Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

February 18, 1996

"I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want--that is what I do."
from the Apostle Paul

Last Wednesday was Valentine's Day. A day to say "I love you" to those we care about. Do you remember when you exchanged Valentines in grade school? We wondered even then how much to say to whom. We didn't want to be rejected when we passed out hearts. And even now as grown-ups, we look in the mailbox, hoping for the red envelope. We all long to be loved.

Gerald May, psychotherapist and spiritual director, says that desire is rooted in a longing for God: "After 20 years of listening to the yearnings of people's hearts, I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. We may experience it in different ways, as a longing for wholeness, completion, or fulfillment. Regardless of how we describe it, it is a longing for love. It is a hunger to be loved, and to move closer to the source of love."

May continues: "The longing at the center of our hearts repeatedly disappears from our awareness, and its energy is usurped by forces that are not at all loving. . . . we give ourselves over to things that, in our deep honesty, we really do not want." May is talking about addiction. Moving towards something that hurts instead of heals. Not being able to pull away.

Years ago I saw a pair of newspaper photographs that moved me deeply. The story behind the pictures spoke to me of the desperation that comes when longing has no appropriate object. One picture was of a man sitting on a partially submerged park bench with a dripping wet puppy in his hands. The companion picture showed him flinging the six-week-old puppy into the water. According to the caption, each time after the puppy was thrown into the water, he would swim back to the man, only to be flung out again, until he eventually drowned.

Addiction is living like that puppy, going back again and again to the source of harm, because you don't know where else to go. The hands that reach out seem to offer comfort of some kind, seem to relieve the pain, the stress, the yearning--and you can't help swimming somewhere, because you know you're drowning. But coming back is deadly, to you and to others.

It is possible to be addicted to almost anything. Common addictions are to alcohol and drugs, to sex, to food, to work--but a person can be addicted to golf, to E-mail, to exercise, to shopping. Whatever you are addicted to becomes your God, and therefore, says May, "Addiction makes idolators of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment. . . . it erodes our free will and eats away at our dignity."

Marion Woodman talks about the "divine muffin." We take take the profane and treat it as sacred. She says that the "projection of the Perfect was once on God. When God died, that perfection was often projected onto the husband. And now the terrible truth is that in many lives that projection has been taken off the husband and put onto a muffin. . . . . At the same time, however, some voice of sanity . . . mocks the whole idea of <mystical participation> with a holy muffin. The muffin is not sacred, [Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, 1982. p.31.] and the power it is releasing is not holy power even when flavored with blueberries. . . . . The muffin cannot replace the divine wafer, nor can alcohol replace the divine spirit, nor can starving replace a religious fast.

Which bring us around to Lent. Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a time in the Christian calendar when adherents are invited to fast, or to give up something, in remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus, and in preparation for the celebration of Easter. Lent is not circled on the calendars of many Unitarian Universalists I know, it is not considered a major religious holiday. I do remember it from my early days, though. As a little Catholic girl I would go to church and kneel with the others and have my forehead marked with ashes. Each of us was asked to give up something for Lent, some food we particularly liked. As I remember, I tried to finesse this request by giving up something like watermelon, which was out of season.

Today as we move into this Lenten season, we're exploring another kind of giving up: giving up what is hurting you.

This is no casual invitation, no easy request. Not for you, and not for me. Once the story goes that a woman brought her son to Gandhi. She said to him, "Teacher, please tell my son to give up sugar. It is bad for him. If you tell him to give it up, I know he will obey." Gandhi said, "Bring your son back in one week, and I will tell him." And so the woman did so. And Gandhi told the boy to give up sugar. Then the woman pulled Gandhi aside. "Why, teacher, did you require me to go and then return a week later? You could have told my son last week." "Because," said Gandhi, "Last week, I hadn't given up sugar."

I would like to tell you this morning that I have given up sugar--that is to say, my addiction, but I have not. I will tell you that I have come to know my addiction more intimately in recent months, and that I am not satisfied living the way I am living. Change will not be easy, but more and more I know it to be necessary. My addiction is to work. My addiction is rooted, as are all addictions, in need. My need to be on top of things, to cover all the bases. To be the best minister I can be. To be perfect. To please everyone. Oh, that's a woman's thing! And underneath that need--the deeper need--is the need for relationship: for friendship and for intimacy. This is not a need that you can fill. We can love one another as minister and congregants, but you cannot be my friends nor my intimates. I must have a life outside the church. And that is what I will open myself to, in the coming weeks and months. You see, this church, with its rapid growth and increasing demands is a set-up for my particular addiction. I love my work here, and take great joy in it. And yet so much of what I do is so intense, so emotionally demanding--I must make time to rest, to exercise, and to play. So my commitment to you is that I will get some help from a consultant and redefine my role so that my life will be more balanced. And I will seek out sources of nurture and care for myself.

I know that as the minister I need to model a healthy, balanced life for staff and for congregants alike, and I'm not doing that right now. Part of the problem is institutional. Please know that we have a church of 1,300 members and only two ministers. According to the books, we should have at least four. Plus we are in a period of transition, needing to move on with our plans to make more space. My role in that effort is super-imposed upon my other tasks. So some things that should be done are not going to get done. And that's going to have to be OK. The larger truth is that I want to be present for you when I am with you, and in order to do that I have to nurture myself more completely than I have been doing.

