Melinda D. Papaccio
As I started to write this reflection, I took a call to our ITHIRST Initiative addiction ministry’s helpline.[1] A seventy-year-old man from Rhode Island said he wanted help—he was so lonely, he said. While I later found out he wanted help for his alcoholism, I noted that wasn’t the first thing he said—first he said he was lonely. I wasn’t surprised. He craved community, the company of others. His addiction had robbed him of that, just as it had my son who died of an overdose after a 15-year struggle. Loneliness is something all of us can understand. Connection, especially heart to heart connection, is something we all need.
Today, medical experts advise us to call this man’s disease as a “substance use disorder” (or SUD) rather than an “addiction” which carries stigma. The motivation for this change makes sense. I knew firsthand how deadly the stigma we attach to addiction could be. I saw it the many times my son, doing the hard work of recovery, would be knocked down by an encounter with the stigma, and struggle to get back up, feeling so alone in his suffering. As much as I wanted to work against the stigma myself, this term seemed inadequate to describe the very complicated thing that happens to those who are addicted to a substance. In a way, the term puts the focus on the substance, as if getting rid of the substance would solve the problem. If the disorder and all its hallmark traits could be eliminated or healed by removing the substance, I thought how simple recovery would be. But it’s not … I knew that my son’s addiction, and this caller’s, was much more than an issue of substance use. I saw, as I watched my son’s suffering which started with a doctor’s prescription after a minor shoulder surgery, how there was much more to this affliction than simply the substance use component. We are seeing medical professionals who understand this, like Dr. Fred Rottnek, of St. Louis University School of Medicine who has created an Addiction Medicine Fellowship and argues that “[f]or most people who misuse opioids, addiction is not a primary issue. The primary issue may be a poor outcome from an acute episode of pain or chronic pain management. It may be self-medication for serious mental illness or trauma—public or private, episodic or continuous. Since addiction is often not the primary issue, long-term recovery is more than treatment and sobriety—it is human flourishing. Catholic healthcare, at its best, is all about human flourishing.”[2]
Healthcare that promotes human flourishing: this is what Newman was proposing in an address to medical students at the Catholic University of Ireland in November of 1858. He reminded students that “…bodily health is not the only end of man, and the medical science is not the highest science of which he is the subject … the mind and soul have legitimate sovereignty over the body…”[3] Recovery from addiction provides powerful evidence of the need for “sovereignty” of mind and soul over the physical self. As those in recovery know, without a transformation of mind and spirit, there is no real recovery. It doesn’t happen in isolation, but in connection with others, because, as so many of us would be surprised to hear, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but community.” Not only do Newman’s words provide a guidepost in today’s efforts to address the addiction crisis, so too does the motto he chose for his Cardinal’s coat of arms—Cor ad Cor Loquitur, or “heart speaks to heart.”[4]
While Newman may be best known as one who extolled the intrinsic value of knowledge, the motto he chose has nothing to do with intellectualism, but rather with the heart. It embodies “the interpersonal encounter” since, above all, Newman “always wanted to speak from his heart and to touch [others’] hearts.”[5] In his “Discourse IX: Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge.” Newman speaks of his affinity for St. Philip Neri, whose heart spoke to his heart: “[he didn’t aspire or presume to greatness] No; he would be but an ordinary priest as others: and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love.”[6] This man of such lofty intellectual powers was drawn to this humble saint of simple human encounter and called St. Philip Neri his “Father and Patron.” He notes that “[a]ll he did was to be done by the light, and fervor, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation.”[7] Newman’s description seems to portray Neri as kind of doctor of the soul who “…in that low and narrow cell at San Girolamo, [spent hours] reading the hearts of those who came to him, and curing their souls’ maladies by the very touch of his hand.”[8] Of St. Philip’s influence on him, Newman said “I can say for certain that whether or not I can do anything at all in St. Philip’s way, at least I can do nothing in any other.”[9] One might say that “St. Philip’s way” was to promote human flourishing.
Newman understood that human flourishing depended on the experience of connection, to others and to God. In one address he complains about those Christians who, rather than “preaching Christ … tell them to have faith” which “obstruct[s] the view of Christ…”[10] Similarly, one can tell someone desperate for recovery from addiction to “have faith” or that “God loves them” or that they should “pray for healing,” but this rarely helps move that person’s broken heart in such a way that they actually “see” that this is so; it is the difference between knowing a fact and beholding the truth of it.
