Humility and Recovery: Lessons for Christians

One of the things I love about the 12 Step Programs is the emphasis on humility that one finds there.  One might think that it would not be difficult for the addict coming into recovery to be humble: after all, no one comes into AA, for example, on a winning streak. By the time an alcoholic comes into the rooms of recovery, he or she should realize that life has become unmanageable as a result of the disease of alcoholism, and should be teachable. As we say in the Program, “your best thinking got you here,” a polite way of saying, “well if you are so smart, tell me why you cannot manage your own life anymore.”  Yet, strangely, the opposite is often true.  An addict recently in the disease or even early in recovery is often full of self-will, false pride and that strange combination of deep insecurity and outsized egotism that seems to reside in most addicts.

This was surely true as I look back on my own journey into recovery.  Twenty years ago,  I had elements of both grandiosity and self-loathing: I was at the same time a professional success—having enjoyed a decade of accomplishment both as a lawyer and a legislator with nothing but promise on the horizon—and yet was a personal and spiritual mess, having sabotaged my young family life with hypocrisy and having spun out of control in an alcoholic meltdown, hurting many people I cared about and bringing shame and scandal upon myself.  This combination of outward success and inward sickness left me deeply ambivalent about my worth and value as a man.  Such a toxic duality in self-esteem is very common for addicts in the disease and even newly in recovery.

Still, fairly early on in the process of getting physically and emotionally healed through recovery,  most addicts begin to learn how to take a realistic assessment of our strengths and weaknesses as people—which is not a bad definition of humility, and one that I hear regularly in meetings. For humility, properly understood, has nothing to do with self-devaluation or debasement, although such is a frequent misunderstanding of the term.  In fact, the origins of the word are from the same Latin that gives us humus, soil.  To be humble, then, has something to do with being grounded, having our feet in the soil, as opposed to being ungrounded, untethered, unmoored.  So the 12 Step Programs teach us that a man or woman is humble when he or she has a realistic understanding of both his or her character virtues and defects, a grounded view of him or herself in relation to God and the world.  This realistic understanding comes slowly but naturally and inevitably if one is painstaking about working the 12 Steps.  Indeed, one can hardly avoid a fundamental psychic and spiritual conversion if one is systematically and intentionally working to become honest about one’s brokenness and addiction, to trust a Higher Power to restore one to sanity, to clean up the wreckage of the years of addiction, and to find ways to be of service to others suffering from the disease. So it is that, after a number of years working a good program, a recovering addict will become comfortable in his or her own skin, with a clear sense of who he or she is in relation to God, to other addicts and to the world.

And so, in a lesson that Christians would do well to learn, we see a spiritual transformation in our recovering brothers and sisters.  For the addict, what used to be a kind of bi-polar self-image—alternatively either grandiosity or worthlessness—gradually becomes a peaceful paradox, a two-headed truth, where a man or woman can embrace that he or she is at the same time broken and deeply flawed person and yet also is a precious child of a loving God who is given a high calling to help save those still suffering. Many years ago I was given by my spiritual mentor a beautiful passage which embraces all this, in a note which said, “I know who I am and to Whom I belong, and having so known, life will not now press so close, and always I shall feel time spun thin about me, for once I stood in the white, windy presence of Eternity.”  Knowing who I am and to Whom I belong is, for me, the starting point of humility.

The Gospel of Bill (W): More on Heaven and Hell—for Addicts and for Christians

So let’s talk more about heaven and hell.  The topic provokes, shall we say, keen interest—at least judging from response to my comments about it in the last post on the story of the alcoholic monk.  And besides that, it provides another opportunity for Christians to deepen their faith through the Gospel of Bill—lessons that Christians can learn from 12 Step recovery.  Specifically, what we can learn from our friends the addicts about heaven and hell is, first, that both are very real, and, second, that there is an inextricable connection between heaven and hell in our earthly lives and heaven and hell in our spiritual lives.

But before we just jump right in on heaven and hell, let’s do a quick review of how we got here.

In the last blog about the old friar who could not stay sober, I noted that the pain and confusion felt by those who love a hopeless addict carries some parallels in Christian theology. In both instances no one really can understand why one person recovers and one does not, why one man is “found” and another “lost.”  And, as I noted in that post, apparently whether one ends up in “heaven” or in “hell”—in addiction, at least—is not a matter of merit.  Anyone who has ever darkened the door of the rooms of recovery will recall brothers or sisters in who, for all appearances, are of high personal and moral caliber but who seem to have the disease of addiction worse than others, who, despite their apparent best efforts, cannot stay sober very long, while others, apparently inferior in terms of moral character or past behavior, are able to achieve and maintain long term sobriety. Why is this so?  The most experienced and wisest men and women in recovery cannot say.

