2024-01-07 A Meditation on Addiction

“20 Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. 21 It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble. 22 The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. 23 But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” (Ro 14:20-23 ESV)

Out of a broad pick-me-up and soothing or pleasant thoughts on life, comes the lingering and lurking fact that still, whether actually intaking or not, the body is a relic addicted and longing. In dream, in strange dreamy recollection. In a Call clarion unto us made: the Call simply to put aside what substance we recall fondly as a crutch, as a notion to lean on, to distract us from the engaged and attentive reality we in truth obtain.

Longing on some deep level is not “cured” by withholding the desire, so much as it is cured by facing directly the alternative. Alternative, flip side to a coin, one half theoretical and never actually found in nature it would seem, the other half simply blotto and indulgent, indulgent in things not actually needed. There is a coping that fails to account for the factuality: that in fact the entire edifice is psychological. There is no need for a substance, bitten off in measured chunks, spoonfed. There is no need for the strange alliance we have made with something that distracts, something that laboriously, lugubriously, keeps us secretive and secret. We are nursing a wound, and it is not healed by the fact of abstaining alone so much as by the grab-the-bull-by-the-horns finding of our New Peace in the willows of real life and patience.

So it is a measurable Project, that the soldier with peace in her or his inner composure, undertakes. That it could really be so simple as this: to hoard honestly sanity and sobriety rather than nursing a wound. But why? Why would we thus bore ourselves with the mundane sober? Why would we thus ask of life, of friendship, of job and labors, that daring Question: be there for me? Serve alongside of me? Help me to abide the peace and the innocence of indulgence, help me mutter a prayer of personal Calm.

Have you coped with the matter at hand? Have you become excitable in a strange obtained Peace? Have you whittled away at the pattern of hand-to-mouth? No: I prefer blotto and the crutch. It is on some subconscious level that I am unwilling to grow out of it, to find there is a cavalcade, a staircase, a world to discover, facing one demon at a time. Yet that inner composure does not in itself heal: we need to heal the dry desire that lied to us. That told us that sobriety is a half-concession to what is not real. That told us we were lesser people as those dry and minus the needle or pill. No, in fact, we are more real and drinking, thirsting for the wondrous satiety of Real Life. We were not so much less of a man or a woman by our abstinence, but more. We were more alert and contributing. We were more available and murmuring along, in prayer, in that boring stasis called Real Life, Pained Life, oh, but how I just wanted to live in my personal blotto and forlorn existence. In real life it is gone, but in dream life it still haunts.

The “fast” then, of food or sugars or what-have-you: this “fast” is also on the subject of a crutch. It is also a test that ramps up in importance, as though we were conceding the kingdom on one errant morsel of food or sweet. For, what does it say about our inner character? What do little decisions taken say about broader more important ones? Thus the peace of the prayerful, who learns to forgive oneself, and ceases to make totem out of personal recognisance: we somehow die unto the fast and live unto the Lord, who ceases to judge us, who for His Son’s sake wants us limber and fluid. Who heals as much as He mourns, quick decisions replacing sobering maniacal desire. For that morsel. For that sweet or sugary drink. For that forlorn patient waiting for the noon-time meal, or supper, or breaking the fast come morning. All these things work together to educate and to distance the would-be solution (eat!) from the ennui and longing. We were longing, and food was no solution, any more so than the cradle of drink or pill or substance. And we noted well which was a lingering, subversive, would-be alternative simply to remaining limber and patient, sobered up no matter how boring and impatient. Against this backdrop comes the loss of loved ones and things more important. Against this backdrop comes the honest assessment of things we have done in the flesh: if depriving ourselves of the vanity of a fast thus helps, then so be it. Eat, and remember it was a gift of His Body. Drink, and remember it was a gift of His life Blood poured out. In all these things forget not to sorrow and tear up, at the strange Abode near to what creature comforts cannot in themselves save, no matter our theology of a real presence in the elements; no matter our scientific proof positive that a pill contains a mind-altering substance. In all these things we are humbled unto basic Love for one another, and a Promise, a coin as token of a year or a decade or a day, clean and in dream-land alerted unto what still does leave us unhealed for the fact of still being tempted.