Addiction is a relationship disease, and suffering and trauma can be a resource, it can make us stronger than we were before, says Reformed pastor Levente Horváth, head of the Bonus Pastor Foundation. Interview.

When Reformed pastor Levente Horváth finished his studies in Scotland and returned home to Transylvania, he was immediately tasked by the then Transylvanian Reformed bishop Kálmán Csiha to organize mission activities to help addicts and drug addicts. Later, he attributed it to God's humor that he was chosen for this task, which, although he was also busy, he would not have felt himself suitable for it. Bonus Pastor Foundation (BPA), which was registered in 1996 to ensure the legal and financial background of the activity, have helped thousands.

People who are addicted not only to alcohol, but also to drugs or gambling, or in fact sufferers of any kind of addiction, can turn to them. In addition to their two-week, short therapy program, since 2005, those who want to change their lives can apply for long, 9-month therapy, but they also organize prevention camps. for children and young people, and they also try to help the relatives of addicts in difficult situations. For Levente Horváth, both faith and expertise are important in his work, and he prefers to use the term relationship disorder for addiction, because according to him, a person turns to drugs when his relationship with himself, his fellow humans and God is not good.

Tell me about God's humor.

His disciples ask the rabbi whether God was too cruel to the Pharaoh and the Egyptians, since he hit them with ten plagues because they did not want to let the Jews go. (We read nine times in the Bible that God hardens the pharaoh's heart, and ten times that the pharaoh hardens his own heart and therefore does not let the people go.) So the eternal theodicy question arises, whether there was God is too cruel. And that

God's humor is something that is expressed in the rabbi's response.

The rabbi says that the pharaoh actually incurred this terrible punishment for only one reason: because he did not say the table prayer. Of course, the disciples do not understand what the rabbi explains, since it is written: "You regarded your people as if they were nothing and threw them like bread to your enemies." The pharaoh was able to feast a great feast of the people, but he did not give thanks to God, so he had to atone for his sin. So I don't know exactly what God's humor is like, but through the wisdom of such a tiny rabbi, I think it shines through.

I started with this because you have said in several places that at the time when you had the idea that something should be done with the addicts and those suffering from addiction, you would not have felt yourself qualified for it, but through the humor of God, the Reformed bishop at the time, Kálmán Csiha, asked you to start missionary activities to help addicts in Transylvania.

My whole life is full of such humorous surprises. There is a difference of 60 years between my father and me, as much as between Isaac and Jacob. I laughed at my father three times in his old age - because I am a child of laughter, living in such a parallel, since Izsák is a child of laughter.

But it is particularly interesting that Abraham's wife is also barren, Isaac's wife is also barren, Jacob's wives are also barren, yet they bear sons. The forefathers give birth to the nation from barrenness. In other words, when it's impossible, it's possible. It is no coincidence that when God's angel announces to the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant, Mary is amazed at how this is possible, to which the answer is that what is impossible for man is possible for God.

In other words, God's humor is that it is easy to make something out of existing things, but to create it from nothing - only God can do that.

So I laughed at my father three times before he died. When I was 18, the security guard told me that I would never cross the border, that I would rot here. I didn't even get a passport, I was on the blacklist. But my father sincerely believed that one day I would study in Scotland, like him, and when he told me this in maybe '88, I laughed out loud. I had one more such laugh before his death, during our last meeting, which happened a few weeks before the revolution. Then he told me that my son, big changes are going to happen here soon. At that time, the change had already taken place in Hungary, the GDR, Bulgaria and so on, but I said that, father, change can happen everywhere, but not here.

For the story of my third laugh, I have to tell you that our house was demolished during communism in the 80s, during the demolishing of the Hóstát houses and the complete reorganization of Cluj-Napoca, so we finally moved to the former Rákóczi út, in the Grigorescu quarter, to a block of flats from the 50s . Also, my parents moved, because I was no longer in Cluj at the time, I was already a pastor in Vásárhely. I visit them one day, and my father, with amazing calmness and certainty, points me around that awful little wagon-type apartment and says,

son, this will one day be a mission center and serve all parts of the country.

Even then, I had a good laugh, because at that time neither a foundation nor an association could be created, especially for the purpose of missionary activity.

Exactly 12 years later, after the regime change, when the Bonus Pastor Foundation was already serving the whole of Transylvania, we suddenly had to move out of our temporary office and had nowhere to go. At that time we didn't even have a therapy home, we only organized two-week short therapy programs, and we always moved somewhere, looking for a boarding house - there were no honest boarding houses even then - to lock ourselves up there for two weeks with alcoholics and all kinds of addicts. But since we didn't have an office, the director of the foundation said that your mother's apartment was empty there - she didn't even live then - and you don't have the money to renovate it anyway, but the foundation will renovate it if you can use it as an office for free for five years. We agreed on this, the foundation's office moved into the apartment, we were preparing for such a two-week session, the phone rang all day, the application list was full, and when I hung up after the last applicant,

I lean back in my chair and look at my colleagues, then I remember what my father said 12 years before...

According to them, God still gives prophetic talent to people today?

I don't know, it fills me up... (laughs). But these things happen to me regularly. God surprises me with these little delicacies, so it's humorous.

The full interview can be read on Főtér!

Featured image: Facebook / VERTICAL