“Then one of the scribes…asked Jesus, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”’ ‘The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these’” (Mark 12:30-31).
As a Catholic in recovery, the most important thing I have come to appreciate in my recovery from addiction is that the “program” of recovery actually has less to do with sobriety, self-control, or abstinence relative to any of my unhealthy attachments or addictions as it does with learning to live virtuously in every aspect of my life. Of course, it goes without saying that my goals in recovery must necessarily include sobriety and the like for lots of very good and obvious reasons. But in my experience, the “spiritual awakening” of recovery extends far beyond such goals, encompassing something altogether much more profound and addressing a reality so vitally important that without it we will not get very far at all in terms of sustained healing and abiding joy. Recovery, at its heart, is about conversion. It is about learning how to love God and neighbor righteously and with humility and “to practice these principles [or virtues] in all our affairs” (Step 12).
In the darkness of addiction, we frankly do not know how to do this, enslaved as we are to our pride, narcissism, resentments, self-pity, and shame, cut off in self-imposed exile from any real intimacy and vulnerability with God and others. We render ourselves incapable of giving and receiving authentic love, what I would call the very definition of hell on earth! Fortunately, we do not have to remain condemned to this miserable existence largely of our own creation.
God provides us guides who can show us the way out if we only avail ourselves of their witness and wisdom. They manifest to us the lifesaving ways of humility and virtuous love. Christ Jesus, of course, is the “Guide” par excellence in our conversion, the living embodiment of perfect humility and love. He is the source and summit of our recovery, our everlasting mercy and strength. And in His Providential Love, our Lord sends us other “guides” in the persons of our sponsors, sponsees, accountability partners, recovery communities, confessors, spiritual directors, and—above all—the saints.
Indeed, as Catholics in recovery, we have the precious treasure of the Communion of Saints, men and women who have gone before us and who radically understood their “powerlessness” and the “unmanageability” of their lives without the grace of God. We can and should look to this great “cloud of witnesses” as especially “gifted” guides on the road of recovery!
One such gifted guide is Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (AD 1090-1153), abbot and Doctor of the Church, who lived in the Middle Ages and led a truly remarkable and God-centered life. He is a most excellent teacher on the nature and necessity of virtuous love for the good life. Although he lived nearly 1,000 years ago, his insights into humility, righteous love, and the nature of God are timeless for sinners everywhere seeking God. They are certainly helpful for us in recovery who are daily striving to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him” (Step Three).
Saint Bernard wrote a marvelous extended meditation on the topic of virtuous love entitled On Loving God. It is within this work that the great saint brilliantly elaborates several observations for why we should love God at all, as well as articulates how we grow and make progress in holy love that are well worth our reflection as we “work” our programs in recovery one day at a time. Indeed, as I hope to make evident, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s teachings on holy love can be tremendously helpful in coming to a deeper understanding of how we seek in recovery to “be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with [God] forever in the next” (Serenity Prayer).
1st Observation: God Is His Own Cause for Our Love
For Saint Bernard, God is first and foremost supremely worthy of our love because, in the sheer majesty and glory of His Godhead, He is simply sufficient in and of Himself for all love. In other words, God is His own grounds for our reverence and devotion. There is no greater “reason” or “goal” or “motive” in adoring and loving God than God Himself. Saint Bernard writes, “You want me to tell you why and in what measure God is to be loved. I reply, the reason for loving God is God himself, and the measure, is to love without measure…[God] is as well the efficient cause as the final object of our love” (On Loving God).
His words in their succinct beauty speak for themselves, but a way to apply them from the perspective of addiction is the foundational insight we all must come to in recovery, namely that God is God and we are not. For a whole host of reasons—pride, arrogance, vanity, fear, distrust, denial, self-pity, unbelief, ignorance, demonic influence—our “reverence and devotion” become obsessively self-referential and self-directed. We make ourselves “the efficient cause and final object of our love,” and hence arise our unnatural attachments to substances, objects, persons, and behaviors, and with them the resultant harm these addictions perpetrate on ourselves and on our relationships with God and neighbor. To be an addict is, at its root, to have a God-complex!
We additionally have a tendency, in the narcissism of addiction, to turn God into a kind of magical being whose only function in our lives is to meet our needs on our time and as we see fit. In other words, to use biblical language, we put God to the test again and again. We demand He satisfies our wish-fulfillment. As such, we demonstrate how we fundamentally misunderstand our covenantal relationship with God as mere creatures before the omnipotent Creator, as finite and dependent beings before Being itself. We expect God to love and adore us for our own good pleasure and glory, not His. We reduce God to a proverbial genie in a bottle. And when He predictably does not answer as we demand, we become angry, afraid, and rebellious in our hearts and so often regrettably act out.
Scripture is quite replete with examples of how God utterly rejects this kind of relationship (cf. Deuteronomy 6:16-25; Numbers 14:22-23, Psalm 78: 18-19, 41, 56-57; Psalm 106:13-15). Indeed, Christ Jesus starkly rebukes the Devil: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7). And in the Invitatory Psalm prayed daily to open the Divine Office, as a helpful and salutary reminder, God makes it quite clear that He will not receive us in His peace if we put Him to the test in our pride: “Oh, that today you would hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah [i.e. the place of contention], as on the day of Massah [i.e. the place of testing] in the desert. There your ancestors tested me; they tried me though they had seen my works. Forty years I loathed that generation; I said: ‘This people’s heart goes astray; they do not know my ways.’ Therefore I swore in my anger: ‘They shall never enter my rest’” (Psalm 95:8-11).
What God is teaching us here is that if we choose ourselves at His expense, if we deny His absolute sovereignty over our lives, then God in His non-coercive respect for our free will will give us exactly what we want—ourselves in all our prideful brokenness and rebellion and “unrest.” The bottom line is that the path to healing and joy is loving God for His sake alone, and thereby learning how to love ourselves and others in His love as He sees and loves us! As He wills the good for His beloved children in an entirely non-competitive way, so we too must also learn in His grace to will the good of the other for the sake of the other. Then the gifts of sanity, sobriety, and serenity will surely come. There is typically no other way.
What must be embraced in the mind and heart of any recovering addict are three essential principles for the healing process to have any real hope of success. In 12-step recovery, these principles are learned primarily in the first three steps and then lived out in the entire program of recovery. We must come to realize that we are not God (Step One), that there is God and we need Him to save us from ourselves (Step Two), and, to become well—to become sane, sober, and serene—we make a conscious decision, perhaps our first real act of holy love, to trust and surrender to God unconditionally without pretense, bargaining, or manipulation (Step Three). Quite clearly, all else depends on accepting these three basic ideas, otherwise, recovery will be essentially a non-starter or guaranteed to fail. We must radically exchange “self-sufficient love” with “God-sufficient love.” We must live the truth that God is God and we are not.
This series will continue with Part 2.
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Grovetown. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for the CIR Daily Reflections. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life and on September 30, 2023, was invested as an Oblate novice of the Order of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA.