Earth Makers: Making Space for Addiction and Authentic Spirituality, Part One
The following is the proposed introduction to a book I am writing on spiritual care and addiction recovery.
I do not give a shit what you believe.
Now, I wrestled with how to start this Introduction and the best I could settle on was to sum things up in a nice, neat, profane package. We like nice, neat packages, don’t we?
“Bite size spiritual granola, now gluten free!”
You know it’s true, don’t you? It feels easier to swallow smaller pieces of wisdom. This is why we listen to Eckhart Tolle’s and Deepak Chopra’s meditations on Spotify or podcasts like On Being with Krista Tippett or Under the Skin with Russell Brand or anything newly published by Glennon Doyle or Brene Brown or Nadia Bolz-Weber. They make us feel like we can do it, that we can do the hard thing we think we cannot do.
Why, exactly? Because they’ve done it. They are normal, hurting people who got smacked in the face by life and now they are writing to us to remind us of who we are and the gifts we have right now that can help us not just survive, but actually thrive.
So, I do not give a shit what you believe. Really. I truly do not. This is a bit of a miracle actually, because, for the better part of twenty-six or so years I very much gave a lot of shits about what people believed. I was born into a conservative Evangelical Christian community in rural upstate New York. My grandfather was my idol and he just so happened to be the local Charismatic Evangelical pastor in town. Although my Poppy was a wonderful grandfather, the truth remains that he was a fundamentalist, “Bible believing” Christian who always voted red.
I was raised in a poverty stricken and economically depressed rural area on the stories of Jesus and on canned spam. My dad differed from his dad, my Poppy, in that he was a strict pacifist and vegan animal rights advocate for most of my life. Dad taught me and my siblings that the most important thing you could believe about Jesus was that he was compassionate. Poppy taught us that the most important thing you could believe was that Jesus was the only way to God, God was the only way to heaven, and you learned about how to get there by faithfully reading your Bible every day. My mom taught us that showing Jesus we loved him through obedience was the most important thing.
Eventually, I left the world of fundamentalist Charismatic Evangelicalism and I entered into the world of liberal Protestantism and the historical church in the Lutheran community of Christians. The Lutherans taught me in church and eventually in the seminary that salvation by grace through faith alone, law and gospel readings of the Bible, and something called the theology of the Cross were the most important pieces of being a Christian. Whether or not this was intended is immaterial, but, the Lutherans taught me a new kind of fundamentalism.
The funny part is, no one ever asked me what I wanted. Parents, friends, mentors, teachers, etc. all assumed I wanted to be a pastor and that I wanted to be a Christian pastor in a traditional church setting. Because people I respected and loved assumed this about me, I embraced their assumption and made it my life’s work. I made it my identity. I formed an entire identity around the opinions of others.
This, dear readers, is the first insidious addiction humans form, the addiction to other people’s opinions. This soon morphs into a more specific, shame based addiction, the addiction to the approval of others. Our default setting becomes the belief that we only have value and worth if we make other people happy. If we make someone happy, we feel happy, and who doesn’t want more of that shit? Seriously. It’s a chemical addiction, isn’t it? So, believing that making others happy would make me happy, I forged onward. I took on titles like “Christian,” “pastor,” “seminarian,” “vicar,” “chaplain,” and “spiritual director” with pride because these are titles that made the loved ones and mentors in my life look upon me with favor. I was hooked.
Nevermind that I was also a stage actor, a playwright and theatre director, an accomplished musician and vocalist, a stand up comic for a brief season, a passionate social justice advocate, a sensitive writer, and a geeky lover of Star Wars, robots, Muppets, movies, and cartoons. To their credit, my parents loved and supported me in theatre and music in my years of growth, and one day my mom said something that blew my mind and would haunt me forever.
The story goes something like this: I was in my second year of seminary and I woke up one morning in my tiny studio apartment with the kitchenette at my feet (literally one of the only situations in which your kitchen and your bedroom are the same room.) I sat up and said out loud, “I don’t believe this shit.”
