Anything but God

There was a new guy in my step meeting this morning. We were covering Step Eleven when it came his turn to read.  He introduced himself as being brand new to AA, then proceeded to read a few paragraphs. Meanwhile, in the row ahead of him, I was suddenly time-traveling back to ten months ago when I was in the same meeting, covering the same step.

For those who don't know it, the eleventh step reads simply, "sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out."  There's a reason it's the eleventh step and not one of the earlier ones.  It's pretty heavy stuff for a newcomer, especially if that newcomer isn't particularly religious, or even anti-religious. If you read the material we cover in the step meeting, the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, it is heavier still, rife with the religious overtones often used to convey important concepts in the time of Bill W(1930s).

Five years ago, when I tried AA for the first time, I let God drive me out of the rooms. You see, when I was a teenager, my older brother found Jesus.  When he does something, there is no such thing as restraint or moderation.  So he began a mission to "save" me, even though I was already a professed born-again Christian at the time.  What he succeeded in doing was driving me away from Christianity altogether.  By the time I was a full-blown alcoholic, there was no way I was going to try anything that mentioned God as much as it is mentioned in AA, God of my understanding or not.  The courts had a different idea, however, and I was forced to give it a shot.

Because of my early experiences, I almost literally couldn't hear anything anyone in AA was saying except "God".  And that was not for me.  I now know that that was what my disease used to keep me drinking.  If it hadn't been God that made me quit AA, it would have been something else, because I purely wasn't ready to quit drinking.

This time I was ready.  In fact, I decided that I was going to get sober in spite of God. I was going to prove that a die-hard agnostic could get sober without any spiritual beliefs whatsoever.  So, I did what they told me to do, and I just said the prayers, not investing any particular meaning in them, and I made contact with my "higher power"(which really wasn't anything at all).  They told me that the only thing I needed to know about God was that I wasn't it.  That much I could accept, and I went with it.

Funny thing is, stuff started happening. Skeptical, scientific-minded person that I am, I wrote it off as coincidence, but I kept doing what they told me to do. I thanked my "higher power" when I went to bed at night, and I asked for guidance in the morning.  Coincidence upon coincidence piled up.  I met people when I needed to, I heard things I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed to hear them, I found the perfect piece of writing to fit my phase of development, the person I'd been praying for got sober, and on and on and on.

For skeptical, scientific types like myself, there comes a point when we can no longer write off as coincidental things which happen reliably.  Repeatability is one of the maxims of good science and this stuff was happening to me all the time.  Early on, one of my new friends in program told me that I was more spiritual than I could ever imagine, and, if I was a scientist, I should prove it to myself.  I did, and I did.

I can no longer say truthfully that I have no belief in a higher power. When I let my higher power be in charge of my outcomes, I get way better results than when I try to direct my own life.  I also have scads less stress and confusion about what I'm supposed to be doing.

This past weekend I was on an AA retreat and had repeatedly interesting conversations about the nature of spirituality with a like-minded fellow.  I knew I was going to blog when I got home, but I hadn't decided on a topic.  Then I went to the meeting this morning and got my little flashback.  I had things to say in the meeting, but others were more ready to share, so I listened.  When the meeting ended, I proceeded on to do my errands for the day, still pondering a blog topic while driving.  Until it hit me.  Sometimes I'm stubbornly obtuse.  But my higher power didn't have to do anything too terribly drastic to get some blog space.

I still don't call my higher power God.  To me, the word is too limiting, and liable to evoke preconceived notions in others.  But I certainly have one.  And I have a lot of contact with it, conscious and not-so-conscious. We're also developing a pretty good relationship, as long as I let it take the lead.  At least it didn't have to break my arm this time.

When enough is enough

Those who are not alcoholics often have a hard time understanding how the mind of an alcoholic works. It seems perfectly obvious to them that alcohol is a problem for the problem drinker and they just cannot get why the alcoholic can't see it. It's easy to understand this disconnect.  Trying to explain alcoholism to a non-alcoholic is like trying to explain full-spectrum color sight to the color-blind.

My husband is color blind.  He tells me that the grass we both see looks orange to him.  How can it look orange?  It's green.  They are two completely different colors to my eyes. Living in a primarily orange world seems like science fiction to me.  To him, it's all he's ever known.  While he theoretically understands that I see something else, he's never seen the color green, so he can't even imagine what I see.  I, on the other hand, have seen orange, so I can at least try to visualize it.

Similarly, I try to explain what alcohol does to me to someone without alcoholism, but they have to take my word for what I tell them.  They've never felt it for themselves. I can picture life without this problem because I didn't always drink. It seems foreign to me now, because my disease is progressive and I can't go back to what I was before.  It can only get worse.

