Introduction: Foundations of a Course

During about twenty of the past thirty or so years, I have had the distinct privilege of serving on the theological faculty of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology as an adjunct professor. For almost a decade until today, I have enjoyed teaching “Spirituality and Addiction,”¹ a course that strives to look at addiction and essential aspects of the addictive process through an Orthodox Christian theological and spiritual perspective. The course is also designed in a manner that will introduce the student to addiction in the contemporary world. The benefits of the “12-Step” approach to recovery are particularly appreciated and highlighted, as numerous aspects of this approach originate from the spiritual tradition of the ancient undivided Church. During the first half of the semester, students are required to visit 12-Step meetings as part of the “field assignment” component of the class.

The study of addiction, addictive processes and trauma over the past twenty-plus years have quickly and deeply come into focus both in medicine and psychology. There is much that cannot be addressed in an introductory, graduate-level seminary course such as the one I teach. Nevertheless, exposing students to this topic is vitally important. At the same time, it is even more important that the Orthodox Christian Church as human “family” commits to becoming more sensitive to this issue.

Student Composition: God is in the Mix

In brief, the course strives to offer a constructive overview of addiction and point to an Orthodox response that is “in the world, but not of the world” with humility and compassion. Typically, I have found that a large portion of seminary students select to attend this class with benign good will. They sense that there may be “some people out there” whom they will be engaging in future ministries battling various aspects of addiction. The underlying focus is on the word “some,” as this word usually implies “not too many.” I have been told on more than one occasion, “I don’t expected to pastor a large, metropolitan parish, Presvytera, so immersing myself in the topic to the degree you wish us busy seminarians do really does not apply to me.” My response tends to be, “My husband serves a wonderful, very small, semi-rural community in New Hampshire that we love very much. The pain and destruction of addiction most certainly is there! How can you be so sure that the souls who one day may comprise your potential future parish will be the exception?”

Other times, students know very well what certain addictions look like because they grew up with or are presently dealing with loved ones who suffer from an active addiction. They come to class earnestly seeking answers to deep-seated questions like, “What is the Orthodox Christian response to this?” or “How can I help my loved ones?” and even “This deeply affects me in ways I do not like. How do I help myself ?”

And still another group of persons elects to take the course because they are actively struggling against an addiction, an addictive disorder and/or a “dual diagnosis.” By the grace of God and their hard work, some of these persons may have advanced deeply into their journey toward healing, enjoying many fruits of long-term recovery. Over the years, usually to their surprise, their new life in sobriety turns out to also lead to a new or renewed life in Christ. This may eventually lead them to dedicating themselves to lifelong ministry and coming to study at seminary. These persons in particular have my respect and admiration. And finally, other students attend this seminary course minimizing, and some even cleverly avoiding, just how “infected” they may really be with anything closely related to an addiction. With this last group, the minimizers and deniers, there seems to be a general similarity among them, that whatever is wrong from their perspective, is never their fault. Sadly, more often than not, although they may complete the class, it appears to me as if they change very little.

Nevertheless, most students do elect to remain in this class for the whole semester. The vast majority seem to have in common two important qualities: courage and openness to growth (i.e., change). The course reading material and other assignments intentionally invite, inspire and even provoke to some degree the student to study this illness as closely and personally as they are comfortably able to do. By the time the semester is completed, most students find themselves joining me in a) realizing that we all are “infected” and b) joining the struggle of respecting the countless parallels of 12-Step recovery with various practices and insights from Orthodox spirituality, without necessarily equating one with the other. For me, this prods us to continue trusting that by the power of the Holy Spirit, the compassionate, risen Lord is in the mix.

Brief Observations Of Today’s Context

Definitions regarding addiction and the addictive process until not too long ago applied only to alcohol and the abuse of other chemical substances. For example, the most popularly respected, non-medical vehicle for self-definition of an “addict” in this society comes to us largely from perspectives of the 12-Step community (founded in the tenets of Alcoholic Anonymous [AA]). From the perspective of the 12-Step community, addiction is identified primarily as a spiritual illness that affects the person holistically; in other words, persons are “infected, ” so to speak, simultaneously through several domains to varying degrees, including the physical, behavioral, cognitive, psychological, relational, and, most importantly, the spiritual. For Orthodox Christians, the 12-Step approach may reflect a more holistic and healthier view than a rigidly legalistic, i.e., “moral” definition of addiction, or a strictly mid-twentiethcentury medical definition, i.e., an approach identified with clinical measurement of chemical intake and resulting physical dependence. Many of the recent developments in the study of addiction are based in widening the field of study in the scientific, medical and psychological communities, as well as recent technological advances, particularly in brain-imaging science.

