Talking Tuesday: Being Bread

An old college chum posted the following on his Facebook page sometime last week, and it really struck me.  I've not read the book the exerpt comes from, but Matthew has never led me wrong with book recommendations, and I'm eager to add this title to my list of things to read.

photo taken by my mom

"A 20-year study conducted by the American Psychological Association found that chronically drug-addicted persons already had in place the personality characteristics which made them vulnerable to drug addiction by age eight. These children's parents had pressured them to improve and succeed, without enjoying their children. They failed to notice and appreciate what was worthwhile and valuable about them at each stage of their growth along the way. They had become a project more than a relationship. Consequently [and because the children had not found their self-worth elsewhere, nor developed the tools to secure it, they] did not have a sense of their own belovedness. Pressure to succeed was felt by these children like a hot sun beating down on them from which they could never find shade. Feeling deeply inadequate and unable to soothe the inner pressure constantly reminding them of this, drugs served as a welcome escape.

"Another group of children turned to achievement in a driven, compulsive way. They appeared to have similar psychological characteristics as the drug-addicted group—only achievement itself was their drug. In contrast to a third more psychologically healthy group of non-addicted persons, these two groups shared a sense of not being good enough, which disabled them from being able to take nourishment from appreciating life in the moment. The race to perfection (and avoiding the pain of failure and rejection) was what mattered most.

"But this world will never be perfect on its own apart from διά-Λογος [dia-logue; that is, the way of the Logos] and neither will any of us. One of my mentors, Barry Estadt, used to say, 'Christ did not come to change humanity [by compulsion] but to embrace it.' Paradoxically, in that embrace, we are changed precisely because we are loved as we are before our image has been fully restored. The medicine we receive from God is belovedness. It is a gift which comes through tears as we respond with gratitude and surprise to an embrace that is undeserved and unexpected, like every aspect for the sheer thatness of each moment. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, 'It is not *how* things are in the world that is mystical, but *that* it exists.'"

—Dr. Stephen Muse, Being Bread, Orthodox Research Institute, 2013, p. 35–36.