Dependence, Independence, & Interdependence
7 Pentecost – July 3, 2005
(Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145; Romans 7:21-8:6; Matthew 11:25-30)
In trying to figure out what to say on this day before Independence Day I found myself thinking about the issue of dependency.
I’ve been accused from time to time of thinking that the only thing that people need for a satisfying spiritual life is to find a good self-help group, a good 12-Step group (and believe it or not that started for me even before I moved to California). But I know it’s not that simple, and yet…Still it can be a start. I did my Master’s Degree work at the University of Iowa School of Religion on the topic of spirituality and addiction. And I find the whole issue of addiction and recovery to be an excellent model for Christian spiritual growth.
Spiritually, addiction involves seeking a solution to an interior spiritual problem in an exterior material substance or behavior. In the end, of course, it is bound to fail.
An exterior material substance or behavior can no more solve an interior spiritual problem than you can gain nourishment by eating sand. But, unlike sand, and maybe more like chocolate, the addictive substance or behavior gives a kind of temporary relief, and yet in that very process, in the end, leaves the addict feeling worse than when she or he began. The long-term effect of addictive substances or addictive behaviors is the opposite of the short-term effect. The alcoholic, trying to relax ends up more anxious, the drug addict seeking a high ends up in a deep low, the gambler seeking excitement finds only the same poverty following the taste of riches, the sex addict seeking love finds only self-hatred. That’s how dependency begins, going back and back, needing more and more drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, it all works the same way.
Religions have always seen this as a problem, as have physicians for at least a hundred years. Religions have focused on the moral dimension of addiction and physicians on the physical or psychological cause.
But two men, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, met 70 years ago this past June 10th, and together developed an approach that they termed “spiritual” rather than religious (meaning not tied to a particular dogma or set of moral values.) And, unlike the physicians method, treated the symptom directly rather than searching for a cause.
Wilson did most of the background work. He studied William James’ book on “The Varieties of Religious Experience”. He contacted Carl Jung in Switzerland, who told him that the only cures for addictive dependency that he had seen had come about through religious experience. And he had close connections through an Episcopal priest in New York with a British Anglican evangelical group know as the Oxford Group. This was the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original 12-step group.
AA’s suggested program of recovery from addictive dependency begins with one step: “We admitted we were powerless, and could not manage our lives.”
But just look, for a second, at the Epistle for today. “I find it to be a law,” Paul says, “that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am.”
That’s the cry of dependency. It’s the admission of powerlessness. It’s the confession of sin. Not sin as some “bad deed, some breaking of a rule or a law, an immorality”, but sin as a basic part of the human condition that traps us in fallibility. Keith Miller, the ‘70’s charismatic author of the book entitled New Wine, wrote another book entitled Sin: Overcoming the Ultimate Addiction.
Our dependency, our sin may be in using alcohol or drugs, or gambling, or sex to overcome the bad feelings we carry around all the time. But it may also be a dependency on thinking that other people should do what we think they should do. It might be a dependency on appearing a certain way – our body, our clothing, our erudite academically sophisticated vocabulary. We might be dependent on having all the latest tech gadgets that are supposed to make life simpler, but in the end complicate it horribly. (My cell phone is supposed to free me, but I’m attached to it all the time.)
Dependency doesn’t depend on the object of the dependency, but on the subject. That’s why prohibition of the objects of dependency doesn’t work. The problem is that we can’t stand the bad feelings, but we still insist on staying in control. So we try to manipulate the outside world in ways that make us feel better for a while, but then worse in the end, and on top of it, ever more out of control.
And it’s not just a problem for individual people. Our nation as a whole is terribly dependent, on consumer goods and entertainment, on fossil fuels and the military industrial complex, on the health care industry and stock speculation. And we’ll foul our environment, send our health care system into chaos, and go to war rather than give it up.
The first step back is to admit that we’re powerless. “Wretched man that I am.” Wretched people that we are! “Who can save us from this body of death?”
Who can save us?” Paul asks. The way Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith put it was “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
In spite of tomorrow being Independence Day, the answer to all this is not “independence”. Every addict is striving for independence. “Just leave me alone. Let me do what I want.” The quest for assumed independence is what’s behind our craving for more and more money, more and more oil, more and more power. Our greatest dependency may be pour demand for independence.
Martha was telling me last week about a discussion she had with a board member from the Episcopal Homes Foundation who said that, with the baby boom aging, their aim is to tailor retirement products and services to individual tastes, so that each person could have the services they want on their own, independently, which really means with minimum contact with others in their situation. Independent living means, for most, being alone in your house with all your needs supplied. And that same model already pertains to pre-retirement need more and more…TV and movies on demand, more and more shopping taking place on the internet. We’re living half the time in a virtual world. And, looked at from one perspective, it can seem wonderful and liberating. But it reminds me of nothing so much as life as it was depicted in the movie The Matrix, a virtual life, lived through hallucination, while other life forms feed off our energy. Independence gained through complete and total dependency.
After the colonies fought their war of independence they began to buy more and more slaves. Bob Dylan sang a song entitled You’ve God to Serve Somebody” and the lyrics said that “it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’ve got to serve somebody”. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob’s third step was “Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understand him.” Saint Paul says, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Dependence is a trap, Independence is an illusion. Interdependence resting on God is the only way out. It’s the only real truth. It’s why his yoke is easy and his burden is light…. the body with the head, the building with the cornerstone. Interdependence is the natural way. It requires no effort, no seeking again and again for a fix, no standing there stupidly pretending we’re in charge. It’s just letting go and letting God. AA says that. Saint Paul and Jesus said it too.
We are all fully woven into a web of connection and mutual influence that reaches so deep that it’s hard to know where my life leaves off and your life begins. I am who I am in part because of you. And you are who you are in part because of me. We depend on each other. And we depend, therefore, whether we know it or not, on the concentric circles of influence and relationship that spread out from each of our lives in space and time connecting us to others and ultimately to God, who is both the center and the circumference of this fully interdependent universe. For Christians, Christ is God at the center of things, and the Father is the eternal, ineffable source of it all at the circumference.
The Spirit is in the connection of it all. And the connection is love – and life – and peace.
Happy 4th of July. Thanks be to God.
