Monist Pantheism Proves Viable Response to Addiction-Induced Theological Crisis

Monist Pantheism Proves Viable Response to Addiction-Induced Theological Crisis

David Bottorff

Loyola University of Chicago

25 February 2010
Abstract

Drug and alcohol addiction forced me to search for a “power greater than myself” to provide an overarching framework for recovery.  After re-examining my spiritual and theological convictions, I shifted radically from pure agnosticism to a monist pantheism, distinct from panentheism, that provides succor while preserving my intellectual integrity. This theology also allows me to appreciate the eloquence of other theological traditions as potential sources of support.

            Keywords: addiction God monist pantheism panentheism Alcoholics Anonymous recovery

Monist Pantheism Proves Viable Response to Addiction-Induced Theological Crisis

Many factors contribute to substance abuse addictions, including genetics, epigenetics, psychology, society, and the environment (NIDA, 2009).  While some of these factors can be addressed through hard science, the most popular addiction recovery programs focus on spirituality as both a cause and a cure (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939).  Monist pantheism, dove-tailed with Buddhist philosophy, proved a flexible and intellectually coherent response to the need for spiritual direction in my addiction recovery.

As a young adult I made substance abuse a way of life.  I defined myself in terms of what I was not – a good boy, an academic, a hard worker, a functioning member of society, etc.  I felt comfortable at the edges of society.  Recovery was only possible with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Upon seeking sobriety in 1994, I was challenged to identify with a “power greater than myself” for guidance.  Basic 12-step theory holds that addictions represent self-will run riot, and that recovery only emanates from a system of meaning-making that supersedes the ego.  This wisdom is reflected in the words of Dennis Ford (2007):

Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual obsessions, and adventurousness – in which meaning remains, but only while engaged in extreme and risky activities, including violence – have all been attributed to misguided and finally self-destructive attempts to suppress the question of meaning by drowning in instinctual behavior.

I do not believe our respective faith perspectives should be identical or even synchronistic.  Yet, there is something inside me that insists on a theology that both explains my transpersonal and metaphysical experiences, and accommodates the beliefs of others.  The bottom line is, I still have difficulty stepping back and accepting mystery on its own terms.

This frustrating need for an over-arching and unifying theology was spawned from a tumultuous religious upbringing.  I hardly remember attending Methodist church as a child.  I do, however, remember adults exhibiting hardscrabble resourcefulness and independence.  They were people of the land and practicality ruled the day.  As an only child in Ann Arbor, I was introduced to hippies and free love, alcohol and marijuana, African Americans and Latinos, and to the extended family in Unitarian Universalism.  When my mother married an Episcopal minister, I became briefly interested in Christianity and was confirmed as an acolyte at a small church in Vermilion, Ohio. 

At university I adopted agnosticism, then graduated to secular humanist utilitarianism.  It was during these years I came to embrace Modern Movement theories about the power of science to answer all questions.  I agree with Karen Armstrong (2009) when she argues the advent of Modernism encouraged the contemporary sense of agnosticism and atheism.

I came to believe no person or institution had a monopoly on truth, spirituality was subjective, and each individual had to find a framework of understanding that suited them.  Although in some ways this desire for open-mindedness echoes Robert Kegan’s highest level of moral development (Dombeck, 2007), it also leaves my spiritual shopping bag empty.

The crisis of addiction forced me to find other answers.  Challenged to find a functional and relevant theology, I leveraged the kind of spiritual pragmatism William James (1897) described in “The Will to Believe.”  Later I found guidance through Native American paganism with the help of Blackwolf Jones (1995) and the Mankind/New Warrior Project, where I worked on archetype modeling as described by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1991), Robert Bly (1990), and Richard Rohr (1990).  In recent years I took a postmodern approach to life while studying Buddhism and Religious Science (a.k.a. Science of Mind) (Holmes, 1938).  I revel in the Transcendentalist musings of writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and their contributions to the American New Thought Movement.

