In retrospect, I can say that I joined the church out of basic need; I was becoming a Christian, and as the religion can’t be practiced alone, I needed to try to align myself with a community of faith.
—Kathleen Norris
I am looking out the large front windows of the Sister Mary Anselm Hermitage. The leaves of oak and maple trees bend and twist in the late morning breeze that caresses the brow of Monteagle Mountain. A Carolina wren briefly alights on the window, peers inside where I sit in the recliner, then darts off. Since my first visit to Saint Mary’s Convent a few years ago, I have made several personal retreats to this one-bedroom cottage. In May of 2021, I was received as an associate or a “formal friend” of the Community of Saint Mary, an Episcopal order of nuns who live at the convent and follow the monastic teachings of Saint Benedict. The fellowship and hospitality of the nuns at Saint Mary’s, along with their generous and open-minded expression of Christian faith, has been a balm and a beacon for my restless soul.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Church without God
I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Protestant denomination known primarily for promoting Saturday as the proper day for Christian worship and for focusing on the imminent return of Christ in the second coming. The latter tenet served as the subject of many sermons and evening revival meetings in my childhood.
One Saturday morning, when I was still living at home near the Gulf of Mexico in rural Florida, I sat in a maroon-cushioned pew with my mother and younger siblings. It was a pleasant day, so the windows along the walls of the sanctuary were open slightly, allowing the room to breathe. The preacher was in full swing, bellowing about the last days, hands raised in exhortation, when a great boom shook the church, and the curtains on the windows jumped in unison as though a great mass of air had been forced in from all sides. This is it, I thought, almost calmly, as though the apocalypse was not as bad as I’d feared now that it was finally happening. Or maybe I was just frozen in terror. Either way, I quickly realized that Jesus had not, in fact, returned. Nothing had followed the loud noise, which turned out to be the sonic boom created by a returning space shuttle.
Despite its obsession with the apocalypse, the church became a refuge for me as I entered my adolescent years and my life at home began to unravel. At least the end-times sermons with their frightening imagery of multi-headed dragons and their admonitions to avoid the mysterious mark of the beast came with a side of communal singing served by smiling, sober adults. At home, the end of the world appeared not in a sermon but in the glazed eyes and chilly sneer of my mother.
Functional is the term used for alcoholics who somehow manage to perform basic adult tasks despite their unmanageable drinking. But even though my mother was able to hold down a job and get food on the table, I can’t quite consider her behavior during my adolescent and teenage years to be functional. How functional is it when you are drunk and determined to drive off at night over the protests of your children? How functional is it when you’ve locked yourself in the bathroom because your family is trying to share with you how your drinking affects them? How functional is it when your young children have to track you down at the bar because you didn’t come home in the evening, only to have you ignore them in favor of some flirtatious sleaze who’s not thinking beyond this one night?
Perhaps the chaos of living with an alcoholic parent drove me to the physical, social, and psychological structure of the church, where turbulent mood swings, unpredictable outbreaks of screaming, and half-baked family interventions receded for a couple hours a week in favor of a sense of order and predictability. Even the preacher’s apocalyptic pronouncements were a tidy and consistent procession of biblical citations from the Old and New Testaments. When I entered the sanctuary, with its clean white walls, high ceilings, and perfectly spaced pews, I knew what to expect. Home was crazy; in the church I sought asylum.
In my late teens and early twenties, however, church came to serve me the way alcohol seemed to serve my mother. No longer merely an escape from the hurt and confusion of living with an alcoholic parent, it became an escape from life. It provided a sense of security and insulation from my inner emptiness. It gave me a false sense of confidence that I was a person of goodwill and positive intention. It isolated me. Even as a newlywed, I holed myself in the upstairs office of the split-level duplex my wife and I rented, immersed in stacks of Bible commentaries, highlighting and carefully underlining the onion skin pages of my Thompson Chain-Reference Study Bible. I mined each verse of Scripture for a gem of meaning the way my mother swam through cases of chilled white zinfandel. I fell asleep watching Adventist preachers on the Three Angels Broadcasting Network, their metaphysical murmurings diverting my attention until I lost consciousness.
