Responding to Our Sisters Struggling with Addiction
Lindsay Schlegel
In the Gospels, time and again, Jesus instructs his followers to tend to the least of their brothers and sisters—those who are vulnerable, marginalized, forgotten by the community. What you to do to them, you to do Me, he tells them. Of the Good Samaritan who tends to the man bruised and broken by the side of the road, Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”
Well, are we doing likewise?
When it comes to those suffering from addiction—particularly substance use disorder—and to their families and friends, I’d have to say we, as a Church, are not doing nearly enough. Over 40 million Americans aged twelve and older are in active addiction, and yet we still don’t really even know how to talk about addiction.
Some of us really want to help, but we don’t know where to start. And part of the reason for that is we don’t understand what addiction really is, as a physiological, psychological, and spiritual disease. All of those elements can come into play when addiction is being formed, and all of them need to be tended to with grace and charity on the road to hope and recovery.
My co-author, Keaton Douglas, and I, were called by the Holy Spirit and our Blessed Mother to make a contribution to helping change the abysmal situation for those addicted in our country and around the world. Our book, The Road to Hope: Responding to the Crisis of Addiction, published earlier this year by Our Sunday Visitor, and honored with the imprimatur and nihil obstat, looks to inform the Church about what addiction is, how we can help, and why—as followers of Christ—we have an obligation to serve those in need.
Keaton is the founder and executive director of the iTHIRST Initiative, which stands for “The Healing Initiative — Recovery, Spirituality, Twelve Step.” Though she doesn’t have her own personal experience with addiction, she can deeply relate to being broken and then redeemed in Christ. When she started to share her story of forgiveness and redemption some years ago, she was invited to speak to a group of women in recovery from heroin addiction. She quickly realized that there were many more commonalities between herself and those women than there were differences.
And if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see the same. We all have unnatural attachments to one thing or another. We have all been broken in some way. In that mutual brokenness is the key to mutual healing. We can’t be anyone’s savior, but we can walk toward the one Savior we all share, accompanying one another and serving as Christ has called us to do.
We all know someone who’s been affected by addiction—a family member, a friend, a coworker, a neighbor, ourselves—and we all probably have someone in our lives who’s suffering right now and we don’t even know about it. One of the hallmarks of the disease of addiction is isolation. The opposite of isolation is community, koinonia, what we are called to as Christians.
The issue is certainly more complicated than a single post can lay out. But in a way, it’s really just this simple. We need to look at those suffering not as “other,” not as “addicts,” but as fellow children of God, as souls with whom God desires to spend eternity.
If it has been on your heart to reach out to those suffering with addiction, or if something in this piece struck a chord, I invite you to read The Road to Hope. Give a copy to a friend, a family member, a priest, a principal, a nurse, or a counselor who might also want to be part of drawing our brothers and sisters back to Christ, back to His Church.
The only hands and feet our Lord has are ours.
To learn more about accompanying those suffering and their family and friends, I also invite you to consider enrolling in the iTHIRST Spiritual Companionship Training at Seton Hall University.
