Recovering Recovery Programs

Last weekend my wife and I watched the movie Beautiful Boy. To say it was gut-wrenching is an understatement. Some movies pull on your heart strings, this one smashes it into pieces.

The movie tells the story of Nic Scheff’s struggle with addiction and his father’s attempt to help his son. It is disturbingly honest, not presenting simple good guy, bad guy character-arcs, but presents the characters as they actually are: well-meaning, but seriously flawed.

I often judge the quality of a movie by its ability to enable the willing suspension of disbelief, or to really enter into the movie, not just as a viewer but as a participant. This movie does that to the highest degree.?

At one point the phone rings… and it rings… and it rings again, and my stomach drops understanding the agony a parent in this situation faces every time they receive a phone call, hoping it is not that call.

The story weaves through cycles of recovery and relapse, teaching the audience the meaning behind a line often repeated in the movie: “relapse is part of recovery.”?

And while the humanity of the movie is in full-force, there also seems to be a certain emptiness due to the conspicuous absence of God. It is not just that God is not explicitly mentioned, there are many movies or books such as Lord of the Rings or Pride and Prejudice that never explicitly mention God, yet He is omnipresent. But in this movie, there is no sense of providence or meaning to the struggle. There is just pain.

There is only one scene in which God is explicitly mentioned. It is an interaction between David Scheff (Nic’s father) and a drug user he meets on the street. It is a moving scene as David is on the search for his missing son, he finds another likely missing child on the street and treats her to a meal.?

He is likely feeding and caring for this child the way he wishes to care for his own, but he is also curious to learn from her about what it is that his son is experiencing and why he is doing what he’s doing. He asks her many questions, one of which is why she wouldn’t continue with any recovery programs she had started, and she replies that they drove her crazy with all that “God sh*t.”

The underlying suggestion in this scene, and throughout the movie in its depiction of recovery programs, is that God is somehow an inconsequential part of 12-step programs and if we removed all that weird “God stuff”, then maybe the programs would become more effective. This is really tragically ironic for a movie with the express aim of raising awareness about addiction and increasing access to recovery that they display such a shallow understanding of recovery programs.

God is not a part of 12-step programs, He is the program. The 12-steps are not designed primarily to get someone to stop using, but to come to know and depend fully on God. Many think of these programs like chemotherapy, when it is much more of a heart transplant.?

The third step, which is perhaps the most crucial step, is to “make a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understand him.” Catholics will typically praise the first half of this step, but then have trouble with the “as we understand him” bit. But this does not seem to be an open invitation to believe in any God one chooses, since it is qualified in that it needs to be a God in which one can reasonably turn over their will and their lives to His care. It would be absurd to make this type of surrender to a God who is not all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing.

But still, even if we are to say these are the characteristics God would need to have in order for us to surrender to Him, how can we be so sure that we did not simply create an idea of this God so that we can receive the peace of surrender, without the reality of God? In other words, how do we know we’re not just tricking ourselves into believing something because we think it may be practically beneficial, though not metaphysically true? And can we actually persist in believing something in these terms? It might be beneficial for my behavior this winter if I believed Santa Claus was real, but I don’t think it’d be possible for me to believe something I know to be false.

This seems to be something that Christianity uniquely addresses. Because the reality of this type of God is made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. Because God is not just an idea, He became a man. My belief in Santa would change if he came down the chimney on Christmas morning, just as my belief in God changed when I realized he was born of a woman on the first Christmas morning.

And by becoming man, He demonstrated what it means to be all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. His goodness in how he suffers patiently, His power in how he serves humbly, and His knowing in how he loves personally. His suffering makes ours meaningful, His service makes it easy, and His love makes it joyful.?

When Christ tells us today that if we wish to be great we must become a servant, He is teaching the same thing as step three from the program: to find ourselves we must give ourselves away. We must surrender ourselves to Him and those He has given us to serve.?

And we can trustingly surrender “for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”