“In place of the visio Dei, Christ has a visio mortis as he contemplates the repulsive horror and self-isolation of sin’s selfishness.”—Alyssa Pitstick, summary, Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale, First Things
At the age of nearly 96, I look back on more than 80 years of addiction and wonder if it is really true that Jesus’ “love goes deeper than my sins and failings and transforms me” (“Litany of Trust”). However, I was reassured when I came across a blog post I’d written eight years ago about Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Holy Saturday theology. Balthasar proposed in Mysterium Paschale that Christ’s entry into Hell was not triumphant; rather, “Christ’s suffering was like that of the damned…his suffering went to the length of infernal punishment.”
While the Church’s Magisterium has neither accepted nor rejected Balthasar’s proposal, I would like to present a theology for those struggling with addiction that takes Christ’s suffering in Hell as a guide for our recovery—as a call “to embrace the darkness.” This is the call that Fr. Anthony Ciorra gives in his book, 12 Step Spirituality: A Guide for Everyone:
“Now what I want to suggest is on this whole topic of the human addiction, the addiction to control and our addiction to want to play God, that when the darkness comes into our lives, when things are not going well, then in fact we want to flee. Instead of staying there, instead of staying with the darkness and staying with the questions, we flee. And as I mentioned in a previous presentation, we then become attached to other things. And that the whole point is that in the darkness, if we stay with the darkness, if we stay with the pain, if we stay with the questions, that’s really where God lives and ultimately that’s where our ultimate desires are fulfilled.”
Christ’s cry on the cross “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) foreshadows the darkness in Sheol, where there is no light of God and only the dead. It is this darkness the addict lives in before recovery.
At the 12-step meetings I’ve attended these last 42 years, my heart breaks when I hear addicts tell their stories: husbands and wives rejected by their spouses, barred from seeing their children; men and women fired from jobs, shunned by friends, arrested, jailed, infected, and physically broken. And they were, as Step 1 reminds us, “powerless” in these situations, just as Jesus was, according to Balthasar, powerless in His human nature when He arrived in Hell.
Fr. Ciorra acknowledges this powerlessness and points out that the addict’s escape route—alcohol, drugs, codependency, sex, etc.—does not work. We have to face the pain, embrace the darkness (“If we stay with the darkness…that’s really where God lives”). As Jesus was resurrected and taken from Hell, so shall we be, if we turn to our Higher Power, God.
In my own case, there were several descents into Hell before I encountered the Twelve Steps. I was forced to “embrace the darkness” but I did not find God in those moments. That came later. My “Holy Saturday” lasted years, as I remained isolated from those with similar addictions. I was an agnostic Jew who, like Einstein, believed in a creator (“Der Alte”) who did not concern Himself with puny mankind.
My first encounter with the Twelve Steps introduced me to the notion of a Higher Power. This concept was too vague for my physicist brain, so I started to explore books about religion, to find out what (or who) this Higher Power really was. The Holy Spirit intervened. I read Who Moved the Stone, in which the author, Frank Morison, demonstrated the truth of the Resurrection. His arguments convinced me of that truth and to the delight of my wife, a cradle Catholic, and the consternation of my academic friends (Has Bob gone dotty in his old age?), I converted to the one true Catholic Church at the age of 65. My reasoning: if the Resurrection was true, then I could believe all that was in the New Testament and, in particular, that Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter to establish the one universal and true Church.
And with this conversion, my recovery began by applying the Twelve Steps and the framework of Catholic teaching. But note: there is one important difference (among many) between the rescue of Jesus from Hell on Holy Saturday (His Resurrection) and recovery from addiction. The Resurrection was essentially a binary event; my recovery and that of others is continuous, one day at a time. The darkness in recovery does not become light all at once but slowly, as we experience during the Easter Vigil when the first candle is lit and one by one each person in the congregation lights his or her candle from another so that the church gradually brightens. I am one of those candles. The darkness is not gone, but it will be if I continue to put my trust in Jesus: “Your love goes deeper than my sins and failings and transforms me.” Let all of us, by the grace offered to us on Holy Saturday, believe it.
Bob K. is an ancient addict on the recovery road thanks to his conversion to the Church in 1995 and to several 12-step programs. As a retired physicist, he writes blog posts and ebooks on science and Catholic teaching, keeping in mind Saint Augustine’s motive: “Therefore at the command of God our Lord and with his help, I have undertaken not so much to discourse with authority on matters known to me as to know them better by discoursing devoutly of them.”