Diocese of New Jersey | News

I am Mark, and I am an alcoholic. It is a singular privilege to be with you at Trinity Cathedral this afternoon as you gather to celebrate Recovery Sunday. I give thanks for the Recovery Ministries of the Diocese of New Jersey, for the witness of the Recovery Ministries Committee members, and for their generous invitation and that of my long-time friend, Bishop Council, to join in this service. I want you to know what a gift it is to me to have this opportunity to reflect on and give thanks with you for the blessing of recovery and the communities that support and encourage it. I find myself particularly inclined to such gratitude as I am a recovering alcoholic, an adult child and grandchild of alcoholics, and the spouse of a recovering alcoholic. I suppose that constitutes some sort of an addiction trifecta, one of the greatest payoffs of which is the extensive exposure I have had to the recovery community.

Of course, the term recovery community is redundant. Recovery is dependent upon community. It is a function of healthy community, and, as those of you who have participated in 12-Step groups know, it is most at risk when we do not remain connected to community. That is why the power of evil is so focused on isolation. The belief that I can do this on my own is both what kept me from sobriety for too many years and the greatest obstacle to my continuing recovery now. Community — the companionship, accountability, and group conscience given us in the fellowship of our programs — is the foundation of recovery.

For those of us who struggled with addiction, our own or that of those we love, healthy and healing community upon which recovery depends was in some ways just beyond the country of the Gadarenes, about which we heard in Matthew’s Gospel this afternoon. It was just over there, beyond the demons that are “so fierce that no one could pass that way.” We know those demons all too well. They inhabit the tombs, the places of death, our own hell. Despite our best efforts, we could not get past them to health. They blocked our way to that for which, if we were not yearning ourselves, at least God was yearning for us: serenity, peace, forgiveness, and self-acceptance. Even after we have stopped using or stopped living as a consequence of another’s using, our demons continue to come out of the tombs of our self-doubt, our shame, our hubris, our resentments, and elsewhere, to block our way to the recovery available to us just over there, beyond Gadara. They come out of the tombs of our all too familiar hell, and prevent us from passing by, from getting over there.

For all the years I used, even after I had served some time as a priest, over there, just beyond Gadara, is where I thought God was waiting for me. I understood that God was just over there, waiting until I had it together. Until I could drink like other people, or not drink at all. Until I was in control. Until I was acceptable. In my own sense of failure and unacceptability, I believed that God and the ability to have a genuine relationship with God were waiting for me over there, just beyond my demons.

But Jesus did not see it that way. Jesus took away the demons’ power. There is no other way for me to understand it now. Dying on the cross and resurrected in 12-Step communities, he confronted the fierce demons I could not pass by, clearing the way to the community that could heal me, and for the first time since I had been an adolescent, I knew that God was not waiting down the road for me, but was right here with me all the time, even in the place of my greatest paralysis, Gadara itself.

David Sheff, in Beautiful Boy, his heart-wrenching account of living through his son’s addiction to methamphetamine, recounts this conversation with a recovering drug addict who is also the parent of one. He writes:

I tell him that I have just gotten my son into rehab. He says, “God bless you. I have been there. It is hell. But he’s in God’s hands.” It startles me. I mention that our family never believed in God. “I wish I did,” I say. “I wish I could put it in someone else’s hands. Someone powerful and benevolent. But I don’t believe it.”

“You will believe in God before this is over,” he says.

Early in my sobriety I heard about a woman in AA with many years’ sobriety who was clear that she was an atheist. About this she did not seem to equivocate. Someone had the courage to ask her what was the deal, how, after all her years in the program, did she reconcile her atheism with this Higher Power business. She explained with uncomplicated certainty, “The only thing I need to know about my Higher Power is that I’m not it.”

One way or another, in recovery we come to see God in our lives and to believe in a new way. Steps 2 and 3 put it clearly: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, and we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Like the townspeople of Gadara in the gospel story, I came to believe that a power greater than I could restore me to sanity. And as with them, it wasn’t all easy sledding thereafter. It cost me something. It changed the economies of my life. The Gadarene townspeople, when the came out to meet Jesus, doubtless were relieved that he had dispensed with the fierce demoniacs. But when they realized what it cost them, what it did to their economy when the swine leapt into the sea, they begged him to leave their neighborhood.

Recovery costs us and changes the neighborhood. It changes the company we keep, it changes the values we hold, it changes what we care about and how we spend ourselves. And it is not always easy, either for us or for those who were used to the way we were. But the new life it brings us, when we surrender to it, is a life worth living.

Healing community is not community that we construct, it is the community we are given by God, the community of those whom God gathers in. It is built not by our choosing, but by our surrender. We don’t get to pick who is in it, rather we get to give ourselves to whomever God has put there. Anyone who has spent any time in the recovery community knows that it is not necessarily easy community; but it is Gadara, the place where we face our own demons and the demons of others, and allow Jesus to clear the way past them.

Recovering people have a critical witness to make to the church and the world. Because of what we have experienced of the healing community beyond our demons, we have good news to proclaim, both by word and example. And it is news the world is desperate to hear.

If, for example, we are going to achieve global economic recovery, we will need to surrender to a globally healing community, we will need to live not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world. We will need to accept that economic recovery, like all recovery, will cost us. It will change the neighborhood, defining anew who our neighbor is. It will mean living in a new way. And that will require the patient yet uncompromising leadership of those who have seen what lies beyond the country of the Gadarenes and have come to know the one who alone can restore us to sanity.

Those who work the steps are well suited to this task. We do it week after week in home groups around the world. By our witness and our companionship, we humbly bear the grace of the one who cast aside the Gadarene demoniacs. We, like townspeople of Gadara, have seen him, yet we beg him not to leave our neighborhood. Rather we petition him, as we do one another, to “Keep coming back.”

Amen.

The Right Reverend Mark Hollingsworth, Jr.
Bishop of Ohio

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