Alcoholics Anonymous has learned that spirituality often begins as we hit bottom and finally reach out to God. Someone has quipped that religion is for people who are afraid of hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there!
If you’re human you are addicted, a truth a bit less scalding if we realize we’re all in the same boat. Some people’s addictions are more obvious than others. Some addictions are triggered and amplified by body chemistry and genes, others by physical or emotional trauma. But if you’re alive you’re addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace.
We are all vulnerable to addiction, and it is located in our thirst for God, for connection, for love.
"I thirst," Jesus said, which put him in the same human boat with the rest of us.
It was not just the thirst Jesus suffered on the cross but the human thirst he had all lifelong. And not just physical thirst for water, but thirst for love, for God, for some sweet release from pain or loneliness.
We could call it the "thirst of desire," which at its heart is the thirst for God, but which gets lodged in addictions. "To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace." To be in need of grace is to realize that willpower alone cannot get us where we need to be. We need help from beyond.
In this we are not left alone. God has come to us in Christ to experience the power of every human push and pull. Jesus knew the thirst of desire and the lure of addiction. As Hebrews 4:15 says:
II
Ours is an addictive society; and since ours is also an affluent society, we can afford too many of our temptations. A member of a former congregation who received a multimillion-dollar windfall said the problem with affluence is you can afford too many of your vices.
What do we do to assuage the thirst of desire, the longing for completeness and connection? We acquire and buy, drink and eat, use drugs, have affairs. We get hooked on approval and applause, needing higher and higher doses to get the same buzz and doing damage to our souls in the process.
People in business, politics and entertainment can get addicted to adrenaline, to the rush they feel when they make a deal, win an election, wow an audience; and this addiction can be as deadly as a needle in their arm.
We can get addicted to anger and the need to be right, to the assertion of power over another.
We are born thirsty, desire and need as close as a baby’s mouth and a mother’s milk. And with it is a hunger just as great to love and be loved, to move close to the source of love: God, our Maker, Lover, Redeemer.
This desire is as natural as breathing, part of our essential created goodness. But something happens and the thirst of desire gets sidetracked in compulsive behavior, lodged in addictions.
What has happened is what both mystics and psychoanalysts call "attachment." The word is from the ancient French language, "attache," which means, suggestively, "to be nailed to." It’s a kind of cross. The thirst of desire whose destination is in God gets nailed to some human someone or material something.
"I’m addicted to you" was a line from the rock band Chicago, which is fun to sing only if you’re not.
In Reynolds Price’s novel Good Hearts Rosacoke awakes to find her husband gone and wonders whether part of the reason was her worship of him:
We are born thirsty, and the soul’s thirst for God, for love gets nailed, attached to people, things and chemically altered states of mind. Part of it is the soul’s deep desire to lose itself in someone or something greater, self-transcendence. But it has run amok, lost its way.
III
Mystics call the process by which we overcome the attachments which bind us "detachment." How does this detachment happen? Is it the Buddhist path of "the elimination of desire" or the Puritan hope in the repression of desire or Freud’s sublimation of desire? All religions and philosophies deal with the issue.
Constance Fitzgerald has described the Christian answer as "the transformation of desire." It is a process she calls "affective redemption," the redemption of the heart. In this process desire is not suppressed or destroyed but, in her words, "gradually transferred, purified, transformed, set on fire."
Such was the hope of George Herbert’s poem (Love II):
Immortal Heat, Oh let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: let those fires
Which consume this world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,
As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again.
The transformation of desire: it happens sometimes dramatically, other times gradually as grace make its way in our lives. It is the way of the awakened heart.
IV
Jesus shows the way. Every addiction is a door waiting to be opened to God. It is your own particular path of salvation. And when you open it, you not only find God there but also a human community waiting there to receive you. "Welcome to the human race," they say, and to real love.
Only a thirsty savior could understand our thirst, God’s own son fed through the umbilical cord in his mother’s womb, rocked by its waters, bobbing on his mother’s breast hunting milk, needing, as we all need, the warmth of human arms.
Our Lord fasted and prayed for forty days in the wilderness, tempted not only by hunger and thirst but also by the lure of political power and the magical escape from pain and death.
It was our thirsty Savior who, traveling through Samaria, came to Jacob’s well for water.
There he met a Samaritan woman, and a conversion ensued which began about a drink of water and ended in the transformation of desire.
"Give me a drink," Jesus asked.
"How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?" she replied.
He answered, "If only you knew what God was offering and who was saying, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water."
"Sir," she replied, "you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?"
He replied, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give will never thirst. The water that I shall give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
"Give me this water," she said.
Then he said, jarringly, "Go, call your husband."
"I have no husband," she replied, wanting to run.
"You are truthful," Jesus said, "for you’ve had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband."
She could have fled in shame. But there was something about him, a mercy so sure and kind, that she held her place.
"You are a prophet," she said. "Tell me how to worship: as the Jews in Jerusalem, or as the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim?"
"Worship is not a place on the map," Jesus answered in effect, "but a place in the heart. Worship is where you come to God in spirit and in truth. Just as you have done."
"I know the Messiah will come and show us all things," she replied.
"The kingdom is now," he says. "I am he."
The woman then ran to her village, leaving her jar at the well. "Come see a man who knew everything about me, she said. "Could this be the Messiah?"
He knew everything about her and loved her still. This is where the transformation of desire begins. And once begun grace begins its work of love in you. It is a lifelong journey, but it must begin sometime, somewhere, with a choice you make.
You may not want to hear these words today. I can understand. Your misery level has not yet reached sufficient force to break through your denial.
Anne Lamott tells the story of her own struggle with alcoholism and all her years of denial laced with anger. She tells of a friend who had surgery to remove tiny pebbles from his face, which got there as his face smashed into the driveway at the end of a cocaine binge. As he was coming out of surgery he said angrily, "Now, everyone’s going to think I have a drug problem."
For Anne the gospel came in this paradoxical and saving truth:
God loves you exactly as you are -- and loves you too much to let you stay that way.
Maybe that’s what the angel said -- and what we need to remember every time we touch that place above our lip.
Conclusion
The gospel reports that when Jesus on the cross said, "I thirst," someone took a sponge filled with the cheap wine of soldiers and lifted it up to his lips on a hyssop stick.
Hyssop. The word triggers an ancient memory, of that first Passover in Egypt when people took hyssop branches and dipped them in the blood of lambs and made a mark above the door of their houses so God would pass over their houses and spare their children, prelude to Exodus and freedom.
It is Passover again and Jesus takes the wine offered him from the sponge and drinks.
It is the cup of death he drinks -- which will become our path of freedom, our Exodus, our passing over from death to life, from bondage to freedom.
This path of freedom is not an easy one, and it may be a much longer journey than any of us want. But there is a savior who understands and a God who will be with you every step of the way.
