Conversatio Divina

Part 12 of 16

Communion & Forgiveness

How the Body and Blood Open the Way for Healing Relationships

Ben Patterson

I am an adult child of an addict. Though true, it sounds strange to say it, since I’m sixty-nine years old, and hardly feel or look like a child. And in a deeper sense it is no longer true—which is what I’d like to tell you about. 

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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  “Already” believers
  2. 02.  “A Good Deal”
  3. 03.  Graced Change

My mother was a prescription-drug addict most of her adult life. She didn’t use alcohol, and her strong teetotaling Baptist convictions told her that those who did imbibe were far from God. But she was drunk daily; falling-down-drunk, can’t-hold-a-thought-drunk, slurring, slack-jawed, stuporously drunk on pain pills, anxiety pills, sleeping pills, and all manner of pills to offset the side effects of all the other pills. The decades of her fifties, sixties, and seventies were largely spent lying on the living room couch in her night gown, the room temperature set at 85 degrees, watching “Christian” television, humming along in alto harmony to the gospel tunes she heard. 

It had not always been that way. In my elementary school days I knew my mom to be a beautiful, vivacious woman. I was proud of her. I wanted my friends to meet her. Sometime around early high school that all changed: she became unpredictable and unreasonable, self-absorbed, and vacant. At that time, I couldn’t put it into those words, since as an adolescent I myself had become unpredictable and unreasonable, self-absorbed and vacant. All I knew was that I didn’t like her any more. Years later, my sister and I were able to connect the dots, and trace the beginnings of what we as adults had come to know of her addictions back to those years and to better understand the source of the confusion, rage, and resentment we felt toward our mother. 

Things got worse after my dad died, and my mom remarried eighteen months later. Her new husband had married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again a woman who was an alcoholic. In what Samuel Johnson drily called the triumph of hope over experienceThe Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 275:36.—he hadn’t learned a thing from his experience with his first wife, and had married a woman just like her. For the next thirty years she was joined to a man who with the best of intentions only helped pave the way to hell for her and deepen the chasm between her and her children. 

I prayed for my mother, but over the years my prayers became lifeless and perfunctory, even though my theological training gave me a framework for real hope in prayer. I was schooled to think of Christ’s kingdom both as an “already” and a “not yet,” as something that has come and is coming, to be embraced in the here and now and to be earnestly prayed for in the future. Christ has come, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ is seated at the right hand of God in power and victory (already!)—and Christ is coming again (not yet!). The decisive blow against sin and death has been struck, and the knockout punch is coming. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus and put your enemies under your feet and hand over the kingdom to your Father, “so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28; see verses 24–28; Revelation 22:20). 

That’s good stuff, sound biblical theology, but it can be twisted to accommodate the kind of low-grade despair that can set in when our prayers go unanswered for years and years, as mine had with my mother. A disappointing “already” was sucking the life out of the “not yet.” There were no signs that anything was changing, and hope, the not yet, at least on an emotional level, was becoming vague and abstract. I gradually began hedging my bets on the here and now by retreating into a future so distant I couldn’t be hurt by the present. It’s also an occupational hazard of one embedded in an academic culture; cover all possible objections to your thesis by making even the contradictions seem to support it: sin and death won’t be done away with until Christ returns, and that’s probably a long way off. Your mother won’t get well until the Kingdom comes—you knew that didn’t you? So chill out on your prayers. 

But chill out is the very thing Jesus said not to do when we pray. He said to keep on asking, keep on knocking, keep on seeking, with unrelenting chutzpah, like the widow who badgered a callous judge into giving her justice, lest she, “beat me down by her continual coming” (Luke 18:5, ESVScripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.). Or like the man who bangs on the door of a neighbor until he wakes up an entire village and shames him into doing the very thing he doesn’t want to do: get out of bed in the middle of the night and give him food for his guest. Read about it—it’s in the Bible.See Luke 11:5–10.

Jesus said to pray that way because that’s what his Father does with us. We would never pray unless God’s Spirit had not first moved us to pray. “We seek only because He found,” wrote P. T. Forsyth, “we beseech Him only because He first besought us. . . . Our prayer is the answer to God’s.”P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (London, England: Independent Press Ltd., 1954), 15.

01.  “Already” believers

My college-aged son Joel was perceptive enough to realize what a mess his grandmother—and his dad—were in. His new-found faith stirred him to truly believe and act on Jesus’ parable about the widow and the callous judge. So he printed out several copies of the story, and taped them to all the mirrors in our house, with an exhortation to the family to keep on praying for the woman he called “G-ma.” He wrote, “If we’re not praying for G-ma, who will?” I was touched by what he did, but saddened by my paralysis. 