Similarly, as has been noted from early on in the history of Christian theology, as early as St Paul and the Gospels, the gift of salvation is given to some, and not others, in ways and for reasons that seem arbitrary, even unfair.  Why is this so? How can this be?  Again, we do not know. Jesus told the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, some of whom began to work late in the day and yet were paid the same wages as those who had worked all day in the scorching sun. As Jesus noted, this is unfair by almost any measure—and yet somehow it tells us something important about God.  And St Paul talks in terms of those who, for reasons not even he can explain, have been “predestined to salvation.” Now while the term “predestination” is an unfortunate translation from the Greek that has led historically to all kinds of silly theologies, yet what Paul is grappling with here is that there is apparently no relationship between merit and salvation.

So it is that both in the world of recovery and in the life of the Christian faith there are those who seem destined to be saved for reasons apparent to God alone, quite apart from whether they are deserving of it.

Now, interestingly, it was my use of the labels of “heaven” and “hell” in the last blog that drew significant comment—much of it plainly uncomfortable that I would resort to such black and white, simplistic and antiquated images.  But, once more, on this topic as so many before, the world of addiction and recovery can teach Christians much about the realities of the spiritual life, and I cannot agree to abandon the idea of heaven and hell, or to water it down, just to make us less uncomfortable. That is not my understanding of the purpose of Christian theology, or of this blog for that matter.  Instead, let us go deeper with the discussion.

Now, it is probably obvious, but worth underscoring, that we cannot here engage in  anything like a full exploration of the various and diverse understandings of the afterlife—heaven and hell—that  can be found across Christian traditions and centuries. These include the most obvious “forensic” model so predominant in Western theologies, and so problematic as well, in which hell serves as a kind of eternal prison for people who have chosen to live apart from God, while heaven is the spiritual reward for people who have chosen God.  Or, the “theosis” or “deification” model from our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters, in which salvation, or heaven, is understood as a slow and gradual process of becoming more and more godlike in this life, such that, at death, we are in some mysterious, but real, ontological way joined with God. While these are fascinating and fruitful speculative journeys for intellectually curious Christians, such pure theological reflection is not my purpose in this blog. Rather it is my hope that, in the struggles and the surrenders of recovering addicts, we Christians can see parallels to our lives in the faith.

Which brings me back to the two lessons of this blog: that, to the suffering and the recovering addict, the idea of “hell” and “heaven” are very real and no mere abstraction, and, second, that there is a direct connection between our concrete and tangible thoughts and deeds, on the one hand, and the and the permanent and spiritual echoes of those actions, on the other.

Those who have spent any time around struggling addicts will tell you that it is hard to see the life of addiction and recovery in any other way besides a kind of “heaven” and “hell.” The hooks of addiction—alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, sex, food—get inside addicts in a way that is cunning, baffling and powerful.  These hapless people are—in point of fact if not in purpose of design—“damned”: damned to a life of disease and insanity, damned to chaos and crimes, damned to brokenness and despair.  And although people in recovery do not speak in theological terms when they say it, in the 12 Step framework, this captivity to addiction is understood as a kind of “hell.”  We are deathly afraid of it and we don’t want to go back there.  Equally obvious to those in recovery, there is also a state of being which begins to look very much like what most of us would expect of “heaven”:  a state of being in which we are happy, joyous and free, grateful for having been saved and redeemed to a new life of purpose and health, at peace with the world and with one’s Higher Power.

A friend of mine in recovery, once asked if he believed in hell, responded with a quip: “believe in it? For cryin’ out loud, I’ve been there…. ” And in answer to the same question about heaven?  “Pal, not only have I been there, but I live there every day….”

So the first thing we learn from our friends in recovery about heaven and hell is that, in some way, some tangible way that we Christians would do well to consider, heaven and hell are to them very real, very present, realities, even if understood primarily in temporal ways.

The second realization we can have in viewing heaven and hell through the lens of addiction and recovery is the link between the temporal and the eternal.  This is the truth that, in addiction as in the life of the spirit, the idea of a spiritual hell is inextricably connected to a series of temporal decisions and choices that we have made.  For an addict learns one thing, if he or she ever stands to be free from addiction, that actions matter, that the rules apply to me, that all the pain I experience and foist on myself and on others is simply but profoundly a natural consequence of a thousand bad acts, and that, unless something changes, the path I am on leads to death, indeed to hell.

