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BY HARRY C. KIELY

Alcoholism holds a paradox: Within this terrible disease there lies a seed of healing. The alcoholic begins to experience liberation not by denying the alcoholism, but by claiming it. “I am an alcoholic.” Alcoholism and recovery have a common denominator – spirituality.

All illness has a spiritual character, as mystics and other spiritual leaders have helped us to discover. The alcoholic’s hope for healing lies in the reality that alcoholism is a physical and spiritual disease. As a recovering alcoholic, I gradually came to see the spiritual nature of addiction to alcohol or drugs.

For centuries the spiritual aspect of alcoholism was overlooked.

Various treatments were tried: forced abstinence, personal self-discipline, incarceration and other forms of punishment, and alternative drugs. All of these dealt only with the symptoms and not with the addiction itself.

Even psychotherapy and psychoanalysis failed to bring about significant positive results because these disciplines assumed that if alcoholics were able to understand why they drink compulsively, they would then be able to control the compulsion. Every approach failed to recognize that the addiction is a form of slavery: The body of the alcoholic is in physical bondage, and his will is in spiritual bondage.

“Will” and “bondage” reflect biblical thinking, which comprehends humanity — and all of creation — in spiritual terms. Only some Power of a stronger spiritual nature can enter the depths of the alcoholic’s soul, unbind him and set him free.

Paradoxically, the plight of the alcoholic is a spiritual quest gone wrong. Noted psychologist Carl G. Jung wrote in a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous founder, Bill Wilson: “John’s craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. ...You see, “alcohol” in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.”

The willful, rebellious, and self-destructive behavior of the active alcoholic would not seem to be a search for “union with God.” Yet healing becomes a possibility only as the alcoholic is understood, not simply as one fleeing from God (although he is) but, on a deeper level, as one whose heart cries out with the psalmist: “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:2). As St. Augustine, in his Confessions, said: “O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are restless until they rest in thee.”

In a recent book, I explore from a spiritual perspective the plight of the drinking alcoholic and the promise of new life. When I was in the early stages of recovery, I found the New Testament story of the Gerasene demoniac to be a perfect metaphor for my own experience as a recovering alcoholic (Mark 5:1-20). This is the tale of a man so possessed by demons that the human being within has been hopelessly lost until Jesus comes and exorcises the demons. I use this story as a powerful metaphor for understanding the paradoxical nature of addiction and recovery.

While I do not question the historical authenticity of the original story, I have chosen to look at it as one might interpret a Greek myth. The story has a mythic quality about it: the life-and-death struggle of good with evil; the divine intervention in the life of a demon-possessed man; and the casting out of the demons.

Mark did not necessarily have in mind an alcoholic. Yet I think my interpretation is in accord with the spirit of the story. Whatever the man’s tragic condition, his life was no longer his own because it was in the sway of powers far greater than himself — an apt description of addiction.

It is my hope that readers who are dealing with addictions in their own lives or in the lives of others — whether drugs, gambling, nicotine, food, sex, money, or work — will better understand their own captivity and hear clearly the promise of deliverance that Mark proclaims.

Living in grace-formed consciousness, the recovering alcoholic and drug addict will feel gratitude. There will be disheartening days when he is revisited by those discouraging faults he had hoped sobriety would cure — depression, nasty temper, poor judgment, immature behavior, the temptation to drink again — times when he feels anything but grateful. Yet he will come to himself and remember; remember that he is surrounded by a community of others in recovery, and that he is upheld by an unconditional Grace whose power to heal is passionately at work in us this very moment.

GRATEFUL RECOVERY: Spirituality and the Healing of Addiction, by Harry C. Kiely, available from Amazon.com, $12 plus $2.50 shipping.