Before I joined AA, there was a hole in my psyche.  I tried to fill it with alcohol.  I poured as much alcohol into it as my physical body could stand, but the hole was never filled. A normal person might have given up and tried something else.  But my disease just tells me that I must not have drunk enough. I wanted to drink it all, every last drop of alcohol that ever was. There were times, when I was very drunk, that I would realize that there would always be more alcohol than I could ever consume, and I'd say that I had to quit. But the next day would come and there would be more alcohol, and well, I'm just not a quitter, you know?

When I first quit, I wasn't quitting for good.  I didn't want to quit.  But I did want to try to quit, and give it an honest try.  I was willing.  Something was wrong with me, and I wanted to know what it was so that I could fix it and go back to drinking, only like other people did.  I could not wrap my mind around a future without alcohol in it.

For me, because I was trying hard to learn what AA was teaching me, and I was trying hard to be honest with myself for the first time in my life, it wasn't long before the sad fact that I was powerless over alcohol dawned on me. It was the lowest point in my life. There was something I could not do that most other people could.  And I had to surrender to that idea, or die in denial.

The good news is that, once I really did face up to my alcoholism, life got better.  For me, it got better very fast. What a relief to know that it was beyond my control. There was truly nothing I could do about it.  At all.  If I was going to live, I was going to have to stop trying to quit and let someone/something else do it for me.

At the time, I didn't realize how brave it was of me to literally put my fate in the hands of something I didn't understand and didn't even know if it existed. But I was scared and I did it anyway, so it was a brave act. I did know that other people had done it, people just like me, so I knew it worked, somehow, and it might work for me, too.  I took my mustard seed of faith and rode it for all it was worth.

Today, I have a better understanding of the ego, and in particular, the alcoholic ego that is always with me but is not "me".  I am not my disease anymore than I am my finger.  It is part of the makeup of my psyche and my physiology, and if the real me, the sober me, does not pay attention and let this thing that works work, I can be lost again, very quickly.

So, I have to stay in the now.  I can look at the past for instruction, and I can look to the future as a rough guide, but I have to live my life in this very moment.  It's all I have, and it's a tremendous gift to be able to do this. If I don't, I will die.  But as long as I do, I'm living a life that is greater than I ever could have imagined.  I live in a world where enough is enough, no matter what it is, because I know for a certainty that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Tolerance, understanding and love are the watchwords

All of us saw, for example, that we lacked honesty and tolerance, that we were beset at times by attacks of self-pity or delusions of personal grandeur.

--12&12, pg. 58, Chapter Five

Before I entered the rooms of AA, I considered myself to be a fairly tolerant person. I thought, compared to many others I'd read about or observed, that I was open-minded, generally kind, and understanding.  But was I really?

The kicker of the above thought was "compared to many others". When I started trying to be truly honest with myself, as is prescribed in the program, I realized that how I rated myself was just that, a rating.  On a scale of one hundred, I might be, oh, an 82 on the tolerance scale.  The problem was that, instead of holding myself to the highest standard possible, regardless of the ideas and actions of others, I was excusing myself by giving myself a B in the tolerance division.

I discovered that it's easy to be tolerant when I'm in agreement with someone, or when they aren't presenting me with personal difficulties.  But personal difficulties are just that--personal.  When I have a problem with a person or a situation, it's MY problem, not theirs.  And it's up to me to come up with a solution if I'm going to live in anything like a state of serenity.

The longer I'm sober, the more depth this challenge takes on.  If I'm truly honest with myself, there's a lot of intolerance in me.  I'm intolerant of what I believe to be rampant ignorance, or political adversity, or even my next-door neighbor's lawn fetish.  I catch resentments wherever I go, for being cut off in traffic, having a rude guest at work, or an unruly child in my field of vision.  I even take on resentments for situations that don't even affect me, such as book-burnings, unfair treatment of a friend, or a downturn in the labor stats.

I'm taught in AA that it is progress we seek, not perfection. I take this suggestion because I'm human and I'll never be perfect, so I must accept this thing I cannot change. However, with progress as my goal, I also have to find the courage to change the things I can.  If I'm rigorously honest, I think I can do better than 82% tolerant.

What that means for me is taking a closer look at the things I don't currently tolerate.  It doesn't mean I have to like those things, or even necessarily agree with them. It does mean I have to reach for greater understanding and sympathy, if not empathy.

I like to say we're all human beings walking around in our own skins.  Sometimes it's hard to remember that everyone I meet has their own internal dialogue, full of self, thoughts, feelings, ideas and misapprehensions, just like me.  We don't all have access to all the data, ever.  That's what our Higher Power is for.  If I were in charge of outcomes, this would be one messed up world, because I don't have all the facts.

So my goal for today, and it is always "today", is to find the courage to be tolerant when it isn't quite so easy.  Let's call it my 83% solution.

Peace...it's not just a noun.