So given this unavoidable truth about the natural consequences of my daily and practical behavior, how could it be that things could be any different when it comes to the spiritual consequences of my actions?  How could anything other than spiritual suffering and death come from a progression of behavior that has brought physical suffering and death?  The short answer is that it can’t.  Actions have consequences, and tangible actions have permanent consequences, as many a recovering addict will attest.  We wish we could undo what we once did, but we cannot, and it is plain that the consequences of what we did—even assuming forgiveness by God and man—are permanent.

Now this understanding of hell is really no different from that offered by various teachers of the Christian way over the centuries. So we remember Jesus’ parable of the rich ruler and Lazarus—a story that ends with the rich ruler tormented by fire as he sees the truth of what his life has been.  Dante’s Inferno presents things in much the same way. In  Dickens, we see Marley, Scrooge’s former partner and now Christmas Eve’s ghostly visitor, who is enwrapped by heavy iron chains, forged, link by link we are told, by a lifetime of actions fed by habitual greed and selfishness.  And CS Lewis’ Great Divorce features a busload of departed souls taking a tour of heaven, most of whom choose to return to hell, that world being more familiar and less frightening to them.

So we learn from the addicts and from Christian thought that there is such a thing as hell, and that the suffering we know there is surely and inextricably linked to how we have lived day by day and moment by moment in this life.

The final question, then, is this: is the same thing true about “heaven”? Is our  redemption and joy in eternity tied naturally and incrementally to our good actions?  The answer, logically, would seem to be yes, it must be so.  But, of course, recovering addicts and instructed Christians know that the answer to the question, surprising as it is, is “no.”  Against all natural experience and expectations, against all moral and spiritual logic, we are surprised to learn, in recovery and in Christian conversion, that we have been saved, through no merit of our own but merely through a simple and profound surrender, we have been given a new life and we are welcomed into the loving arms of God and reborn.

We Christians call this “grace.”  And it is, of course, the miracle and the scandal of both recovery and Christianity, that  people who plainly and obviously do not deserve to be saved are saved nonetheless, simply and solely because of the unreserved and uncontainable love and mercy of a loving and merciful God.  And in response to this scandal, an entire civilization called Christendom—with its cathedrals and libraries, its hymns, art and literature—was built to try to acknowledge, celebrate and contemplate this stupendous mystery.

In contrast, I suggest that it is too easy for Christians nowadays to treat this gift of grace as the end of the matter rather than as the starting point, to take it as a given rather than as a gift.   But here, again, we learn from the addicts, alcoholics, the compulsive gamblers and the others.  For they teach as a first principle of recovery that one cannot simply receive the gift of grace and then call it good.  Instead, they know and practice the reality that the  only way to stay sober is by working with other addicts, that what is not given away will be lost, and that the only way to keep the gifts of recovery—heaven, if you will—is to give them away freely.  Which is why it is a first principle of recovery that one must constantly be helping others, or else one will relapse and lose everything again.

And so it is that, to use language that will ring some bells for those familiar with Christian theology, addicts may believe that they have been saved by grace, but they act as if they are saved by works.   We Christians should perhaps rethink our lives, if not our theology, in this light, for I suspect that all of us would do well to practice this habit, as do our friends the addicts.

Gospel of Bill—The Alcoholic Monk and Hidden Spiritual Progress

The purpose of this blog, of course, is to see what Christians and churches can learn from the Twelve Step Recovery programs: what analogies, examples, ideas and practices occur in those rooms amongst the addicts that might help us Christians see our faith through new lenses.  Much as we might learn something of what it means to be faithful Christians if we were to observe, say, a devout and orthodox Jewish community, or if we as the Church were to take inspiration from highly committed Shi’ia Muslim communities, so also we Christians can learn much about the nature of brokenness, surrender, mutual love and support, and outreach in service to others, by observing our friends the recovering addicts.

