"Memorial Day Celebration/Addiction"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 27^th of May, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
between two processions of rainy days,
to worship,
to deliberately receive the grace that we are at all ,
to yield for a time to luminous praise
that it might illumine the daily prose of our lives;
to stride amid the green branches of promise and hope
there to find beautiful blossoms we never expected.

And as we move through this time together,

(assembly) may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Call to Silence [Next] [back to top]

O Spirit of Life
in this place of memory and hope,
as is our custom, we take time to deliberately set aside…
if for but a moment,
the structures we allow to control us.
the clock, the duties, the whims, the needs,
the wants, the failures, the seductions of our day
we now set aside, so that the sheer uncontrolled grace of things may flow around us like a river swelling in spring.

Grace I say.
Not grace, as in the clemency or mercy of kings.
Not grace, as in the terrifying theology
of the saved and damned.
Not even grace as in the elegant shape of a purple iris;
but rather the grace that flows like a river in spring,
powerful, free,
the Life of our lives that is not managed,
nor tidy, nor made safe by final or tidy opinions.
I speak of the life that refuses to pout
but cannot refuse to dance.
Spirit of Life,
shake loose the clogged grace in our lives,
grace that is so amazing that
we can even question ourselves,
change our minds,
retool old habits, deflate grudges,
and undermine our own easier comforts
for greater goods.
Flow, so we might feel what we feel,
and think what we think
without caring if anyone is looking over our shoulders.
This is the grace, the unrehearsed reality,
that flows before we named it
and tried to box it and tamp it down,
the grace that ran and played before adulthood
stamped it out with a thousand shoulds and oughts.
Oh, I know, it discomfits us, too, I suppose,
the reality beyond our naming and control.
But, Spirit of Life,
like the rivers that leap their banks in the spring
remind us we are not really
the solid and sturdy things we often fancy we are.
Remind us of this as we pour ourselves now into the silence that has neither edge nor form….

(silence)

Free to grieve, free to remember,
free to prioritize this or that as not all that important,
free to be teary if that's what flows,
free to smile if that's what flows.
Let the names of those people with whom
we are in relationships of comfort or concern
flow in our hearts, or leap from our lips
into the common air!
Let them flow as we recognize that our freedom
is bound up with all the other freedoms,
freedoms that exist and flow like graceful streams
through our day-to-day lives.
Free us to live, not alone,
but in a communion of forgiveness,
And Spirit of Life,
free us never to so much relive, as to live.
I begin by naming Lisa Cox,
whom I mourn deeply, and I lift up her
family thrown into deepest grief.

(names)

Grace, amaze us ever with yourself.
Where we feel wretched, lost or sad,
fill us with the music that reminds us that
we live not alone, but in harmony with all that is.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
is taken from the wonderful book called The Zen of Recovery / written by Mel Ash in 1993

Your disease and your suffering: Are they you?

If you say they are the same and a part of you,
you have already denied any possibility of change
short of self-destruction of all or a part of you.

If you say they are different and not a part of you,
you have surrendered and become a victim
to something outside yourself over which you feel powerless and not responsible.

Which is the true way?
Are they the same or different?

Show me the mind that decides and I'll show you
your disease and your suffering.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
The Second Reading comes from Lynn Unger's 1996 Meditation Manual, which consists of her wonderful poems. This selection is called COTTONWOOD TREES

The cottonwoods are
flinging themselves outward,
filling the air with spiraling flurries,
covering lawns in deepening drifts.
You could not call this generosity.

Like any being, they
let loose what they have
in order to survive,
in order that their lives might continue
in a new year's growth.

The more seeds they send out
on their lofted journeys
the greater the chance
for their kind to flourish.
There is no hesitation.

No one asks how much
they will give. Without words
they know so clearly
that everything depends
on what we call giving,
that which the world knows only as creation.

Sermon: Memorial Day Celebration/Addiction [Next] [back to top]

When I was a child, Memorial Day almost always involved bringing flowers or a wreath to the graves of those men and women who had lost their precious lives in the wars of the last century.

It was a day for parades, for a few speeches; and yes, for picnics, cookouts and first trips to the nearest roller coaster.

Today, Memorial Day weekend is mostly seen as an extra day off for people.

Oh there are still picnics and roller-coasters, but the close relatives of so many of the men and women who died in the Second World War aren't as able these days to bring flowers to the cemeteries. And some have already joined their loved ones.

