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A House of Spirit
Reverend Brian J. Kiely,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, September 23, 2001
Last Sunday churches all over North America noted a dramatic rise
in attendance with numbers rivaling Christmas figures. This comes
as no surprise. In coming to terms with the terrorist acts of September
11, people had a need to grieve, to give expression to fear and anger
and, perhaps most importantly, to reaffirm that they were not alone.
Why? Our culture teaches that to find God, meaning and a spiritual
community, you go to church.
Now the large majority of westerners seldom feel those needs clearly
or keenly, and so the majority do other things with their Sundays.
For many church is like the tire store. You don't need it often,
but when you do, you really do need it. That's fine. I don't begrudge
that mind set, though I personally don't feel that way. Well last
week our culture had a collective blowout, and our spiritual tire
shops were doing land office business.
IMillions of people went to church last Sunday for the first time
in a long while. I think it might have been a demonstration of the
old adage, "There are no atheists in foxholes." The traditional
meaning is that in war, when death is both all around and truly imminent,
one begs God for assistance. Perhaps it's true. I don't know. I have
never been in that kind of danger.
But I have always taken that bromide a slightly different way. It's
not so much that we want God's help when we are alone and in fear
for our lives -- although I imagine any such assistance would be
most welcome if offered. No, I think it's a comment on our fear of
being alone. At some moment, no matter how strong and independent
we think we are, there comes a time when events overwhelm us. And
in that moment of helplessness we want to know we are not alone.
And when there is no other person on earth, at least there is still
God. That's why there are no atheists in foxholes.
Last Sunday, it seems a good many folks across North America were
feeling that fear, were feeling that need to reconnect and to affirm
our humanity in the company of others. As George Odell wrote in
a piece we used last Sunday, " We need one another when we
mourn and would be comforted...All our lives we are in need and
others are in need of us." Hopefully people found what they
were seeking last Sunday in a hundred varieties of spiritual homes.
This summer I witnessed a different expression of this shared need
for community and spirit. I was invited to be a guest at a meeting
of Narcotics Anonymous. Someone was having a ‘birthday' marking
their first year clean.
So on a warm August Saturday evening I went into a stuffy church
basement on Whyte Avenue. Like most 12 step meetings, there were
some rituals to be observed. Some core readings were passed around
and read aloud, welcomes and announcements were made and then sharing
began followed by good wishes for the birthday girl and the eating
of her one year cake.
Three things struck me most powerfully in that small, warm room.
The first was diversity. There were schoolteachers sitting next
to tattooed bikers, a preppie sitting next to a man with enough ear
and nose hardware to set off an airport metal detector. There were
people not yet old enough to vote and those old enough to collect
a pension. There were people with faces untouched by their addictions
and people who looked like everyone's nightmare image of an old street
junkie. By the way, I later learned that man had been clean longer
than almost anyone in the room. Looks can be deceiving.
Now, everyone there had crashed and hit spiritual and emotional
bottom before starting recovery. Everyone had lost their soul to
drugs.
But there were people who had caught themselves before completely
destroying the visible parts of their lives and careers and people
who had lost everything, job, family, relationships. The NA folks
have a saying, "You don't have to ride the garbage truck all
the way to the dump." But some did. Some waited longer and got
into dealing, prostitution and theft. Some died. It is hard to imagine
a more diverse group of people.
The second thing that struck me was the unity. These folks shared
pain many, perhaps most of us can never know. We expect pain to come
from an outside source. For the folks at NA, the pain comes from
within. Routine self-doubt is magnified into deep self -loathing.
A typical need to ‘get away for awhile', becomes a desperate
and self-destructive drive to escape. An ordinary bad day becomes
a time for the dancing of demons..
Each one had come to understand that there was a part of them that
wants them dead... that simple. They call it their disease. It speaks
negative messages, craving messages, abusive messages. I have a hard
time imagining it. Certainly I have had moments of self-destructive
and overly indulgent behaviour. But I have never experienced self-loathing
to the degree that I wanted myself dead, either by active suicide
or by a slower route of drugging or drinking myself to death. After
an hour of listening to their sharing, sharing done without self
pity, I began to understand. They were living with this thing, this
disease that I could not begin to understand in a personal way. It
owned them once and was waiting to do so again. In another religious
age, we might have called them ‘possessed'.
Like every recovering addict, each takes responsibility for their
behaviour and for the wrongs they have done. Yet at the same time
their addiction is a separate creature that is both in and of them.
There is unity in their recognition of this shared disease. It is
what brings them together. For these folks, being alone with their
thoughts can be dangerous. They have another saying, "An addict
alone is in bad company." That's when the disease comes out
to play. And so they attend meetings to help them stay on the path
to recovery. In hearing the stories of others they find some recognition,
some sanity, and another clean day.
Odell's words, "All our lives we are in need and others are
in need of us." took on new meaning.
And so they came together, all self-identified addicts seeking recovery.
