This is about spirituality and recovery—they are, after all, connected by an umbilical cord of hope. In Christianity, which is my practice path of hope, God, the only known unbroken thing which makes Him Holy, chooses to dwell in broken things. Someone undefiled with darkness, pathology, lethargy, hopelessness, depression, bone weariness, confusion, intrusive thoughts and cognitive dissonance chooses to infuse this purity into the chaotic whirlwind called ‘soul.’ I don’t understand that any more than the 50-some years I have read “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form and void.”
All I can see is that from the beginning God was going into things that were empty and dwelling there to infuse them with something holy. He found formlessness a good place to inhabit. God could choose to inhabit anything, anywhere, any one but seems to look for the empty places in which to stuff His hope. Our own brokenness from pathology is the place we want to recover from. It’s a dark, dank, hell hole full of disintegrated minds. Why anything so integrated and whole would want to park in there, I do not know. But I’m fascinated that Holiness wants to dwell inside people—and mostly broken people. God wants to prove that pathology does not have the last word—in anything. Everything stripped away from lying, cheating, and violence can be redeemed in its brokenness by the dwelling, the indwelling, of Holiness. Like a truffle-sniffing dog, God LOOKS FOR the place of brokenness that has made room for Him, and goes to that place.
The rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous have given me such hope of this message – recovery as a holy place to dwell – because millions of people have sat in those rooms broken and ravaged by pain and have had God in the room with them, hanging with them in their recovery, then choosing to move right into their soul so pathology doesn’t win. If recovery were a place of hopelessness, God would not dwell there and it would not be holy. This brings a different view to recovery.
Our brokenness is the entry point, the point verge of coming to a holiness we would not have had any other way. It is not that we have learned from our stupidity of choosing a pathological partner, it’s that we get the gift of finding recovery as a holy place to dwell because it’s where the holy himself, dwells. Sure, take the insight that comes with the pain (otherwise the pain has been useless) but by all means see recovery as a holy place upon which God sees worthy of journeying with you. Kum-by-yah mountain peak experiences are not the only place to find God. He finds something of His heart in others when they are broken. When their soul is seeping out of the cracks of their broken heart vessel, it’s where he imagines His balm of Light that is needed.
Brokenness and dissociation does not feel like a place of recovery, much less a place the holy wants to dwell. But it is, in fact, exactly where the holy indwells—right there in the fetal positioned part of our pain. When we want to curse God and die, we have forgotten God lives in our recovery and that holiness is finding it’s home inside of our dissociation—something fragrant is germinating—hope, change, a different way of being. Every symptom we hate about the aftermath is a place where holiness dwells. When your brain fog is knee deep, wonder to yourself “this place right now, the way I am, is where Holiness is.” The issue of the ‘sacredness of place’ is not that we have to pilgrimage to a cathedral to have a goose bump encounter with a sacred place, it’s that our brain fog is as sacred a place as anywhere else. The chanting of the Book of Hours is perhaps not even as touching as your chanting of the laundry list of harm done by pathology.
I didn’t make the rules—I am just an observer and it appears God finds the broken a special place for holy and the path of recovery, the indwelling journey He prefers. Scoot over.
(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)
