drill into a place where saturation has occurred, a layer of earth called an aquifer. When they drive a well, they are relieving pressure. Pure water comes then, not under pressure, but when pressure is taken away.

  My brother Jim was eventually able to identify the pressure that he was under, pressure that often kept him from receiving Living Water. Like many addicts and people who have grown up in the church, he was resentful toward God. Remember my brother’s question in the ruins of his marriage: Where is God in all of this? Every person that I have known who struggles with addiction has come face to face with suffering and decided that God cant be trusted. If I can’t trust God, then I can’t trust other people. If I can’t trust God or others, then I have to trust myself I can’t think of anything more terrifying or discouraging than to believe that I am the only one who can be trusted.

  This lack of trust also propels us back into hiding, which is the breeding ground of addiction. For Jim, this suspicion about God and others led him to a community that harbored the same distrust. There are many things that make us vulnerable to addiction, but the greatest pitfall is believing that we must hide.

  Jim is not stagnant. He is searching and asking a crucial question that I pray will lead to greater brokenness and a further understanding of forgiveness. What do we do with our questions about God? Life is often unfair. Most addicts I know come pretty quickly to a sense that they need to be forgiven, but we are often halted in our spiritual life when we cant consider another type of forgiveness, the need we humans have to forgive God. This might seem like a startling concept to you, but how else can you grapple with tragedy that doesn’t make sense? Our thinking brains might be able to acknowledge, in the abstract, that God knows what He’s doing, and somehow in the scheme of things, everything will work together for good. But our feeling brains need more. Forgiving God is a way of saying, “I don’t understand You, but I trust You. I don’t need a neat and tidy explanation of things, but I will be sad about difficult and disturbing realities.” This brokenness before God allows us to remain broken with one another.

  Regarding those things that we can’t understand, I have returned over and over to the experiences of two volunteers who work with terminally ill children. One of them tells a story that poignantly demonstrates what it might mean to have a heart of forgiveness, to recognize the brokenness of human experience, and to respond in creative love.

  My idea was pretty simple at the beginning. I started to volunteer in wards with terminally ill children or burn victims—just go in there to cheer them up a little, spread around some giggles. Gradually, it developed that I was going to come in as a clown … .

  It’s a little tricky coming in. Some kids, when they see a clown, they think they’re going to be eaten alive. And kids in hospitals and burn units, of course, are pretty shaky … .

  Burnt skin or bald heads on little kids—what do you do? I guess you just face it. When the kids are really hurting so bad, and so afraid, and probably dying, and everybody’s heart is breaking. Face it and see what happens after that, see what to do next.

  I got the idea of traveling with popcorn. When a kid is crying, I dab up the tears with the popcorn and pop it into my mouth or into his or hers. We sit around together and eat the tears.7

  I know that this story is a lot to digest. We can barely get past envisioning the burned and hurting children to even frame questions about where God is in the midst of suffering. If you are feeling overwhelmed by this story, then you can understand what happens in addiction, especially in relapse. We experience shocking, heartbreaking realities and can’t think of anything else but “I need to make this go away.”

  Experiencing brokenness requires that we first
of all face it. Feel it. Don’t move quickly to make everything okay. Don’t come up with trite answers or neat and tidy conclusions. There are some things that we cannot explain and that we should not look at alone. But we do not have to run away. We can engage with the pain.

  We sit around together and eat the tears. As my brother and I came together and began to share our sorrows and our struggles and our questions, we stopped trying to come up with answers. We started to forgive God for the shattered circumstances of our lives. Of course, God didn’t need our forgiveness. But we needed to forgive Him. In the end, the only thing we can know is who we can trust. Forgiveness is way of saying “I trust you.”

  By trusting God, we begin to trust community again.

  Not too long ago, my brother and I were talking about this again. Quite honestly, he has still not found a large community that he can trust. But he has found a few people, and for now that is enough. Jim is experiencing love and offering it too.

  As we talked about addiction and community, truth and trust, I jumped on my soapbox about the suffering that addiction causes. A lot of pain came pouring out of me. In our community in the past six months, we have seen a beautiful young mother and her two children mowed down by a drunk driver, a judge who presides over traffic court pulled over for driving under the influence, and two pastors asked to leave their churches because of secret addicted behavior.

  “Somebody needs to do something,” I complained to my brother.

  “Somebody already has,” he answered softly.

  HARD WORK IN THE MIDST OF HOPELESSNESS

  My brother has not done the work of recovery perfectly. He continues to struggle to find community. Like me, Jim is prone to wandering into the desert of trying to do it all by himself, but he does not waver from remembering who is the Source of spirituality. He quoted to me from the gospel of John, “God is sheer being itself—Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.”8