The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  The poet quoted in Anne Lamott’s story of love and addiction said, “Yearning is blind.” Certainly that is a deep human truth. That blindness leads us into the shame, controlling behaviors, and fear-filled realities that we have examined in this chapter. But what if God’s yearning for us is not blind and He loves us anyway? loves us desperately?

  Then the promises in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous might be true:

  “We will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace …. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

  Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled.17

  God’s promises to Moses are being fulfilled right now as you consider Moses’s story as a model for your own. The writer of the book of Hebrews put it this way: “Even though [Moses’s life] of faith [was] exemplary, [he didn’t get his] hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that [his] faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole.”18 In other words, Moses’s struggle and your struggle are intended by God to come together to lead you to a deeper story. In the very next chapter the writer to the Hebrews explains, “Do you see what this means— all these pioneers … blazed the way [so that you would] [k]eep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in.”19

  The deepest story promises Love. There are some promises that are not broken. Some really do come true.

  10

  THE DEEPEST STORY

  Some of our stories describe abandonment, betrayal, and ambivalence. We experience these losses and assaults as orphans, strangers, and widows. Should it surprise us then, that God wants to make himself known as the Father who protects the orphans, as the Brother who encourages the stranger, and as the Lover who cherishes the widow? The Triune God who is One wants to redeem our story and restore with his love what our story took from us.

  —DAN ALLENDER, To Be Told1

  There are two kinds of people—winners and losers. Inside each and every one of you, at the very core of your being is a winner waiting to be unleashed.” These are the opening words by Rich Hoover, father and motivational speaker, in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. As the movie begins, we soon notice that everyone in this family desperately wants to be a winner. Ten-year-old Olive Hoover has a dream of winning a beauty pageant. Her father, Rich, has a nine-step program to help people put their losing habits behind them and make their dreams come true.

  Even Olives awkward teenage brother, Duane, wants to be a winner. An opening shot shows him lifting weights in front of a picture of his hero, Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was a Prussian philosopher who died insane at the age of thirty-five. One of his most notable concepts identifies what is good as all that heightens power in a man and what is bad as all that is weak. In his 1895 book The Antichrist, he exhorted his followers to “pity the ineffectives.”

  Everyone in this entertaining film lives by the same story, which has at its deepest level the idea that we are our own creators. We make ourselves. And the goal of life is to become a winner. Pity the losers.2

  I know this story. I started living by it when I was in the sixth grade and a participant in the Optimist Club speech contest. It was my first experience with competition. I won the first round. I won the second round. I discovered that I liked feeling like a winner. I got my picture in the local paper. My parents bragged about me to all their friends, and I had two shiny trophies on my bedroom dresser, cheering me on.

  For the third round, the statewide competition, we had to travel to Albuquerque, New Mexico. As soon as I heard the other contestants speak, I knew that they were winners too. I stood with all of them at the front of the hall as the judges announced the first-, second-, and third-prize winners. When the third-place and second-place winners took their trophies, I knew that I would not be getting the grand prize award. I didn’t get any award. I was a loser.

  I can still recall standing there in shame. I forced a smile to my face to congratulate the other winners, but their joy was my sorrow. I think this is when I began the nervous habit of picking the skin away from my fingernails. When I finally joined my family after my defeat, the first thing my mother noticed was my bleeding nails. “You’ve picked down to the quick,” she said. I stared at my fingers, unsure of what she meant. I later learned that the quick is the raw flesh, the living vital core of a thing. I understand now that this is what I was trying to find, a source of life in the midst of losing.

  Flash forward in my story: I am an adult in the detox unit at Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I had tried many things to stop drinking. I had “whiteknuckled it” for a few weeks at a time. I had a read a book on breaking free of bondage. I had memorized Bible verses. I had attended one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But I couldn’t stop drinking.

  My parents had found me in my home, completely intoxicated. In shock and fear, they took me to the hospital. I smelled awful. There were unidentifiable stains on my shirt. I couldn’t walk by myself to the bathroom to produce the urine sample requested by the emergency room nurse. My mom helped me into the bathroom, and her eyes stopped at my hands. I don’t remember a lot about that night, but I remember her saying, “You’re still picking at your nails.” And I recall her explaining to the nurse, “My daughter isn’t like this. She’s bright and articulate.” “She isn’t like this.” She isn’t a loser—that’s what I heard her say. But I knew she was wrong. I was a loser, and my desperation was coming through my hands, the longing, the emptiness, the thirst for a deeper story than trying so hard to win, and losing.

