A Catholic In Recovery: From AA To RCIA
By Paige Rien
There have been two occasions on which I have been welcomed home. First, when I attended my first Overeaters Anonymous meeting and second, when I came into the Catholic Church.
Overeater’s Anonymous meetings were truly the last house on the block for me at twenty-two, having sought healing and help for a deeply entrenched eating disorder for over ten years at that point. I had assumed OA meetings were filled with heavy people who supported each other in their acceptance that they ate and weighed more than everyone else. Instead I found men and women of all sizes, shapes, ages, backgrounds and professions. I would find some reprieve from my disordered eating behaviors at that time, but soon found solace in what I thought was a great solution to binging and purging in my apartment: drinking as much alcohol as I could afford.
In college when I wasn’t eating, or starving, I was drinking. So it was no surprise that I resorted to this “solution” to my disordered relationship with food; to stave off junk food with a pitcher of gin & tonic. Soon enough, after a few occasions waking up in places I never intended to go, I found myself in AA meetings, again surrounded by people of all backgrounds, creeds and colors.
I wasn’t interested in the church, or faith whatsoever, but I found a home in the one thing I had never considered during my achievement driven youth: that there was indeed a power greater than myself. This was truly a revelation and a turning point in my life where faith had never taken root. I came to believe, to my shock, that that power could and would be found and accessed to climb out of the holes I had been digging for myself with food, and now alcohol.
Despite my apathy towards God and religion, a Higher Power, was real and active and wanted me well. I had no problem calling “my” Higher Power, “God,” but was still years away from considering that my Higher Power, who helped me to not eat and drink myself to death, one day a time, could actually be Our Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ.
I was stubborn and had been taught that religion, specifically the Catholic Church, was just around for irritatingly perfect and not very smart Katies, Kellys & Kathys who didn’t have any problems. Over years and years the Lord revealed Himself to me, and I came to understand that it Jesus might be for abundantly broken me too. It was Jesus who helped me find a home in that first meeting when I was 22 years old. He was in the kind faces and accepting smiles, the people who loved me well before I could love myself.
We like to think we’re anonymous in 12 step groups where we only use our first name, but it’s Jesus who is truly anonymous. He is there to heal and make whole so many people who will never say his name or enter his house. He knows we have no chance of holiness before we are actually whole. So he continues to walk broken people into church basements and into fellowship where they can find healing in communion, well outside His holy church.
Somewhere between marrying a lapsed Catholic and stumbling (quite literally by accident) on Medjugore, I discerned that perhaps I was a Christian. I later stumbled on Bishop Barron’s Catholicism series on PBS, of all places, and learned for the first time, who Jesus actually was. As I heard Bishop Barron’s voice, standing in the holy land and explaining who Jesus really was, what He really did and who He really came for, I wept, that, now in my 30s, I had never been taught about Jesus.
Still years later, I stumbled into RCIA, and came into the Catholic church thereafter, truly feeling at home for a second time. Now, when I attend mass, I know without reservation that the mass is for me, that the church is not a hotel for saints as I had thought, but a hospital for sinners like me. It is there, so that I can attend it, broken, but being mended, by His grace, one day at a time.
I am still broken, with a hunger for God that sometimes feels like a hunger for extra food or attention or money or alcohol. But I know now that is how the Lord made me, it’s not an accident and it’s how I came to know Him. And it’s now how I know to go to Him.
Recently, I discovered a program called Catholic in Recovery, a fellowship that is modeled after the 12 steps, but is fundamentally Catholic. I started a weekly Catholic in Recovery meeting at my church, and as a true answer to prayer, now have a way to seek and know Jesus, along other recovering people, with the first lamplight to my feet, the 12 steps, there too, to continue to offer a healing path forward.
If you want to know if there is a Catholic in Recovery meeting near you, start by visiting catholicinrecovery.com. If you have any questions about starting a Catholic in Recovery meeting at your church, or attending any of their 30+ weekly online meetings, you can also learn more about that on their website.
