Where are you God?

Can you reach through this fog

that envelops me?

Can you permeate the stink

and bring me back from the brink?

You see, I’m drowning in my addiction,

succumbing to my affliction.

Am I still under your jurisdiction?

Or have I ‘sinned’ myself out?

Where are you God?

Are you hiding?

No, you are.

I’m abiding.

Eira Kitchen

This ‘Prayer of an Alcoholic Mother’ has a surprise twist at its end. Without warning, the voice changes. The ‘alcoholic mother’, having asked with bitterness whether God is ‘hiding’, receives an answer.  “No, you are,” retorts the divine voice. “I’m abiding.”

God’s not going anywhere! The ‘fog’ and the ‘stink’ of this ‘drowning’, would put many off. Powerless in the face of damage pouring from the bottle into every sphere of life, others might give up.  Not the divine one, affirms this prayer. God is ‘abiding’ - steadfastly, enduringly present in this woman’s ‘Passion of Addiction’.  

In the 15th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus uses the verb ‘abide’ eleven times in ten verses. He’s talking about his relationship with his disciples, with us: “Abide in me as I abide in you… I am the Vine and you are the branches,” he says (vs 4,5). Only with this mutual abiding will the grapes come.

We hear this intimate relationship in Arvo Pärt’s I Am the True Vine, composed for Norwich Cathedral’s 900th anniversary in 1996. Inspired by the vine metaphor, an intriguing sound pattern is created as John’s text is sung - words and phrases begun by one voice and completed seamlessly by another. And, with all that plump and plentiful fruit pushing through the leaves in her delicate painting The Vine (also inspired by John 15), Dee Beggarly spotlights the link between God’s abiding and our flourishing, addict or not.