God without Church
August 2007. In August of 2007, I sat in our kitchen, my wife packing lunches for us to take to work that afternoon. I felt numb and desperate, oppressed by my thoughts, which endlessly circled my awareness like vultures. I had been attending 12-step meetings for almost a year, just beginning the journey of healing from the trauma of being raised by an alcoholic parent. During this time, I had been through several similar emotional cycles: swirling thoughts, frozen feelings, and a gradually building pressure that culminated in a cathartic crying jag, which brought momentary relief but no real insight or healing.
As my throat constricted and my eyes pooled, I realized I was unable to break the cycle. Sitting in the spacious kitchen, feeling ashamed that my wife of just two years was seeing me break down yet again, I realized the tears were nothing more than the temporary opening of an inner pressure valve. I knew that as soon as the valve closed, the pressure would build again. As my wife zipped up our lunch bags, I tried to say as clearly as possible what I’d just come to understand. “Something’s wrong with me,” I told her. “And I don’t know how to fix it.”
Beginning with the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in the 1930s, the 12-step program has grown into a decentralized global phenomenon that has helped untold numbers of people recover from a slew of addictions. Alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, sexual compulsion, addictive shopping, and overworking, just to suggest a few of the issues addressed by the dozens of unique 12-step groups in existence today.
Step 1 of Alcoholics Anonymous reads, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Although it was clear as I entered adulthood that my life was becoming unmanageable, booze was not my drug of choice. The legacy of alcoholic parenting creates its own destructive patterns of thinking and behavior, based in a powerful sense of shame and anxiety, and my 12-step journey has been largely about recognizing and recovering from those patterns.
During the months after the scene in my kitchen, my own sense of powerlessness sank in, and I found I had lost any clear sense of who, or even whether, God was. Maybe this was the result of my solo dive into the bewildering world of the Bible or the apparent lack of response to my cries for help when I felt most depressed. However it came about, my tenuous hold on faith left me little hope that I could move out of the despair of step 1.
Here, the wording of the steps themselves came to the rescue. Each time the word God is used, it is followed by the phrase “as we understood Him.” Right away, the recovering person is encouraged to discover or develop their own conception of a higher power. Some, perhaps many, Christians will find this theological license unnerving or even heretical. But Jesus did this all the time. In an attempt to connect with his followers and the multitudes who came to hear him speak, he referred to himself variously as a vine, a gate, a shepherd, and a mother hen, while presenting heaven as a kingdom, a mustard seed, yeast, and a lost coin. Each of these conceptualizations tried not to have the last word on God but to express some aspect of the ineffable, the way a prism bends light to reveal its various colors.
In 12-step meetings I heard several of these incomplete yet enlightening conceptualizations of the divine, all of which used the term God as an acronym. The first was Group of Drunks. Here is a collection of addicts, this idea suggests, who are reliably present when I show up at a meeting, who have a wide and deep pool of experience from which I can draw wisdom, who have in many cases found sobriety through the steps, and who are eager to guide me through the program as well. If that does not represent a power greater than myself, I don’t know what does.
The second acronym was Gifts of Desperation. Sitting in my kitchen crying in August of 2007, knowing I didn’t know how to end the cycle of misery I felt trapped in, I gave up. Not in a suicidal sense, which would have been just one more self-imposed idea for how to fix my problem. Instead, I gave up trying to find solutions altogether. I needed to rely on someone else’s thinking for a while, but not just another individual, the way members of a cult will cede their rationality to a charismatic leader. I needed the guidance and insight of time-tested collective wisdom, represented in the words of the 12 steps. Had I not truly despaired of solving the problem on my own, I would not have found the will to follow the suggestions in those words.
