CLOSER THAN EVER

CLOSER THAN EVER

It didn't get any better as I had hoped it would after attending my fourth AA meeting in two days.

After the massacre in Newtown, CT^* Friday, I knew that I would be attending more than my usual fill of AA meetings around town to quiet my inordinately agitated mind. I was in shock and my usual cynicism was entirely inadequate to the task of fending off the onslaught of unwanted emotion from the event.

My daughter had been in town for an appointment and as she returned it had come on the news and its direness struck us both to the point of speechless stupor. We were dumbstruck in disbelief.  The insanity that seemed to infect the rest of the country had finally come home to roost in the bedroom communities of Connecticut.

But how close it had come had not registered until my wife returned from work and she mentioned that one of her colleagues had a daughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School who was in the kindergarten class next to the one in which the children had been slaughtered. And moreover, she had known one of the children who was killed!

Then yesterday morning I went to a men's meeting where one of my friends reported that the wife of his employee was the psychologist at the school who was killed trying to stop the gunman.

At this morning's meeting another friend mentioned that his son had a playmate who was killed in the incident; and this afternoon I returned from a meeting at which the chairwoman told us that one of the little girls who used to take riding lessons at her stable was one of the victims and another guy was telling us of another young boy whom he knew who was also killed.

Jack, who was telling us about that young boy, was saying about how his son and his friends were asking questions that you would never have thought would be asked like:

What are they going to do with their beds? and, What are they going to do with the Christmas presents that the parents bought for the kids that were killed?

Innocent but pathetic questions and, no doubt, probably, the same questions the adults are asking themselves between beating themselves up for reasons they have no good reason to be beating themselves up for.

When Mary Beth opened the meeting, she said that although it was a meeting about Step Four, it was clear there was no way that this meeting was going to pass without mentioning the dreadful events of the past several days. And she went on to tell us how she supervises horseback riding lessons for these little kids and how one of them was due for a lesson this morning until they realized that she was one of the kindergarteners who was killed on Friday.

And she broke down in tears.

This event has made many things clear to me in my evolving sobriety and about what things used to be like.  And I know why I drank so much. It was to avoid all of this pain. I know that in the past during events like these I would have been plenty sarcastic about all of the people who acted so devastated about all of the children who were killed and how they took the situation to heart.

My attitude would have been to say "buck up"! "Suck it up! People out there are crazy, you can't predict these things and you've got to pick yourself up and move on!"

I'm now thinking that how can anyone be anything but paralyzed?  How can anyone think of anything but death, doom and destruction? How can anyone who has their lives invested in their children even think of moving on? But then I think, how else can one move but on? What else can one do? Nothing else will serve. Standing still, howling at the wind, taking up arms, taking up drink, nothing else will make anything better...really.

Just to be able to feel the pain and seek relief in the comfort of others, I never believed that having that available would be of any use to me. But I was wrong. I now wonder what do people do who don't have groups like I have in AA to spill their grief at? How do they manage to cope? The pain they must go through! And the loneliness!  

If there is anything that these past few days has taught me it is how closely we are connected to each other. People with whom I scarcely have any relationship I find are but two handshakes from me and to this sorry event.  

I used to believe that there were greater distances between me and the rest of the world; which is to say that I wanted to believe that was the case. But if distance and time become practically meaningless how can I face down such reality? That was the case when Stephen Jay Gould, (noted Harvard Paleobiologist), realized that he was but three handshakes away from Charles Darwin.

And when I thought that the shootings in Portland, Oregon had separated me in space I had to remind myself that my wife's best friend lives close to that mall and could have been a victim there.

So escape into alcohol is no longer an option, and, of course, its value as an alternative to dealing with reality is, as it always was, tenuous.  A drink never made any situation better, and surely in these circumstances a drink for me is no solution to the pain of the reality.

The President just said in a memorial speech for the victims, that in the end, all we have is the love we have for our children and each other. The material success and wealth is but a pale shadow of what is real and important in this world.  And if we cannot protect what is most important in this world, then all we have is a pale shadow. And a pale memory.

My pride and progress is that I am here to be able to feel today and mourn for those who lost their loved ones.  I would rather have been able to celebrate their greatest fortune. But that was not to be.

