Religious Addicts

There were seasons I felt like my husband was cheating on me with the church. Because he spent more time with it than me, and talked more about it than anything else. When you live church planting, you start breathing it. There is a fine line there, and we have to become aware of our life and set boundaries. — Jessica Florea, pastor’s wife

[re-post from 2016]

In the Catholic tradition, “religion” is a virtue that expresses humanity’s friendship with God. The word, linked by Augustine with the Latin word religare “to bind fast,” indicates the virtue’s role in joining all elements of our life together around our love for God.

As a professor of mine once said, “Religion is the first thing, but not the only thing; it gives right order to things, so all is in harmony with God’s plan.” The good things of religion – like piety, liturgy, sacraments, spiritual gifts, sacred ministry – are not meant to exist in competition with the good things of temporal reality; things not-religious. Rather, they are meant to restore the temporal goods to their beautiful and rightful place in this world.

Another way of saying this is that sacred and secular are needful companions, incomplete without each other. Per Kenneth Himes: “The sacred is the sacramental form of the secular, i.e., the sacred is the secular in its full depth.”

But as with any good thing, religion can become distorted, an obsession, become unhealthy, extreme or fanatical, abused and used for ends alien from God. The things of religion can become an idol, ends in themselves, and take innumerable forms.

In my experience, it can be used to mask unhealthy, compulsive or addictive traits.
It can become a pretense for
manipulating and exploiting others,
escaping from the ambiguities of reality,
avoiding difficult relationships,
sanctifying resentment, prejudice or anger,
feeding an insatiable appetite for affirmation or attention,
canonizing a superiority or inferiority complex,
legitimizing arrogance masked as zeal,
ignoring dealing with real-world problems,
avoiding taking responsibility for one’s own life and decisions,
or, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II,
“the temptation of being so strongly interested in Church services and tasks
as to fail to become actively engaged in responsibilities in the professional,
social, cultural and political world.”

There have been many examples of this diseased form of religion in my own life and experience. One particularly significant one for me personally was back in the early 1990’s. I got deep into what I call “apparition culture,” particularly the unhealthier forms of obsession with Marian apparitions, stories of mystics, reports of miracles, secret messages and dire apocalyptic warnings of impending doom. It was a religious culture that Dominican theologian Fr. Frederick Jelly once described as “a dark view of God as the Grim Reaper, with Mary as his Henchwoman.”

I especially remember back in 1990 getting involved in a group sunk deep in preparations for the coming worldwide divine chastisement with its macabre descriptions of the “three days of darkness.” During my two year-long immersion in this group, I drank from the dregs of this movement’s fear-full, paranoid, sectarian, elitist and gnostic elements. I remember the relish we all had in the secret knowledge we believed we had gained, meeting visionaries and exploring various private revelations.

Let me say, that experience did serious psychological harm to me and to others I knew. In fact, some of those children in this movement I came to know later as adults left their families and the faith because of that harm they say they suffered.

I remember so well just how seductive it was to be privy to the ‘alchemy’ of stitching-together this mystic and that apparition, laced with disconnected doomsday prophecies – all of which we believed were all about to be fulfilled. Certainly by Y2K. Stocked up on blessed candles ready to light when the darkness came, steeled with marching orders not to answer demonic knocking at our barricaded doors once the darkness commenced.

All we seemed able to speak about was religion. Nothing else really mattered. Why waste your energy when everything was going to be wiped out?

It was all deeply dissociating. It took me years to fully recover from those days. When I finally broke with it all, I was so embarrassed I had allowed myself to waste so much energy and time. But in hindsight, thirty+ years removed, I am so grateful. I am the wiser, and I have been able over the years to help many others who were imprisoned by these fears.

Orthodox theologian Fr. Tom Hopko articulated something of this imbalanced culture:

Religious addiction is a thing. Some of the signs that you might be a religious addict include wanting to hurt a parishioner when you see them eating a hot dog at a ball game during Great Lent; exclusively associating with religious people; compulsively thinking and talking about religious matters all the time; or attending so many religious activities that your work, your children, your marriage suffers.

I remember hearing a story about a man, recently married, who went to the Holy Mountain [Mount Athos] for a retreat. As soon as he arrived, an elder monk greeted him and asked, “What brings you here?” The man said, “I was just married and thought I would get away to spend some time with God before returning to my new life.” The monk sharply rebuked him and said, “Why are you here?! Go home! Why do you run away from God to come here? Go home to be with your wife…” The man left…

Pope Benedict offered a more spacious and healthy view of a virtuously religious life:

If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again [Pope John Paul II] said: No!

If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.

And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.