Last was Good Orderly Direction. In the early years of my recovery, I listened to many recorded talks given by various members of the program. On one of these recordings, the speaker said one’s ideas about God weren’t nearly as important as one’s openness to the practices and principles of the steps. In fact, he suggested, it could be helpful to place one’s theology on the shelf for a while. With a mind temporarily relieved of cosmic conundrums, one might look at the steps through a more practical lens. Step 2, “Came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore us to sanity,” was asking no more than whether I believed the program could work. And step 3, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God as we understood Him,” turned out to be, in its simplest terms, a question of my willingness to practice steps 4 through 12, which were explicitly designed as a way of living in alignment with spiritual principles.
I had never known such generosity of belief, such willingness to meet the skeptic or the bewildered one on their own turf. What I had known instead was Eve, a woman at my home church in rural Florida. Eve was tall and imposing, with blonde-gray hair secured in a tight bun. An old friend of my mother’s family, she was stern but seemed to have a genuine affection for me and my siblings. Once, I confided to Eve some of my adolescent misgivings about heaven. As a thirteen-year-old, I wasn’t sure I would relish the golden streets and gates of pearl and endless hymn-singing. I certainly didn’t want to end up in hell, but I couldn’t say I felt excited by the alternative. Eve considered my expression of reluctance and then declared, “If you’re not going to like it, you won’t be there.”
The Community of Saint Mary
For a long time after working the 12-steps, I felt content without any connection to the church. I had outgrown an old, narrow worldview and found a life-giving connection to a power greater than myself. That power, whatever it was, had helped restore me to sanity after years of battling the crazy-making trauma of alcoholic parenting. A friend in the program introduced me to a meditation practice rooted in the wisdom of Buddhism and Hinduism. I began to explore the teachings and teachers of these ancient traditions and found fresh insight into the world of the spirit. My unofficial religion became what Aldous Huxley called, in a book by the same name, the Perennial Philosophy, a compilation of the central and often overlapping truths from many faiths.[1]
At some point, though, I began to feel a gentle inward tug, a subtle but growing desire to be part of an established faith tradition. The problem, as I saw it at the time, was that while I knew I couldn’t return to the Christianity of my childhood and adolescence, the Hindu and Buddhist traditions felt too unfamiliar to provide the connection and community I sought. I had become, as Marcus Borg puts it in The Heart of Christianity, a person “seeking a faith to love.”[2]
Then about five years ago, I discovered a retreat center just an hour’s drive from where I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On its website, the Ayers Center for Spiritual Development listed workshops on mindfulness, centering prayer, Zen, and other spiritual practices. In addition to these enticing offerings, the center was perched atop Monteagle Mountain in the Cumberland Plateau, near the southernmost tip of the Appalachian Mountains. On the day of my first visit, the weather was mild and clear. After briefly touring the lobby and peeking into one of the meeting rooms at the center, I wandered around the grounds, taking in the view from the ridge. A retreat or workshop seemed to be in progress. People were scattered in small groups or singly among the chairs, benches, and other seating areas behind the main retreat building. I found a large flat rock and sat facing the valley: blue sky above, sloping dark green forest below.
After eating the bag lunch I had brought with me, I walked the gravel roads that crisscrossed the property. One road stretched back along the forested lane, and at the head of the lane was a sign that read, The Episcopal Church Welcomes You. A red arrow at the bottom of the sign pointed down the graveled path into the woods. With no Frostian dilemma to hold me up, I followed the sign’s suggestion. Intrigue blended with enchantment as I walked past a raised-bed garden enclosed in a fence with rustic, tree-branch posts. Farther on, a quaint and simple structure, perhaps a guest house, stood alone just off the lane. A carved wooden sign near the building read Ora et Labora. I was pretty sure I’d seen that Latin phrase somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite remember what it meant.
