by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given February 22, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into this circle of love and justice;

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health;

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together.

I came across a story recently that reminded me of my growing up days in a small town in N. Louisiana.  Our parish was dry—that is, no alcohol was sold there—and my family attended the Southern Baptist Church with its big white columns rising up over the city.  Catty-corner from the church was Pee-Wee’s filling station, where boot-leg liquor and white lightnin’ could be purchased any time of the day or night.  Anyway, the story goes like this.  The preacher was ending a long sermon on demon rum.  He was all fired up.  He said, “If I had all the beer in the world—I’d take it and throw it in the river.”  And then, with even greater enthusiasm he continued, “And if I had all the wine in the world, I’d take it and throw it in the river!”  And then finally he shouted, “And if I had all the whiskey in the world, I’d take it and throw it in the river.”  At that dramatic moment, he sat down.  The choir director stood up very cautiously and then announced with a smile, “For our closing hymn, let us sing, ‘Shall We Gather at the River.’”

It’s not the alcohol that is the problem, of course—it’s the addiction to the alcohol that plagues so many people, costing the nation billions in decreased job performance and untold pain to families, that figures in about half of traffic fatalities.  Fourteen percent of Americans will at some time have a serious problem with alcohol.  More than 50 million Americans smoke cigarettes, contributing to almost half a million deaths a year, more than 12 times the number killed in traffic accidents.  Drug use is endemic—we have lost the war on drugs, as our prisons fill up with purveyors of drugs.

But of course it’s not just drugs and alcohol and tobacco that draw us into addiction—we can be addicted to a wide variety of substances and behaviors—like food, work, chocolate, sex, computers, exercise, the stock market, pistachio nuts, and potato chips—and I believe that most of us are addicted to something and usually more than one thing.  I have to confess right now that I’m totally addicted to popcorn and diet coke at the movies.  Do I know that that stuff is bad for my body?  Yes—and I’m usually very careful about my diet.  Do I understand that I’m paying about 20 times what it’s worth?  Yes.  Do I feel guilty because I should be donating this money to the food bank?  Yes.  Does any of this change my behavior?  No.  I just feel so happy when I’m sitting in a dark movie theater eating popcorn. 

There are two basic reasons, so far as I can see, for the prevalence of addiction in our society—the first is the pleasure-pain principle, which all creatures are subject to.  All living things seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, and when something gives us pleasure, we want to do that thing again.  But then something else happens as we repeat that behavior: our brain—our central nervous system—begins to change, and we become “hooked” on that particular pleasure.  We have to have it.  And some substances are chemically addictive, as well as psychologically addictive.  Take cigarettes, for example.  As Mark Twain said, “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.”  It’s not quitting that’s hard—it’s not starting again.  The problem is that once this new state in your brain has been formed by mind and mood-altering chemistry, it cannot be forgotten. As one writer explained it, it’s like rewarding a puppy with petting and a big bone each time he urinates on the couch.  How do you think he’s going to get housebroken?

How do drugs work?  Drugs hijack our pleasure pathways to the brain, and when we take in a substance like cocaine, it just goes—zap—directly to the pleasure zone, and our brain thinks it’s in heaven.  The part of us that doesn’t want to do drugs is pushed aside. In experiments with rats, the rats are given food and also a pleasure button, through which they get a drug that makes them euphoric.  They will continue to press the pleasure button and ignore their food until they starve to death.

So the first reason for addiction—the pleasure-pain principle—would carry over to every culture and every age.  The second reason is more specific to our culture—our culture is almost perfectly designed to create addicts.  Depending on their perspective, different people will give you a different interpretation of why our culture is so given to addiction—the psychiatrist might say lack of good early parenting; the sociologist might say the loneliness; the environmentalist might say separation from the natural world; the theologian might say the longing for spiritual wholeness.  And all of them would have part of it right.  Think about it.  There is an emptiness and a longing at the heart of our culture. 

