This beautiful passage reveals how our lives are never truly our own, how God lovingly and purposefully created each one of us, and how our perfection and happiness as creatures is always determined by how obedient we are to God’s will for us. We can unpack this story a little further if we first look at it from the perspective of active addiction and then from the point of view of recovery.

In active addiction, we are the ones sitting in the potter’s chair, having supplanted the Creator by playing God in our pride, frantically spinning the potter’s wheel to conjure from the clay what we wanted. The clay represents everything and everyone in our lives that we seek to “manipulate” and “conform” to our self-will, to serve the caprice of our selfish desires. The more intense our addictions, compulsions, or unhealthy attachments, the faster and more violently the wheel spins as we desperately try to “force” the clay to take on shapes and roles it was never capable of fulfilling. These insane efforts to “craft” the world after our own image invariably, to quote Jeremiah, “turned out badly.” But because of our unyielding pride, we were unwilling to abandon the potter’s seat, and the potter’s wheel—the cycle of addiction—would spin on and on as we compulsively and idolatrously sought to make from the clay yet more “object[s] of whatever sort [we] pleased.”

In recovery, we discover that we were never meant to sit in the potter’s chair. We are never meant to “craft” the world after our own image, rather we were called to accept “this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that Jesus will make all things right, if I surrender to His will.” Our identity was always that of the clay where the true craftsman, our Higher Power, can mold and fashion us after His own divine image. When things “turned out badly,” when we resisted God in our habitual addictive sins, God never abandoned us. He persistently continued to work the clay by gently and lovingly inviting us to become docile to the movements of His skilled hands that He might recreate us in the fullness of His holy will. Conversion in recovery reveals to us that our purpose all along was to be formed into vessels of His love so that we in turn could share this same love with any and all willing to receive it. And it is therefore vital that we never forget that our fundamental dignity rests in the fact that we are the precious “clay in the hand of the potter.”

Saint Alphonsus Liguori, pray for us!

Reflection Questions

• In your life of active addiction, how were you like the imposter sitting in the potter’s chair trying to form the world into your own image?
• How have you learned to be docile to the movements of the Holy Spirit in crafting and shaping your life for the love of God and neighbor?

Daily Mass Readings

First Reading: Jeremiah 18:1-6
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 146:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6AB
Gospel: Matthew 13:47-53 

Reflection by Pete S.