Though probably none had ever been to war, they understood in unique
and personal ways that there are no atheists in foxholes.
The third striking feature of that NA meeting was their sense of
community. We who join in religious community can learn from it..
Whenever I thought of 12 step groups in the past, I always thought
of a meeting as the place you went when you were on the edge, feeling
crazy, about to take a drink or some other drug. To me, the visitor,
it was the place of last resort. Sometimes it is just that, of course.
But it's more. A key component to recovery is giving back. These
folks at NA understand that if you only go to meetings to take away,
you're still feeding the self-centered part of the addiction. Few
of the people there that night were on the edge of relapse. Most
were there to celebrate the birthday, and to lend their strength
to those few actively battling their disease. They go to meetings
to keep the community alive and vibrant. They go to make sure the
meeting is open for the still suffering addict. And in return they
know the meeting will be there on the days they really need it.
The road to recovery must lead out of yourself, must lead away from
the self and into community. We have all heard of 12 step phrases
like ‘being powerless in the face of addiction', ‘Just
for today.' and "Let go and let God."
Indeed, many people in recovery use those phrases with literal fervour
and draw deep comfort from them. It's language that can cause tension
for Unitarians, those in recovery and those on the outside..
I found it helpful to think the ‘atheists in foxholes' analogy
as I listened to that language. ‘Let go and let God' says two
simple things to me. First, it reminds us that we are not in control.
In the world of addiction a common denial of that addiction is the
illusion that we can stop whenever we want...that we control the
drugs, they don't control us. A first step in recovery is admitting
powerlessness before the addiction.
Second, ‘Let go and let God' is a reminder that the recovery
can't easily be done alone. It is a reaffirmation of the human spiritual
connection. In the lonely shadows of this terrible addiction, recovering
people need to build strong ties with something or someone outside
their foxhole. For some it will be God in the traditional sense.
For others it will be something else, a Higher Power, and Eternal
Truth or even the very idea of a clean community.
And there is that precious community complete with the expectation
to give back. In the simplest form this means attending meetings
and being there for the suffering addict. It is common for those
on the path to give their phone number to the newcomer with permission
to call 24 hours a day. One little ritual underscores it. At the
meeting I attended the meeting's leader simply handed out the readings
for the night. If you got one, you were expected to read it. Everyone
understood they were in it together. How well you read was not important.
Doing the work and sharing the responsibility was.
The people at NA - and in so many other 12 step groups - succeed
in recovery at least partly because they understand they need connection
that only exists in real community. And they also understand that
to be in community, you have to give a part of yourself to it.
To some degree all groups share those three aspects I observed at
the NA meeting. They have diversity. They have unity. And with common
purpose the people come to build a spirit of community.
Now it would be easy to turn this into a volunteer recruitment sermon
and to bug you to get more active, but I already did that two weeks
ago.
And I think it would be missing the point. A true House of Spirit
is more than a building and a group of people. It is a home. It is
made a home by the commitment of the heart. What makes this church
a house of spirit is not the multifaith banners on the wall, it is
the meaning each of us gives them as we look at them. It's not the
grand piano in the corner, but the amazing efforts that went into
raising the funds to purchase it...and it's the memory of the comfort
and warmth it's music has given us over the years.
A House of Spirit is made real and living by our interactions, by
the memories we share, by moments that move us whether in the service
or outside of it. There can be real diversity, but the differences
do not divide if the spiritual focus is there. What makes this place
alive is not our thinking all alike, but our commitment to this congregation
and this faith. And here I don't mean commitment of time or money.
I mean the commitment of the heart and soul. I mean the step that
moves each person beyond saying, "I attend a church" or " I
attend a friend's... or my parents'...or (God forbid!) Brian's church" to
a place where you say, "This is MY church," and you say
it with passion and pride.
A House of Spirit is not a tire store where we drop in to buy what
we need. Oh you can do that and you will always be welcome, but if
that is as far as your personal commitment goes, you are missing
something I think is of precious value. You are missing a sense of
ownership that marks true and deep participation in community. You
are missing a chance to get outside the self into a place that could
save your life. Last year I had many opportunities to hear our newly
elected continental president, Rev. Bill Sinkford. He talked of being
a young displaced and disenchanted black man in America's city streets.
Not sure which path he would follow in life, he came to a Unitarian
Universalist church. He found a home there he had never known. He
says the church literally saved his life. Maybe it can help others,
too.
There is no right or wrong here about how to participate in church,
merely an invitation. The deeper you go, the more comes back to you.
If now or in the future you are ready to come farther inside, we'll
be ready for you.
The Narcotics Anonymous community is one that literally saves lives
because the people are determined to do for others what was done
for them. They inherit and embrace a tradition. It is a real thing,
and it does save lives.
Should not our Unitarian way of religion be as strong and meaningful?
Should we settle for less? Or should we not come together to make
this church a place that saves lives as well? We can. It only takes
heart and soul.
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