The stranger, later revealed to be the Christ, walked with them and opened their minds and hearts—as I said in “Kairos, Koans and Conversion 6,” it may well have been to a “suffering servant” messianic model. This is the help they needed to make the switch from doubt to belief.
On a simpler level, the question I want to ask today is “What do you do when [any ideal, pick your fave] is not enough?”
In part, it’s a question occasioned by the movie When Love is not Enough in which Barry Pepper and Wynona Rider play Bill and Lois Wilson. It’s a movie about a subplot: it depict’s Bill W.’s journey to sobriety, but in truth its about how Lois dealt with the statement “he should have been able to quit drinking based solely on my love for him.”
In short, Lois found her own statement to be unreasonable, in the end. Drinking is a compulsive act, and ultimately all compulsive acts medicate either uncomfortable emotion or unmet spiritual and physical needs. Lois found that, however much she loved Bill, she couldn’t be the object of his spiritual search. She could be a primary source of help in that search, but not its object. Lois found herself to be a “para-alcoholic.” In modern parlance, she was “codependent.” That is to say, she exhibited all of the symptoms of alcoholism, without ever touching a drop of alcohol. She had all of the resentment, the impulsive relationship with emotions, and the sense of self that’s drawn almost entirely from the positive reinforcement of others. In short, Lois Wilson became a “friend of bill”—code for a 12 stepper—without ever being friends with the harshest of compatriots, John Barleycorn. So the “movements” of the movie are twofold: Bill learns to to stop medicating away God’s unattainability with drink, and Lois learns how to be the primary support, rather than the object, of Bill’s search.
In short, Lois found her own statement to be unreasonable, in the end. Drinking is a compulsive act, and ultimately all compulsive acts medicate either uncomfortable emotion or unmet spiritual and physical needs. Lois found that, however much she loved Bill, she couldn’t be the object of his spiritual search. She could be a primary source of help in that search, but not its object. Lois found herself to be a “para-alcoholic.” In modern parlance, she was “codependent.” That is to say, she exhibited all of the symptoms of alcoholism, without ever touching a drop of alcohol. She had all of the resentment, the impulsive relationship with emotions, and the sense of self that’s drawn almost entirely from the positive reinforcement of others. In short, Lois Wilson became a “friend of bill”—code for a 12 stepper—without ever being friends with the harshest of compatriots, John Barleycorn. So the “movements” of the movie are twofold: Bill learns to to stop medicating away God’s unattainability with drink, and Lois learns how to be the primary support, rather than the object, of Bill’s search.
Here’s why the movie asks an important question: we, in the Catholic Church, have a corollary statement: we say “God alone suffices”—a statement that’s totally true—but when we then we say “God alone should suffice,” the whole Church gets in the same predicament Lois was in, and unhealthy Catholicism ensues.First of all, no matter how much “God alone suffices” he’s not going to suffice if we think of him wrongly. If people think of God as they do Santa Claus—if they see him as answering petitions from his remote, heavenly abode, he will eventually answer one of those petitions in the negative. So long as we, from an egotistical space, ask for desire to be fulfilled, God will not play ball.
So the short answer to “What do we do if God isn’t enough for us?” is to reduce the amount of self, desire and duality being transacted between you and God. A sober relationship with God is only possible when we learn that God is a part of us, and learn to question both our ego and desires.
But this leads to a host of other questions: “What if my lover’s support and affection isn’t enough for me?” This isn’t a crisis. Sober coupledom routinely admits both friends and the spiritual search of both people. My girlfriend is my guru, and the biggest part of my spiritual search, but I need to be on the phone routinely with my two best friends from the monastery—just to ensure I’m not missing important pieces of healthy relating. Also, using my girlfriend’s help to try to troubleshoot the way I play the boyfriend role is like trying to service the engine of a moving car. Bill Wilson discovered that, in order to be a good husband to Lois, he needed the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Personally, I discovered that the fellowship of Adult Children of Alcoholics was not enough for me. (I’ve written about this previously, in a number of posts. Among them: “Only As Sick as My Secrets,” and “Steps 4-11: Cleaning House”) Having moved away from my “home group” in Charleston, I found connection with Chicago ACA harder to establish. When I picked up the thousand pound phone, no one responded.
Also, I learned the role my ego plays in fucking up recovery. If my ego always establishes a distance between me and recovery, me and my healthiest self, me and God, then no amount of supportive friendship will help. So Zen, and non-dual thinking, became central to the program’s other pieces playing their proper role.
But I digress, there’s more. There’s the question “What if God’s grace isn’t enough for me?” Even with an evolving God concept, sometimes I can’t deconstruct my ego fast enough to keep ahead of my own illness. It’s difficult indeed to try to function in the face of the anxiety of an intact false self, or the sadness and anger of a dying one. Spiritually materialistic people can get themselves keyed up quite a bit, call it zeal and label that excitement “Grace.” That works for a while, and then stops working. Ultimately, grace is about living with normalcy, not being excited. It’s the methadone, not the heroin.
It’s important to stop here and do some theological reflection. Ultimately what I’m trying to gain from this is both a healthy understanding of grace as stripping us of unhealthy dependency, and the ability to aid egoic deconstruction, in proper measure, with whatever help the world gives.
I’ve known alcoholics who want nothing more than to die painlessly enough that they don’t require a substance to help the process along. Whatever else we might say of Jesus, I’m fairly certain of two things: first, that he wasn’t an alcoholic, and then that he wanted to encounter his death consciously. On the Cross, he was given wine mixed with myrrh and he doesn’t take it—this would have dulled his senses, and he wanted to be awake. When offered a sponge soaked with wine alone, though, he drinks it. It’s only then that he gives up his spirit.
