Our Spring Lecturer two Sundays ago uttered a word that is regrettably seen as dreaded in Unitarian Universalist circles and is almost never associated with spiritual or psychological growth by us: surrender. It forms the center of an irony of ministry I want to invite you into this morning. The story begins back in Milwaukee in the 1980’s when I had been in the ministry just a few years.

    I attended a seminar on addiction and the presenter, an old Episcopalian priest, made what I thought to be an outlandish claim. He said that 90% of the people who come to a clergyperson for any kind of pastoral care have alcohol or drug addiction as part of the problem or part of their family history. After the seminar was over and I confronted him with my skepticism, he challenged me to test it. So, over the next five years anytime anyone came to me to talk over a problem of any kind, I asked if alcohol or drugs were part of the problem or part of the family history. He was right.

    I also began to look at my family and all the families I am connected with, and saw things I had denied or had let escape my view. I began to look at my own life differently.

    I remember the first Unitarian Universalist in Milwaukee who came to me to disclose he was a recovering alcoholic. He asked me if I knew about the twelve steps. I didn’t then. He told me about them and told me that he found that in our faith tradition most who shared with him the particular struggle of addiction were caught by number three. Most couldn’t get past it: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. “I think individuals understand God in their own way,” he said, “But I don’t believe in God. How can I turn my life over and surrender to something I don’t believe in?”

    Twelve-step programs meant to deal with addiction follow a pragmatically proved formula for success. An individual succumbs to continuous use of a substance. That continual use takes control over the individual’s life until the life of the individual is out of control because the self no longer regulates itself. Some substance other than the self controls what the individual consents to do and become. The individual hits “rock bottom,” where his or her life is completely controlled by the use of the substance, until that “rock bottom” becomes a revelation. The self no longer regulates what the self can regulate. Consent is completely absent. There is an external control enslaving the person, which has invaded the center of personal energy and controls it. Giving up one’s control to the realization involves confession that the self no longer is in charge, restitution towards those relationships severed, and a new life becomes possible. And it works for many. The pragmatic measurement that it works is real.

    But, there is an irony to addiction as well. Your life is out of control. You come to realize it. You want control over it. But to get control you have to surrender control! Or, so it appears. What you know is there and in control, is the alcohol or the drugs, or whatever is the substance to which you are a enslaved: “You and me and booze – a threesome,” as the character in Days of Wine and Roses puts it to the woman he loves, to whom he offered the first drink that began their addiction together. He wants out of booze’s control of him but she doesn’t, and doesn’t see it as a “problem.”

    You have to surrender, but to what? You are aware of the way something else controls you; alcohol or drugs. And now, you are told to let religion or God control you, and it can easily seem as though you are being counseled to go from believing in alcohol or drugs, to believing in God as the controlling influence of your life. It is easy to see that the choice you have is to go from surrendering control to a belief in a substance, to surrendering control to a belief in a Being. “Religious” people tell you that you must. Give your life over to God. The irony is it can be seen not as being about control over a life out of control, but losing the self, individual consent, to a belief once again. The irony is that it can be seen as losing control all over again. Surrendering your life to God can actually become surrendering your life to another’s belief about what that God is, what that God wills and wants, what that God will reward, and what will placate that God and make that God happy. You can in reality be fleeing from your addiction, your belief in alcohol or drugs as the controlling influence in your life, and fleeing towards another addiction, someone else’s belief in God as the controlling influence in your life. Either way, the self does not regulate its consent, but succumbs to an outside controlling substance, be it alcohol, drugs, or someone else’s faith! There is an external control enslaving you still, which has invaded the center of your personal energy and controls it.

    And how do you know that the belief in the God you are being counseled to adopt won’t create the same kind of loss of control that characterizes addiction? You lose yourself to booze. You lose your selfhood, your family, everything you hold as dear to drugs. And now you are being counseled that the only way to rid yourself of this debilitating belief is to take on another belief you have to surrender yourself to that is equally debilitating. Trading one belief for another belief, and that’s suppose to make a difference when you don’t have “the self,” “consent,” in either case?

    Of course booze and drugs are vicious taskmasters, but belief in God can be too. It can appear strikingly the same! You can look around at the ways people believe in God and surrender the “self’ and lose the “self” as if it is in the bottom of a bottle. They surrender their thoughts to their faith, as someone else dictates what they can think, who they can be with, even what they read. They surrender their livelihoods to their church, when the church tells them what to believe, and what is real and unreal about their experience. Some people even literally surrender their own lives to their gods and set off bombs that take out other human beings with them. You look at the women coming out of that religious compound in Texas and they look frighteningly like the boozer who believes he needs multiple martinis everyday to relax or the druggie who can spout justifications to account for surrending himself away to behavior where the “self” disappears: “…nobody, and I mean nobody, can talk a junkie out of using. You can talk to 'em for years but sooner or later they're gonna get ahold of something... Something to relieve the pressures of their everyday life, like having to tie their shoes.” Religion can be THE controlling substance.

    And you don’t want to surrender; not to that either. Not to another belief that robs you of who you are.

    But that is not the only way of religion and faith. That is not the only conception of God, of what power it is that animates existence, gives it its “breath” and bears an Affection towards the healthy fulfillment of created life, like yours and mine and all souls!

