Addiction & Grace
While visiting my father, who’s been bedridden for the past month and a half in a suburban Detroit hospital, he asked my mother to bring his hearing aids in from home. She did the next day. Then, he refused to wear them, demanding that we shout for him to understand us. He proceeded to prod me on the recent New York Times article about the rash of bicycle theft in Burlington and its relationship to the city’s reduced police force. My buttons perfectly pushed, I’m soon arguing with him at full volume about opioid addicts in New Hampshire and the shootings in Burlington’s New American community. I’m also imagining what we sound like to anyone within earshot through the thin walls and outside the door of the room.
My father and I have been driving each other crazy for most of my life. I’ve spent the past decade investing inner work and outside support to help resolve the crux of this conflict in my soul. Yet, it is a tragic comedy that even us facing his encroaching death like a new next-door neighbor, him emaciated as a starved prisoner of war and fed through a tube in his stomach, our old habits are still so hard to break. I was struck by the symbolic synchronicity that we got in a row about opioid addicts because on this visit to Detroit I’ve been re-reading the utterly profound Addiction & Grace: Love & Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions by the psychiatrist & theologian Gerald May.
As May points out: The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things. We are all addicts in every sense of the word.
This quote almost seems too far-fetched and overreaching until I feel into the weariness of my soul having spent a succession of entire days with my dad in his hospital room. I realized that because I love this man so much is why his compulsive words still hurt me to the bone. And yet each time, apparently, I can’t help myself to grind him right back when he comes at me.
Like Adam & Eve in the Garden, I know better than to pick the apple and bite into it. But like them, I too have someone or something to blame for acting on my temptation. In fact, I have a lifetime of grievances against my father that validate my continued behavior towards him. Though I am starting to feel like May’s example of how: It is not at all unusual to hear aged alcoholics who have lost jobs, families, and homes, and who are now hospitalized with advanced cirrhosis of the liver saying, “Hell, no. I’ve never had any trouble with booze. I can take it or leave it.”
However – it is precisely because the throes of addiction are so dark that when the true light of grace pierces through it can be seen so clearly.
In the following days, I sat by my father’s side and perceived a different kind of longing in me. I wanted to be close to him. And as our intimacy deepened, an old pattern would eventually emerge between us, and I’d be filled with seething waves of spite for him. But as much as I wanted to lash out, my re-awakening love for him would not dissipate but became even more tender amid my inner storms. I choose to love him despite my demons, and I see there are angels carrying me over this great divide in myself. Freedom is possible through a mysterious, incarnational synthesis of human intention and divine grace writes May.
I think of Jesus, the ultimate healer of addictions and afflictions, who came as the New Adam to not fall into temptation but to call us back home. His own journey to return to his Father was paved with his ultimate sacrifice. Whatever our addictions are and however deeply they are embedded in our soul, there is a greater glory that we are being invited to give them up for that can’t be imagined but only lived out through faith in God’s Grace.
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16: 24-26)
*Quotations: May, Gerald. (1988). Addiction & Grace: Love & Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions. HarperCollins
-Kenzo An