  TWO STORIES

  Two stories are at war in our hearts. The first is the story of victory, of independence: we can do it. We can create our lives, keep our lives, and save our lives. The second story is about defeat and dependence. We didn’t make ourselves, we can’t keep our lives on track, and we can’t save ourselves. Each of us is highly influenced by the story that we choose to live by. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung taught that people are not shaped by laws, governments, and armies, but by myths—powerful stories. In this sense, a myth is a story with the ability to make itself real. It gives us understanding and creates meaning in our world. The story that we live by controls the meaning we see in the facts of our lives.

  I have discovered, and experienced, that a person can profess to live by a certain story and yet be governed by another. For example, a person can say that she trusts God but live as if it all depended upon herself. A person can even profess believing in a Savior and yet worship at the altar of self-help. The story we live by is our true religion. The wise King Solomon explained it this way, “As [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he.”3

  Many times since the sixth grade and since that awful night in detox, I have felt frozen between two stories that gave very different meanings to the facts that I experienced. Was I a loser, or a gainer, by these experiences?

  What’s the deepest story?

  LOOKING IN THE MIRROR

  If you ask ten different addicts or their families and loved ones to write about their experiences, you will hear different stories, each linked by distinct shame-filled, unspeakable experiences. In this book I have tried to tell true stories about addiction, not shrinking back from its realities. Some of them are painful, poignant stories of loss, hope, and more loss. Some are ultimately awe-inspiring stories of courage and progress toward recovery. All are stories of desperation, stories that could be told with shoulders slumped and heads bent down. All are stories of losers.

  Perhaps that last sentence made you wince. Where’s the redemption in that? Maybe you want me to add that they somehow became winners through courageous effort. We don’t like stories that don’t have a happy ending.

  Nevertheless, I believe that the dee
pest story beckons us to look steadily in the mirror and face our desperation, because only this truth can break us out of the story of self-effort, self-help, and self-rescuing. Facing our desperation, we can acknowledge the last addiction. Whether we say we’re Christian or not, this last addiction is what isolates us from God. Blaise Pascal wrote that understanding desperation comes from radically experiencing it. No one experiences desperation more radically than addicts or their loved ones. I have one more simple, awful story that reveals my own desperation. When my mother accompanied me to the bathroom in detox all those years ago, I was able to produce a urine sample in the plastic sample cup that the nurse provided. As we walked back to the examining room, my mom had to stop me from raising that cup up to my lips to drink from it. Shame still fills me as I recall this story. I don’t tell it to be graphic or dramatic, but to say I understand desperation. I understand losing—losing self-respect, self-control, and self-help. And I have to ask what was really going on in that awful moment. Was I simply drunk out of my mind? Or was there something deep within me compelling me to acknowledge my desperate thirst and my need for a story that would quench a desire that I could not satisfy myself?

  We need to look straight at our desperation and see its truth—its anguish, its activity—before we can recognize that it reflects the image of God. The most radical experience of desperation is not just part of my own story, but it reflects the deepest story—God’s story.

  The Hebrew word kamar helps express the intensity of such desperation. The verb kamar is defined as “to shrivel as with heat, to be deeply affected, to yearn.” The word graphically suggests someone who actually loses control of his bodily functions while contemplating his desperate longing. In the hospital detox unit, I was not only under the influence of alcohol, but also under the influence of kamar. Desperation is a gift, because kamar leads us to the deepest story.

  Kamar shows up in the Old Testament in the court of King Solomon. Two hysterical women stand before the king, trying to gain possession of the same baby. Both women are outcasts—losers—each with no man as her advocate. Solomon wisely calls forth the truth by asking for a sword to split the infant in two.

  The king’s command revealed die baby’s real mother.

  The woman whose son was alive was filled with kamar—“her bowels yearned upon her son”—and she desperately thrust her baby into the arms of a cruel stranger to save his life.”4 The story suggests a mother who lost control of her bowels while trying to save the son she loved. Her kamar revealed what was true in this confusing dilemma.

  Perhaps you recognize this kamar: longing for a loved one who is in the grips of a cruel addiction, longing to escape from a torturing habit, longing for someone to choose you and rescue you from anguish, longing to be free. Addicts and those who love them suffer from ulcers, insomnia, and all manner of distress caused by kamar. I know that it is hard to believe that this desperate longing is something good. But I believe it is the prologue to the deepest story, the story whose plot is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

  Desperation hounds addicts and their loved ones, taunting us, “You are alone. You have to find your own way out of this. You can’t do it. You must do it.” Even those who have overcome addiction or detached themselves from the “losers” in their lives know that there are moments that catch us unaware: when you are loading the dishwasher; waiting to make a left-hand turn; reaching for the mail; or the moment just before sleep steals the day, when a vague uneasiness flits before your eyes and desperation whispers, “If you let your guard down, everyone will know that I am the secret you keep hidden even from yourself.”

