Sin, Recovery and Finding Our Way Back Home

For a lot of us formed in or informed by conservative, evangelical Christianity, an important aspect of spirituality is the reality and consequences of sin. 

Sin is our big problem, creates a crisis, results in our judgment, is addressed by God’s mercy and Christ’s redeeming work, which in turn calls us to repentance, faith and surrender. Whew. There’s a lot there. 

Sin is often defined as “missing the mark” meaning we don’t live the life we were intended to live. We are imperfect creatures, belonging to a Creator who expects, or deserves, or demands perfection.

But we may be putting too much emphasis on sin, missing what sin has to teach us. Not that we are bad, or unlovable or a grand disappointment. Could it be that sin is not so much our problem as the result of our problem? 

The crux of “sin” is really separation. Separation from our Source. Separation from our true identity. Separation from ourselves, really, and then from each other. 

Sin is a Symptom

Sin maybe isn’t the real problem for us. Perhaps our real problem is the separation we experience in this life. It makes us feel lost and alone, casting about for some sense of connection. And sin is the result.

Attachment, or the lack of healthy attachment is a pervasive problem for a lot of people, and all addicts suffer from attachment deficits.

Healthy attachment, acquired in the earliest forming years of our lives, gives us identity, security, comfort and the ability to manage and regulate the various parts of us that make up our self.

But if we don’t get what we need from a safe, nurturing adult, we lack in our sense of who we are, we’re not secure, we cast about in search of something to comfort us and we have difficulty self-regulating.

Addiction, like Sin, is a Symptom

For a long time those of us who either live, study, treat or think about addiction and recovery have recognized an important truth: addiction is never the real problem in a person’s life. It’s a symptom of the real problem

The real problem is a lack of integration. It’s fragmented living. That’s how a person can both detest an addictive behavior and engage in it at the same time. 

It is our alienation—both from ourselves and others—that creates our sense of separation, and therefore our suffering. 

The truest work of recovery is recognizing reality, desiring wholeness and pulling the separated pieces of our souls back together to live an integrated and coherent life. 

We belong to God

Now ontologically our hearts (our best self, Imago Dei, our inner person or our true identity) still and always belong to God. 

It is our experience of belonging that is disrupted. And that loss of intimacy, that attachment deficit is what causes our sense of suffering. 

So we go looking for solutions and we find unworthy substitutes. We don’t know that’s what we’re doing; we’re just trying to make life work or at least make it tolerable. And you can think about addictive behaviors or substances in just that way: they are solutions to a problem. 

Really everyone does this to some degree. But those of us who are compulsive in our behaviors, who have an addiction, we do it to the extreme. And in so doing, we live counter to our own, best heart.

Sexual compulsive behavior is a self-reinforcing engine in a soul that is  living separated from its Source. Addictive behavior reinforces the separation. Deepens and widens it. Makes us more desperate for any connection, solace or numbing so as not to feel so alone, so abandoned.

We all need and on some level are aware that we want to belong. Our Source (Creator) is the ultimate and best place of our longed-for belonging.

Making Our Way Back Home

The truly spiritual pilgrimage is that of finding our way back home. Home never left us. It just felt that way. 

Consider this way of framing the Gospel of Jesus. Somehow in this shadowy world of light and darkness, of gifts and struggles, of freedom and choice, we strayed. But we were never abandoned. We were always seen, always wanted, always sought after, always desired. 

Jesus came for us because of the Father’s desire that we find our way back home. This is Good News. Really Good News. 

In one sense, finding our way back home is a journey of re-parenting ourselves. We are invited to a journey where we have a part to play. 

We dismantle learned attitudes, beliefs and patterns of behavior and gradually replace them with new beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behavior.

Some beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behavior, though, are so deeply entrenched, and have such a destructive yet self-reinforcing effect on us that it takes extra intervention, specialized help to find our way through the thickets back to our home.

For almost all of us, the path towards our Source will be each other. We need help and we need to help others in finding the way home.

This is the work required for healthy recovery.

This is acquiring healthy attachment.

This is the letting go of the pieces of our souls that are false and uncovering within ourselves our best, true nature.

Recovery is reconnecting with our True Self and incrementally integrating all our parts with our True Self.

What Are Your Next Steps?

Do you need to explore deeper recovery? Check out Four Tasks for Getting Your Life Back and Fifteen Practices for Living the Life You Want. Use them; they’re free and they are for you. Share them with others.

Is this blog thought-provoking to you? Helpful? Then please pass it along to others. 

We were not meant to recovery alone. 

We need others.

And others need us. tcr