Today, I feel comfortably at home with monist pantheism, which is the belief that God and the universe are one in the same.  While taking exception to his tone, I largely concur with John W. Grula (2008) who states, “By reestablishing the natural sciences’ metanarrative, even as it asserts the divinity of the material universe, pantheism simultaneously demotes postmodernism and reconciles science with religion.”  Pantheism is intimately linked to many Eastern theologies, including Buddhism, Taoism, and even Hinduism.  The brevity of this essay does not allow me to fully explicate how pantheism is commensurate with such world religions as Judeo-Christian monotheism.  Suffice it to say the theology gives me ample intellectual room to appreciate the subjective spirituality of people emerging from these and other great traditions.

In modern times, I embrace what I might call post-postmodern philosophy, in which subjectivity of experience is respected while harmonizing communal influences are honored.  That said, I am challenged yet entertained by the predominantly Judeo-Christian teachings at Loyola of Chicago.

Frankly, I have trouble thinking about faith, meaning and especially spirituality as separate from myself.  This uncomfortable feeling is most obvious when I try to discuss the nature of God in the third person.  For me, God is a state or quality of connectedness and unity.  It is the fundamental creative path of all things.  It is a verb that can only be understood in terms of my manifestation in, and interaction with, the world.  I am inseparable from this phenomenon called God.

I derive meaning from the notion all things – ideas, emotions, objects, actions, people, animals, plants, whatever – are in a constant state of change, and therefore impermanent and fundamentally empty.  My sense of reality – transcendental or mundane – is a product of an illusion I am separate from all other things.  A constant stream of cause-and-effect relationships underlies the principle of perpetual creation, a seamless process of simultaneous construction and destruction.  Individual experience can never be accurately communicated with symbols or rituals.  All such endeavors are merely referential and gesticular.  Each person comprehends and internalizes their unique relationship with the worlds of sense and transcendence using both logos and mythos.

Here is the fundamental challenge: All things, regardless of how defined, are constantly changing.  The implication is that meaning can be derived at any instantaneous point during a thing’s birth, life and death, but meaning ultimately is ephemeral, and the final purpose of all things is to change into something else.  Just as the Hebrew Bible describes God bringing order out of chaos, it also returns order to chaos.  Comfort stems from accepting and embracing life’s dynamics.  Nothing is static. As Heracleitus said in Cratylus (Plato, c. 300 BCE), “[A]ll things flow and nothing stands.”

My attempts to rationalize “sin” are rendered thus: Specific things have positive or negative meaning to the degree they advance or retard the underlying fluidity; things can be “good” or “bad” in an ethical sense but not in a moral sense.  A thing that facilitates creativity reduces pain while a thing that destabilizes change causes suffering.  “Letting go” enables God’s grace to work unimpeded.  So, for me, God is the process by which a block of stone is turned to a statue, whether beautiful or ugly.  The sculptor facilitates this process of transformation while the vandal inhibits it.  We call the artist “good” and the thug “bad.”

I tend to embrace a Gestalt approach to life, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Aristotle (c. 350 BCE) described holism in Metaphysics, Book VIII, Part 6, saying, “In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause.”  This observation applies to the cosmos, to Earth, to plants and animals, and to me.

Today I perceive a “self” or “soul” similar to that described by Richard Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems Model (1995), or perhaps like Buddha Nature (Buddha-dhatu).

I believe our collective dream – the sense ego is separate from the external world (Thetford, 2007) – is harmonized by the lessons and expectations into which we are born, as with the modern concept of nomos and the concomitant notions of externalization, objectification and internalization. The subjectivity of our experience, especially of our transcendent world, means Baal and Thor and Elohim are equally real to those who believe, and should be respected as such. The individual must ask, “How is my concept of transcendent reality working for me?”

Compassion is the only emotion I feel when accepting the idea we all are of the same stuff – a benign creative force – and operating under the same delusion of binary thinking – me and it, I and thou.  My mission is to create a world of unity and belonging through creative compassion.  I want that mandate to drive all decisions I make and all actions I take.  In this respect, the following wish brings me great comfort: “May all beings abide in great equanimity, free from attachment and aversion to things near and far.”

Coda

I would not have been able to traverse the chasm between adamant agnosticism and monist pantheism without the help of many very patient people, including the recovery community, my academic and spiritual teachers, the loving congregations who took me in, and my various mental health professionals. It has been an exciting journey that continues to this day.

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