June
5, 2016 Community Christian Church
of Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “Addiction: A Spiritual
Disease”
“The
Truth may be puzzling, it may be counter-intuitive, it may contradict deeply
held prejudices, it may not be consistent with what we desperately want to be
true, but our preferences do not determine what's true.”
Carl
Sagan
Our topic today is addiction and I want to
approach this topic in reverse order, that is, I want to start with my
conclusions. Before anyone on YouTube gets distracted by sidebar ads or anyone
sitting here starts to think that you have heard all of this before, let me
make these three points:
1)
The war on drugs has been a terrible failure.
Its inevitable failure would have been obvious to anyone who ever spent five
minutes studying our previous experiment with Prohibition. The war on drugs has
cost trillions of dollars, it has ruined millions of lives through
incarceration, giving young people permanent criminal records, and it has
fueled organized crime with endless resources of cash, guns, and political
power.
2)
My second point is that addiction is not a
crime. It is a problem. A.A. insists that it is an illness and that may be true
in some cases. There are people, I’m convinced, who have a physiological
addiction to drugs or alcohol but in most cases it is a psychological issue in
much the same way that many people are addicted to sex, TV, the internet,
smoking, or shopping. Because it is either an illness or a mental health
problem, incarceration only makes it worse. We don’t lock people up for having
cancer or for being depressed. You treat a disease or a mental illness; you
cannot punish it out of existence.
Therefore resources
being ineffectively spent on incarceration and law enforcement should be
immediately transferred into proven, successful treatment programs.
And, if you are
listening President Obama, you have about six months left in which you could
pardon about a million people are currently in prison for non-violent drug
offenses and wipe the slate clean of another ten million who have criminal
records related to non-violent drug offenses. Nothing would help to stimulate
our economy more, show greater leadership and compassion, and you wouldn’t even
have to ask a recalcitrant congress to go along with you. In fact, damn you if
you don’t do it because you are the only person who can and we both know that
it should be done.
3) My third point is a
restated agreement with something Carl Jung said at the dawn of the 20th
century… that is that root of addiction is a spiritual thirst and because it is
a spiritual disease, the cure must also be a spiritual cure.
If you are a member of the very elite group of
literate people who read my 1999 book, Christian Wisdom for Today, you already know what an important role
that the 12 step movement in AA has played in my life. Not because I was an
alcoholic or an addict but because there was a spirituality that I discovered
when attending meetings with church members who were seeking sobriety that I
had not found in church.
I was a graduate student, serving a student
church, and I was already getting very disheartened by the shallowness of
church life. I had gone to seminary
thinking that faith was a matter of great urgency, of insurmountable
importance, but I was finding that church was, by and large, a life enhancing
exercise of such little meaning that people would leave over matters so small
that it would embarrass Charles Darwin.
But when I persuaded an alcoholic church member
to go to AA by promising that I would go with him, I discovered that the
spirituality of AA was a matter of life or death. The mostly men and some women
who met in a smoke filled room in the basement of the Methodist Church on the
outskirts of Russellville, KY generally looked much older than they were. They
had lived hard lives, most of which none of them could even remember.
They had lost marriages, family, jobs, and their
health along with their youth and their self-respect, but in this little
cluster of 20 to 30 recovering addicts, they had found the strength to return
to sanity.
The 12 step movement was founding in the 1930’s
and has been historically more successful than any other treatment program.
And, what I say now, I want to say very carefully. I don’t want to be critical
in a way that would give anyone permission to stop going to meetings or to be
dismissive of a program that has worked for millions of people.
I want to talk about why it works but I don’t
want to do an autopsy on a program that we still host here in our building every
Thursday evening and that is still the best option for very many people.
The literature in the Big Book and the 24 Hour
Book is astonishingly open minded and progressive in its religious assertions
for a book written by people who were not theologians in the first half of the
20th century. They insist that everyone pray to the God of their own
understanding and they at least attempt to avoid making it a specifically
Christian program though Christian religion is clearly the common language of
those early founders.
I loved the aspect of the 12 steps that required
of the sincere person seeking sobriety that they be willing to become
completely honest with themselves about themselves. I liked the confessional
aspect of the steps that made it necessary that you confess your failings to
another person and that you literally partner with that person in
accountability for how you want to change your life.
