WHEN FAITH BECOMES SUBSTANCE
My students tumble into class chattering excitedly about an awesome worship service. They talk about how ‘Spirit-filled’ that one moment was; how they know God is real because they felt compelled to cry or raise their hands in a packed auditorium stoked by electric guitars, professional lighting, and a hunky white dude ‘pouring out’ his heart. Their own hearts are burning as they envision a romantic life on the mission field, saving souls for Jesus. I can’t shake the foreboding that washes over me. When I ask if I would experience just as authentic a sign of God’s presence by lighting up a joint, they squirm in their seats. Why is following the way of Jesus Christ so much like searching for a dopamine hit?
I have only to walk around campus to encounter more revelations. At the hands of their Christian families, my students endure physical violence, the use of siblings as informers, financial manipulation that withholds in order to enforce, and control of things as small as tank top straps and as large as fields of study. They are inured to demeaning reactivity or degrading comments codified as good Christian parenting or difficult but necessary pastoral decisions. And always, always, they maintain the rule to save face, to protect those in charge. They know to keep problems secret, pretend things are terrific, ensure that if any story of real pain is told it must quickly find a happy ending where God intervenes to remove uncertainty, struggle, or loss. These strategies preserve a cocoon of comfortability at the expense of authenticity. How do spiritual highs so quickly become means of controlling others?
***
Thanks to my communities of origin and early pastoral experience, I’ve long held season tickets to the production “Alcoholism: Jacking Up Everyone Within Reach.” Several times, I’ve been upgraded to a front-row seat, watching as relationships I held dear irreparably deteriorated while my own efforts to fix or escape the situation just increased my agony.
My life experience prompted attempts to become an expert in addiction – or at least in its controversies. I have read just about all the books. I know the catch phrases, the factors, and the debates. It’s a disease; it’s a habit; it’s a coping mechanism; it’s genetic. After enough growth, someone may no longer need restrictions; the compulsions will never completely go away. The outline shifts, requiring nimble adaptations. One thing seems certain: addiction is a wily beast, and searching for a one-size-fits-all cure merely entrenches its patterns.
These demons belong to me, too. I am an academic theologian and clergywoman, and I know the acrid taste of addiction as it oxidizes what I love. I know how the search for control in a world hellbent on burning itself down will seize any means possible. Using substances is one method; co-dependent enabling or manipulating offers a more socially acceptable path. But perhaps the most deceptive form is using faith as a substance.
What does this assertion mean? I know how it looks and feels more than I know how to precisely define my terms. This seems fitting for a problem so mired in our feelings. It’s easier to reach for a bottle or an ice cream tub or to click ‘add to cart’ than it is to have that hard conversation with someone we love—or with ourselves. It’s simpler to wheedle others than to acknowledge the yawning abyss of loneliness or fear swirling around one’s core; faster to slap a spiritualizing band-aid over the gaping wounds organized religion inflicts upon its children than to admit that our houses of worship are built by oppression. It isn’t the bottle or the ice cream that is really the problem, nor is every turn to them a sign of addiction. It’s when we always numb out our feelings with our substance of choice, when we use in order to dodge all vulnerability and responsibility, when we need ever-greater amounts to sustain the relief, when we disappear from our lives for the sake of our hit. Our means of controlling our painful, unpredictable world begins to control us. We lie or obfuscate to avoid this cold truth, which only deepens our shame and entrapment. And oftentimes our loved ones play along: they control others so we can escape, they lie or obfuscate on our behalf, they compress themselves until they, too, are controlled by our substance. This becomes their hit, their means of control. Yet removing one substance often just makes room for other, less taboo ones. Our impulse to control distressing feelings remains. We trade oxycontin for the social capital of “being in recovery.” We leave behind the booze but end up chained to the office. We exit our former spirituality in favor of the newest morality code we are convinced will save us from the world’s chaos. Under it all, the originating pain festers.
Like I said, I know how it feels. As I plan the week’s intercessory prayers I will offer on behalf of the church and the world, my bones gnaw with a hunger that cannot be sated. I start to get the mushy-green way I do when I cannot fix everything for everyone but believe I should. So I wring absolution out of the rubrics that beg God to take away memories that haunt or terrors that menace. At work, I struggle to witness to what is good and what is true and why there seems to be such a distance between them. So I diagram christological formulae and trace the grooves forming in my mind as I transfer my anguish into obsession over correctness.
