Good morning.
Today we are observing Alcohol and Drug Awareness Sunday and I am here to share the story of Recovery Ministries of the Episcopal Church, my own journey as an addictions counselor, and some thoughts about the relationship of recovery programs to how we operate in the church.
After we married, Dawn and I spent two years in the Peace Corps. My Peace Corps assignment was as an agriculture volunteer – apparently where they assigned history majors. It wasn’t long before it became clear that my supervisor was a practicing alcoholic. It was several years later that I recognized my parent’s abuse of alcohol and, much later, my brother’s alcohol addiction. But I leap ahead of myself.
Following Peace Corps, I got a master’s degree in Vocational Rehabilitation Counseling and did my Internship at the VA Medical Center in Seattle. After graduation, I worked in the Methadone Maintenance Program, a newly funded drug treatment program. I was naïve and ignorant about addictions, but my clients educated me in a hurry.
A few years later, I transferred to an experimental treatment program at the Vancouver VA, unusual for the time because it combined treating addictions to alcohol and drugs. That one-year commitment lasted 20 years. All this prologue is to say that the journey from naiveté to a professionally equipped counselor took some 28 years.
In 1979, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established the National Episcopal Coalition on Alcohol and Drugs, NECAD, which is now Recovery Ministries. They also directed every Diocese to create their own ministry, which the Diocese of Olympia did shortly thereafter, naming it the Commission on Alcohol and Substance Abuse, or CASA. The church recognized that alcohol dependence and substance abuse was not only a serious illness in our society, but that is also a Spiritual Assault.
In the mid 1980s, I became a member of CASA and later with NECAD. Working with people in the recovery community in our diocese and with the national church awakened in me an understanding and admiration for people seeking recovery. Along with that came the understanding of the tools of recovery.
Among the first tools of recovery is recognizing that addiction is about loss of control, chronic negation and violation of self, and the loss of trust in oneself.
The most well-known recovery programs are 12 Step Programs, originally founded as Alcoholics Anonymous. These programs have expanded now to other areas of recovery and support.
The Twelve Steps themselves are profound and personal, and are clearly founded in Scripture. They are fundamentally seeking the redemption, love, and direction of “God as you understand it, revealed in a Higher Power Greater Than Oneself”. The founder of AA, Bill W, searched for direction and confirmation that the very realization of a power greater than oneself was, in fact, a spiritual journey.
Samuel Shoemaker, a friend of Bill W’s and an Episcopal Priest, wrote an insightful and dynamic tract entitled “What the Church has to Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous”. I want to share a few of his observations from an address he made to the 20th Anniversary AA Convention in 1955. I have taken the liberty of updating some of the language.
He said the first thing the Church needs to learn from AA, and now other recovery groups, is that nobody gets anywhere until they recognize a clearly defined need. People do not come to recovery groups to get made a little better. They do not come because the best people are doing it. They come because they are desperate. They are not people looking for a religion; they are utterly desperate persons in search of redemption. Without what these groups give, death stares them in the face. With what the groups give them, there is life and hope.
Is there anything as definite for you or me, who may not be addicted? If there is, I am sure it lies in the realm of our conscious, withholding of the truth about ourselves from God and from one another, by pretending we are already good Christians.
The relief of being accepted can never be known by one who never thought of themselves unaccepted. I hear of ‘good’ Christian people belonging to “fine old church families”. There were no good Christians in the first church, only sinners. Peter never let himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour the cock crowed. Today, it sometimes seems that the last place where one can be candid about one’s faults is in the Church. In a Bar, often yes; in a Church, often no.
The second thing the Church needs to learn from recovery groups is that we are redeemed in a life-changing fellowship. Recovery groups do not expect to let anyone who comes in stay the way they are. They know the person is in need and must have help. They live for nothing else but to extend and keep extending that help.
Like the Church, they did not begin in glorious Gothic structures, but rather in houses or other places where they could gather and meet together, the people in need and the people helping them.
A person in AA was heard to say that he could stay away from his veterans meeting, his Legion, or his Church, and nobody would notice. But if he stayed away from his AA meeting, his telephone would begin to ring the next day.
“A life-changing fellowship” sounds like a description of the Church. It is of the ideal church. But is it actually?
The third thing the Church needs to learn from Recovery Groups is the necessity for personal connection. People at Recovery Groups know all the stock excuses for not being engaged or attending meetings. They have used them themselves and heard them hundreds of times. People in recovery see themselves just as they are. I think that many of us in the Church see ourselves as we should like to appear to others, not as we are before God. Also, how many of us have ever taken a “fearless moral inventory” of ourselves, and then dared make the depth of our need known to any other human being?
The fourth thing the Church needs to learn is the necessity for a real change of heart, a true conversion. As we come to church Sunday after Sunday, year after year, we are supposed to be in a process of transformation. Are we?
At each Twelve Step meeting there are people seeking and in conscious need. Everybody is encouraging the people who speak, who are looking for more insight and help. They are pushed by their need. They are pulled by the inspiration of others who are growing.
My takeaway from Shoemaker’s offering is that one of the greatest things the church should learn is the need people have for an exposure to living Christian experience. The ordinary service of worship in the church doesn’t usually offer this.
We need to expand opportunities where people who are spiritually seeking can see how faith takes hold in other lives, how the Christian experience comes to them, where people speak simply about what has happened to them spiritually. Let us ask God to help us learn our need for honesty, for conversion, for fellowship, and for honest witness!
Tools that have guided me through my journey of seeking to be a better Christian, a better person, a better listener, a truth teller include the Serenity Prayer. You are probably familiar with it. It goes:
God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Another is the Prayer for the Victims of Addiction, Prayer 56 in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s found on page 831. Join with me to pray.
O blessed Lord, you ministered to all who came to you: Look with compassion upon all who through addiction have lost their health and freedom. Restore to them the assurance of your unfailing mercy; remove from them the fears that beset them; strengthen them in the work of their recovery; and to those who care for them, give patient understanding and persevering love. Amen.