Healing

A dramatic reading adapted from a litany by Ervina Boev and Acts 2:1-21

and Excerpts from Killian Noe, Founder, Recovery Cafe Network

June 8, 2025

Nicole M. Lamarche

I invite you now to take some deeper breaths with me. Breathing in peace, breathing out worry. As always I will begin with a prayer from the words of Psalm 19. I always begin with a prayer, resting on the words of the ancients. Tuning into whatever message the Universe has for us today. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

The situation seemed hopeless, especially since at that time in the 1920’s and 30’s those living with a substance use disorder were thought to be morally weak. And among the socially prominent families of the time, particularly prominent the wealthy industrialists of 1880’s Rhode Island, they were inclined to be “mum on family problems.” If you traveled among the top social circles, like he did, the focus was prep schools and moral discipline and marrying well and all layers of social agreements around manners. Still most knew he had a problem with alcohol, but it seemed like he could still do it all. As his friend Ebby wrote, “I was very much impressed with his drinking career, which consisted of prolonged sprees where he traveled all over the country.” So when Rowland’s father died, everyone thought it would be him, the eldest brother, who would take the helm of the many companies his father had started. Instead it was his younger brother just three years out of college who become the one to administer the estate and he became the patriarch of the family.

By around 1931 things were getting dire with Rowland and according to one writer, “For years he had floundered from one sanitarium to another. He had consulted the best-known American psychiatrists” of the time. So, at age 50, he sought help in other parts of the world, and he traveled to Switzerland where he had an encounter that changed everything and you know I think really it started to change the whole world.

In Zurich, he scheduled an appointment with Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. Historians don’t agree on the next details around how long they worked together, but they all agree on this. Dr. Jung, one of the greatest psychiatrists of living memory met with Rowland and saw him for a time

and Rowland stopped drinking, and then relapsed. He went back to Dr. Jung and here is what he was told. Dr. Jung told him that he had done everything in his power to help him. That clinically speaking, he said that there was nothing left he could do for him. There was nothing more that medicine could offer, but that there was just one thing that might help heal him. Dr. Jung told Rowland Hazard that he if he could find a way to have a “vital spiritual experience” he might be able to get sober.

Jung wrote later, “How could one formulate such an insight that is not misunderstood in our days?” “The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding. ”Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism”—through an enlightenment or conversion experience, that is. It might also occur through “an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends.”

It turns out it was all of it. These were the ingredients for the recipe for healing. Rowland went back to the States and because he already had connections with the Oxford Group, an evangelical, small group gathering of the time. He carried on with that and built deep relationships with others living with similar struggles, making friends with a woman named Ebby. The stories vary but somewhere along the way, Rowland and Ebby and Bill Wilson had all made friends and all needed support, and all needed that vital spiritual experience to stay healthy. They talked in Bill’s kitchen in Brooklyn Heights in 1934 and some months later, all of this came together to form AA.

I know not everyone uses the 12-step model and part of what we will explore today is that there are many avenues to recovery, but I think all of the ones that work have a spiritual component. Part of what I love about Recovery Café is that it is deeply spiritual without the baggage of religion. It offers space for that vital spiritual experience that leads to healing and wholeness.

Conversation with the leaders of Recovery Café Longmont

Communal Reflection

How can we individually and collectively more fully live into our call to heal

and to be healers?

What does it look like to be a congregation committed to supporting those

in recovery?

Beloved of God, on this Pentecost Sunday, let us reclaim our purpose as

healers, to be a place and a people of healing, a place for pivotal spiritual

experiences. May it be so. Amen.