Learning...
What I have learned in my sobriety, from the men and women who help keep me sober, is how to pray. Blind drunks who get sober get a kind of blind faith - not so much a vision of who God is, but who he isn’t - namely, me.
Thomas Lynch, “The Way We Are”
In a few hours I will hop on a zoom call (yes, writing in the midst of a pandemic) and church leaders will share ideas about how to help their community and congregation re-emerge from the quarantine that COVID-19 has required of us. They’ve asked me to prepare a few talking points and I’ve gladly obliged.
What strikes me as I ponder this question is how much I have learned about the meaning of church from the recovery community. In recovery, we may roll in late but will receive welcoming smiles and sometimes a happy clap. In recovery, we make a LOT of mistakes, so we focus on embracing messy people - including accepting ourselves. In recovery, often for a long long time, we may get sober but still feel shaky - we keep expectations low. In recovery, we have few metrics for measuring success, because in many cases, this drive to succeed has just about killed us. In recovery, we work on realizing there is a God and we did not get the job. In recovery, we don’t think big picture, we focus on moment-by-moment decisions. In recovery we have issues; our issues are so life-threatening that we cannot play around with them.
These lessons are hard fought ones. They spring from an acute and loudly claimed reality taught to us by our. Our self-seeking, selfishness, dishonesty and fear - the four biggies - have encouraged false beliefs that have led to questionable life choices. We must be rigorously honest with ourselves in order to get well. If you were looking to find a television equivalent - we are the show Survivor. Kind of grungy, beat up, ragged but fighting for our lives as faithfully as we can.
We come to faith from this perspective. And this informs how we construct church. So during the age of quarantine, our community has not lost much because we weren’t much of a church to begin with! We continue to find ways to serve and ‘see’ each other because these are two core values that, if not lived out in real time, could kill us. We miss being with each other; the hugs and handshakes, the lingering after a meeting to catch up. We miss physically being with our brothers from The Healing Place (our local treatment facility for men) - who cannot zoom with us. But when I zoom with pastors from communities across the country today, I hope I can bring a word of encouragement. Your choir can rest; your handbell group can do some bicep curls to keep in shape. You, dear pastors, can take some naps in the middle of the day and eat dinner with your family at night - something most pastors rarely have time for. Because we know who God is, and he is not us. We know that church is NOT about what we know, teach, preach, or perform. It’s two or more gathering together - on zoom, via phone call, sitting in a big empty parking lot with appropriately sociable distance and a sandwich talking to your friend. I hope some of these lessons that recovery folks know well will become more alive for church folks during this time of shut down because these are big truths that heal hurting people far more than any splashy service or four point message spoken with a lot of enthusiasm and pretty pictures on a big screen.