I thought real hard about what I did actually believe and I couldn’t come up with a damn thing. Then it dawned on me — I didn’t know what I believed because I had no clue who I was. That happens when you live your whole life pleasing others out of a sense of desperate addiction, or, what the Buddha called attachment/clinging. I then felt the need to confess my unbelief to anyone who would listen. So, I set up a meeting with our professor of liturgy. He was a really cool, badass Brazilian theologian with long hair and exotic, colorful beads around his neck. He was a dedicated, envelope pushing type of rebel who engaged with mystical spirituality on a visceral, tangible level. He was just my kind of guy!
I sat down with him and told him that I was intensely worried that I was slowly becoming an atheist, and when the rebel professor asked me why that worried me I told him it was because I had dedicated my whole life, vocation, and identity to being a Christian pastor and theologian. I couldn’t back out now!
The rebel professor looked me in the eyes and said, “Josiah, I need to let you in on a little secret: I don’t believe.”
“What?” I asked in shocked disbelief. “How could that possibly be?”
He shrugged and laughed, his gorgeous smile flashing painfully and honestly under his mustache. “I don’t believe. Every day when I walk to the seminary chapel, I have to pray as I walk, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ It has become my mantra, my friend.”
The rebel professor placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “I have a gift for you, my friend.” He gave me a copy of a book containing the meditations of Meister Eckhart, a medieval German mystic who coined the prayer, “God rid me of God.” My journey toward authentic spirituality had begun.
I told my then significant other, now spouse, with tears in my eyes that I was worried I had lost my faith. Then, my mom called. I answered and gave her the typical rundown of how my life was going, then, I said to her with a lump in my throat and a sinking feeling in my gut, “Mom, I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I think I might need to leave seminary and come home.”
“What do you mean, Joey?” she asked.
“I mean, I don’t think I can be a pastor. I don’t know if I want to be one anymore. But, honestly, I am so stressed out at the thought of leaving this all behind after all the time and money I have spent.”
Then, she spoke the words of good news. Did you know that the Christian buzzword “gospel” comes from the Koine Greek and just means “good news?”
Mom said to me, “Honey, you don’t have to be a pastor if you don’t want to. No one is making you do this and no one can make you do this.”
Her words were both a wave of extraordinary relief and a surprising stumbling block for me. Could she really be right about this? What’s more, why the hell was my Evangelical Christian mother advocating for me to leave the pastorate?
My mom is probably unaware of what a liberating moment this was for me. Earlier, I used the word “haunt” to describe my relationship to my mom’s statement. In the moment, those words were full of life and life-giving, even! I now realized that if I moved forward with my Masters of Divinity program it was because I chose to, not out of obligation, but out of my freedom to choose.
But only a short-time later, I would forget these powerful words of my mother and they would follow me around, a spectre of truth and lost freedom, the ghost of Jacob Marley hanging over my head, rattling his chains. My addiction to the approval of others was already morphing into a monster I could not control. I stuck with my chosen career path out of fear of losing approval and, as such, my identity.
I became fiercely dependent on the identity of “pastor” and how others viewed me and the stories they told about me. This soon evolved into a full blown addiction to sex and love. I was sleeping with anyone who wanted it and I was using drugs and binge drinking. I consumed tons of pornography in my alone time. Crippled by the insidious voice of shame and the immense, dark emptiness that followed, I lived my life in hiding. I was hiding in plain sight, however, and most of my hiding was done in the pulpit.
By all appearances, I was a valued member of the seminary community and a gifted parish pastor. I pastored two rural churches for a year as their vicar and, following this externally successful year, I found myself at the mercy of the ordaining authorities in my region.
Two weeks before my wedding, I was informed that my addictive behaviors had come to light. I had harmed people in my narcissistic path of destruction, and I hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Everything was up in the air. My fiancee and I, months before, had worked through the pain of her sense of betrayal. In what is nothing short of a miracle of human love, she forgave me and remains my partner to this day. I mark the day of our wedding as my first day of sobriety and the beginning of my recovery journey.
