The greatest enemy to recovery is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness: if it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not I abstain from using drugs or alcohol, why abstain? There is a similar tendency in the Christian life, as we live out the ongoing war between the desires of the Spirit and the desires of the flesh, “for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:17). The temptation to give up, to live like a captive to the law of sin (Romans 7:23) is ever present. And the needed response in both recovery and the Christian life is spiritual tenacity or perseverance.
The importance of spiritual tenacity was emphasized in My Utmost for His Highest, for February 22nd, “The Discipline of Spiritual Tenacity”: “It is endurance combined with the absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire.” We need to work deliberately to manifest love, justice, forgiveness and kindness to others, relying upon “the certainty that God is not going to be worsted.” We are to persevere. My Utmost for His Highest was a devotional read in early A.A.
Because of the very real correspondence between sin and addiction, spiritual tenacity or perseverance is a daily requirement for the Christian believer and the recovering alcoholic or addict. In another article, “Born of the Flesh,” I noted that addiction was simultaneously “a disease of the brain” and “an infection of the human heart.” The scientific evidence of genetics and biochemistry explains the physiological aspect of addiction, but cannot fully account for how that is translated into abnormal behavior or why the tendency to fall back into active addiction must be guarded against for a lifetime.
Increasingly in our time, materialistic cause seems to dominate accepted views of human nature and disorder. Here the bodily, material aspect of humanity is emphasized. Our mental, emotional, and spiritual lives are thought to be simply by–products of our material constitution. Therefore, explanations of human behavior have a radically naturalistic explanation. The notion of freedom, the ability to choose how we act or respond to our environment is ultimately a myth from this perspective. Moral responsibility for our actions is not something the individual can claim. Physiology, society or the environment—or a combination of these sources—is ultimately responsible for our good or bad behavior. Ultimately there is no God or Higher Power and no sin. Morality is a socially constructed phenomenon; sin does not exist; and addiction is merely a brain disease. A wonderfully complex brain disease, but ultimately caused by bio-physical mechanisms alone.
But if we are psycho-somatic beings as Anthony Hoekema claims in Created in God’s Image, we are creatures with a body (soma) and soul (psyche). Then there is an interaction between the physical and psychological aspects of our being. Genetics and biochemistry can influence human behavior, but they cannot fully determine it. If you believe that we are more than a sophisticated complex of bio-physical processes, explanations for all human behavior—including sin and addiction—must have this dual causal sense without subsuming ultimate responsibility under the other. For more on Hoekema’s idea, see “Created in the Image of God.”
Now we come to a necessary presumption, the existence of God or a Higher Power. This God or Higher Power is a necessary part of Twelve Step recovery and Christian, Biblical belief. But it is an irrelevant nuisance at best if you hold to a consistent view of addiction as merely a brain disease. When there is a God or Higher Power, there can be a basis for morality beyond human, social consensus. Wrong doing or sin can then be a violation of what this God or Higher Power declares is right. Biblical, Christian thinking goes one step further and sees sin as wrong being as well as wrong doing.
Sin is thus never merely a voluntary act of transgression; it proceeds from something more deep-seated; the expression of a sinful heart. Here the sense of sin in Romans 3:23 (all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God) and Romans 5:12-19 is in view. We are sinful in this way because the sin of Adam is imputed (credited) to all of us. Rejecting the doctrine of original sin fails to appreciate the close relationship between the imputation of Adam’s sin to all of humanity and God’s plan for the accomplishment of salvation in Christ. In the New Bible Dictionary, John Murray and B.A. Milne said:
The history of mankind is finally subsumed under two complexes, sin-condemnation-death and righteousness-justification-life. The former arises from our union with Adam, the latter from union with Christ. These are the two orbits within which we live and move. God’s government of men is directed in terms of these relationships. If we do not reckon with Adam we are thereby excluded from a proper understanding of Christ. All who die die in Adam; all who are made alive are made alive in Christ.
So that which is born of the flesh (the physical body) is flesh (a depraved heart, given over to wickedness). Addiction is simultaneously a disease of the brain and an infection of the heart. And this bio-psycho-social-spiritual ‘disease’ precedes the addictive/sin behavior noted in Romans 7:18-19: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”
Like sin, addiction is wrong being as well as wrong doing. And the wrong being of addiction has an ongoing existence in the human heart that continually strives to re-engage the addict or alcoholic in the wrong doing of active drinking or drug use. So, it’s not enough to simply abstain from drugs or alcohol; the addict has to change: Abstinence plus change equals recovery. And this change process must be a lifelong pursuit.
Walking Up the Down Escalator
One metaphoric image that captures this truth is to say that recovery is like walking up a down escalator. The trick for progress is to continue walking up the escalator faster than it is moving down. It doesn’t matter how long you have been walking up the escalator, the moment your efforts to walk up are less than the down movement of the escalator, you start to drift back to where you started. You may even continue to walk up; but if the effort isn’t greater than the movement of the down escalator, you don’t even realize you are actually moving backwards. For more on this concept, see “Preventing the Relapse Process, Part 2.”
In the AA Grapevine article, “PO Box 1980,” was the story of an older man at a treatment center. He approached a counselor after a talk on relapse and said that until two weeks before that, he had been sober for forty-two years. For thirty-nine of them, he attended A.A. meetings. After he moved three years ago, he stopped going to A.A. when he found that he just didn’t like the meetings in his new area. He figured he’d heard all he was going to hear and learned all he was going to learn; that he didn’t need them after thirty-nine years.
On an ordinary day, when a couple of things went wrong, he thought he would feel better with a drink. “That first day I only had a couple, but the next day I drank until I passed out. I disappeared for two weeks and my grandkids came looking for me. They found me passed out in a closet and they brought me here.” Abstinence relieves the symptoms of wrong doing, but it does not cure the disease of addictive wrong being. Recovery is a life-long process.
If you’re interested, more articles from this series can be found under the link for “The Romans Road of Recovery.” “A Common Spiritual Path” (01) and “The Romans Road of Recovery” (02) will introduce this series of articles. If you began by reading one that came from the middle or the end of the series, try reading them before reading others. Follow the numerical listing of the articles (i.e., 01, 02, or 1st, 2nd, etc.), if you want to read them in the order they were originally intended. This article is the 12th in the series. Enjoy.