But for me to be able to be here, in the moment, at the ready, to help and be of service, if needed, is what I can do today.

And feel.

©  res 12/16/2012

rev: 12/25/2012

^{*Shooting of 20 kindergarteners and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012}

NOT THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN

NOT THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN

Sometimes I feel like sleeping in because my daily routine has finally gotten me exhausted. At least, that is my perception. And so I think that I require an extra half hour or more of sleep. But my body, so accustomed to the habitual 5:30-6AM  awakenings  unfairly jolts me awake regardless of my long hankered for extra thirty minutes' snooze and  without warning, my eyes just pop open, forcing me to face the day, "ready or not here I come". And to face it right that usually involves starting with an early AA meeting. 

But since my body is coercing me into consciousness I think today, I will use the opportunity to sample a different venue and go to a Beginner's Meeting at the local Rehab facility, the one where I used to run some Living Sober meetings. I have never attended this meeting and I have been told that it is special.

I have made up my mind that if I have to get up on this dreary Saturday morning then I am going to treat myself to something new, although I regularly attend a different beginner's meeting, it is a rather small affair, certainly by comparison to this. My meeting has on its best days maybe twelve attendees. Today the meeting had about seventy men.

I mean it is really imposing...and impressive.  And there are a lot of newly sober men there and that fact alone is important. Because, it is often said that those who are counting days are the most important men in the room. Which is not to make anyone feel better; it's just a reminder to those who might be inclined to be so world weary that sobriety is a tenuous thing. It hangs by a thread.

 

And if we take it for granted, it can be lost in an instant.  We have no right to be cavalier about it and it takes only one drink to lose our hard won sobriety! So everyone counting days is a reminder that we were once there too and we could be back there tout suite.

 

But more than the reminder of how tenuous sobriety can be, is the infinite variety of  stories that got us into the rooms of AA. They whirl in their color and diversity, in their humor and their pathos, in their hope and their despair. The stories tell us over and over why we return to the rooms.  We want to hear, to acknowledge what we are, we want to see and hear people whose stories sound like ours. 

 

They are barely the same but at the base, they are just like ours, because when all of the differences are stripped away, what is left is surely us.

 

So when Casey told us that he had just two weeks of sobriety and this was his first time at this meeting he was greeted with a round of applause.  "I'm a pretty good drinker.  I suppose that I drink about one to three scotches in an evening but I am really not the worst in my family. No, really, it's true. My father, now he can drink; my mother, boy! Really I'm not the worst in my family.

 

"I come from a long line of alcoholics and there are really bad drinkers in my family and I certainly am not the worst. You should see my brother. Now there is someone who can really drink!

 

 "But I did not realize how quickly things were deteriorating until the night before Thanksgiving. My wife was preparing a big dinner, the house was set up for 25 guests, she had worked her tail off and my brother and I were staying out of the way. 

 

"Which we did by starting in drinking a few scotches, maybe three, I thought, and, well, we got into an argument, a bad one, and, I don't even remember what we were arguing about but whatever it was, well, he wound up in the hospital. And that Thanksgiving Day my wife and my daughter were on a plane to California to be with her parents.

 

"I haven't had a drink since that day, which is why I am here today."

 

Charles, who was leading, remarked, "I suppose you did enough damage for someone who really wasn't the worst drinker in the family!", which broke the pathos of the moment with uproarious laughter.

 

I come to these meetings to hear stories like this to jar my memory.  Just as a reminder.  Alcoholics like me have "built in forgetters" that need nudging from time to time to keep them awake.

 

I do not know how long Casey's wife was holding those plane tickets in her apron. There is little doubt this wasn't a spur of the moment decision but an exasperated final straw that had  broken the back  of her stoic composure after repeated assaults on the resilience of their marriage. But that is what happens in alcoholic matrimony. She had finally had enough.

 

And the fact that Casey actually wound up in AA suggests that he had been thinking of coming in for a while. Which is a  good thing.

 

This can only be good news for Casey, his wife and child.  And it is at times like this that I wish I had been as smart as he is to have accepted the fact that I was alcoholic at as early an age as he appears to have.

