E-mman-u-el  [ ih-man-yoo-uhl ] from Hebrew ʿimmānū’ēl “God is with us”

I was listening the other day to an interview with Chris Herren who is in his mid-forties. He’s a humble, insightful, and articulate man. And he’s doing such good work and touching so many lives. I was moved by his story—one often, but I think inaccurately—called a fall from grace.

Formerly a high school basketball All-American from Fall River, Mass—he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he graduated, in a best-selling book about his tough blue-collar town, team, and especially him. Recruited by all the power-house programs in the country, he opted instead for Boston College close to home where he barely broke a sweat before being kicked out of school after failing several drug tests. Eventually, he made his way to Fresno State for his first of many second chances from where he made his way to the NBA where in his second year of pro ball he ended up in the players’ parking lot of the Boston Celtics in his uniform and sweats fifteen minutes before the horn and the introduction of the starting line-up waiting for his dealer to drop off his drugs. You get the picture. But more than likely—or hopefully—only a small fraction of the picture, of how bad it got.

Soon he was bounced out of the NBA onto courts in foreign lands where he continued to play pro ball, fall deeper into addiction, dance with its concomitant demons, and exasperate and exhaust his family, friends, former coaches, teammates, a whole squad of health care workers, the law, and all his family’s funds. The former millionaire wunderkind was living in a home his mother left to him where—for a time—his young family ate in the dark and bundled up in the cold because he spent all their money on his daily deeds of death and woe.

Married to his high school sweetheart whom he’d known since the sixth grade, with two youngsters and a third child on the way, he overdosed for the fourth and final time (knock on God). He was found unconscious in his car where he crashed into a cemetery, was found with a needle still in his arm, and later told by the paramedics that he had been dead for thirty seconds. He tells all about his Dante-esque journey in his 2012 book Basketball Junkie: A Memoir which tells the full story of what years earlier ESPN had made into a 30 for 30 documentary film of the still-unfolding story titled Unguarded.

Now, fifteen years sober, he is the co-owner with his wife of two holistic, professionally-staffed treatment centers and is one of the most in-demand speakers in the country invited to talk to professional and college sports teams and young students and parents throughout America. He speaks at 200 gatherings a year.

I tell you all this simply as background and—because I’m not a sports writer but someone writing on spirituality for everyday living—to bring you to a comment he made about something that happens now quite frequently after he speaks to high school students, and—more recently with a full-blown opioid epidemic—to junior high school students. I think it is especially apropos in this season of Advent.

Having discussed in the interview the painful details of his journey to recovery he says to the interviewer:

“I had a therapist say to me, ‘How great would it be to spend time with that little kid (meaning himself when he was an innocent youngster)? You know? Like, how great would it feel to get to know him? You’ve stored him away for so long. We need to bring him out.'”

The interviewer asks: “And what would you say to that little Chris now?”

Chris quickly responds, “Ooh. I’m super emotional. I’m like a big baby, right? I would cry on his shoulder, man. I’d hug him. Like people say that to me all the time. ‘What would you say to your younger self?’ I don’t—I don’t know if I’d be able to speak. I would just hug and hug and hold and hug. I think that would be my approach with the younger version of me. . .”

He continues, as I wipe my eyes:

“The recovery community is a bunch of huggers. Hugs feel good, you know? To walk up to a kid (after giving a talk at a junior high or high school) who’s struggling, and hug
’em and hold ’em and tell them I hear them—that’s why I do what I do.”

I THINK THIS IS THE APPROACH GOD took and takes with us. I think Chris’ words are God’s word: “That’s Why I Did What I Did and Do What I Do.” Not just words aimed at people—but words enacted. Truth enacted. Good news enacted. The embrace of grace. Love-in-action. This at least points toward the power in the mystery of the incarnation we draw near to in this season where we re-member ourselves to the approach and presence of God in our midst, in the unlikeliest of places and people.

Is this not the instinctive, compassionate move that a loving mother or father would make when words well-worn suddenly seem powerless, unpersuasive, and unable to break the firm grip of addiction or shame or pain or arrogance or anger or self-loathing or trauma or disappointment or terror we hold or see every night on the news.

It is worth interjecting here that the straw that broke the camel’s back of Chris Herren’s addiction was the Director or a therapist—I forget which—at the treatment facility where he was taken after being hospitalized after OD-ing saying what today would probably get the person fired.

Meeting privately in his office, he handed Chris the phone and said, “I want you to do the loving thing. I want you to call and tell your wife that you are not going to contact her ever again. And that you want her to tell the children that you died in a car accident. And then never bother them again, but instead love them all enough to let them go free from you so they can have a life.” And the father in Chris broke, and he spent the entire night on his knees in his room. That was August 8, 2008. He’s been alcohol and drug-free ever since and twelve-stepping it regularly. If in the prayer space of faith, where we imagine the fathering and mothering love of God for each and all of us and creation, is it so hard to imagine the Holy One being verklempt, and choosing to just hug and hug and hold and hug?

We have been taught that Jesus is the Word [in Greek logos] of God. Logos is the noun form of legein (λέγειν) which variously is translated as to put in order, arrange, plan, choose, discourse, say, or explain. In the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries of the Christian era, it came to refer to the ordering principle or mind or reason of God that reveals the Divine and is fully embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. As it appears in the well-known prologue to John’s Gospel—

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,^[a] and the life was the light of all people. . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:1-4, 14)

Logos, then, can be exegeted to mean the expression, revelation, and communication of God and creatively and evocatively understood as the parable or story God desires to tell us about God, the cosmos, ourselves, and life itself. This poetic and powerful Word of God is the self-disclosive presence of the Divine in our midst. For Christians, the logos refers to the second person of the Trinity, the pre-existent, present now, and eternal Christ who for a time pitched a tent and lived among us in the person Jesus—the incarnation of love.

But the danger when we hear—“the Word of God”—is immediately to think “words” and in our verbose, word-saturated, and word-cheapened world to miss the Ineffable mystery of the incarnation which cannot adequately be put into words. Otherwise, God would have sent us a memo. But God didn’t send us a memo, an email, or a tweet. Jesus is not the Tweet of God. Nor is Jesus the meme of God, cute and amusing. Jesus is not even the messenger of God, not even the messenger of God bringing us good news. Rather, Jesus IS the Message and the Meaning and the Action and the Embrace and the Mystery of the Elusive Presence all wrapped in one. “For now,” as St. Paul wrote, “we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Jesus is the embodiment, the tangible enfleshment, the real presence, and the physical manifestation of God’s ineffable compassion, loving solidarity, and self-gift by which WE are known, cherished, enlivened, liberated, and made one.

The Source of all life, the Author of Beauty, and the Giver of each of our lives knew and knows that actions speak louder than words. Jesus is the action God takes to convince us of who we are—the beloved of God—and of what God is like. Jesus is the self-donation of Divine love. Jesus is love-in-action (which is the only non-fraudulent form of love there is) drawing us into the Divine dance of love, the dance of the Beloved Community who is God and sending us forth to be lovers in the world. For if we are made in the image of God—as the household of faith believes—then the Advent image of salvation, of liberating, life-giving love (not just after we die, but now) is the Advent-Christmas summons and self-implicating gift: Be a conscious, intentional, loving proxy. Be Emmanuel for someone. Become the one who upon being seen by someone you know evokes in them the inner reaction: “Oh! Here comes good news! Here comes love-in-action! Thanks be to God.”

Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassionately on this world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body.

~ St. Teresa of Avila

~ © Dan Miller, December 16, 2023

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