The Beautiful Letdown

An Addict's Theology of Addiction

David Tremaine

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532646171
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

One of the most widely accepted ways of describing an addiction is as a disease, but do we realize what we are saying when we describe it that way? Our current language and approach to addiction is not only lacking in depth but is keeping us blind to an amazing way that God is working in each and every one of us. What if our addictions are not broken parts of us that we have to get rid of, but invitations from God to new depth and transformation? When we are able to hold this experience gently and look at it anew, it reveals a new depth to how we can understand ourselves, our suffering, and God. For too long we have been trying to treat addiction like a disease, and tear it out by the root, but we are invited to something more in our humanity; something that we will never find if we continue to wish away our suffering. Author David Tremaine explores the possibilities of understanding addiction not as a diseased part of our humanity, but as a blessed part of our spiritual journey, and sheds new light on this deeply engrained experience of God.

1

What Is an Addiction?

The first time I remember seeing pornography was in the basement of my friend’s house when I was in sixth grade. It was 1999 and the internet was becoming a more normalized part of the average American life. Almost everyone I knew had a computer, and all my friends at school were chatting every night on AOL Instant Messenger. The vast complexity and endless resources of the internet were just beginning to dawn on me and my friends at that perfect early age of prepubescence.

I could find information for school projects without even stepping foot in the library. I could listen to music, communicate with friends, play games, and go to any website in the world. Anything I wanted to see or hear was right at my fingertips—and what I wanted most was sex. I wanted anything and everything about sex. Like generations of middle schoolers and prepubescent teens before me, I thought about sex all the time. I wanted to see pictures, movies, and TV shows, anything that came even close to risqué, provocative, or sexual. What was different about me, compared to all those generations before me, was that I was coming of age with the internet. I was not sneaking into R-rated movies. I wasn’t stealing dirty magazines. I wasn’t scrounging around the real world for sex—I didn’t have to. It was all right there, free of charge, right at my fingertips, whenever I wanted it. Whenever I could be alone with the computer I could be alone with sex.

It all started with nude photos. It all started in that basement. Four of us gathered around a computer, one sitting at the keyboard, like the leader of a research team showing a group of fellow scientists an earth-shattering new discovery, showing us that there were websites with nude photos of women. This particular website was devoted to WWF (now WWE) “Divas,” or female wrestlers in the World Wrestling Federation entertainment industry. At the time we were all infatuated with professional wrestling, and especially these hypersexualized women we had seen displayed so provocatively on television and about whom we had often fantasized. Now they were right here in front of us, completely nude. That was all it took. I felt that thrill bubbling up from deep inside of me, tugging at my insides. I had struck gold.

From that day forward so much of my physical and mental energy went toward what I now in recovery call “sexual acting out.” This includes compulsively masturbating, searching endlessly for pornography, obsessing for hours and days about women, watching and looking at pornography in all varieties of media. It all began in that basement with that wrenching feeling somewhere deep down in my stomach, far below the surface.

The feeling always started somewhere much deeper within myself than I could ever comprehend. It always ended with feelings of shame, fear, self-hatred, anger, inadequacy, and warped relationships, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was the one thing that I always went back to and needed more than anything else. That ravenous yearning always came back, taking me over, possessing me, removing me from myself. I needed that pornography. For so many reasons I knew I needed it, went back to it, wanted more of it; and every time it let me down. It destroyed me more and more. Every time I thought it was the answer, and it never was.

A New Invitation

At first glance, addiction looks like something evil, destructive, deadly, and deceitful—and that’s because it is. It destroys people’s lives, bodies, and relationships. It warps interactions, rewires our brains, and manipulates the way we perceive the world around us. It is all these things, but it is so much more. In my life, I have felt these effects through my addiction. I have lied. I have devalued, manipulated, and obsessed about other people. I have been rewired, destroyed, and seen my relationships fall to pieces. Yet, I am more myself now for it than I ever could have been if it had never happened.

We often define good as something that contains no evil. We define life as that which contains no death. We define holy as containing nothing profane. As an addict, when I shine the light (or maybe the luminous darkness) of my own experience on them, I can’t help but see that these glaring dualities no longer hold up. In the light of my experience, the line between good and evil is blurred, the barrier between life and death is more ambiguous, and the distinction between what is holy and what is profane becomes incoherent and unhelpful.

If we stop for a moment to examine the phenomenon of addiction, and gently take it apart without preconception or assumption, this uniquely human experience can teach us much about ourselves, one another, and God. It can reveal to us the deepest truths of our spiritual lives and journeys. It is a mistake to look for such revelation solely in historical dogmas and Scripture and ignore the wisdom of our human experience, because we are made “in the image of God”1 (Gen 1:27), the ultimate and infinite mystery. Not only that, but the Christian tradition holds that this mystery became enfleshed in the life of a human person, Jesus of Nazareth. What more evidence do we need that our human experiences are themselves sources of revelation and that there is truth to be found in the living of our spiritual journey?

