Contemplative Christian Recovery

This group is a hybrid of addiction recovery, grief support, fellowship, biblical study, and Christian theology located in Cookeville TN. In addition I lean towards holistic healing, homeschooling, and natural birth. It is not officially affiliated to any church or organization and is open to everyone earnestly interested in these topics. It is open to all the beloved children of God because you matter, you are loved, you are worth the trouble, and you were not created to be enslaved to addiction living a life of despair and confusion.

An often glossed over fact regarding 12 step recovery programs is that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous had a Catholic priest as his spiritual director and sponsor. Bill W spent 13 years with a Jesuit priest Fr. Dowling from St. Louis who helped develop AA. The 12 steps mirror the spiritual exercises from St. Ignatius who founded the Jesuit order in 1543. This is one example of how Catholic teachings are alive in the world today and have saved millions of lives while leading them to a closer relationship with God. Most physical and mental ailments are spiritual maladies. The science of the saints provides one of the deepest and most comprehensive studies of mind, body, and soul that exists throughout human history. Discovering this vast resource of wisdom is a humbling experience especially in an age that believes we are the most knowledgeable and advanced group of humans that has ever existed, creating a pattern of pride and superiority which severs our relationship with historical spiritual wisdom.

"To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes. One cannot see one's own eyes because they are that with which ones sees and God is the light by which we see." - Thomas Merton

A modification of the 12 steps reveals the principles below that can be used to recover from any existing addiction. Today everyone is struggling from some type of addiction and escapism from emotional sobriety that affects their relationship with self, neighbor, and God.

1. Our will to action and intellect have habitual patterns that form a template.
2. Our passions, sensory experiences, and faith influence our human experience in known and unknown ways beyond our present understanding.
3. Silent and shared reflection with others helps us discern the will and way of the divine Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
4. Moral theology, the science of the saints, and scripture provides revelation for how our ways have fallen short of God’s ideal ways.
5. Through an act of penance we give voice to acknowledging how we have fallen on the path of the suffering servant.
6. We offer our sacrifice of self-oblation to transform ourselves inside and outside to be renewed by God’s grace and aligned with His providence.
7. We are sent into the world to draw others into God’s loving, peaceful community through our example of service and presence.

"O my brother, the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God; but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons." - Thomas Merton - Letter on the contemplative life