 

But my regrets can only redound to his benefit and with the grace of a higher power, and if he can keep coming and find a program that works, he will be able to live a life beyond his wildest dreams. For there is no reason for him to ever have another lonely Thanksgiving again.

 

© res 12/8/2012

rev:  12/25/2012

 

DEPENDENT ON SPIRITUAL CONDITIONING

DEPENDENT ON  SPIRITUAL CONDITIONING

 

This morning I went to the first religious service that I have been to in over four years and it was not even a Jewish service, it was Episcopalian.  That is the denomination of our resident priest in AA, George, and since today was the first Sunday of Advent it was designated Recovery Sunday in honor of those who are in recovery, the families of those in recovery and to those in need of recovery. I thought that the intent was wonderful  for this parish to celebrate.

And in honor of this first service, our resident priest was to give the sermon on his recovery both in AA and what it meant to him as a priest specifically.  George got sober in the mid 1990's after twenty years in the priesthood and after about thirty years of drinking. It was during a spiritual crisis that he got sober. In fact, he came to AA, as is most typical, after a complete loss of spirituality.

He had become a nightly drinker, alone in his home, and he felt that although he could tend to his flock's spiritual needs well enough, he did not feel that God would ever find it in his heart to be able to forgive his deeds and misdeeds, such was the state of his spiritual condition. He was of such intellect and  perceptiveness that he could minister to families in the most dire straits and attend to their spiritual necessities capitally but when he looked in the mirror he was sure that for him God saw nothing worthwhile saving.

Then one day two members of his parish noted his despondency and aware that he drank a lot, invited him to attend some AA meetings in the very church at which he was a deacon. Such was the sinking condition of his spirituality that he agreed to accompany them.

And there, on a Saturday, in a crowded room filled with fifty men he listened.  And he heard men who were once despondent, down and out drunks, who had lost everything, money, jobs, family, who had become happy, joyous and free. How?

They had admitted that they were powerless over alcohol and their lives had become unmanageable; they came to believe that a Power greater than themselves could restore their sanity and they made a decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God as they understood Him.

And all they had to do was to have a "desire to stop drinking".  And George did and has had each day since then. He found in that room and in many others, men sharing their love of one another, of the principles of how to live life without rancor, with simplicity, and understanding and to learn to live in peace with their fellow Man. Here he learned all that he had failed to learn in all the years he spent in the seminary, in graduate school and as a priest and deacon.

As a result he found that he had to radically amend his theological view of God and even his interpretation of the Bible! All because he got sober in AA. All because he had become a spiritual being in AA; all because he had come to see God in a more ecumenical way.

He saw people in the rooms from all kinds of ritual backgrounds who "accepted a God of their understanding" getting sober next to people of diametrically opposed or at least radically different religious practices. Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Christians all in a room together each sober by the grace of Gods of their understanding.

Clearly God must be great and grand and a lot more forgiving than he had previously conceived of him. So George rethought his theology. And now his God and the God of the Testaments as George reads them today is one of kindness and forgiveness and patience that is infinite. But not necessarily of infinite power to do anything to and for anybody. He does not believe that God manages the quotidian life of people. They have to do that for themselves. He is One who has bestowed free will on Man to allow Man to make choices for good or bad.

We can choose to be good or evil. We can be generous or penurious. We can be crotchety or happy. We can be drunk or we can be sober. But God will always be forgiving, for his forgiveness is infinite. He is not vengeful. But it is our choice to become spiritual.

And one of things that George found in the rooms is that like God you can always come back regardless of whether you are sober or not. For all you need is a desire to stop drinking and you are always welcomed back.  Even if you haven't yet stopped. Even if you are 'auditing' the rooms.

So George returned to the church with a renewed understanding of the love of God and the infinite patience of God's acceptance of Man; that as long as Man accepts God, God loves Man back. It is our choice.

You can listen to the stories in the rooms just to find out if you really belong there.  Because if you really are an alcoholic, you will hear your story being told, and when you hear your story, you will be saved just as George was.

What George found out when he stepped into those rooms of AA those many years ago was that he was not terminally unique; that he was just like so many of God's "lost" souls who through God's love saved so many of those drunks.

And if God could save all of those drunks, they could save George and bring him back to God too.

 

©  res  12/2/2012