Then something happened in this country. We needed to do more in a day than we could. We began to crunch time and squeeze it up. In our technocratic society, we began to make it work so that we got three days work in one day. What we got was some kind of a giant psychological hover-craft. We went down the river in that. If a dog barked, you could turn and it would be two miles back and you couldn't hear it.

We couldn't get in touch with our feelings because our feelings are on the other kind of time. We eat together; we sleep together; we talk together and we don't feel anything. We sort of pass each other in the halls, emotionally.

What has happened with this speeded-up, stressed life that we are living is that we are all in it so we don't notice. It leads to a kind of anxiety and develops into an indivisible spiritual emotional disease. This disease is crippling individuals and institutions and even the church, which is supposed to be a sanctuary from this disease.

But now we are only afraid of the disease and we seem to have our relationships fouled up. Our kids don't like us. They don't want to come home and if they do, they want to leave early. We don't understand each other and we're lonely, surrounded by people.

As a church, we seem to have forgotten the point of our message, like people who have a great joke to tell and who have forgotten the punch line. Some years ago, a man was talking about this, a friend of mine who was educated in England. He is an Anglican priest. He got one of these big, old churches when he got out. They are so cold; they have no heat. In the winter the people wear their overcoats and scarfs. I've spoken in one of those churches. He was preaching to very few people, average age about seventy. This young vigorous man was preaching. All of a sudden the back door opened and his bishop came in. The retired bishop had been his mentor. The young priest was horrified that the people were nodding off. He said, "Wake! I've got to confess something to you. I lived with another woman for seventeen years besides my wife." It got very quiet and people got up on the edge of their seats. He said, "It was my mother."

Everybody laughed. The old bishop said, "He's pretty clever."

They listened to the rest of the sermon. Two weeks later the bishop was to preach in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. A lot of people had come out for it. When he got there, he was preaching and everybody was nodding off. The old bishop was sort of doddering. When he got to the place where he noticed this, he remembered what his young charge had done. He said, "Wait! I've have something I have got to confess. I lived with another woman for seventeen years who was not my wife." Everybody was just up on their seats.

And then he said, "For the life of me, I can't remember who she was."

It seems we have done this in the church. We have forgotten where we are going and what we are doing. This spiritual disease has caught us up. It has made us start controlling each other and doing things we really don't want to do and are not supposed to do as Christians.

When I use the word "spiritual," I don't mean religious. Jesus never used the term "religious" that we know of. When a person is spiritual, he or she is in touch with reality. The degree to which one is in touch with reality is the degree to which one is spiritual. If I am in touch with ultimate reality, I am not just talking about God, I am in touch with God.

A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them. What happens is that people who are very religious but who are not in touch with reality, cannot be spiritual. They cannot be intimate. What happens is that this disease keeps us from being spiritual. Because we go so fast, we are out of touch with our feelings. We can't be intimate because we can't share feelings that we don't have.

The modern things about all the addictions -- the Twelve Steps -- are an example of how people have gotten into this disease and what it does to us. Piet Heim, the Danish philosopher, said that the classic words of our time are like old houses at the beach with the windows knocked out. The meanings flow in and out of them like the wind from the sea. Intimacy is one of those words.

If I said to you that I was intimate with my wife last night, you would think I had sex. Intimacy, as I am using it, is sharing my reality with you. When I share my reality with you and you don't fix me, we have been intimate because then you share your reality with me and I don't fix you. In a fast-moving, task-oriented society, we fix each other.

I say I'm lonely at home, my wife says to me, "You shouldn't be lonely." She discounts my reality. My mother or my father will do these things so I can't be intimate any more, because my reality is too precious to share and too fearful.

What does this to have to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ? A lot, I think. In the Old Testament, the first man and woman tried to take charge of God, to be number one in paradise and to control him. From there on, they were trying to get back in touch with each other. This separation, this control, was called "sin." The rest of the Bible is man's and woman's attempt to get back in touch with God in an intimate way.

In the New Testament, it indicates that God ripped open His chest and showed us His precious Child, that part of Him that is most vulnerable, most nearly accessible to us as people. He gave us a model that we are supposed to open ourselves to each other. In this opening of ourselves and sharing our precious children with each other is the milieu in which healing takes place. Unfortunately, it is usually only in a psychiatrist's office or a counseling group that people feel free to share in this way.

We don't even think it is appropriate in the church any more. The problem is that this speeded-up life and stress in America causes us to cut off our feelings, so we are out of touch with our reality. This is made worse in the church, where we are told that our reality is not good, but bad, that our feelings are bad. Many people are told this.

I was raised to think that anger is bad, that pain is bad. Feelings are like a color chart that God has given us. They make life rich instead of black and white. When we cut them off, our lives are strictured and narrow. Besides, we are in touch with our lives through our feelings when they are healthy.

I was taught that pain is bad. In a Christian group if somebody cries, you rush over and hug them, pat them and stuff kleenex in their face, because we can't stand their pain. Unfortunately, the pain is the doorway to wisdom and healing.

When people sit in their pain in Twelve Step groups, and when they finish, no one interrupts them or stops them or pats them. Then they say, "I see what my problem is." The insight lies below the pain. In our culture, we cut off the doorway to the insight.