In these 50th anniversary years of the Second World War, we can read books on the Greatest Generation, and see rather well-hyped movies about Pearl Harbor; we can find articles, criticisms and exposés.

My own guess is that long after the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we might begin to deal at greater depth and more consciously with the conflicts and debates surrounding that intense war, and its terrible carnage to bodies and spirits.

But I don't think we are there yet. Not by a long means.

We have, however, made some headway on a different kind of battleground, one that has no Memorial Day to lift it up. This battleground is not found in Europe, not in the "Pacific Theater," not in ancient Vietnam. This battleground spreads under our feet right now.

This is the battleground of human addiction. Addiction to alcohol and other drugs. Addiction also to cigarettes or to sexual acts, although I do not intend to address those two today, since they bring up special issues.

I tell you truly, no minister, rabbi or priest has survived even a single week of their chosen work without learning first hand something about the carnage in this other battleground. There are many wrecked lives, lost children, angry and depressed people  lying all over this battleground, too many limping stunned and bewildered over its fields.

There are no bazookas or howitzers on this battlefield. There are no bombs or mines.

The weapons on this battleground to fight addiction are weapons of metaphor. The weapons on this battleground are weapons of imagination and symbol.

As in any war, battles enrage people. Tempers burn hot, opinions are rife, and a sense of being absolutely right seems absolutely important.

So I will assure you right off that you will think me utterly wrong if you insist there is only one right way to face the immense calamity on this battlefield. I will also confess to you that I cannot comment on this issue with the experiential authority of a drug addict, or an alcoholic, since I have no reason to think I am either.

I am related to some addicts or alcoholics, of course, as we all are, by blood, or friendship. And, of course, churches and synagogues are hardly exempt from the fray. I remember getting a letter from a good friend at seminary who was a year ahead of me. Once he had been settled in his first church for six months, he wrote:

"Dear Mark, I think ministry would actually be possible, if it wasn't for the immense loneliness I feel having moved so far away from home, and if it weren't for the vast quantities of alcohol routinely consumed by members of this church just before they come to committee and board meetings."

I don't remember ever receiving such a moving, and yes, even sobering, letter. And although when I went to serve my first congregation, I was not lonely, since I did not have to move out of state and maintained my friends, I did find that alcohol consumption was rampant, and that alcoholism and what folks call codependency threaded through every aspect of church life. And slowly I began to realize how much codependency there was in my own life.

I mentioned that the weapons on the battlefields of addiction are metaphors. What are these metaphors?

1. Some talk about the addicted by using the metaphor "sinners." A sinner is someone lacking both in will-power to obey and lacking in absolute reliance on God's power.

2. Some talk about the addicted by using the metaphor "reprobate." This is an old fashioned word meaning person without principle. When you say someone is a reprobate I suppose you must be saying that they have no center in their lives, no commitments, no directions that ground them, other than those demanded by the effects of alcohol or drugs.

3. Some talk about the addicted by using the metaphor "disease." They suggest that somehow these people are sick, ill with a malady of sorts. There is an important debate for these people which puts one camp at odds with the other. The debate whether this disease is of a spiritual or quite physical nature.

I use a metaphor, too, when I talk about people who are addicted or alcoholic. I call them human beings.

What is a human being?

While, since I am a human being, I guess I can speak with a little authority on that. I am a creature made of flesh and blood, just one of billions on the face of the earth. I am a mammal, with ancestors that go back millions of years, before speech, before tools. I have within my brain the echo of reptiles. Because of this, I find some satisfaction in doing things ritually, that is, with some noted rhythm and repetition. I was born from a man and woman. Sometimes we human beings call these folks mother and father. Sometimes we call other people mother and father. I get something being born from a man and woman. I also get something from a mother and a father. Things in my brain. Customs and culture in my heart, that make me different from other human beings. And yet, even though we are each unique, to be human is to live in relationship with other human beings. Without these relationships, I would not be who I am. Love is one of the names I give to the kind of relationships that enable me to flourish, and to be who I am without apology.

As a human being, I live with wonder burning inside me like an inextinguishable candle, wonder that I am at all and that all things are. I live with thoughts and images inside me, planted there by the grace of my senses. I am afraid sometimes, but usually for not very good reasons. Some of that fear is in my flesh, I think, something that comes with my particular being. I am not God. I am mortal. I will die one day. I also live with loss daily, and my responses to the twin realities of my frailty and strength, my present life and coming death I call my "spiritual life." My spiritual life reminds me that I am not entitled to anything in particular, nor do I think that I deserve or do not deserve anything in particular that I can think of.