According to the Jewish mindset of his day, if God provides you with the goods of the earth and you don’t appreciate and take advantage of them, there are some who say you’re liable to divine judgment. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that Jesus had to take advantage of the help wine gave him. But I am at least saying that Jesus could take the wine without “drinking judgement to himself” as Paul would later put it.
So it’s at least a morally neutral, if not potentially good thing, to use the goods of the earth in the process of dying and rising. Physical death is hard, and if faced completely, egoic death is just as hard, multiple times over.
The point isn’t to say “let’s pharisaically define what things, other than grace, it’s ok to take advantage of.” Celibates are told “you should only need God’s love.” The healthiest celibates are the ones whose religious communities have given, or have given themselves permission to make up the difference elsewhere.
One man’s wine might be another man’s myrrh. The alcoholic may wish to be drug free, while for people whose battles with ego has permanently modified their brain chemistry, psychiatric medications are necessary and fair tools.
The point is to say “we all need a lot of different kinds of love and help, and it’s okay to take advantage of that.”
But Jesus goes even further. At his last supper, he locates his very blood in an addictive substance. For people like me, with budding capacities for addiction, he located himself there in order to come and find me, to move my use of alcohol into its proper place. These days, the “proper place of alcohol” is almost no place at all. God’s other blessings—the love of my girlfriend, for instance—provide comfort amidst egoic deconstruction and convey the sacredness of life.
One last thing should be understood. Whether it’s wine, in Jesus’ case, or someone to workshop your concepts with, as with the disciples at Emmaus: the help it takes to be open to the deconstruction of the ego is not the same as the revealing of Christ, not the end of the road. Jesus took wine on the Cross. He’d said it was his blood, and after he adjusted their expectations and revealed himself at Emmaus, the Apostles believed.
That is to say: It takes the body of Christ to be open to the mind of Christ. The “whole truth of the situation” is not that Jesus legitimately used wine to deconstruct the ego, that the celibate, as best he can, uses friendship to aid his loneliness, or that the psychiatric patient uses drugs to troubleshoot his brain chemistry. At the end of the day, it’s the moderate use of life’s comforts in a loving, transformative community that lays things out plainly. If we have found both, Jesus is truly risen: he is risen indeed, and has been revealed to us.
But I digress, there’s more. There’s the question “What if God’s grace isn’t enough for me?” Even with an evolving God concept, sometimes I can’t deconstruct my ego fast enough to keep ahead of my own illness. It’s difficult indeed to try to function in the face of the anxiety of an intact false self, or the sadness and anger of a dying one. Spiritually materialistic people can get themselves keyed up quite a bit, call it zeal and label that excitement “Grace.” That works for a while, and then stops working. Ultimately, grace is about living with normalcy, not being excited. It’s the methadone, not the heroin.
It’s important to stop here and do some theological reflection. Ultimately what I’m trying to gain from this is both a healthy understanding of grace as stripping us of unhealthy dependency, and the ability to aid egoic deconstruction, in proper measure, with whatever help the world gives.
I’ve known alcoholics who want nothing more than to die painlessly enough that they don’t require a substance to help the process along. Whatever else we might say of Jesus, I’m fairly certain of two things: first, that he wasn’t an alcoholic, and then that he wanted to encounter his death consciously. On the Cross, he was given wine mixed with myrrh and he doesn’t take it—this would have dulled his senses, and he wanted to be awake. When offered a sponge soaked with wine alone, though, he drinks it. It’s only then that he gives up his spirit.
According to the Jewish mindset of his day, if God provides you with the goods of the earth and you don’t appreciate and take advantage of them, there are some who say you’re liable to divine judgment. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that Jesus had to take advantage of the help wine gave him. But I am at least saying that Jesus could take the wine without “drinking judgement to himself” as Paul would later put it.
So it’s at least a morally neutral, if not potentially good thing, to use the goods of the earth in the process of dying and rising. Physical death is hard, and if faced completely, egoic death is just as hard, multiple times over.
The point isn’t to say “let’s pharisaically define what things, other than grace, it’s ok to take advantage of.” Celibates are told “you should only need God’s love.” The healthiest celibates are the ones whose religious communities have given, or have given themselves permission to make up the difference elsewhere.
One man’s wine might be another man’s myrrh. The alcoholic may wish to be drug free, while for people whose battles with ego has permanently modified their brain chemistry, psychiatric medications are necessary and fair tools.
The point is to say “we all need a lot of different kinds of love and help, and it’s okay to take advantage of that.”
But Jesus goes even further. At his last supper, he locates his very blood in an addictive substance. For people like me, with budding capacities for addiction, he located himself there in order to come and find me, to move my use of alcohol into its proper place. These days, the “proper place of alcohol” is almost no place at all. God’s other blessings—the love of my girlfriend, for instance—provide comfort amidst egoic deconstruction and convey the sacredness of life.
One last thing should be understood. Whether it’s wine, in Jesus’ case, or someone to workshop your concepts with, as with the disciples at Emmaus: the help it takes to be open to the deconstruction of the ego is not the same as the revealing of Christ, not the end of the road. Jesus took wine on the Cross. He’d said it was his blood, and after he adjusted their expectations and revealed himself at Emmaus, the Apostles believed.
That is to say: It takes the body of Christ to be open to the mind of Christ. The “whole truth of the situation” is not that Jesus legitimately used wine to deconstruct the ego, that the celibate, as best he can, uses friendship to aid his loneliness, or that the psychiatric patient uses drugs to troubleshoot his brain chemistry. At the end of the day, it’s the moderate use of life’s comforts in a loving, transformative community that lays things out plainly. If we have found both, Jesus is truly risen: he is risen indeed, and has been revealed to us.
No comments:
Post a Comment