The same way with anger. There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart. Jesus was angry and threw people out of the temple. That is hardly turning the other cheek. The disease causes us to read it the way we need to read it to maintain our present situation.

We get these feelings that are out of phase. We push them out of sight and then they get like beach balls. When they come up, they are too big. We feel increasingly frantic, lonely, angry, sad and afraid. To quiet these painful, stress-laden feelings, we get into compulsive behaviors. We drink too much or we eat too much, which is exactly like drinking too much spiritually. It is just a different use of sugar.

We work too much. Religious work is one of the best ways to keep from facing your reality if you are Christian, if you are using it to calm the pain, because that it what all addictions are, attempts to cover the pain of this spiritual disease.

We act out sexually or we take tranquilizers to quiet this pain. When we can't, we start controlling the people in our lives to get life under control. Beneath all of these addictions is this disease, this control disease which is the mark of our society.

I discovered this disease in my own life. When I was a child, my father couldn't love me because he loved my older brother. I felt like nothing. He took him fishing and wouldn't take me. Work was the thing I chose to be somebody. I think a lot of us do that. It is easier than love.

When I grew up, I burned out. Then I found God and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I was so happy that I began to go crazy telling people about it.

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid. The book jumped out and sold a couple of million copies. I was asked to speak everywhere. As I began to put my work addiction into a religious work addiction, then I abused my own children like my father did me, only I did it in the name of Jesus. A lot of people do that. It is very painful. Your kids don't know whether you are at the bar or the Bible study. You are just not with them.

I got a divorce. The thing that happened to me was what I was afraid always would. I was rejected by the church. Some guys just held me together in a prayer group while I cried.

Then one day I read about a book that said that the church is the only army that shoots its wounded. I said, "Yes." That night in my prayers God said to me, "Don't you blame your own sin on the church or anybody else. You face your issues and I will take care of my church."

So, I did. I began to face the things in my life and I got into a Twelve Step program. In this program, I not only got closer to God, I began to find peace for my compulsive need to control and I began to learn to live with some serenity one day at a time, a thing I had never learned in the church. I had just learned to perform. People shared their reality and there was intimacy in these groups and healing began to take place. Nobody fixed anybody. They were authentically intimate and we began to grow.

I learned that the purpose of the Twelve Steps is to do the will of God. Did you know that? It is not to get sober. It is to get sober so that you can do the will of God.

I also learned that you must give it away in order to keep it. We in the church must, too, or we will lose it all. I learned through this group of people, many of whom had been rejected. I learned that it is okay to be a person and to live and to make mistakes. I have learned to like myself for the first time and to have some serenity.

If God is in a life, it doesn't have to be big to be happy and to be important in His kingdom. For some of us who have had a compulsion to be big, this is very good news. Amen.

David Hardin: Keith, in your new book, A Hunger for Healing, you take this topic of the model of the Twelve Steps of AA as a model for the church. AA refers to the Higher Power. They don't name Jesus. Why is that, when it was created by a Christian group?

Keith Miller: David, when they started out, these drunks had been rejected by the church, by medical science and everybody. They had nothing but God and each other. So they formed this program and started talking about what Jesus would do. Some of them said, "No. We know Jesus and His people. We've been there. They reject you and we can't have that. We're not having Jesus."

The people had thought it was a moral problem and had absolutely rejected alcoholics. What happened was that I got in the Twelve Steps programs and got closer and closer to Christ. Suddenly, He was real to me in a way He had never been. I began to see the characteristics of this Higher Power. He was totally loving, redemptive and would give you all kinds of chances -- a moral, ethical God who said, "You have got to do it."

There is only one God in history with that profile and that is Jesus Christ. I thought, "Why would this be?" Then I thought, "Well, our Lord in His graciousness has deigned to do this program anonymously." It is the God of Jesus Christ.

Hardin: One of the things that struck me as you were talking is some of these fears we have. You talked about intimacy. I think the idea of intimacy scares people. Why?

Miller: I am afraid that the same thing will happen with me that happened with my dad, that you won't love me if I share the fact that I am afraid. I am six feet tall. I am not supposed to be afraid.

Some of the things I have shared would make me uneasy, except the fact that it was through the doorway of the pain of those experiences that I found a new doorway to God. If I don't share, those people don't get the doorway. If I preach at them about their fears, it just makes their defenses go up -- and their denial.

Hardin: John Powell, who spoke this season, has talked about being real. Buried inside of this misshaped figure that we are is the real us. We are afraid that people won't like the real us, so we don't show that real person. Being real is part of being intimate.

Miller: The problem is that I always wanted to be real but I was afraid, so I would say, "Love me, please love me!" All of a sudden, some of you would. Then, I wouldn't believe you because you didn't really see me. My only hope to receive love is to let you see who I am, then I may believe you.

Hardin: The surprising fact is that when the people see the real us, it is very lovable. The thing we are afraid to show is always lovable, I think.

Miller: That is the paradox of the disease.

Hardin: The other side of that is fear of pain. You said that fear is the gateway.