It all goes down so cool and smooth, settling over my raw and prickly edges with a clean finality. When an extended family member calls me, convinced that her son’s admittance to rehab is a sign she hasn’t prayed enough, I sense the hand of terror seizing heavy at her throat, because I feel that same grip settle around my neck each time I interact with my relative who still uses, every moment I worry about the state of the universe. That’s how I recognize its shadowy form lurking behind my enthused students, beckoning seductively. I, too, am driven by helplessness in the face of wounds much bigger than I, even if that makes me a martyr or a scapegoat for others’ projections or the star of the show. I may not be hiding vodka under my bed, but I, too, am a user.
***
I come by religious addiction naturally. I was raised in a Christian home, sent to Christian schools. My childhood is marked by a singing blue songbook, sermons railing against the evils of this world, and summer VBS memorizing Bible passages as sweat trickles down my neck alongside my worries already at age six that I was not cool or thin enough. I am a veteran of flannelgraph Sunday School lessons, lectures on being a good girl, and by age seven asking questions about biblical inconsistencies or oddities deemed too out of bounds for discussion. Mission trips give way to Bible studies and youth Sunday sermons and eventually elaborate presentations on how to beat secular worldviews, prove evolution wrong, and learn to love a God who predestines some and hates others merely by the luck of their draw.
I can do all of this surprisingly well. My early call to ordination is remarkable only because it lands on the wrong kid, or perhaps my parents misread the instructions when they produced another girl instead of a boy. Later on, in a charismatic evangelical community playing with liturgy like a child should never play with fire, I discover that my background primes me to welcome the pressure of always feeling there is more I can do to get holy or extra sins I should confess. Lenten restrictions are no trouble, late-night prayer watches earn the badge of true faith. The power in fasting dwindles if I drink broth. Until I have a nervous breakdown under the strain of always submitting to my boyfriend, I adopt restrictive gender roles that promise relief from the pricking call to ministry. I chase lengthy introspection in small groups where the hands laid on me and oil anointings and prophetic words will finally, fully, set all to rights. I feel pleasure in upholding the one and only right way to worship. I accept exclusion when I do not measure up. I want everything to be right so badly that if it will tip God’s hands on the scales, I will gladly self-destruct. These, too, are addictive modes, careening me from user to enabler to hero and back again. Is it the denomination? My genes? My trauma-haunted childhood chalking out patterns that I cannot help but keep re-embroidering? Some toxic interplay of it all?
***
Employing faith primarily as a mechanism to control self and others reduces spirituality to the same rigidity that drives an addict’s desperation. Using often involves secret stashes or enablers covering for lies, damage, and absence. Religious forms of addiction merely tape ‘God’ over similar practices, leaving us liable to suffer or commit abuse. Just as with alcohol or food or exercise, using faith requires that we smile while we twist jagged cuts. And as many an A.A. member has discovered, even the ‘right’ practice, be it the 12 steps or a new spiritual exercise, can so quickly become just another mask, another compulsion. In religious contexts, our expertise at the lingo, the gestures, the knowledge, becomes another form of control, another straight jacket posing as life vest.
When my students lose their grasp on faith as a fixer, they fall through an invisible trapdoor. Sometimes they compensate by striving to show their capability or intellectual prowess. Sometimes they exhibit mood swings, crying, or withdrawal. One calls me over the summer from the mental health in-patient ward. They have long held at bay difficult memories that keep pouncing into consciousness, claws shredding concentration. They finally feel safe enough in a new living situation that the flashbacks come roaring up with a vengeance, necessitating attention. They ask me how they can possibly integrate psychiatric care with their faith. I ask if that is really the issue, or if their own how-to lists—including how to best be spiritual during a psychological crisis—are simply another form of avoidance.
