Zombie Land

The character Edmund, in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, when offered some Turkish Delight by the White Witch, saw no purpose in concealing His pleasure. The sweet confection was unlike anything he’d ever experienced!  It was more than just sweet, it was the taste of heaven!  His entire mouth, nose and tongue tingled, his tummy felt warm, and his body felt like it did just before he fell asleep – mellow and satisfied.  It was definitely a feeling he liked, and he wanted it to continue.  In fact, every time he stopped eating, the memory of it was so pleasant and alluring, that it drew him back for just one more taste.  So he continued to eat another, and another, and another, never suspecting that it might lead to trouble.  The White Witch was so nice, and seemed to have a never ending supply of the stuff.  What could be wrong?

Yet soon his desire for it was all he thought about.  It became an obsession.  He turned his back on his siblings, became irritable and irrational, and became blind to the rising danger of the White Witch’s evil intentions. 

How might Edmund have felt about his relationships and what his obsession was doing to them?  When he thought about them, he no doubt felt bad, and might even have sworn, from time to time, to simply say no to the next bite, in order to try and give up the habit and feel normal again.  Yet the memory of that initial pleasure he felt would come sneaking back, and it was irresistible.  “Just one bite”, he would tell himself, all the while knowing it was controlling him, not the other way around.

Now imagine instead of Edmund, the character’s name was Dave.  And instead of Turkish Delight, what he had been offered was cocaine.  How seamlessly these two changes fit into the story.  We need to change little else, except perhaps to change the word obsession to addiction.  The phenomenon is precisely the same, even though the euphoria that cocaine can deliver is much more powerful than that of Turkish Delight.  

But the two substances have this in common: They both make the user feel so much better than they do normally, that they are compelled to replicate that pleasure.  Yet each successive high is just a little less pleasurable than the one before it.  So it takes more and more, to get less and less of what the user seeks.

Now, substitute the love of money for the substance.  Can the story line still hold up?  Of course it can.  When Paul the Apostle wrote that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, that’s just what he was talking about.  Don’t you see?  The problem of addiction or alcoholism requires something much more than just the overuse or abuse of a substance.  It requires a person who has a void in his soul and is in need of something to fill it.  The man or woman obsessed with the accumulation of wealth is no different, in this respect, than the sexaholic, the alcoholic or the addict.  What ruins lives is not the object of our obsession, it’s the obsession itself. 

So what’s the answer?  How can we human beings pursue financial gain without money becoming an obsession?  How can Edmund have a bit of Turkish Delight without allowing it to control him? And how can a social drinker take a glass of wine without it taking control of him?  The world is full of shiny new things, things that unexpectedly enrapture us in ways we have never experienced before.  And some of them, if we are not careful, have the potential of becoming an obsession for some unsuspecting soul, intent only on a pleasant new experience.  And don’t think for a moment that you are not one of those people.  You just haven’t found the stuff, or the experience, or the quest to chase after, that really blew you away and turned you into a green-eyed monster the way Turkish Delight did Edmund.

This propensity for human beings to turn into the living dead because of an obsession or addiction, is nothing new, of course.  And man’s cruelty to his fellow man assures us that we will continue to invent new ways of trapping innocent wanderers.  Who would have ever suspected that something as innocent as Turkish Delight could have the same effect on a young boy as it had on Edmund?  Yet many have been ensnared by the addictive power of glue sniffing, cutting, gambling, internet porn and all manner of things.  Again, it’s not the object of the obsession that ruins lives and turns people into zombies, it’s the obsession itself.

A man named Thomas Chalmers, writing in the 1800s, said that if one did fall victim to an ‘impure affection’, the answer was to expel it, and replace it with a pure one.  Few people who have themselves fallen victim, or seen a friend of loved one do so, realize just how powerful the spiritual aspect of the phenomenon is. In fact, few people have ever heard or been told that the substance itself may not be the main issue.

Participants in Alcoholics anonymous and other so-called 12-step programs learn about this spiritual aspect in the very first three steps of the program:

1.       “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.       “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.       “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

Many of the testimonies of the early AA pioneers were assembled into a book, often referred to as simply “The Big Book”, although its official title is Alcoholics Anonymous.  It’s in the public domain, and can be read in its entirety online at http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/.  Each testimony is just a few pages, and it only takes perhaps a dozen of them to realize that almost universally, completion of the first three steps became the key that unlocked many, many doors to recovery.  Participants in the early AA movement discovered something on their own that had baffled the medical community for many years: That God could replace in the alcoholic the need to take another drink.

Pursuit of that higher power, Chalmers would say, can become the pure affection that can successfully replace the impure one. Edmund met Aslan, who spoke wisdom to him powerfully, and became for him the pure affection he needed.  Christians would say that the power of God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, is the only pure affection that can permanently replace the impure one.

As stated previously, everyone is at risk, either directly or because of the relationship with a friend or relative.  It is so pervasive and insidious, that we should all be on guard at all times.

Edmund had never tried Turkish Delight before.  He was totally unprepared for the powerful feelings of desire that rose up in him when he did.  So the question to ponder here is this: Could you become an Edmund at some point in the future?  Have you already fallen victim?  This world is full of tender traps like this one.  What makes you so sure you won’t fall into one someday?

The other thing to be aware of is that an addiction alters the chemistry of the brain.  Either the substance itself or the chemicals the brain releases because of the euphoria take the addict to an altered state of being, and those under their spell can go years, even decades, until they finally experience enough pain that their desire to heal starts to eclipse the desire to get high.  And while that’s going on, the growth and maturity that takes place in ‘normal’ people is arrested.  Many of the addicts we encounter are in their 40's, but have the emotional maturity of teenagers.

Addictions of the adult kind are so persistent in their ability to entrap us, that victims often go many years, even decades under their power, usually thinking that the cure is to stop drinking or stop using.  But we can now safely say with a high level of confidence that that’s simply not the case.  The drugs or alcohol are not the problem.  The reason they took hold is deeper.  The key is that their victim felt such pleasure at first.  Yet some people try the same things and don’t feel so good.  The ‘high’ is just not all that high.

Of course those of us who encountered our own Aslan, or higher power, have reason not to fear.  Pursuit of that relationship is almost alone in its ability to replace the impure affection.

Christian 12-step programs like Celebrate Recovery, believe that as well.  They believe that the HP has a name, and that it’s the name above all names: Jesus Christ.  And they believe that belief in the power of the right and true Higher Power is much better than believing in one who is mythological or false.

Whether one is willing to accept Jesus Christ as the true HP or not, however, this much is undeniable based on the evidence.  No other program or method has helped more alcoholics get sober than AA, bar none.  And those who have read the testimonies can easily see that the power of those first three steps is the key.  Many report that taking that third step created for them such a powerful effect, that they felt free almost immediately.

We are such curious creatures.  We ask ‘God, where are you?  Where have you been?’ We don’t realize that it’s like standing in a hurricane and searching for the wind. 

He is there.  And He is not silent.