From the Rector

My dear All Saints family,
 
As we continue to explore new ways to revitalize, re-energize, and eventually to grow our parish, it is important to remember that our God is relentless in love, always yearning after us, calling to us, reaching out to us at all times and in all places.  So we should, for our part, always be seeking God, listening for the voice of the Spirit for new ideas, fresh inspiration, and exciting new ways of seeing, thinking, and being.
 
Whence this lofty and poetical introduction to this week’s column, you ask?  Well, I’ve been finding some inspiration is a place that is not personally familiar to me, and I want to share that with y’all.
 
Many of you know that for some time now All Saints has been providing space one night a week for a local chapter of Narcotics Anonymous, an addiction recovery program and support group founded in 1953 and modeled on the 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.  The Twelve Steps to recovery have been around since the 1930s, and the individual steps may well be at least passingly familiar to a lot of us.  If you’ve never read through all twelve steps, or if it’s been a while since you looked at them, I highly recommend your looking them up.  They constitute a powerful spiritual journey, and completing them is far from easy. 
 
Although the Steps are written explicitly for and in the context of substance abuse and addiction, they are also unapologetically spiritual in form, intention, and methodology.  As such, they have much to teach all of us -- a point I will come back to more explicitly in just a bit.  But first, here are the Steps as written out, in the introductory booklet that’s given to new participants in NA, presented as “the principles that made our recovery possible”:
 

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God as we understood Him.  [emphasis in the original]
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him [emphasis in the original], praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 
Now, other than the fact that God is explicitly mentioned several times, you might be wondering what all that has to do with us here at All Saints.  Well, setting aside the fact that problems with addiction are pretty rampant in our society, affecting many more people that we might necessarily imagine, take a look at what happens if we frame the entire process … by admitting that we as human beings, all of us, are addicted to sin.  To be sure, we may each of us be addicted to different particular sins, or patterns of sinning, or types of sin, and we may all be at different places in terms of managing our addiction to sin, but the addiction to sin itself is the great equalizer that puts us all on a level playing field (Romans 3:23 comes to mind).
 
Imagine what our church communities would look like if we understood the mission of the Church to be helping sin-addicts into recovery.  Imagine what our individual relationships with God would look like were we to root that relationship in acknowledging that we cannot free ourselves from our addiction to sinning, that we depend utterly upon God to free us.  Imagine if church were a place where it was safe to make a searching, fearless, and honest moral inventory of ourselves, without fear of judgment, scorn, or shame.
 
There is a particular paragraph in the NA introductory booklet that really jumps out at me.  I’ll reproduce it here, but I’m going to substitute the word “sinned” for the word “used” in the original:
 
“We are not interested in what or how much you sinned or who your connections were, what you’ve done in the past, how much or little you have, but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help.  The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting [emphasis mine], because we can only keep what we have by giving it away.  We learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.”
 
Can you imagine what our church community would be like if that paragraph were our mission and mandate?  How that might invigorate our faith, both personal and shared, how it might reshape our parish’s relationship with the larger community around us, what we might be able to offer the folks God put us here to serve?
 
I would love to hear what y’all think!  Please call, text, email, or otherwise let me know!
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

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