    We represent a particular understanding about human nature and religious faith. To other faith traditions the choice may be to surrender to addictions or to God. Other faith traditions may promote that it is healthier to surrender to God because you will have saved your eternal soul. But, that is not this faith tradition. That is not the centuries old understanding of religion and faith that this congregation exists as a representative of. We see how it can be that surrendering the self to religious belief as others have determined it for us, is similar to surrendering to the drink someone hands us or the pill we pop. The recovering alcoholic is a visible critique of the falsity of living by booze, and we turn that critique upon religion itself. The “man of faith” or the “woman of faith” can be so caught up in a life of still being controlled by an “outside substance,” in this instance religion itself, that they can become an “addict to a god” that is as severe and life denying and debilitating as any bottle or needle. We hold that there is a self “there,” deep inside, that we can consent to give away to the control of all kinds of “others,” or come to know and accept, make peace with and live through to become what we were created to become. We can give away the “self” or live into the growth of the “self.”

    And so to us, the deeper question the irony of addiction contains is what is it in our makeup that leads us to desire to give away the deepest, most honest, most authentic portion of the self? Why do we choose to relinquish the self to booze or drugs, or give away the self to a religion and belief others have determined for us? Why do we see surrender only as abandoning the self’s consent?

    Abandoning the self to booze, drugs, or religious beliefs can save us from what?

    Save us from the loathing that is locked deep within human nature? “It's horrifying how much you can hate yourself for being low and weak and my husband couldn't save me from that. So I turned it on him; I tried to empty it onto him. But there was always more, you know. When he tried to help I told him that he made me feel small and worthless.” Religion can compound that self-loathing like nothing else can, not even booze and drugs! But, do you think God would want human beings to become even more imprisoned in self-loathing? Our faith tradition declares God wants more for you than that. And it is God’s love for all souls that is the invitation towards that something more.

    Save us from an inflated sense of what we can control, the human hubris that plagues us? “I woke up one morning, and when I looked in the mirror I noticed my nose was bent over entirely onto one side of my face. So, I got a hammer, and started banging my nose back to a right angle with my face. Suddenly, I looked at myself in the mirror, hammer in hand, blood streaming down my chin, and I realized my life was no longer manageable.” But religion, too, can give us a sense that we can control what we cannot control, especially when religion says it can give you a belief that will guarantee that your death will not be real! Religion can claim it knows what God wants, wills, and thinks is right to believe! Talk about human beings thinking they can have control! But, do you think God has created some human beings favorably to know exactly what would please God, and to hell with us others? But, do you think God would want human beings to become even more imprisoned in self-loathing? Our faith tradition declares God wants more for you than that. And it is that you have been created in an image of the Divine that is the invitation to each of you, in your own distinct way, towards that something more.

    Saved from an emptiness that is the reflection we live in part. I feel real empty inside. But, do you think God loves it when human beings are in the pain of emptiness? Do you think that someone in pain pleases God? Do you think God savors the moment that out of desperation, because we are so lonely, we believe in God to save us from an emptiness that otherwise would lead us to drink themselves to death? Our faith tradition declares God wants more for you than that. God is the experience we feel when we are truly liberated from the enslaving chains of any kind of addiction including religion.

    Addiction is physical, psychological, and can be learned behavior. But, addiction is also a spiritual disease. It is not moral weakness which can be redeemed by believing in the right way and surrendering your “self” to the right things. And it is not inevitable that every addict will use until he or she is dead, as some believe and proclaim. Addiction is a spiritual disease but not about the contents of human belief. It is not solved by believing the right things.

    Addiction is about the want of trust It is about the poverty of trust, the deprivation of trust, the scarcity of trust. At the deepest levels of ourselves we thirst for trust. We seek an affirmation of self deeper than want. We seek relationships that contain an affection more enduring than pain. We seek a source of Affection, a Love that is constant when our desires are pulled this way and that, and we feel out of control. We want to live into this trust in ourselves, in others, and in a transcending mystery that is a Love upholding life. But, the pain is felt so intensely at times that we fear we cannot find what we seek. We fear we will lose ourselves, which we know we can do. We fear relationships will compound pain, which they can do. We fear we will be alone with an emptiness we know we cannot fill, which can happen. We fear and lack the trust that our emptiness, our spiritual loneliness, can be endured long enough until we can be filled again.

    Faith is not about surrendering ourselves to right beliefs. Faith is about how we possess the capacity both to surrender the self to fear and deprivation, AND to a life lived in trust. Faith is about knowing human nature, and walking with others in that all too human condition towards giving ourselves to a trust, which will yield that we are found in Love. Faith is about walking with others through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil because there abides an Affection that redeems all fear.

    Addiction is the spiritual condition of a want of trust. And the pain of this want is so great that sometimes it cries out inside of human being to be anesthetized by booze, by drugs, even sometimes by religious belief. Addiction is a dependence where the self is lost in fear. Ironically, it is a fear compounded by the prospect of surrendering to another debilitating belief!

    But something else is real, too. When we realize our capacity to fool ourselves by thinking any surrender will do; when we hit rock bottom of giving the deepest portions of ourselves away never to find that self again; when we fear human connection because we know how we will lose ourselves in dependence upon others and how we will also drive them away with who we are. Yet, when we so think we are unworthy of affection, there abides in this existence a deep Love that is not dependent upon us for it to abide. There is at the center of all things a Love that will not go away because creation was made with this as its DNA, and when we turn in trust towards the self, towards others, and towards this great Love, we can find companionship deeper than our pains and our mistakes and our failures and how in our weakness we want to abandon who we are to all sorts of controlling substances.

    At the heart of all things there is Grace. At the heart of all things there abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit. At the heart of all things there is a Love there for all souls to find and to trust when it is found.

AMEN.