A FAITH THAT WORKS

A FAITH THAT WORKS

And then James said 'What is so characteristically true about AA and so different from everything else is that we are promised a path to a faith that works.' I don’t know of anything else that I have ever experienced that has brought me closer to other humans,to other men than AA.

Picture a room of 50 odd (and I do mean odd) men who get together every Sunday at 7:30 AM to spend time in a church social hall in order to share our hopes, fears, dreams, problems and hopefully solutions with each other. But mostly it is the shared experience that lets us know that we are not alone in feeling the way that we feel. As men we are brought up to be islands of stoic resolve, never breaking down that wall of unbreachable feeling so that the outside world will know just what we experience in our hearts.

They don’t know how we love. They don’t know how we fear; for ourselves, our families, our souls our wives and children. We never permit them to see into that well of emotion for fear that what they will witness will make them think less of us.

Yet we need them to see it. Without that experience the most important people in our lives don’t know us. So we must seek it elsewhere and we do that in AA.

Palter,our re-frocked priest, notes that if any men attend the Sunday services after our meeting, one would be hard pressed to see half the number of men in attendance than we have at our meeting. Why? Because the spiritual sustenance that men get from a church service is valueless to a man. It is at best an intellectual exercise.

Our rooms provide an emotional battle ground to face our enemies, choose our weapons and fight our demons with the help and support of men who have been to the same Waterloo and fought against the same demons and have learned to hold them at bay.

And now, we are here to help us learn to keep our demons at bay. But we must join the club, learn some of the principles and start to 'practice those principles in all our affairs' as the twelfth step says. And then we are promised a path to a faith that works. But we have to trudge that path, we must work the steps, the faith being only promised if we practice the principles in all our affairs.

I come to listen to a group of men speak in metaphors like I’ve never heard before. Like Albert; - 'I have to take out my tool kit all the time in order to fix the problems that I face daily. But as I join in facing these situations and apply my tools to them, they get dull. And I come here on a weekly, even daily basis in order to sharpen those tools. You men are my sustenance and my whet stone. And I remember to bring my sharpening stones to polish and buff my tools to keep them sharp so that they will be ready to handle those situations that repeatedly present themselves to me.'

And Jon E remarked that at Christmas dinner he could have engaged his mother in law in some repartee that would have ended in fireworks which nobody would have enjoyed. But instead 'I took your counsel and put on my cooking smock and helped with the cooking'. And Darryl who knew that the Christmas day was going to be difficult but he could not put his finger on just why, was looking kind of odd. His son asked 'what’s the matter Dad?' , and in the past just such a small interrogative would have caused him to launch into harangues of the grossest proportions, leaving no one unscathed. But yesterday he had the good sense just to say (as would any ordinary person) 'I don’t know, I’m just feeling a bit squirrelly'. And his son knew exactly what he meant and said, 'don’t sweat it Dad, just leave all the heavy lifting to us'. 'And if I hadn’t been in the program who knows what kind of radioactive chain reaction I would have launched.'

And Connor noted that he had stopped for breakfast before the meeting and had seen the front page of The Post on which was a picture of two servicemen taking fire in Kandahar. They had red stocking hats on. Which caught him up for a moment for his son was an officer in that province in some redoubt that was in the mountains by the Pakistan border in the Pashtun Kush with Delta company.

And with some pride he said that he felt sure that his son would be alright because two days ago his son had emailed his fiancée with a note saying that he was really happy and confident he would be fine,'this is what I’ve been trained to do'. Connor choked a bit and said that he truly believed what his son said. He got that faith from being with men in the rooms by drawing on their faith that things are as they should be and his son is where he should and wanted to be.

I left the meeting knowing I was going to see my wife to have that ultimate discussion of whether we were going to stay together as a couple or not. One thing I was sure of. A year had gone by leading to this point and I knew that the answer was going to be different from what I wanted and imagined it to be a year ago. But I was alright with that answer. Because after a year of thinking about it and learning about me, and understanding finally about the me and the her and the us, I finally realized that the us was no longer working and in the back of my mind I was hoping and expecting that she would come to that realization too.

Frankly neither of us had the energy required to put into repairing the relationship; that too much energy was needed to go into the repair of our individual lives. The time for that repair was a decade, perhaps two ago. The window of that opportunity, if ever there was one, was long gone. Now, there was only a window of recognition,acceptance and acknowledgment. Well, we finally did that and I think we two have finally come to terms and are good with that without all the recriminations that could have gone along with that but won't.

I owe that to that 'promised path of faith.' My wife may owe it to some series of deductive reasons. Which may be fine for her. But I just know that for me, mine is the softer and gentler way and if I am ever able to find the promises of the program, it will be through that spiritual awakening in the ‘faith that works.’

© res 12/25/10