Now, of course, Twelve-Step Recovery, being a program grounded in deeply spiritual principles, is usually a thing of hope for millions of addicts and their friends and families.  And yet, as this remarkable little parable of the alcoholic monk shows us, sometimes, and for some addicts, sobriety, as most of us commonly understand that idea, simply never happens.  The fact is, some especially tortured addicts seem to struggle more to achieve even short term sobriety, they seem to relapse constantly, they get worse and worse over time, and eventually the disease of addiction kills them—as it did this little monk.  For, as every recovering addict knows deeply, alcoholism and addiction are fatal diseases, and un-arrested over any serious length of time, they will surely kill us ugly and dead.

Now the second point worth noting in this parable, aside from the brutal reminder that addiction kills, is the reaction of the other monks to their brother’s struggles: they are scandalized, upset, confused.  For when someone we care about cannot live clean and sober, we imagine all kinds of reasons why:  she must not really want to get sober, he isn’t working the steps, she hasn’t trusted in her higher power, he is still dishonest about something in his life, and on and on it goes.  We—we on the outside looking in—get angry, we get hurt, we get embarrassed, we lash out, we withdraw, we threaten, we leave, we come back, we leave again.  None of this, of course, does any good, for the great mystery of addiction is that the key to sobriety lies within each suffering addict, having been placed there by God himself.  But, as with so many other mysteries about how God works in the lives of suffering people, we do not know how or why some people are able to turn the key and some not, why some are able to get sober, some not, and some, like our friend the alcoholic monk, make progress known to God alone.

These struggles and mysteries are really not all that different from the kinds of questions that thinking Christians have always asked about sin, grace and salvation– why some people seem naturally to be more deeply flawed than others, why some seem to be able to receive grace and redemption so completely while others struggle two steps forward and one step back, what it means when a man or woman opts to walk away from a life in the Spirit and chooses a life without God, and in the end, what it means to be redeemed and—always more difficult—what it means to be lost.  Of course, in our age of radical secularism and societal ignorance about deep religious faith, no one really knows how to talk about this anymore, or else we are too afraid to be labeled by the keepers of political correctness as harsh, judgmental, impolite, a social outcast, ever to talk in terms of someone being “saved” or “lost.”  And so we don’t talk about it: even in the churches, we don’t talk about it, and we never talk seriously—I mean theologically—about it.

But our friends the addicts know how to talk about it. And they do. They have to, for it—life and death, both spiritual and actual—goes on all around them all the time, and they must have a language to describe their experiences. For—to say again the hard thing—the rooms of recovery are regularly ravaged by death from addiction. So recovering addicts talk about those who have been saved and those who could not be, those who were found and those still lost, about those who find themselves redeemed through no apparent merit of their own, and those who, equally for reasons no one except God can understand, don’t, and so end up in that state of existence that can only be called hell.

For those in recovery or those in the churches, these are great and hard mysteries, no doubt, but they are ones that we can contemplate without fear, for we believe in a loving and compassionate God.

And, to that end, there is one more way in which this story of the alcoholic monk can open our eyes: for in this story we see that not all questions of spiritual progress are black and white. The brother monks, of course, assume that, since the alcoholic monk has not been able to find continual sobriety, his soul must be wholly forfeited. Only the abbot has the wisdom to see more deeply what is going on.  Only the abbot sees with the heart of God.  Now those who have read AA Big Book will remember a similar idea there.  For we are told in those pages that alcoholics in recovery “claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection….We are not saints.”  Once that spiritual elephant is out of the room, we can strive for spiritual progress, one day at a time, even if God alone can see it.

And so the story of the alcoholic monk teaches us that addiction kills, and so does sin. Some are saved and some lost, and no one except God alone knows why.  And some progress—whether freedom from the twentieth drink or freedom to draw closer to the heart of God—is known only to God.

Why AA is Not a “Self Help” Program– David Brooks’ “Bill WIlson’s Gospel” Column Revisited

“In a culture that generally celebrates empowerment and self-esteem, A.A. begins with disempowerment. The goal is to get people to gain control over their lives, but it all begins with an act of surrender and an admission of weakness.  In a culture that thinks of itself as individualistic, A.A. relies on fellowship. The general idea is that people aren’t really captains of their own ship. Successful members become deeply intertwined with one another — learning, sharing, suffering and mentoring one another. Individual repair is a social effort.

In a world in which gurus try to carefully design and impose their ideas, Wilson surrendered control. He wrote down the famous steps and foundations, but A.A. allows each local group to form, adapt and innovate. There is less quality control. Some groups and leaders are great; some are terrible. But it also means that A.A. is decentralized, innovative and dynamic.”