So God knocked on the door again. Literally. It was a friend, knocking at our back door, who I’ll call Linda. Linda drove by our house every day on her way home from work. She was what I would call a Charismatic or Pentecostal Christian—the terms aren’t exactly interchangeable, and I’m not using them with precision. My experience with Christians like Linda, and I have many friends like her, is that they are decidedly “already” kinds of believers. They expect miracles to happen just as readily and as frequently as they appeared to happen in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. I have problems with their hermeneutics, but I like to be around people who I think err on the “already” side of things, because, as I just said, I tend to err on the “not yet.” 

From time to time, whenever she felt the Spirit nudge her to drop in and share a word or two from the Lord, Linda would stop at our house. Sometimes I was a little irritated when I heard her knock on our door, because it meant I had to stop doing whatever it was that I was doing. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I’m that kind of guy: more Not Yet. But by the time she left, I was always glad she had interrupted me, because she usually did have a word from the Lord. Since she arrived around dinnertime, we would invite her to stay and share a meal with us, but she always politely declined. 

But this time she didn’t. She stayed for dinner. I expected her to leave soon after we ate, but she stayed and chatted over a cup of tea. Surely she would leave after she finished her tea, but she lingered until my wife had to go to a meeting at church. Then she helped my daughter Mary and me clear the table and wash the dishes. Surely she would leave then. But she didn’t. The conversation continued for some time after the dishes were done. It was now 9:00 pm, and she had been with us for three and a half hours. I started looking at my watch, and was on the verge of telling her I needed to go to bed because I had an early meeting the next day, when she asked, “How is your mother?” 

I had never mentioned my mother to her. She knew nothing of my family. So I told her. 

She look relieved, and asked, “May I pray for you?”  

“Yes,” I said, and we bowed our heads, Linda, my daughter, and I. 

I closed my eyes, and in that moment, my mother’s face filled my mind and heart: more vivid and beautiful and vivacious than I had ever remembered her when I was an elementary school boy. And she was wise, smiling at me with something like compassion and understanding. Understanding? My mother? She knew me, and she was someone I wanted to know. All of this came is a flash, the twinkling of an eye. It was no memory, no wish—for I was beyond wishing. It was a vision of my mother in the Resurrection, in a future so sure and powerful that it was invading the present. 

How do I know this? I know that I know that I know. If you could see what I saw, you would know too. 

 

I looked up at Linda and my daughter, weeping, and stammered out what I saw. Linda just smiled and said, “Oh, good. Now I can go home.” She had been hanging around all evening because she knew that she knew that she knew the Spirit wanted her there for something, she knew not what. She was getting as tired as I was, waiting. Now that she knew what she had been waiting for, she could go home and go to bed, her mission accomplished. 

My prayers for my mother changed. There was new vigor and hope, and I was satisfied and grateful that God had done in me what he wanted to do. Mission accomplished for me, I thought. But there was more, much more. Two years later my worst nightmare came true: my stepfather died, and my mom moved in to live with us. The heavenly vision collided with the earthly reality: the falling-down, can’t-hold-a-thought, slurring, slack-jawed, stuporous, pill-chasing reality of addiction. The face of a glorified and redeemed mother and sister in Christ faced off with the old addict. Over the years, I’ve loved to quote a line from Jim Elliot: “The will of God is always a bigger thing than we bargain for, but we must believe that whatever it involves, it is good, acceptable and perfect.” It preaches really well. I was about to find out how difficult and precious the “bigger” can be. 

02.  “A Good Deal”

Daily I had to watch her shuffle drunkenly around my home. The old bitterness crept back in to my heart, and as I watched her I would think, “You’ve lived a bad life, you’ve alienated your children, and here you are in my home, getting taken care of, sucking more life out of me. You sure are getting a good deal, Mom.” I silently repeated those words scores of times. 

But daily I also watched my dear wife knock herself out caring for my mom, who could not be left alone, and needed constant care. I would be at work all day, and come home to find my beloved exhausted. She was laying her life down for my mother and me. The best I could do was to step in and help carry the load. But I was hardly laying down my life, for as I did, I was silently repeating the angry litany, “You’re sure getting a good deal, Mom.” This went on for months. 

A wonderful doctor in our church helped us titrate her down from the lethal levels of narcotics she was ingesting, but that meant me giving her pills to her each evening as she sat on the side of her bed, her hands open like a supplicant at the communion rail, and me placing in her hands the things I hated. 