The human experience of addiction is a mystery, and our impulse in the face of mystery is to label, name, and diagnose. Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a growing number of people recognizing addictions to prescription or illegal opioids in the United States and around the world, a phenomenon now widely labelled as the “opioid epidemic.” Understandably, this “epidemic” has caused a frenzy of fearful and anxious behavior on a nationwide and worldwide scale. In the face of these reactions, that which is hidden in this deeply spiritual human experience of addiction is overlooked. The mysterious, still, small voice of God, the mustard seed of the kingdom of heaven, and the pearl of great price get trampled on and buried deep under the layers of well-meaning attempts to destroy the cause of our suffering.

For too long Christian communities have let this vital experience pass through our doors without letting it influence our theology, our reading of Scripture, or our approaches to our own spirituality. As we peel back the layers of addiction we discover a deeper invitation beyond the labels, names, and diagnoses. What we call addiction is more than just physiological chemical dependence, and it is more than drugs and gambling. Addiction points beyond itself to something much deeper going on within humanity—not just some of humanity, but the whole human experience.

Our constructs of addiction have led to the personal and cultural alienation and ostracization of those who identify as addicts. We now have an opportunity to understand it anew, as a vital part of our human experience, and to understand it as an invitation. On a larger cultural level, this is an invitation to reimagine Christian theology through the lens of human experience as it continues to develop and reveal itself to us. On a personal level, it is an invitation to each of us from God to depth, wholeness, and salvation.

As we reimagine a deeply ingrained concept such as “addiction,” language is at the same time the most helpful and the most hindering tool. This book is about redefining and reimaging some of our most deeply ingrained assumptions. From the beginning, it is important to note that all language is limiting and in every case points to a much deeper mystery than any word can ever fully contain. While we are forever bound by the limitations of language, we are also set free by it if we are humble before its equally powerful limitations and possibilities.

What Is an Addiction?

In our modern vernacular, we use the word addiction in many different ways. We use it to describe things that we like or use a little too much, whether that is in a serious context, speaking about chemically altering substances, or in a more lighthearted sense, speaking about things like playing Candy Crush or binge-watching Netflix. As most understand it today, the word addiction is used to describe the experience of not being able to stop doing some sort of pleasure-seeking behavior. When you think of an addiction, or an addict, what are the images that come into your mind? What do you associate with addiction? If we survey the landscape of history, as well as our current rhetoric around addiction, the picture that we see is jumbled and disjointed. At various times throughout history, and in various cultural contexts today, addiction has been seen as a moral failure, a weakness of will, the inability to make healthy choices, a mental illness, a disease, a product of sinful human nature, or a hereditary dysfunction, just to name a few.

Over the last century the response to addiction has become very black and white. This is to be expected, as so often our reaction to things we don’t understand is fearful, dualistic, and adversarial. Especially in the current climate of fear surrounding the increasing use of opioids, we have entire government agencies strategizing on how to destroy the epidemic, as hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, are becoming addicted to prescription pain medication, heroin, and other opiates. This prompts us to view addiction as the ultimate enemy, the object of an unending fight for life and death. In the face of this kind of response we are not left with many options. Overall, addiction has become either a source of shame, an invasive disease that requires medical treatment to remove, or an enemy of our national wellbeing. In the face of what are ultimately well-intentioned reactions to the painful realities of addiction, people are still becoming addicted, still hurting themselves, and still hurting one another.

Currently, the most widely accepted way to understand addiction is as a disease, an epidemic, and therefore, as a medical issue, the best way to treat it is with medicine. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, scientific research has made clear that there are biological and physiological elements to every addiction. This includes the fact that different substances lead to varying degrees of chemical dependence in the human body, and thus lead to varying physical complications when approaching a point of detoxification. Every day there are research findings coming out about the physiological and biological causes and effects of addiction which lead to new and vital ways to help people recover physically.

In many cases lifesaving medicines are necessary for people to survive and to break their chemical dependence on the drugs themselves, but if recovery stops at the physical there is great spiritual opportunity missed. Responding to addiction is about more than finding a path to physical surviving. It is about discovering a path to spiritual thriving, to deeper and more meaningful life, to living within a framework that is not bound by substances, success, power, or any of the other things to which we get addicted. When we only view addiction as a physical disease among other diseases, we negate the spiritual journey that is inviting us to deeper connection with God, with one another, and with ourselves.

The longer we approach addiction as an enemy, as an invasive parasite in our humanity, or as a surgically removable tumor on our morality, the deeper the gulf will grow between us and God, one another, and our own identity as beloved. In reimagining our spiritual and theological understanding of addiction we have an opportunity to move forward on a new path, to move from surviving to thriving, from reacting to responding and, most importantly, from fearing our addictions to befriending them. This requires us to reexamine our current disease model of addiction, and place beside the physiological and biological understanding of addiction a spiritual one that is based in our inherent and unwavering connection to the divine.

A Spiritual Disease

One of the main catal...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Is an Addiction?
• Chapter 2: Spiritual Wholeness
• Chapter 3: What About Sin?
• Chapter 4: Addiction and Sin in Eden
• Chapter 5: Sin: Relative or Relational?
• Chapter 6: Salvation and Addiction
• Chapter 7: Addiction and the Sacraments
• Chapter 8: The Jesus Movement
• Conclusion
• Bibliography