I am privileged to teach a class called Journey of Transformation, in which students read classic texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition and other religious traditions, that address some of life’s “big questions.” Sensitized by my son’s addiction to the general human tendency toward attachment, I saw how these texts could help them engage the issue and I developed a service-learning component to the course that would put my students in conversation with our ITHIRST ministry’s recovery community. It was my hope that students would be able to begin to behold some truth about the experience of addiction. I wanted their hearts to be moved by the stories of those who have suffered this affliction. I wanted those in recovery to feel seen, their experience validated by these conversations. There could be, I hoped, conversations in which heart spoke to heart. I do this from the core of my own broken heart, to honor my son’s struggle, and to help others have that experience of heart-to-heart connection that he craved but did not have. Over the years, I have seen wonderful moments of connection as a result of these service learning dialogues but it became personal when, several months after my son’s death in 2018, my daughter attended one of our meetings and had a conversation with a young woman about her experience of heroin addiction. Afterwards, my daughter said she understood her brother’s struggle a little better. It was so difficult for family to understand how hard recovery was for him, and it was heartbreaking for him that they couldn’t. However, in conversation this young woman said something that touched my daughter’s heart and helped her behold her brother’s struggle. She said “My addiction speaks in my own voice” which was her way of explaining her addiction’s power over her. Perhaps it was a moment not unlike moments Newman imagined occurred in St. Philip Neri’s cell, as he tended to the soul maladies of those who came to him. It was a sacred moment, a heart-to-heart encounter. “Cor ad cor loquitur”—her heart spoke to my daughter’s heart and blessed it with a moment of healing. I am grateful for this.
In his recent book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction, Carl Eric Fisher, a psychiatrist in recovery from his own battle with alcohol and other substances, traces the path of addiction through human history, our efforts to understand it, and find ways to treat it. In the end he sees that, despite his addiction, he is not “fundamentally different from the rest of the population” and that addiction is a feature of the human condition. In the human tendency toward attachment substance addiction is “just the place where our universal human vulnerabilities are most clearly on display” because all of us “will experience loss of control, loss of power.”[11] He also says that those who suffer from substance addiction and those who do not, “share a fellowship” in that, while substance addiction “causes unthinkable suffering,” that suffering is “contiguous with all human suffering.”[12] Further, it is an affliction of more than just the body. In order for recovery to occur there “needs to be some element beyond the boundaries of traditional medical care, too—one that goes beyond saving lives to promoting well-being and flourishing. To truly meet the challenge of addiction, a therapeutic response alone is not enough. For centuries, people have sought out a further step, something more recently called recovery.”[13] The opposite of recovery is not sobriety, it’s community—Cor ad Cor Loquitur.
Fisher ends his book with the insight that “[a]ddiction is profoundly ordinary: a way of being with the pleasures and pains of life, and just one manifestation of the central human task of working with human suffering.”[14] He doesn’t sound like a clinician here, and that’s just the point. He sees that, as Newman warned in his lecture to medical students, in addition to the truths of his profession, “there are other truths, and those higher than his own.”[15] That higher truth is borne out in Newman’s motto, in the need for connections of the heart in order for humans to heal the soul’s maladies and to flourish. It is what the elderly man who called our ITHIRST helpline that day needed. It is what my son craved, that heart to heart connection with others, and with God.
ENDNOTES
[1] ITHIRST Initiative. https://ithirstinitiative.org
[2] Rottnek, F., MD, MAHCM. “Opiods: One More Epidemic for Catholic Healthcare.” Health Progress. Journal of the Catholic Health Organization of the United States. www.Chausa.org March-April 2018. Accessed July 9, 2022. https://www.slu.edu/medicine/family-medicine/pdfs/opioids-one-more-epidemic-for-catholic-health-care.pdf
[3] Newman, J.H., “Christianity and Medical Science. An Address to the Students of Medicine (November 1858), “The Idea of a University, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1982), p. 383.
[4] Crosby, J., The Personalism of John Henry Newman, (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), p. 66.
[5] Crosby, J., The Personalism of John Henry Newman, (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), pp. 74-5.
[6] Newman, J.H., and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University, “Discourse IX: Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,” (University of Notre Dame: Notre Dame, Indiana, 1982), p. 178.
[7] Newman, J.H., and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University, “Discourse IX: Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,” (University of Notre Dame: Notre Dame, Indiana, 1982), p. 179.
[8] Newman, J.H., and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University, “Discourse IX: Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,” (University of Notre Dame: Notre Dame, Indiana, 1982), pp. 179-80.
[9] Newman, J.H., and Ed. Martin J. Svaglic, The Idea of a University, “Discourse IX: Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,” (University of Notre Dame: Notre Dame, Indiana, 1982), p. 181.
[10] Crosby, J., The Personalism of John Henry Newman, (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press,2014), pp. 72-3.
[11] Fisher, C.E., The Urge: Our History of Addiction, (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), p. 283.
[12] Fisher, C.E., The Urge: Our History of Addiction, (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), p. 284.
[13] Fisher, C.E., The Urge: Our History of Addiction, (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), p. 289.
[14] Fisher, C.E., The Urge: Our History of Addiction, (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), p. 300.
[15] Newman, J.H., “Christianity and Medical Science. An Address to the Students of Medicine (November 1858), “The Idea of a University, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 385.