Our culture is filled with broken families; 25% of us live alone, something that can be said for no other country in the world; we have been led to believe that our problems should be solved by technology, whereas our most important problems—like lack of meaning and loneliness—are often exacerbated by technology; individualism is lauded over community; our culture is high stress; our culture is comfort-oriented; we have been led to believe through advertising that we are inadequate—worse than inadequate—not lovable, that we should be ashamed of how we look or smell, or of what we drive; our ideals are difficult to uphold and are being replaced by cynicism in many.  We are an absolute set-up for addiction.  Who would not want to escape from such a life?  And so we find our ways out. 

The problem with addictions of any kind—and granted, some are much worse than others: pistachio nuts are not to be compared to crack cocaine—the problem is that they bring a rigidity to our lives and a lack of freedom.  Finding an experience pleasurable or comforting, we cling to it, and in doing so take the first step towards the narrowness and inability to choose, which characterize addictive states.  We sometimes fall into patterns which seem so natural that we don’t even recognize them as addictions any more.

Robert Aitken tells the story of one of his friends who fell ill while at the beach.  The lifeguard called an ambulance, and the man was rushed to the hospital.  There he was diagnosed—it was a heart attack.  He was treated and put to bed, to rest.  When everything was quiet, he reached for a cigarette that wasn’t there, in a pocket that wasn’t there.  “A moment of truth,” says Aitken.  Without even thinking, we reach for the cigarette or the TV remote or the refrigerator door.  We fear the emptiness of the night, and we program ourselves to avoid it.

We can be addicted even to virtue, to purity itself, and become an awful prig, unable to feel genuine compassion in the moment.  We can be addicted to a person, in which case that person becomes an object.  The boyfriend of a young woman who had attempted suicide said, “I guess she must really love me, because she tried to kill herself when I left her.”  You don’t kill yourself out of freedom, out of love.  How free are we in our love?   We have all had experiences of making compromises we shouldn’t have made, to avoid losing the affection of someone, even sacrificing our principles, perhaps, or our dignity.  Anything which has you under its spell, which has you in its control, is harmful to your spiritual well-being.  Anything which you are attached to that becomes more important than God actually becomes your God.  So you have the stock market as God, or work as God (and I have to confess that I have to be doing something all the time, have to be busy all the time), or saving the world as God.  Our idols today are not the gold calf of the Israelites.  Anything that we worship in the place of God becomes an idol.

The following was the beginning of an article on the travel page of the NY Times last Friday:  “Precariously straddling a ridgeline atop the nation’s tallest sand dune, Rick Seth takes a moment to explain his addiction to dune buggies.  ‘I like to call it anger management,’ he says.  ‘It’s like a roller coaster that never quits.’  With that, he guns his muscular Volkswagen-powered sand rail buggy, and we fall 600 feet down the gritty, black-diamond slope of Nevada’s Sand Mountain at 70 miles per hour.  Then we turn around, and do it again—only faster.” This is interesting to me—what would make a grown man want to spend his time this way?  “Anger management,” he says.  I think that begins to explain it.  A lot of people in this culture are “keeping the lid on.”  They are cut off at the neck and just not in touch with their feelings—they don’t dare get in touch with their real feelings, because work, or life, might be unbearable.  So when the rage threatens to come up, or when they are dying from boredom, they start eating or drinking or spending money or gambling—or riding dune buggies.  You name your poison. 

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman believes that many addicts are profoundly religious people.  She says that people are driven to addiction because “there is no collective container for their natural spiritual needs.”  She says that once the church was the place where people would enter into the sacred world and surrender to it and take meaning back into the profane world.  Their suffering was given meaning.  “You can’t live with meaningless suffering,” she says.  “So you have avoidance.”