Not long after our honeymoon in the woods of Maine, I was informed that I was being removed from the ordination process. In what can only be described as a season of public shaming, I was scolded in community emails, forced to resign from my on campus job at the seminary, and effectively exiled from the community. My spouse and I, newly married, lived like hermits in our tiny urban apartment on the perimeter of campus. We were no longer invited to campus events. Only a small handful of my classmates and professors seemed to have enough compassion to check in with us. This was a season of deep suffering.
Eventually, I would wind up living in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota finishing my clinical training as a hospital chaplain in intensive care units and focusing hard on my recovery. I met with an addiction counselor every week and I dug deep into my addictive patterns. This treatment experience served to save me. It forced me to face the harm and destruction I had created in the lives of innocent people. My amazing counselor, who I’ll call Nadia, wore bright pink eyeglass frames, bright pink nail polish and lipstick, and drove a Harley. Oh, she is also the age of a grandmother! Only in the recovery community will you find such unique, wild, weird, and wonderful shining stars as these!
It just so happened that I did my clinical residency at a suburban Minnesota hospital where my clinical coordinator/mentor was a Tibetan Buddhist chaplain, who I’ll call Mae, and my senior chaplain leader was a Roman Catholic turned Zen Buddhist turned Roman Catholic again chaplain who I’ll call Brad. Mae and Brad were intuitive enough to notice what horrible shape I was in. They could see the agony of my shame and past traumas leaking out my pores as I walked the hallways of the hospital and intensely, angrily defended myself in staff meetings.
Nothing I believed was working! My Christian beliefs were, sadly, not helping me stay sober. This was something Mae pointed out not long after I started my clinical supervision with her. This is not to say Christian teachings are bad or wrong. My addiction to those beliefs was detrimental to my psychospiritual health. My beliefs were just new drugs to become addicted to. Mae taught me how to meditate, a concept I had only heard theories and aphorisms about. Brad taught me about the connections between Christian belief and Buddhist practice. These two pointed me away from my addiction to belief and toward a practice that helped me recover the most authentic version of Josiah.
I believe addiction is destructive. I remain addicted and struggle with the urge to re engage with destruction, every day.
I believe the Earth’s climate should be protected. I still drive a car.
I believe that never speaking ill of others is a helpful and healing way to live. I still gossip, at times.
I believe the teachings of Jesus Christ and many of his followers are good and helpful for whole, healthy, peaceful living. I still engaged in behaviors (what the Abrahamic faiths call “sins”) that defied the teachings of the gentle rabbi from antiquated Palestine.
So, I truly do not give a shit what you believe….most of the time. As long as your practices are helping and healing you and all beings, does it matter what the vehicle is? I don’t know.
I’ve had well meaning “believers” from different faith traditions tell me that my role is to evangelize, proselytize, and convince, so that people will turn to God. I’ve had patients come to me in despair that their long held Christian beliefs have not helped them stay sober. My response to them is, “I am not concerned with keeping you a Christian. I am concerned with what keeps you alive, because the disease of addiction is killing people. So, either 1. Your Christian beliefs and practice are not the right fit for you or 2. You are misunderstanding some important life-giving pieces of your tradition. Let’s explore this stuff and see what we find!”
Earth Makers are people in sacred spiritual traditions who make space for other people to show up exactly as they are to receive exactly what they need for all of life’s wounds. Whether you are an old school 12 stepper, a member of AA, NA, or SA, a disciple of Celebrate Recovery, a practitioner of Refuge Recovery, or a student of Smart Recovery or We Agnostics, I believe that the recovery process is a deeply spiritual process that invites Earth Makers to make more Earth Makers, not through promotion, but through attraction.
I’ve written this book to make space for you, the authentic you. If it is helpful, wonderful! If not, throw away what doesn’t serve you and hold on to what does.