The bottom line for self-definition of addiction concerns persons acknowledging that their lives had become “totally unmanageable” because of the disease. This understanding, for me at least, seems to have a somewhat close affinity with the patristic appreciation for acknowledging the sin of lemargia, or “madness of the palette.” This term refers to the profound, self-inflicted suffering that results from reacting to inward, insatiable “fury” or “madness” and its corresponding external behaviors. While often involving food, a lemargia can also refer to an “appetite” for many things. From a more precise Orthodox spiritual perspective, the lemargia’s fixation is on the “oral” and less so in the “intake” of quantity. From the level of the “deep heart” or nous, this term identifies an out-of-control craving to “take things in” on the experiential level yet never experience satiety. Our side of the healing effort or ascesis prods us to stepby-step encounter our own uncharted, “terrible” inner depths while simultaneously and unconditionally trusting our entire being into “the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). This is a hunger that only God can fill.

And so, during the past twenty-five to thirty years in the world of addiction treatment, help, and studies, the scope of the lens of addiction has been widening to include much more than alcohol and substance dependence. Codependency, pornography, relationship and sex addiction, eating and body dysmorphic disorders, cutting, hair-pulling and other forms of self-mutilation— as well as gambling, spending, hoarding, professional success, celebrity, popularity and personal image, “excitement,” the Internet, “explosive disorders” and the like— are now also being examined through this lens. These virtually beg to be considered seriously through the lens of addiction.

Is it possible for us to become “addicted” to ourselves? To our image? To our always being “right” at the expense of others? To religion and religious scrupulosity? An Orthodox Christian approach and the 12-Step addiction model, through their respective lenses of exploration, would both unequivocally respond with yes. We bear in mind the Lord’s words: “I have come to give life, life in abundance” (John 10:10).

The Very Bottom Line

Patrick Carnes, a pioneering scholar in the field of addiction, especially regarding sex addition and clergy sexual misconduct, in past decades has often been heard by his friends to joke, “Don’t kid yourself: the first and most dangerous addiction of all is the addiction to power (i.e., power and control over others).” About twenty years ago, I had the honor of being included in one of these circles of Dr. Carnes’s friends at meetings of the board of the Inter-Faith Sexual Trauma Institute (ISTI) in Collegeville, MN. At the moment I heard him say this, I was stunned by his insightful closeness to the Orthodox Christian theological understanding of the “first sin.” Briefly, the Orthodox teach that the Fall of Adam and Eve is founded in a crisis of love, where they freely chose to disobey the Lord’s directives in the garden, “desiring (or loving) to be god without God.” By ignoring the directive of the all-compassionate God in the garden, our fore-parents chose “in-authentic relationship” so they would become God without God, seeking for themselves His position and power (i.e., His “power, glory and honor”). Orthodox Christianity traditionally identifies this same phenomenon as the sin of pride.

From the Christian perspective, authentic and abundant life begins after repentance (metanoia). The Lord’s first recorded words in His earthly ministry were a call to repentance: “repent for the Kingdom (baseilia) of God is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). The Lord bids us to “first seek the Kingdom…and all these things will be given to you, as well” (Matthew 6:33). The new life in Christ is established in repentance, a radical turning away from false gods.² That which disables us as individual persons and communally from “abiding” in the Lord first and foremost is related to sin. Seeking anything else that sets itself above the Lord’s directive is ultimately idolatry, and idols offer no real life. In class, we tend to spend a lot of time discussing the difference between authentic life and relationships reflective of the “life in abundance” with the various ways we can become “high” off our “personal drugs of choice.” These range from real chemical substances to and/or through our own “terminally unique” delusions of grandeur, i.e., pride.

The 12-Step model strongly asserts that genuine recovery can only begin with each person only after the bravest act of courage and humility, when the “penitent” unconditionally acknowledges his or her powerlessness over this activity. These persons must declare that their lives have become “totally unmanageable” because of their addiction and that God alone³ is able to restore life to sanity. As a result of this unconditional surrender, they immediately turn their lives over to Him before taking another step forward. And this act is repeated one day at a time, day after day. For me as an Orthodox Christian living in contemporary society, this approach to repentance feels eerily familiar…usually, in a very good way.

For On-going Consideration

In this reflection outlining essential “take-away lessons” from teaching this course, I wish to conclude by offering five important assumptions that are engaged frequently through the semester: 1. It is all about authentic relationship.

Beginning with a thoughtful discussion about the Holy Trinity, the class is founded in a theological model stressing the importance of personhood, where no one is redundant and where, paradoxically, we find the fullness of our unique personhood through growing communion (koinonia). The class begins to explore the importance of the lifelong effort of cultivating authentic relationships in the Lord.