So says David Brooks, the thoughtful commentator at the New York Times, in this column, now nearly two years old. Brooks gets three pieces of AA that I have been trying to emphasize now for several months: first, the admission of powerlessness, second the crucial role of community, third, the nontraditional nature of 12 Step leadership, based on service and not power.  I often say that “others call AA and the other 12 Step Programs ‘self help,’ but those of us inside know better.”

Addiction and Christian Recovery

This from Christianity Today is a helpful piece in helping Christians understand what addiction is and is not, how we can help and how we can hinder someone struggling with the disease, and the complexity that prevents simplistic answers.  On behalf of one more Christian recovering from addiction–and one who is working to help Christians understand addiction, thank you to CT for an excellent piece.

Thomas Kinkade and the Reality of Addiction”

I don’t know Thomas Kinkade’s art well, and it does not especially appeal to my tastes, but I do know that he was a big deal in certain Christian circles.  And since since his death last week–apparently at least partly related to an alcohol relapse–I have been struck at how the secular news reports and those from Christian sources each try to separate out what was apparently inseparable in Kinkade: the fact that he was both a man of Christian faith and at the same time deeply broken and addicted. The secular media, such as the LA Times, seem to point to Kinkade’s inner struggles to suggest that there was something missing in, even hypocritical about, his life as a Christian, while the Christian reports take the attitude that he just must not have been trusting Jesus enough.

Both approaches badly misunderstand both the nature of faith, and the nature of addiction.  As I have tried to elaborate in this blog, there are two things that are wholly true about the intersection of faith and addiction:  first, addiction is a powerful disease, fatal if unchecked, and no amount of willpower–as that idea is traditionally understood–can cure it, even when that willpower is brought by a Christian; and, second, Christians, even more than other people, should never be surprised when one of our brothers or sisters gets snared by the hooks of alcoholism or other addiction, relapses, or otherwise struggles in these areas. After all, one of the things we know most centrally about ourselves is that we are drawn to Christ because of a sense of brokenness, emptiness or incompleteness in our lives. Who more, then, than the addicted might better understand the need for God in the healing person of Christ?

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, said our Lord.  Yet how often we forget this in our shallow, non-biblical fantasies about what the “good life” in Christ is supposed to look like. The hard fact is that Thomas Kinkade apparently carried within himself the brokenness of addiction, and it killed him.  Sad as that may be, it reminds us that addiction, untreated and unchecked, is a fatal disease.   That is as true for talented and famous Christians as it is for skid-row drifters.

Gospel of Bill: Faith, Certainty and Doubt

One of the great things about being in the 12 Step fellowships is that many, perhaps most, of the people in the rooms claim no special expertise when it comes to questions of spiritual and religious faith. In fact, many recovering addicts have had bad experiences with “organized religion” in their pasts. But because these men and women are coming new, or returning afresh, to a spiritual life, and coming with an urgency driven by utter brokenness,  they bring a level of willingness and humility, even childlike openness, to the journey of faith that sometimes eludes those of us in the churches.

Now, one area of confusion that frequently surfaces among recovering people is the difference between faith and certainty, and the parallel question about the necessary tension between faith and doubt.  But, then, it is not just in the recovery communities where such crucial distinctions are missed, but in church circles as well. I often find Christians stumbling over the fact that they don’t “believe” in some piece of the Christian Gospel the same way that, say, they “believe” in some piece of science or history. But, whether in the rooms of recovery or in the churches of Christ, it is vital to our spiritual progress that we understand deeply and clearly what faith is and what it is not, and the crucial role of doubt in the life of faith.

For, whatever else it is, faith is not intellectual certainty, and faith does not exclude—indeed, it absolutely requires—doubt.  Here, I think, Christians can learn something profound from the honesty of children and the urgency of addicts. And recently I have had two encounters that illustrate all this quite poignantly and pointedly.

“You don’t really believe all that, do you?!” asked an eleven year-old especially dear to me recently, referring to the Easter Story.  The question caught me wholly by surprise, since it burst forth quite suddenly out of an ordinary conversation about what would be our upcoming church plans, and since there was such obvious pent-up energy behind it.  “Well,” I answered slowly, pausing to catch my breath and say a quiet prayer for guidance: “yes, I think I do….” An animated conversation ensued, with me feeling like I was on roller skates going backwards, as the child pressed on relentlessly, demonstrating a near textbook cross examination technique—ask closed-ended questions only, keep the witness to only “yes” or “no,” allow no space for the witness to equivocate (even as I was on the receiving end of it, for a trial lawyer like me it was a thing of beauty to see!)—all of which further reinforced my sense that she had played out this conversation in her mind many times. “So, if you believe the Bible then you don’t believe in evolution, right?”  “And you think Jesus actually walked on water and came back from the dead?” On and on it went.