I simply am who I am. Right now. I live with both a sense of unrest, and peace. I am a human being.

I think people with lots of addiction problems, people with a few little addiction problems and people with hardly any or no addiction problems, are each and every one human beings.

That is my metaphor. I do acknowledge the others.

Yes, there surely are components of addiction to alcohol and drugs which are largely social. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that our North American society as a whole is basically an addictive society, one designed to stop our welcome, our wonder, and the free flow of all things graceful. Our modern society tries to control and channel such things with a constant barrage of advertisements and with Madison Avenue promising us at every turn that certain products we would not ordinarily choose for ourselves will make us whole and win us love: this brand, this kind, this beauty, that powerful machine, this sort of design, that sort of taste.

Certainly even those of us who claim not to be addicted to alcohol or drugs are living in an addictive society, one that is controlling and reluctant to actually encourage any real freedom. If you do not smoke such a brand, or drink such a beer, you will not be a very interesting or lovable person. If you do not buy such and such a car, or brand name, or wear a certain logo on your shirt, you will be out, not in, on the edge, not near the center. You will be far from love, they will tell you (even though that is a lie, since love is free, not controlled, great, not small.) So, the addictive, consumerist society also plays a part on the battlefield I outlined above.

But this general problem is not what I want to address here. I want to get more specific. Real people with real lives. What of them?

Some people grew up in families where alcohol or drug addiction was the only state of affairs. Other people are in families right now where that is true. Some are living in families that are no longer families, because of addictive behavior, but only tattered shreds of angry, depressed people who treat each other terribly under the influence of alcohol or street drugs. This is carnage too, carnage that is just as bloody as the carnage running red across the rice fields in Vietnam.

And wars, as you know, are often caught up in vast economic and political struggles. So we cannot be too surprised that, just as there is an Oil Cartel, there is a Drug Cartel. And just as there are political battles neither won nor lost in the Middle East that are somehow connected to oil, so there are skirmishes, neither won nor lost in South America, and on the streets of North American cities that are somehow connected to drugs.

The warfare is real. It's big. The casualties are high.

To not see this, I say, is to cover one's eyes deliberately. How can I ever forget how a drunk driver killed my beautiful 25-year-old friend Stewart, as he stood on a corner? What can we do to put an end to this carnage?

Many will step up right away and say that religions are certainly of no help. Oh, the religions have tried, yes. They asserted their social influence once. Many of them pushed temperance on American society. Our own Universalist ancestors were big very big, in the temperance movement for example. Alcohol was a villain, the snake in the garden. It was not to be tolerated, ever. Not even one drink. Not even during holy communion. It destroyed lives, wrecked families. It was immoral to drink, they said. Immoral, plain and simple.

And yet how poignant, how poignant that the Universalist mover and shaker, Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, seminal figure in United States History, found out that such moralism on the Civil War battle field sounded pretty flimsy.

Like the great Walt Whitman, and like so very few of us alive today, Clara Barton saw the actual result of warfare as a nurse. She saw the mangled limbs, the amputations, the scars and destroyed lives. She saw the young men made deranged by the loss of their friends. She was by their side as they died.

Some of them asked for drinks. Some of them asked for a cigarette. They were asking for a bit of comfort. She wanted to tell them that they were immoral, that such practices lead inexorably to death. Then she looked around and saw that they were already inexorably dying …or wanting to.

So she relented. "This is no time to prate on moral influences," she wrote her cousin. And, actually, I think she was right. Unbending opinions always seem to do more harm than good. Allowing a shot of whiskey to broken young men in the midst of the complete insanity of the Civil War hardly seems immoral. I am convinced that such moralism in a religion will have little chance of turning addiction around. Especially since I am clear that not all drinking is addictive or a sign of addiction. I do have to note to the anti-religion types, at this time however, that one of my best friends who was severely addicted to drugs and alcohol, is no longer addicted now that he practices a certain kind of Buddhism. No twelve steps, no prison, just Buddhism, which is, by Western reckoning, called a religion. Thus I, for one, certainly think churches, synagogues and mosques and sanghas do have an important contribution to make to the solution. Just not all by themselves usually. More on that later.

Then there are people who agree up front that religion will not provide final answers, but who claim that an organized spirituality just might. These people are the twelve-step groups and their non-theistic counterparts, such as the groups which speak of an eleven step method for secular sobriety. These consist of circles of men and women who are addicts, alcoholics, or the friends and relatives of same. These groups have a long history of very successful stories.