2. Addiction is a disease, and no one is uninfected.

Although every person is fully responsible for his or her actions, addiction is a disease. No one is “uninfected” by the “illness.” This distracts and is even “life-effacing” from the cultivation of authentic relationships. Through the centuries, Orthodox Christian spirituality traditionally understands sin and death through the lens of “illness”—where the Church is the hospital. With this in mind, and as the 12-Step approach to addiction recovery is rooted historically in wisdom of the ancient undivided Church, as an Orthodox Christian, I describe addiction to my students in the following manner:

If a healthy cell of the body were to represent the human person in perfect health, i.e., the human person “fully alive” as proclaimed by St. Irenaeus,⁴ a second-century bishop, and that same cell mutates over the course of time into a cancerous one, the end product of this process of mutation represents the addiction in its full-blown and most visibly destructive, deadly expressions. All other intermediate stages between fully alive and fully mutated involve a degree of sickness, or “infection.” Outside of theosis, we are all infected to some degree. Hearing a few Orthodox today promote themselves as “former” or “healed” addicts is for me like hearing them say, “I am no longer a sinner.” This is delusional.

3. Attachments and the passions undergird every addiction and addictive process.

Spiritual attachments⁵ are all of those priorities that would be God in our lives; they are all idols and although we may experience some kind of temporary “high” from them, these ultimately offer no real life. This phenomenon is intimately associated with the Orthodox Christian understanding of the passions. They are rooted in both the attachment and the external imbalanced reaction the “patient” has when his or her attachment causes challenges and this sin-sick reactivity has become an embedded, imbalanced noticeable pattern. The Fathers are full of examples depicting this process. A quick, hopefully humorous, non-patristic example to illustrate the above may be to warn you not to take my cherished morning cup of coffee away from me. If you were to grab and take away my cup of coffee, my (quite imbalanced) reaction would probably not be very pretty; nor in that moment does my reaction serve to build my side of relationship with the Lord or you. This demonstrates an embedded “love” that values the gift more than the Giver of the gift. This indicates a deeper distraction impeding my “seeking first the Kingdom.”

4. Radical humility “in the presence of God” is the antidote to pride.

In our fallen, self-preserving tendencies, we—the broken ones and sinners when unrepentant— easily judge others. It is as if the tiny mote is in our own eye and a log is in eyes of almost everyone else. This depicts a symptom of the sin of pride or “grandiosity” of the infected person. There is a popular 12-Step therapeutic slogan that states, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by what we see through their behaviors.” From an Orthodox Christian spiritual perspective, this phenomenon usually indicates an astounding degree of “hardness of heart” resulting in a growing inability for compassion for others. The antidote to this includes the radical cultivation of humility, resting on utter dependence on God. This process leads us to new discoveries related to our personal spiritual poverty (cf. Matthew 5:3) and what we often call in class “humility, that living (wakeful) quality of being right-sized in the presence of God.” Authentic humility serves the “life in abundance” (John 10:10) and functions as the royal road to sobriety and love.

5. Confront our addicted random thoughts and concepts (logismoi).

The practices promoted by the 12-Step model, each in their own way combat the random thoughts and concepts (logismoi) that vie for our internal attention, through to our resulting behaviors. These are combatted against by the encouragement of frequent personal prayer, mutual accountability, the use of therapeutic slogans, such as encouragement to “pick up the 500 pound phone,” to share personal pain and wrongdoing (i.e., sin) with at least one other person, and/or to attend a meeting to be with others on this path. These practical, “non-cerebral” actions help form a kind of humble-yet-powerful, psycho-physical “scaffolding” to guide the growth of the person toward his or her sobriety, through which God will do His work. These techniques are very helpful for persons motivated to grow in their sobriety. As a result of this on-going, day-to-day discipline and process, we discover that we are as “powerless” over the disease as we are over the miracle. The simplicity of these vital practices when compared to the rich, superabundant resources filling the life of the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit, Who always points to Christ, however, are no match for the fullness of Orthodox Christian spirituality. Nevertheless, almost every year there is a student, not infrequently a seasoned member of the clergy, describing his experience with the 12-Step community to the class by stating that “their honesty, sharing and humility becomes a kind of group confession, reminiscent of the early Church, and my faith as an Orthodox Christian is renewed.”

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Father of Compassion and the God of all comfort. (2 Corinthians 1:3)

Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, MDiv, PhD, serves as Adjunct Professor in Theology at Holy Cross and as Executive Director of St. Catherine’s Vision. A licensed psychologist and pastoral counselor with more than thirty years of clinical experience in the addiction, trauma and depth psychology fields, her underlying phronema is founded in the Orthodox Christian theological and spiritual approach to the human person and our call to koinonia as experienced “in the presence of the love of the living God, thrice-holy.”

¹ This article is dedicated to Fr. Nicholas Triantafilou, President of Hellenic College-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, 2001–2015, who encouraged me to develop and teach this course.
² With metanoia in mind, this class is grounded in the following brief description of Reality: “Reality is Our Abiding in the Presence of the Love of the Living God, Thrice-Holy.” This topic is discussed in my book, Persons in Communion: A Theology of Authentic Relationships (Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2005).
³ Or “Higher Power,” as is said alternatively today.
⁴ That is, glorified in the presence of the loving God (also known as theosis).
⁵ While not unrelated, this type of psycho-spiritual “attachment” is different than contemporary developmental, psychological attachment theory.