I have said that this change in me will not be easy, nor will changes that you need to make in your own lives. For you see, we're not talking here just about individual vulnerabilities. We need to move not with judgment, but with compassion, for ourselves and for others. We are part of a culture that is addictive, for there is no longer any collective container for our deepest longings. The muffin cannot take the place of God. We find that, like all people, we are born into a time and place that is not of our choosing, and even if we have the most loving and well-balanced parents in the world, we live in a culture that is not life-giving. Eros is challenged on every hand by the cult of greed and injustice. Our economic system and the political system that supports it sets us over against, in competition with, using up others and being used up, exploiting our Mother the earth in the grossest of ways. It is very difficult to be a part of such a system and to feel integrated and whole. Rather, there is a sense of guilt and loss and fragmentation. The children of this country are acting out the cultural death wish, as suicides and juvenile killings climb. They have not yet learned to deny and and displace their pain as we have done. Our anxiety and our loneliness are not some kind of individual flaw--nor should this suffering be pinned entirely on our families of origin, as the "recovery movement" is wont to do. If our parents couldn't love us well enough, we need to ask ourselves why that was so. We are called upon not only to heal our personal lives, but to resist the larger social and political structures that re-inforce unhealthy living and relating. Don't buy goods you don't need. Don't do jobs that are demeaning to you or to others. Don't let political candidates who are pro-greed win the day.

I think of my parents and how they lived and how they died. Yesterday I saw the film "Leaving Las Vegas," in which the main character Ben decides to drink himself to death. It is a wonderful film, but was difficult for me to watch, because Ben reminded me of my father. Like Ben, my father was charming and good-looking--but he died of alcohol dementia. He didn't know me at all in those final years. I do remember the last coherent words he said to me. I was trying to tell him what my life had become, who I was. Maybe my goodness could make up for his badness. "I'm a minister, Daddy," I said. He looked at me with his watery, blue eyes, uncomprehending. "I'm a minister, a minister," I repeated, more loudly. Still he didn't understand. Finally, even more loudly, I said, "Daddy, I'm a preacher!" "Give 'em hell!" he answered.

And my mother. She had been a professional dancer as a young woman. But she gave up any notion of a career when she married my father. That's the way it was done then. As my father tells the story, she put on a dress one morning to go to work. She planned to leave me with a babysitter. When she told my father, he put his hand in the neck of her dress and ripped it down the front. She was to stay at home with me. Lucky me. He lost my mother, who was in and out of mental institutions, and as a man he could not speak of his pain, and so he drank. My mother, earthy and romantic, never looked at another man. As she lay dying, she asked for word of my father, who could not speak of her except when he was drinking, when he would weep and remember. She died, and then a few years later he died. That was just before I came here to be your minister. I remember when I got the call that he was dead. Both of them gone. I cried so deeply, not so much for myself, but for my mother and my father--at the pain they had endured, these two good people who loved each other, but couldn't find a container of peace in which to make a home.

And like all of you, I have become what I have become because of what birthed me, and the choices I have made out of that wonderful and terrible mix that families are. As a minister, I want to help create liberating structures, containers for pain and joy, so that people can come here to church and experience healing--and then go out and heal those broken places in the larger world. I want to create with you a church community where people are accepted as they are, where the addiction can be released because the love and sense of purpose are there to fill the emptiness and the longing.

And yet the church community can only go so far. It can give you safety and comfort. It can point the way to wholeness. But you, each one of you, must ultimately enter your own darkness with your own demons. How will you face them, the compulsions that control you and make you do that which you would not do?

I believe we can only be set free through grace. I don't think self-help books will do it, or psychotherapy, or will power. I don't believe you can do this hard thing on your own. Nor can I. I believe that we must first acknowledge our own brokenness and need. Only then can grace flow into our lives. I know this is difficult for Unitarian Universalists to hear. I remember in one church where I served, we sang "Amazing Grace" one Sunday, and when we finished one woman made no bones about it: she resented singing the line "that saved a wretch like me." She was not a wretch, and she wanted us to know that. Then someone else stood up. He was a man who had AIDS and who suffered from mental illness. He allowed that down at the Salvation Army they liked to sing "Amazing Grace," because you see they knew they were wretches.

And the Kingdom of God will be made known to such as these. We have to really be open to grace, as scary as that is. We can't through our usual consumer mode rid ourselves of addiction. We can't just use prayer as a kind of leverage to get what we want, as though God is some kind of vending machine in the sky. Rather, we enter into a covenant with the Holy: we come in our weakness and in our need. We vow to do our part. And then we leave the rest to God.

We have "to try to make friends with the spaciousness," says Gerald May. There will most likely be the fierce pain of withdrawal. And the temptation to substitute one addiction for another. But stay with the spaciousness, the void. And out of that void will emerge our authentic longing, and then the blessing that awaits us.

Let me be clear. Our desire must not be focused on ridding ourselves of the addiction. That is a by-product. Our proper desire is to be at one with the Mystery, the Ground of our Being. We cannot make it happen. But we can be sure that we are being pursued. Do you remember when you were little and out playing in the evening and your mother called you to dinner? She would call and call, and if you did not respond she would call again. "Come on home," she would say. "It's time to come home." There will be constant invitation. Direction will emerge. You are beloved. Dare to take the Holy as a partner, and you will find the way home. So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.