Limited by Trauma She felt guilty. Her father had just died, but instead of feeling sad, she felt happy. Was she a horrible, heartless daughter? Not knowing what to think, she asked to talk to a chaplain. In bits and pieces, her story came out. For the last year and a half, she’d been her father’s caregiver. He’d never been easy to be around. A combat veteran, he had run his home with military discipline. Orderly, rigid, and autocratic, he showed his children a limited kind of love. Mostly he ignored them, but he could be abusive. When drunk, he was cruel to their mother. It was the typical story…
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Addiction, Surrender, and the Holy
Surrendering to the Wrong Thing Twelve-step groups talk about surrender. Few of us, perhaps none of us, get through life without surrendering to something, but not all surrenderings are created equal. Some lead to freedom and restoration; others lead to suffering and eventual annihilation. During my late adolescence, I saw some of the ugliness that comes when we surrender to the wrong things. On my way to the Midwest, I ended up riding around with a young man who sold large quantities of drugs to local dealers. Some of them lived in homes where the lawns were trimmed and the siding newly painted, but most squatted in boarded-up apartment buildings,…