After all, alcohol and drugs take us out of the mundane world for a while.  Thrill-seeking does the same, and so we have high-risk sports.  Some of you may have seen the film “Touching the Void,” about mountain climbing, and you wonder why anyone would climb up the straight side of a huge mountain in freezing cold weather, daring death.  As you hear the two young men talk of their experience, you see that mountain climbing gives them a sense of presence, a feeling of aliveness, that can come in no other way for them.

In our confused and venal lives, in the ways we remember and regret, in the ways we hope and yearn, sometimes we just want to get to a place of forgetfulness.  Call it a place of perfection, or ecstasy, or transcendence.  We want to go beyond ourselves and the limitations of our earthly striving.  We want to forget the fear that haunts us, and we want to open ourselves to experience beyond the everyday.  We want to move into the realm of the sacred.  And yet because of whatever reasons—perhaps the failure of our institutions of faith, perhaps because of the paucity of symbols to contain meaning for us, or because of the sheer commercialism that engulfs us every day, we opt simply to escape instead—and we find a vehicle and too often become trapped there.

It is only when we acknowledge our lack of freedom that we have an opportunity to break free.  A physician, Dr. Richard Sandor, tells of one of the first AA meetings he ever attended.  He said he listened to a woman who introduced herself as follows:  “Hi, my name is Pamela, and I’m a grateful alcoholic.”  He was puzzled, he said.  What had she to be grateful for?  A ruined marriage?  Lost jobs?  Serious physical ailments stemming from her addiction?  Of all the adjectives he could imagine an alcoholic using to describe herself, “grateful” wasn’t one of them.  “Grateful” described me, he thought, and a good many other people who’d never had this problem in the first place!  But that was early on in his work with addicts and alcoholics—when he thought he was fundamentally different from “them,” Sandor writes.  “Gratefully, some six years later, I have begun to learn otherwise.”

What is he talking about?  Sandor is not an alcoholic or a druggie. What does he mean, he is not fundamentally different from them?  He means, I think, that he fights with the same demons they do and that you and I do—and he means that he needs people and good work to do, that he needs love and nourishing food and play and community.  He lives in the same culture they do, and has the same temptations.  But for the grace of God, he could be an alcoholic, and he knows that.

But for the grace of God.  Let’s talk about grace, for a moment.  I think it is safe to say that it is the rare person who can overcome an addiction through willpower.  I think we have to partner with God, or as they say in AA, with a higher being, however you conceive of that.  Once we recognize our powerlessness, we will begin to open to the spiritual power that is ours through grace.  Without humility, without knowing that we have a need, we can receive nothing from God.  So long as we continue to say, “I can handle this,” we remain stuck in our pride—relying on our shaky willpower.  Once we understand that we are not in control, and that we must throw ourselves upon the mercy of our God, then and only then can this partnership bear fruit. 

Life is very hard.  It is hard to live well, to live with honor and with integrity, to keep the wolf of despair from the door.  The only way I have found to deal with this hard piece of reality is to try to make myself somehow useful in this world, somehow in spite of my woundedness to bless the world.  God enters at the point of our woundedness.  It is not enough to say “no” to the addiction—asceticism in itself is not a form of liberation.  That just prepares us for the “yes” that is to come.  What will take the place of the addiction?  What manifestation of the Sacred will be appearing, through grace?  I think it was St. Augustine who said, “God is always trying to give us something, but our hand is always clutching something else.”  Today I invite you to open your hand, in faith, and let go.  You may need to breathe deeply for a while, or weep.  But keep your hand out, and see what comes to you as a gift, freely given, through grace, not because you deserve it, but just because—just because.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we are weak when we would be strong.  We admit this, and ask you to be with us in our weakness.  We know that we cannot set the time and place that your grace will fall upon us, but we would be open to your gifts of grace, gifts of the spirit that we in no way deserve, but are given out of your boundless love.  Thank you for this day, for the love in this community that we call church.  Help us to live as though we liked ourselves, and help us to bless others, even out of our woundedness.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place, may the grace of God fall upon you.  May you go with love in your hearts and the peace that passes all understanding.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.