But weekly, I also was forced to hand her the elements of Communion, the symbols of the body and blood of Christ. She would sit with us in church, but since she wasn’t able to safely walk to the front of the sanctuary, I would go up, take communion myself, and then bring back the elements to her, and say, as I handed them to her, “This is the body of Christ, broken for you; this is the blood of Christ, shed for you.” And she would say to me, “Thank you.” Later that evening, I would again hand her the pills, as she sat at her bedside. 

Only God can arrange those kinds of collisions and juxtapositions. When he does, something has to move over, the way the poor old idol Dagon fell over and broke to pieces, when the ark of God was set next to it.See 1 Samuel 5:1–5. I could not go on indefinitely muttering under my breath, “You sure are getting a good deal, Mom,” as I watched my sweet wife daily lay down her life for my mom—and me—enacting the very words I said as I handed my mother the bread and the wine: “This is the body of Christ, broken for you. This is the blood of Christ poured out for you.” The light shines in the darkness and the darkness, uncomprehending, must flee. 

So, one day as I saw my mother shuffle out of her bedroom on her way to breakfast, and as I started to curse her once again, with my angry, “You sure are getting a good deal,” God spoke to me as clearly as I have ever heard him speak. 

He said, “So are you, Ben,” meaning that Christ suffered and died for my sins every bit as much as he did for hers. The “crucial eccentricity”Frederick Buechner’s phrase. of the gospel, the great mystery of God’s grace is that all who trust in Christ for their salvation are getting an incredibly good deal. I knew that, of course. I believed it when I opened my heart to Christ as a child. I’ve preached it with conviction. I’ve written a book about it. But I’d forgotten it. What else could explain the way I had taken the evangel, “You sure are getting a good deal,” and turned it into a curse? Lord, have mercy on me. 

He did, and he does. I forgave my mother that day, in a moment. But it was decades in the making, this forgiveness. 

03.  Graced Change

So much happened after that. The generosity of friends (another good deal) made it possible for my mother to move into a fine care facility just four blocks from our home. Over the next eight years she slipped happily into dementia. Let me explain: Gradually, as she lost her cognitive powers she became spiritually what I had never known her to be. She became thankful; gratitude poured out of her for the littlest things. I had never known her to say thank you for anything except to have the salt passed to her at the dinner table. She started asking us how we were. She had never, in my memory as an adult, asked questions like that. And though she would soon forget how we answered her question, she really wanted to know how we were. And she became curious. She was childlike in her wonderings about how clouds would move across the sky the way they did. She marveled at the colors of things. The people at the care facility loved her; this shrunken and wizened little lady whose false teeth wouldn’t stay put, and who finally gave up on them. The old vanity was gone too. Our gratitude, wonder, humility and love grew with hers. 

I know this was no quid pro quo on God’s part. He was in no way obligated to do such a sweet thing for us because I admitted that before the cross I stand on the same level ground as my mother. He just did it because it’s that old “crucial eccentricity” of his at work again. He delights to do good things for bad people. 

My mother died at age ninety-five. How did she live so long, this woman who had so abused her body? My sister and I think God kept her alive so long so we could get straightened out, and be reconciled to her. She passed away in the early morning hours of Saturday, March 31, 2012. As God’s providence would have it that is also the date of the feast day on which much of the church around the world remembers the raising of Lazarus. It is also the day before Palm Sunday. And again, as God’s kind timing would have it, she was buried on Good Friday, and my entire family would gather together for the first time in decades to remember her life on Saturday, and again to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, the next day on Easter Sunday. 

I began this piece by announcing that I am the adult child of an addict, but that in a deeper sense that is no longer true—of her and of me. This came home to me vividly as I watched her casket lowered into her grave. I heard the words of the apostle Paul: 

 

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory (Colossians 3:1–4, NIVScripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™, Italics added.) 

 

The truest thing that can be said of anyone who is in Christ, is that we have yet to see who they really are, for that is hidden with Christ in God, waiting to be revealed when Christ appears in glory. My mother? I’ve not seen the last of her. But I got a little peek of what I will see those last eight years of her life. 

Footnotes

For more than ten years, the Reverend Ben Patterson has been the Campus Pastor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is a contributing editor to Christianity Today, Leadership Journal, and was previously a contributing editor and editorial writer with The Wittenberg Door. Ben has written several books including: Serving God: The Grand Essentials of Work & Worship, Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, Deepening Your Conversation with God, The Prayer Devotional Bible, He Has Made Me Glad, and God’s Prayer Book: The Power and Pleasure of Praying the Psalms.

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