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.