I have a new article up over at Communitas Collective, a collaborative cyber way station for those Christ followers who are trying to sort out their spiritual lives outside of what is referred to as the institutional church. My post is exactly 777 words. (cue Twilight Zone music.....) I dip my toe into the murky water of religious fervor as another kind of addiction that keeps a person from feeling the pain of the fears they carry about themselves.
Here's an excerpt to tease your appetite:
The woman lost herself in the grip of her religious fervor. She took the words of the bible literally that said things like, “Die to self,” and “God must increase but I must decrease.” What she could not realize and would not know for many more years was that she had traded her addictions to drugs and alcohol for an addiction to religion. Faith was a fire in her, for sure, but the dysfunction of addictive tendencies ran with it and made it yet another escape for the woman, an escape from the one thing she had been trying to outrun her whole life.Click HERE to read the whole thing. If my out of country readers can't access the link, shoot me an email and I'll cut n paste it to you.
7 comments:
Thank you, Pam. I really appreciate this article. In a lot of ways it really cuts to the heart of my fears about become more involved in religion (or in anything, really). I am an addict, and the addict in me seeks at all times to fill the "God-shaped hole" with externals: alcohol, drugs, sex, fiction, food, rituals...anything that could possibly stand in for a real connection to God. I need to be very careful and very clear about what I am seeking and why. I'm so glad you're putting this out there.
I have been taught (and it is my personal experience) that there are four lies an addict usually tells herself/himself.
1. I am not good enough. There is something inherently unlovable about me. (This results in shame and/or self-loathing, leading to the rest of the first lie: If people knew who I really am, they would reject me.)
2. Therefore, I cannot trust anyone to love the real me. It is not safe to become that vulnerable.
3. Therefore, I must find a substance or behavior to comfort or protect myself. I must find a way to cope with the deep inner shame, the self-loathing, the fear of abandonment and the pain of being alone.
4. Therefore, once I have found that means of coping, I can never let anything threaten it. I will die without it. Or, at least I will feel like dying without it. I can no longer envision life completely without it. That idea scares me to death.
When you add physiological and neurochemical dependency to the picture, things become even more convoluted.
A genuine life solution must help an addict honestly and courageously face and deal those lies. Ultimately, a genuine solution must address Lie No. 1, the deepest, most primal lie.
My experience has been that religion can make matters worse, feeding that core-level lie even as it promises freedom. When I used religion in response to lie No. 3, it created a deadly circle of hope, failure, escape, remorse, resolution, hope . . .
What I am finding though is that my evangelical Christian faith dying broke that loop, as devastating as that was. I lived two years in despair. I described it as wandering alone in a dark tundra. Fortunately my new unfettered faith in the Triune God is helping me deal with the lies. That's happening even though I still don't truly trust God. I don't think I truly trust just about anybody. But I no longer feel desperate about it. I am working, but also patiently letting the process happen. Well, some days I'm patient.
@nichim, i wish i could have had this awareness much sooner in my life, but I suppose I likely wouldn't have been able to accept it. What I am grateful for is that God seems to be ok if we use him as drug or an escape. He seems quite sympathetic to our human condition. I hope you'll keep moving forward in your faith relationship!
@gary, well said Counselor Gary. Totally nailed what I know about me in this realm! I joke about being a recovering evangelical, but really, it's not really a joke. It's the truth. And with honest people like you around, I know I am not alone!
Pam,this is beautiful...thanks for sharing it!!!
Pam, pardon me for slipping into pedantic mode there. :)
I read it. Wow. It moved me. Thank you, Pam, for writing it. I think it was just for me.
Hey Pam, isn't any church institutional? How would you define a church as an institution? I ask because any kind of orthodoxy and its affiliated ideas- inerrancy, atonement, eternal life (or inversely heaven on earth), social justice- stem from creeds whether from the Bible or not. If addiction to a creed means no real change at all but simply a change of the object of addiction, I'd say Christianity itself is an addiction.
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