Steps Three and Four are probably the most daunting steps for anyone to take. No one likes to admit to the creepy crawlies in his personal closet. And no one likes to surrender to another in the context of having that person know every single thing about his/her moral failures. This is why priests urge transparency in the Sacrament of Confession. They know that it is all too human to want to hide the worst and most embarrassing of our failures. Many have gone to their graves without doing this soul searching inventory and have remained unchanged people. My own father would be an example of this. I remember him being the same man in his eighties that I knew in his forties. It is all to easy for those of us who are comfortable within our own skin to want to remain as we are, even if we are causing others significant emotional pain.

For some of us, however, God will do what we are unwilling to do for ourselves. In my own life I had this happen in 2008 when I was staying at Holy Trinity Monastery in Butler, Pennsylvania. I was there because my first wife, Karen, had passed away and I was trying to get a grip on what I should do with my life now that she was gone and my children were all grown. Two nuns in our church, with whom I was friends, had both encouraged me on this path. I had visited the monastery several times before for a short, two-day weekend, but this time I committed to spending all of Lent and Passion Week to really try to see if this was this God’s will for me.

On the last night, I had a very deep and profound experience, an experience which was needed for my growth, but was most unpleasant. Here is what I wrote about it several years later as I described my journey at the monastery:

“And with these few simple words, the unexpected happened. A visual panorama was laid out across my mind to intimately show me the falseness of the ascesis and spirituality I was pursuing. My thoughts reviewed the last ten years of my life, a life marked by consistent solitude, even in crowds. Because of the hurts and pains of my family life and early years, I had placed a distance between myself and the world, preferring my own company and solitary amusements to the possibility of real friendship and the pain which can accompany it. I had never come to see that there is a true spirituality in the concrete realities of every day life when lived in the love of Christ. To me, everyone and everything had been a nuisance which interfered with my pursuit of God and holiness. I had never seen that God can often be found in the ordinary pursuits of life. I envisioned my wife, sitting alone on the couch watching TV. I thought of how she would have loved to have me just sit by her. I knew in my heart how that simple act of companionship would have provided her with a sense of being cared for. I saw years of neglecting my her and my children. I had my room, my computer, my little world. And I had not ventured out of it to share the love of God with those whom God had placed closest to me.
Then I saw the truth, a shocking truth which buried my soul in pain. I had done the very thing I had sworn I would grow up and not do. I had become just like my father. My father, who could have been replaced in our house with a bronze statue of a sitting man and no one would have known any emotional difference. My father, who had been a decent provider, but had never, ever made me feel at all wanted.
To say this revelation shocked me is a great understatement. I spoke earlier of thinking of these things, but this was a much deeper and more profound revelation. I think it may have been a very small realization of how God viewed my life up to that point. It was devastating beyond my ability to express. I realized now why I was feeling so comfortable in the monastery. It was absolutely no different from the selfish and self-centered life I had been living at home. The only difference was more prayers and getting up earlier. This bare, naked reality hurt more than words could even express as I thought of my family at home who needed me to be there and show them the love of Christ in a real and substantial way.
I hardly slept that night. I prayed many fervent and sorrowful prayers that God would have mercy upon me for my sins and failures. Every failure to love, every mistreatment of the people God had put in my life was confessed repeatedly. Sorrow washed over me in waves. As I prayed, I seemed to sense a new level of despair which said to me “This is what hell is like” Not the fiery hell of revenge from God, but the hell which comes from living eternally in the knowledge that you have failed the very ones you should have loved the best. The hell of not being able to receive God’s love because you have spent a lifetime shutting yourself off from love, even with all its times of pain and struggle.”

In reading the lives of the saints, I have read about others who have had the same stunning and painful confrontation with the truth of their lives. Perhaps the most visible of these is St. Mary of Egypt, a woman who lived a life of wanton promiscuity. She did so “not even for money” as she said of herself later. Yet God intervened, opened her eyes, and made her see her true state. This experience drove her to a deep repentance. In this change of heart and life we acknowledge her as one of the greatest saints of the Christian faith.

This experience I had was a mercy from God because it did not allow me to continue in my vain and deceived thoughts of being the fine Christian person I thought myself to be. It is very painful to have your eyes opened and your ego shattered, to come to understand that you are a long way from being what you are called to be. But this experience of knowing the harm you have caused to both yourself and others is an absolute necessity if we as addicts are to change. We are called to forsake the ego and the selfishness that drives mankind to war, divorce, adultery, theft, and a host of other sins which are have such a deep hold on us and so easily sway us.

Unlike other ecclesial bodies in the Christian faith, Orthodoxy offers a true remedy for this, one that Father David has been trying to show us by linking the Steps and the Gospel message. The Orthodox faith calls us to times of fasting, alms-giving, much prayer, and marital chastity. These small ascetic exercises train our bodies to know that we do not live for the pleasures of this life as the sole focus of our existence. In other words, to make it quite plain, it is fine and within God’s providence to have sexual relationship with your wife. It is not fine to serve the demands of your body by giving in to random fornication. It is fine to eat and enjoy food. Gluttony is not fine. This is why we fast almost half the year, to bring our bodies in subjection so that we are not controlled by the passion for food. It is fine to have a bit extra money on hand for emergencies. It is not fine to be a billionaire when there are so many in need of basic living necessities.

May I even take this one step further and say that it is fine to be a Christian, but it is not fine to be a self-centered religious nut (as I once was and still fight against) who thinks he knows everything and that everyone should listen to his theological opinions. That’s an addiction to religiosity, which is just as bad as addiction to alcohol, drugs, and other sins. It’s just a very noble-looking addiction.

A searching and fearless self-inventory exposes these things for what they are. It also shows who we have hurt with our behavior, and that can be, as I found out at the monastery, extremely painful.

It is not therefore surprising to have found out that for some people, work on Steps Three and Four can take years before the addict moves on.