A discomfiting experience is watching what happens on Christmas morning after the season of Advent has run its course. For weeks children have been hyper vigilant to the appearance of new gifts under the brilliant tree of possibilities. Curiosity, imagination, and colorful gift wrap keep children utterly mesmerized with visions of bliss. This rapt attention and focus for weeks suddenly sublimates into shredding frenzies manifesting as Attention Deficit Disorder at its worst. How many times have I seen children rip apart those beautiful metallic holographic papers, only to drop unwrapped boxes to the floor, not even bothering to open them; moving on to the next hypnotic gift wrap. Grandiose imagination has given way to reality.
For a Christmas junkie keeping Christmas trees up all year, the metaphor seems apt for my own life. Every time I see a woman up close or even at a distance across the fitness floor in the gym, I find myself being the little kid at Christmas, wondering what lies beneath the colorful wrapper, not in so much a voyeuristic way as in a much broader one. Grandiose imagination runs amok. Will I suddenly find the person who is going to make my life work; giving me purpose, discipline, motivation, social confidence, guidance, and those much needed pep talks at the exact moment of maximum demoralization after something important to me has imploded?
Eighteen months ago I nearly sold all my positions in life, thinking another person could meet all my needs. I was willing to consider selling my house, casting aside my history, taking inordinate risk. In the intervening months I’ve learned more fully my true deeper needs can only be met by conscious contact with God as a result of a vital spiritual experience. There’s no possibility of another person doing for me only what God can do for me. As long as I believe another person can fulfill all my secret dreams I’m going to be wasting energy, frantically tearing open every life within reach of me. The only assured result for such behavior is leaving behind a wake of emotional trauma in many lives, and gaining for myself increasing social isolation, loneliness, and brooding self doubt.
In the recovery journey we learn ever more deeply only God can meet our deepest needs. After five and a half years on the recovery journey and having nearly torn my life out by the tracks in a romantic fugue a year and a half ago, I still struggle with the object of my faith. Do I really believe God is my true source, or do I still believe one of those beauties in the gym is going to take me to Nirvana? Worse yet, do I believe I can be a knight in shining armor to one of our new arrivals in recovery who has utterly destroyed her life with addictions? Am I to be the savior to one who has no job, no car, no home, and nothing to eat because she gave it all to the crack dealer? There’s sometimes an overwhelming urge in us spiritually unregenerate people to be the big deal strolling into another’s life, saving her from every form of poverty. I see this urge in myself and I see it in others almost daily.
In counseling sessions I hear this with astounding frequency. An intellectually gifted young man with every possible option open to him just related to me his three suicide attempts after his girl friend of ninety days overdosed on heroin and died on his birthday. One wonders just what a struggling heroin addict can do to give one purpose, discipline, motivation, social confidence, guidance, and those much needed pep talks at the exact moment of maximum demoralization after something important has imploded? The young heroin addict could not meet this young man’s needs in any way. She could not meet her own needs and never let God do so. It cost her life itself. The man relating this scenario to me is still unsure, even after being willing to cash out his own life. She imploded. He was not even successful at taking his own life.
When we put all our faith and belief in the ability of another human being to meet our own deep needs, the results are often catastrophic. Rarely does a week pass I don’t observe men and women newly released from prison and rehab facilities falling into each other’s arms and beds, giving up the disciplines and accountability of recovery. They move into shabby apartments or trailers, unemployed, without transportation. They stop coming to meetings and cease doing the recovery work which would bring them to the all-important realization that only God can meet their deepest needs. The incredible gift of sobriety is so often exchanged for the possibilities of romance. Funeral directors here are too often the direct beneficiaries to these ill-advised imaginations of romance.
Melody Beatty has been endowed with a great ability to speak into the hearts of those struggling with addictions and the ill-founded belief another being can meet their needs. In her The Language of Letting Go she implores us to consider “Our happiness is not a present someone else holds in his or her hands. Our well-being is not held by another to be given or withheld at whim. If we reach out and try to force someone to give us what we believe he or she holds, we will be disappointed. We will discover that it is an illusion. The person didn’t hold it. He or she never shall. That beautifully wrapped box with the ribbon on it that we believed contained our happiness … it’s an illusion.”
Henri Nouwen wrote many of his best sellers from the ground of his personal struggles with affective angst and feeling isolated from so many people, this despite being beloved by millions. It was a severe learning for him to come to understand only God could meet his deepest needs. In his The Inner Voice of Love he wrote “A split between divinity and humanity has taken place in you. With your divinely endowed center you know God’s will, God’s way, God’s love. But your humanity is cut off from that. Your many human needs for affection, attention, and consolation are living apart from your divine sacred space. Your call is to let these two parts of yourself come together again. You have to gradually move from crying outward – crying for people who you think can fulfill your needs – to crying inward to the place where you can let yourself be held and carried by God, who has become incarnate in the humanity of those who love you in community. No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you.”
How often it is we see people leave community, thinking another can meet all his or her needs. So often we see them descend into the abysses of depression, anxiety, addiction, the basement of the undertaker. It was only yesterday I sat with unnumbered thousands in one of the fastest growing churches in the Western Hemisphere, listening to the preacher exhort us men strongly to ‘pursue’ women. Reading easily between the lines one easily came away with the idea an all-out pursuit of women was going to gain us a trophy capable of meeting all our needs. The preacher paused to exhort the thousands of women present to not give any consideration to a man who did not offer to pay for her dinner. He specifically chided men who would suggest Dutch treat for a first encounter, writing them off as unviable candidates for Godly women. It’s a still small voice telling us God is our true Source. I didn’t hear it yesterday among the cacophony of thousands.
An astoundingly insightful message is found buried in one of the books used by many in recovery. “Either we insist on dominating the people we know, or we depend on them far too much. If we lean too heavily on people, they will sooner or later fail us, for they are human, too, and cannot possibly meet our incessant demands. In this way our insecurity grows and festers. When we habitually try to manipulate others to our own willful desires, they revolt, and resist us heavily. Then we develop hurt feelings, a sense of persecution, and a desire to retaliate. As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant.”
In an era in which popular culture teaches romance is the answer to all my needs and wants and conservative preachers in vast mega churches tell me to pursue women, to chase them down with meal tickets, it’s difficult to find the true source Who can make my life work; giving me purpose, discipline, motivation, social confidence, guidance, and those much needed pep talks at the exact moment of maximum demoralization after something important to me has imploded.
As Jesus did, it’s sometimes important to go off into the wilderness for a creative absence and figure out just where we are hanging our hat. It’s tough to hear His quiet whisper in the ‘grab-it-all” secular culture we live in. We might just even learn the greatest Gift came wrapped in a crown of honey-locust thorns and welts raised by a Roman cat-o-nine tails.
“I know the thoughts I have for you, thoughts for good not for evil, plans that will give you hope and a future.”
Blessings,
Craig c. Johnson
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