One thing I look forward to during the week is our Narcotics Anonymous meeting at the monastery.

 

The longer I participate in it, the more I realise that sin is not our problem – alienation is the problem and sins are only some symptoms of it. That we are alienated from God – that is the correct understanding of the story of Adam and Eve and of the fall. This is so essential to understand, and we must put away from our hearts all thoughts of the juridical heresy of “Original Sin.”

 

Because of our alienation from God, we can also become alienated from each other, and from our own selves. Understanding this latter fact – alienation from one's own self – is of the utmost importance if one wishes to actually help anyone or support them in their struggle.

We may have 50 people in our Narcotics Anonymous group at any one time, but when we are gathered together, no one is alienated from the rest of the group. Everyone there is gathered with a people who understand them and know the meaning of their pain and suffering, of their trauma. No one is being made to feel that they are in alienation because of their race, past, colour, or sexual orientation. This is starkly unlike most religions –from so much of Christianity and Islam in particular. Everyone at N.A. is open to each other, to support them in their struggle, and to assure them that they are not alienated from those around them. That is one of the main healing features, and it is also one of the reasons why religion fails so often when it tries to help people who are addicted: our moralisation. Our penchant for trying to moralise everything often makes it impossible for us to help people who are truly traumatized, suffering, and in need.

 

One thing we are trying to do in our N.A. group is to help people discover an inner strength that they themselves have but did not know that they had. So far, I have never met anyone in the group who was truly an atheist.

 

We too often look for some "hypothetical moral issue" when dealing with people who have these traumas, when we should be looking at understanding their inner suffering and the source of their various alienations. Instead of "convicting them of their sin" (as the sectarians like to say), we help them to overcome their alienations.

This is the greatest value that I see in the Narcotics Anonymous movement.