I begin to understand this for myself when I sign up to take the Ignatian Exercises. This is, after all, what really holy people do, and I want to be one of them. At this point, I still know spiritual formation as the forced appeasement of the divine, and I cannot yet imagine another way. During our introductory meeting, the spiritual director instructs me to draw how I feel about the opportunity. I dutifully go away and doodle, surprising myself when I appear in a school uniform complete with blazer and pleated skirt, polka dot rain boots on my feet as I stomp into a puddle and yell at the thunderstorm over my head, “but I don’t wanna.” Journal in hand, I return for my second session, certain that my experienced guide will know how to wisely direct me past this spot of stubbornness. She looks at my sketch. She looks at me. She points out that in the middle of a raging downpour I am outfitted with an umbrella and those fabulous boots, plus the lightning in my illustration has avoided striking me. “Hmmm,” she muses, “look how protected you are as you express your feelings and set your limits.” And then she says, “we are not going to do the exercises this year.”
***
Sometimes I envy my colleagues and friends who can lace a constant rule of faith around their days: these prayers from those venerable sources, this way of making their beds or packing their lunches that helps them know God is near, a set of commitments to things they will always say or never watch. I have to go easy. I am forever discovering yet another way spiritual guiderails can be soldered into cages. I chirp warnings like an over-functioning mine canary or jump back, jolted and smoldering, from testing for electrical faults by sticking my own fingers into light sockets. My latest iteration concerns how I approach social justice. No, it’s not optional, and I’m not here to argue the lie that there could be too much. The entire Bible is pretty clear that the way to heaven runs through righting the wrongs perpetrated against the marginalized. It’s the attempt to effect change by using shame that damages the goodness of the movement and betrays my white savior complex.
Making my home in The Episcopal Church has helped me no longer demand absolute control and certainty from my faith. I likely won’t be threatened with damnation from the pulpit or emotionally ambushed by earnestly sobbing songs and prayers. I’m neither shamed for imperfectly conforming to this spiritual discipline nor given more holiness points for completing that one. Weekly rituals and standards for communal life build safety. This quiet heals me. There’s still plenty of room to innovate, and indeed many more revisions must be made. But liturgical spirituality is not magically immune from the same addictive forces that ensnare my decidedly non-liturgical students. Like them, in order to soothe the self who is our harshest critic, our search for control can colonize any spiritual practice or evacuate our personhood into zealous battles over propriety. This, too, is using. For liturgy isn’t an end in itself. It doesn’t save me so much as offer a frame into which I cast my anxieties while I plod along, searching for where Jesus will show up next. It’s one of my favorite frames, but it’s not the only one. And sometimes, for me and for others, it’s the wrong one.
One of the twelve step articles I’ve read noted that joining Alcoholics Anonymous is like learning to cage a lion. Being called to the priesthood and to teach theology is like living in the cage with the lion, who is both yourself and everyone you love, including God. I am like an alcoholic who has been assigned to perpetually tend bar at a really amazing wedding. Sometimes the barkeep grabs the mic and gets up on the counter for some bad karaoke and even poorer dance moves. Sometimes she can take a sip of one particular drink, but not more or not others. And sometimes she must disappear out to the back alley for a while to kick a few stones and pound the wall.
The secret I’ve learned is that the back alley teems with its own glory. When I close the door on the sentimental veneer and lofty language that religious folks like me specialize in, I learn how to get used to beginning again, how to keep giving up my use of faith as a drug and once more accept the actual contours of my own life. Sometimes out there I find myself a guest of those doing what I thought I was doing in the church: creating belonging by refusing to pretend. They believe they’re not welcome in the front door, and many times that is sadly still the case. Or they just don’t want to go inside, which is their valid choice to make. But they often tell the truths the church denies as it pounds in the stakes for its banners of righteousness. I want all the stowed boxes of fragile dreams unpacked and all the swallowed stories sung. So I holler with delight when Hannah Gadsby eviscerates misogyny using language that would get me fired. I laugh until I cry and then keep crying as the teens on Sex Education fumble their way around condoms, cliques, and fraught families. I drive back roads through cornfields at that hour of a summer evening when the light and the scent and the crickets in the wind envelope me in a drenching drowsing gold . I turn up Rodrigo or Beyoncé very loud and clutch my phone as the late-night news rolls in, hoping the Holy Spirit is alchemizing all my groans into prayer. She’s got a reputation to uphold, and she’s not an addict about it, so I’m cautiously optimistic. I still haven’t taken the exercises. Maybe someday.
For my students weaving courage, resilience, and integrity. None of us is free until all of us are free; each tiny move towards freedom by any benefits us all.