I personally have many friends who have had great success with these groups. Despite their own personal lack of religious doctrine, a number of my friends found these groups to be amazingly helpful.

One friend of mine no longer attends, but I assure you, I have seen photos of this man, during the days when he was using and drinking, and he looked about as wretched as a man could possibly look. He now glows with health, and lives a wonderful, happy life without booze or drugs. He neither needs nor attends the meetings any more.

Others however have become meeting "junkies" (their word, not mine). I know one person who likes to shame those who choose no longer to go, warning them of doom and relapse around the corner.

Still others I know are frustrated by the meetings. They only seem to manage to find 12-step meetings that are entirely Christian evangelical in tone. Being Jewish, their own real discomfort with conversion tactics, and their sensible disgust with the common claim that the Lord's Prayer is "not really a religious text but a spiritual one" undermines their trust in the whole procedure for them. I agree with my Jewish friends. This Lord's Prayer business seems like a dishonest use of language, as if the words spiritual and religious have nothing to do with each other, which is historically just not true.

Still, I have little doubt that because, as I said, there are social sources and supports to some forms of alcoholism and addiction, the creation of the twelve-step social groups by Bill W. so many decades ago served quite smartly to help undermine many of these social sources. I think that is a good thing. I think this represents great progress over the "sinner" metaphor, personally. And, despite criticisms, it's clear that many more have been helped by these groups than not.

Then there are those who insist that neither religion, or any form of spirituality is the answer. It's all a question of strict hard-science medicine. Addiction is strictly a physical problem.

I can see how someone would say this. I had a good friend named Roy out in Oakland, who was a member of the Spokane Nation, that is, a Native American. When he drank, as he often did, I could see that his body reacted to alcohol totally differently than my own. I could tell that this was not merely a social, ethnic difference, contrasting my Mediterranean upbringing with his own. I did not have to be a physiologist to see clearly that his physiology was entirely different from my own. Roy finally reached the alcoholic state called the DT's (the Delirium Tremens) and started seeing things that were not there, (e.g. his co-workers flying outside his third story window). It was then that I realized that amassed alcohol can be a drug not much different than an hallucinogen like LSD. Had I drunk half as much as he did, I am sure I would be dead. One day he got on a bus, went up north, and none of his friends have ever seen him again.

But now, there is a new medication especially created to help negate the special vulnerability of Native Americans to alcoholism. This medication is now being tried out with great success among the Native Nations.

And there have been many studies on Euro-American brains steeped in alcoholism and drug addiction, as well.

Michael Field shared with me an article from Science Magazine from earlier this month. It reports an interesting and most significant discovery. By stimulating the part of the brain that gives cocaine users the same sense of high that cocaine brings, there is no addictive hunger created. But, when stimulating the part of the brain where the memory of the last cocaine high is stored, a huge drug hunger surges, making the person want to immediately go out and find another source.

In other words, it is not the pleasure itself that stimulates addiction, as I once thought, but the memory of the pleasure, which is housed in an entirely different part of the brain. This is a surprising discovery, but it might soon lead to a kind of medication that might actually be able to help end a long time cocaine addiction. This is a wonderful and most concrete kind of hope to report on the battlefield on which we all live.

In fact, this sermon came about because I was reading such a medical report. The article I read spoke about the noted drug addiction of a famous and very good movie actor, who has been to jail for drug use and possession far more times in five years than I have traveled overseas in thirty years. This article spoke of the "sweet spot" in his brain which represents a clear biological vulnerability this man has to certain drugs, a vulnerability clearly not of his making.

Now this actor, as some of you may know, has been ridiculed on the Tonight Show, made fun of on Comedy Specials, and suffered the contempt of both press and public, who feel superior to him because they imagine themselves to be more mature and strong-willed.

Yet I found that this "cool" scientific article on the brain expressed more compassion toward this unfortunate man than I have ever seen coming from the moralists. Or worse, ten times more compassion than I have ever seen coming from the criminologists, who think that a prison term and some intense psych work is a neat solution to a complex multi-dimensional problem. These folks don't use the metaphors "sin" or "reprobate" or "disease" but rather "crime" when talking about the drug user or even the alcoholic. The medical article I read, however, did not ridicule this actor as having no principles, or for not having sufficient willpower. They did not look down on him for refusing to give his life up to the higher willpower of an all-powerful God. They did not say he had a spiritual sickness, or theorize he was doing drugs to forget some misery in his life. They did not vilify him as a criminal.