And I liked the community aspect of the final
steps that insist that you not just come to meetings long enough to restore
your own life, to find your own sobriety and then run along your merry way. The
program implores those who are successful to remain active in AA groups,
helping other addicts to find their way into a meaningful life.
And if you are listening to this sermon and you
are currently active in an AA group and you are getting your first taste of
sober living, you might want to pause this message and come back to it a few
months from now because I want to take a look under the hood of this old beauty
of a recovery program and when you are just starting, you really don’t want to
over think the program, you just want to work the program.
But now, four generations later, we are being
buried in a new wave of addiction in the United States. Not that the numbers
anywhere near rival alcohol abuse but the severity of opiod addictions, both to
prescription pain killers and to heroin has brought addiction to the front
burner of social concerns once again.
Twenty years ago Dr. Thomlinson and I were
involved in a research project funded by the Burrell Mental Health Fund to
investigate the rise of methamphetamine addiction in the Ozarks. I learned a
lot in the process of working on that project about the physiological aspects
of how drugs affect the neuro-receptors in the brain and how a person’s will to
stop using the drug can be destroyed in a very short period of use.
The people we interviewed in our research were
all people who were either still incarcerated or were still on parole. We did
not interview anyone who had managed to be an occasional meth user nor did we
interview anyone who had managed to change their life and stop using without a
long period of time in either treatment or incarceration.
So, it is easy to conclude from that kind of
study that meth is bad, and we can say heroin is bad, cocaine is bad, oxycodone
is bad, and whatever they invent next month or next year will likely be bad
too.
What we didn’t know 20 years ago is that there
were thousands of people all around us who had been occasional users and had
managed to quit. There were people who were users in certain circumstances and
they were able to change those circumstances before they ended up in jail.
A recent lab experiment with mice uncovered an
important insight into the cure for addiction. The old format for conducting
addiction experiments involved giving a lab rats or mice two water sources, one
was just water and the other one had either cocaine or heroin in it.
In virtually every case, the caged rat would go
repeatedly to the drugged water until it finally died of an overdose. But recently a very clever fellow thought, of
course an isolated animal with nothing to live for seek a mood altering drug
but what if we created a kind of lab rat heaven, a place with lots of good food,
friends, sex, exercise, interactions, and little rat families.
In that experiment, there were no overdoses,
there were no addictive behaviors and almost all of the animals virtually
ignored the drugged water source. It appears that social connection and
meaningful living is the best cure for addiction.
As much as I don’t want to criticize the popular
12 step movements, it may just be that their actual program, especially in its
dogmatic insistence upon absolute abstinence over learning to live a life of
moderation may not be what made them successful in the first place. The real
cure that has come out of the AA movement may just be the fact that they create
community.
They tell new comers that they need to attend 90
meetings in 90 days…. They need to deeply invest time and energy into getting
to know people in the meetings, get a sponsor, be in conversation with other
people in recovery. Forgive me for saying it, but a lot of the meeting content
may be bologna, but the meeting itself is the cure.
And before you dismiss that idea too quickly,
let me remind you that it was estimated that some 70% of our battlefield
American soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin while they were in Southeast
Asia but only a fraction of them came back to the USA and continued their drug
abuse… because they came back to family, jobs, college, a life that they wanted
rather than the life they did not want.
I can tell you from my years of experience with
working with addicts, none of them set out to become addicts and almost all of
them were basically self-medicating…. In my line of work, they were mostly
self-medicating for depression, by-polar disorder, or chronic pain.
There is no way to come up with a percentage but
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most addiction begins as a
desperate need to altar either a physical sensation of pain, or an emotional
sensation of pain. And therefore,
neither outlawing the drug nor treating the addiction itself will ever make any
sense if we cannot treat the actual causes of either physical pain or emotional
distress.
And there is nothing that amplifies physical
pain or emotional distress more than being cut off from meaningful, loving,
supportive connection to others. Which, if I may put that into our present
context…. Is why churches need to get their theology and their heads out of the
clouds and start dealing with reality. Church needs to stop being a religious
institution and start being spiritual communities where people can find
meaningful connection, where they can expect compassion and understanding.
It can be said that the church has been the only
army in history that ever made it a policy to shoot their own wounded. It is
high time that the church becomes better at loving than we are at judging,
better at creating community than creating division, and better at healing than
we are at wounding.