Now, some answers were relatively easier: “well, it might surprise you, but I don’t think there is actually much conflict between the scientific theory of evolution, properly understood, and the biblical idea of divine creation, properly understood.”  Other questions were more difficult. Still, each time I generally answered along the lines of, “yes, I think that is probably what happened, although I don’t pretend to know for sure, and there are a lot of things about it that I don’t know or don’t understand,” or, “yes, I think it is more likely true than not true that Jesus was raised from the dead in some very real way—though I admit there is much about it that we don’t know and probably were not meant to know.”

And, then finally, I made a comment from some deep place inside me that sensed it was far more important in that moment to be wholly authentic than wholly convincing with this highly intuitive child. “Of course, faith is not the same thing as certainty, and I realize that I could be totally wrong about some, most or all of my faith.” Silence…and a piercing gaze… and more silence, which I took as at least permission to continue. “But, you know what?  Even if it turned out in the end that I was completely wrong about my faith, I don’t think I would change the way I am living now, because my faith fills up my life, makes me better person than I otherwise would be, and gives me real joy and happiness.”

“And, by the way,” I added quietly, “I said that I realize I could be wrong about all this.  But what is surprising to me is that so often all those people out there who seem so sure that Christianity is not true can’t or won’t do the same thing.  Why do you suppose that is?”  A slightly surprised and amused smile was her only answer.

The second incident was much briefer, and came from a close friend of mine in recovery, a tough-guy former US Marine who in his days of running and gunning in addiction needed no one and nothing but who has now spent the better part of 15 years working a good program and seeking a vibrant spiritual relationship with God. “You know,” he said, as he was explaining how scared he is about his family’s economic future as he stays the course on a business venture that might or might not work out, “at some point, we have to stop all this spiritual babble about faith and trust and just lay it all on the line. I mean, we either believe it or we don’t, which means we either live it or we don’t. Right?  I mean, that is right…isn’t it?  Cuz, I’m way out on a limb here, but I believe I am following God’s direction.”  The only answer I could give him was, “we’re all way out on a limb here, my friend…and that’s where I think God wants us.”

The point of both conversations, it seems to me, is that spiritual faith is not intellectual certainty, and doubt is a necessary element of faith.

Faith is not the same thing as certainty. On the one hand—religious faith, properly understood, is the intersection of reason, emotion, spirit and choice applied to our relationship to God. Meanwhile, intellectual certainty, on the other hand, is merely the kind of knowledge we bring to subjects like mathematics, biology or physics—two plus two always equals four, plants in fact use sunlight as nourishment, light can be shown empirically to bend and die in the immense gravity of black holes.  But faith and intellectual certainty are two different kinds of knowledge, and even a basic understanding of epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—reveals that we know them in different ways, with different “knowers,” one primarily intellectual, one more wholistic, only the former being susceptible to “proof” as we usually understand that term.  As I explained to the eleven year-old, most things worth knowing cannot be proven with scientific certainty.  I can’t “prove” that my family and friends love me, but I know it better than I know anything in my life, for I have seen it over and over again, I have received it, I know it to be true in the deepest center of knowledge in my being—my mind, my heart, my experience.  I have “evidence” for it, but my knowledge is not limited to forensic or scientific proof.

And secondly—and perhaps even more critical for Christians to internalize deeply—doubt is a crucial part of faith. At some level faith always includes a decision of the will. This is a quiet spiritual truth made plain and palpable ever since Peter answered a hard question from Jesus with the words, “I believe; but, Lord, help my unbelief.”  And since then, Paul and the early Church fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Paschal, Dostoevsky, Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, CS Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Paul II and Annie Lamott—all these Christians have been witnesses to the hard truth that it is only by acknowledging our doubt, by owning and embracing it, and then by stepping out in faith anyway—like my recovery buddy the former Marine is doing–that our faith grows.

So, when it comes to understanding faith, we Christians can remember—with our friends the children and our friends the broken addicts—that our deepest brokenness can open us up to deeper levels of belief, and that our deepest doubts are the constant guardians, not the enemies, of faith.   For those of us who carry brokenness and yearn for healing, who believe but need help in our unbelief, these are comforting truths.