Instead, they expressed compassion for him as a fully human being with a physical, social, spiritual, and medical side all wrapped up into one. For you see, I agree with Mel Ash's poem; the real disease and suffering in this addictive world results as much from the metaphors we use to talk about addiction as from the addiction itself. "Show me the mind that decides" whether it's only really physical or only really spiritual, "and I will show you your disease and your suffering."

And how about the wonderful poem about the cottonwoods by my friend Lynn Unger? Have you seen the cottonwood fluffs floating like snowflakes during the sunny breaks in the last week?

"The more seeds they send out, the greater the chance for their kind to flourish. Without words, they know that everything depends on what we call giving…"

Which seems like another word for compassion to me.

Imagine, here are these cottonwoods sending out their seeds, giving them up, so that there will be a greater chance that their kind will flourish. These wordless trees know that everything depends on giving, on being gracious. I think this is a form of compassion.

And are trees wiser than us? What? We don't want our kind to flourish? Have we given up on giving?

Listen, please don't think I, of all people, am "dissing" metaphors here. We use metaphors to help us make sense of a world that is often confusing and frustrating. We use metaphors to center ourselves in a world wild enough to fling us past the edge.

But I do think that not all metaphors are helpful in the end. Some can be downright destructive.

And look, I know. The problems generated by alcohol and drug addiction in the world are vast. As I said, no minister, priest or rabbi ever misses out on this reality; we have been reporters at the front for years, true witnesses to true disasters. Some of us have been alcoholics and addicts ourselves. Many of you have been witnesses to all this too. I suspect most of us have known frustration, anger, and despair about this issue. I suspect most us have seen families reduced to neurotic Gettysburgs where no one gets out sane or even alive. We have been lied to, stolen from, and vilified. And we may have done some of that ourselves.

But I still do not think all metaphors are equal. I don't think it helps me to flourish if, by metaphor, I am made into a sinner, a reprobate or a diseased, unhealthy creature.

It does help me flourish, however, to describe myself and all of us, addicted or not, as human beings. And as I suggested earlier, there is no simple definition of a human being. We are social and electro-chemical. We are alone and in communion constantly. We are unique and typical, broken and whole, bound and free. It's rare that any one metaphor will work for everyone, but most of the other metaphors I know of work only partially for most everyone. To face this problem, I'm convinced it's better to concentrate on whatever offers a greater chance for our selves, for movie actors, and all our fellows to flourish. To actually flourish. Blame will not make us flourish, accusations of moral weakness will not, "I'm in/you're out" spirituality will not, mere scientific reductionism will not.

But, as I said earlier, a humane religion can call us, ever and ever, to give amply of the gifts of our hearts, our compassion, and even our forgiveness, difficult as that may be. Working with the social, medical, spiritual and religious dimensions together, we have some chance of seeing this long term battle begin to lose steam.

Oh sure, the scars will still be there. Clara Barton saw with her compassionate eyes that a war always leaves permanent scars. But I believe with all my might that if we approach each other compassionately (not co-dependently, mind you, compassionately), as human beings, some of the younger among us might even live to see the day when addictions, in their present form, are a thing of the past. Call it a dream, call it foolishness, or call it an outburst of amazing grace, or wondrous love (NB two hymns sung in the service), I don't care. But there has been progress, I tell you. And I hope one day, some compassionate person will call for a new Memorial Day, one for all those, like me, like you, who have lost loved ones in this war. May this dream I have be the one dream I have which comes true, if not for me, then for our children's children.

Memorial Day Prayer: [back to top]
written by the Rev. Barbara Pescan

Spirit of Life
whom we have called by many names
in thanksgiving and in anguish

Bless the poets and those who mourn
Send peace for the soldiers who did not make the wars
but whose lives were consumed by them

Let strong trees grow about graves far from home
Breathe through the arms of their branches
The earth will swallow your tears while the dead sing
"No more, never again, remember me."

For the wounded ones,
and those who received them back,
let there be someone ready when the memories come
when the scars pull and the buried metal moves
and forgiveness for those of us who were not there
for our ignorance.

And in us, veterans in a forest of a thousand fallen promises,
let new leaves of protest grow on our stumps.

Give us courage to answer the cry of humanity's pain
And with our bare hands, out of full hearts,
with all our intelligence
let us create the peace.

[back to top]

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