I reached the end of the lane and found myself looking at a cinder-block gray building with a small chapel on the left and a bell tower reaching toward the treetops. A windowed walkway, through which I could see the expansive view from the ridge on the other side, connected the chapel to the rest of the structure. A paper taped to the glass of the chapel door stated service times and welcomed all to attend. The next service, the noon office, was set to begin in just a few minutes. I checked my watch, considered how long I had before I needed to get back to Chattanooga, and went inside.
On that first visit to Saint Mary’s, in which I clumsily chanted psalms and had a delightfully forthright and wide-ranging conversation with the prioress, I noticed a pamphlet in a wire rack near the front door. Flipping through the glossy trifold, I learned about the community’s associate program, which the convent’s website describes as a program for those “who wish to commit themselves to a Rule of Life and friendship with the Community.” The pamphlet led me to Benedicta, a member of Saint Mary’s for more than thirty years and the director of the associate program.[3] Eventually, I would share with her the outline of my journey and my desire for connection to a community of faith. She then helped me develop a personal rule, which allowed me to see the big picture of my spiritual life, its strengths as well as its limitations.
The 12-step program was an obvious strength. After more than a decade in recovery, I had acquired practices I now consider basic spiritual hygiene: morning meditation (step 11), a personal inventory at the end of each day (step 10), and sharing the wisdom of the program with others (step 12). These practices, accompanied by a thorough review of my past mistakes with another person (steps 4 and 5) and an honest attempt to make amends to anyone I’d harmed (steps 8 and 9), allowed me to experience a more immediate connection to God than I’d ever had as a faithful churchgoer.
But I was gradually realizing that the life-saving spiritual fellowship I’d found through the 12-step program could not become the community of faith I craved. With its liberating insistence on the right of each member to develop or discover their own conception of God, the program precluded any cohesion of belief. I don’t criticize this principle of recovery; I believe it to be one of its wisest features. Those in thrall to addiction (or some other force over which they are powerless) do not need the hurdle of a faith pledge standing between them and recovery. And the experience of millions of people in 12-step programs has shown that miraculous recoveries regularly happen without them.
Nevertheless, I found, as have many of my friends in the program, that the psychological and emotional healing I received from the 12 steps rekindled a desire to join a faith community. I don’t fully understand this trend, but it is undeniable among a significant number of 12-steppers. Maybe the program of recovery is akin to a lifeboat: it can snatch a person from the edge of catastrophe, but ultimately he or she needs to return to shore.
However, setting foot on terra firma is not without complication. Just going back to church would leave unresolved the spiritual vacuum I experienced in my earlier relationship with religion. For a few years, I lived in dismay of my hunger for church, assuming I had nowhere to satisfy it. But communities like the sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent—as well as institutions like the Episcopal Church and authors like Marcus Borg, Richard Rohr, and Barbara Brown Taylor—introduced me to an expression of Christian faith that combines an openness to the diversity of spiritual experience I found in recovery with the ancient practices and principles of one of the world’s enduring religions. In a delicious synchronicity, I discovered in one of my early talks with Benedicta that she was also a member of a 12-step program, and our subsequent conversations have been as peppered with phrases from the lore and literature of recovery as they are with Scripture.
Advent on the Mountain
I am in my car, driving to the convent on a windy December morning in 2023. My mother, visiting from Florida, is meeting me there. I have shared with her my affection for the nuns and their joyful home on the mountain, and to my delight, she is eager to meet them. When we arrive, they are trimming their Christmas tree with the help of several guests who attended that morning’s prayer service, and they encourage us to join in the decorating. I hang a couple round, shiny ornaments and a felt angel. My mother records the moment on her phone, the way her father used to do with his camcorder. Behind the tree, through large picture windows, I see the mostly bare woods sloping down into the valley, performing their annual miracle of death and rebirth.
[1] See Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1945.
[2] See Borg, The Heart of Christianity, New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2003, xiv.
[3] Anonymity is a core principle of the 12-step program, so I am using the pseudonym Sr. Benedicta in place of this nun’s real name.