  But kamar is not the end of the story. God does not shrink back from desperation. He weaves it throughout His narrative. Consider just the New Testament stories about the people Jesus chose to interact with: the woman caught in adultery, the prostitute humiliating herself by pouring perfume on Jesus’s feet, the outcast tax collector, the pitiful man blind from birth, the thirsty Samaritan woman who could not keep a husband, the sick and grasping ragwoman, and the doubting, denying, betraying disciples. I believe God tells their stories because their desperation is a reflection of His own.

  THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES

  We fear desperation, we hate being losers, because we fail to understand Gods desperation. His anguish, humiliation, and relentless pursuit reveal the potential holiness of my desperation. I can accept being a loser when I understand how God wins. He wins by losing. The apostle Paul explains it this way: “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”5 Seeing God’s desperation can transform mine.

  I have never told anyone this. That night when my parents delivered me to detox, when I finally made it to my room, I saw a vision. I saw Jesus. You might scoff that I was merely a drunk who was hallucinating, but I recall this image with great clarity. It was an image of light and love, a tender face with sorrow as its most distinguishing mark. I asked Him, “What are You doing here?” He answered, ‘“You brought me with you.” I remember pondering the next day: if that was true, then He was there when I got drunk, when I couldn’t walk, when I tried-to drink my own urine. At my worst, my lowest, my most helpless, He was in me. I was in Him. And that is my deepest story. It’s not a story about becoming a winner but about being loved.

  What does this story mean? First, that I am a loser. A loser and a failure. Second, my maker is God. And how does He make me? Not through self-assertion or self-help. He wisely and tenderly uses the gifts of addiction—getting caught, surrender, humility, woundedness, and brokenness—to make me into a woman who first and foremost knows that she is loved. The tenets of His story explain His process: that the first will be last, and die last will be first; that the meek are blessed, for they shall inherit (not conquer) the earth; that you lose your life to find it. In God’s story there are not two kinds of people, just one—the lost who have been found, the losers saved by grace.

  In Little Miss Sunshine, all the characters are trying to save themselves and end up creating their own private hells. In fact, when Duane, the teenage son, welcomes his uncle to their home, he greets him by saying, “Welcome to hell.” When we live by the story of overcoming and self-help, making ourselves winners, we create our own hells. Self-help doesn’t explain life. It only explains life’s limitations. Self-help is not life, but the ending of life. When we come face to face with our desperation and look for a different story, we discover the truth of the New Testament:

  We … see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, … everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment …. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe … get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the Cross.6

  I can stare in the mirror and see desperation’s hideous reflection, yet how sad if I cannot also see the reflection of the image of the Most Holy. Philosopher-rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, “We discover that the self in itself is a monstrous deceit, [and] that the self is something transcendent in disguise.”7 We can value ourselves only by grasping how much God loves us. I think that is why throughout His stories God radically communicates His transcendent way of desperation—as desperate Parent, Lover, and Savior— and tells us the deepest story.

  GOD AS DESPERATE PARENT

  The desperation of God as parent begins in His first story, when He asks Adam His unending question to all wayward children, “Where are you?”’ It’s not a simple question. Certainly God knew the precise location of the bush behind which Adam cowered. His question is the agonized cry of parents whose daughter is on the streets doing drugs or whose son sp
its, “I can take care of myself!” as he walks out the door: “Where are you?”

  I have a friend whose son was on the streets for weeks in a vicious cycle of using meth and finding a way to pay for more meth. She spent the nights in her car driving up and down the streets, looking for her son. “Where are you?” She was filled with kamar.

  Desperation in parenting does not come only in the form of parents looking for children, but in the form of children longing for parents. When we have been abandoned, abused, misunderstood, or neglected by our parents, we are strangely drawn into behaviors that guarantee a reenactment of the old, familiar struggles that we grew up with. Addicts act in ways that push others to abandon them, abuse them, and leave them misunderstood, often in a state of neglect.

  Are you ready to give up on love, thinking that you love too much or need love too much? Consider one of Jesus’s New Testament stories. I wonder how modern psychoanalysts would diagnose the father or the prodigal in Luke 15. It is impossible to exaggerate the desperation of the prodigal son as he ends up homeless and penniless, slopping hogs and eating scraps from the pigpen. It is equally impossible to exaggerate the father’s desperation, his daily watch and wait for his wayward son. The terrible tension is finally broken. Jesus describes their reunion: “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”8

  The word “compassion” here is the Greek splanchnon, the equivalent to the Hebrew kaman, “to have the intestines yearn.” Desperate loved ones of addicts need only envision the sleepless father, scandalously gathering up his robes with one hand and holding his cramping stomach with the other, running wildly to his son, to see the strange sacredness of their own desperation.