Daily Reprieve

1. Sincere efforts to offer apology for past harm.
2. Wonderful bridge-builders for more positive future relationships.
3. Effective agents for removing the tremendous weight of guilt, shame, and remorse.

“Don’t sponsor, not with that mind set. I have passed through many successful years when I wasn’t sponsoring anyone. You can’t give away what you don’t have”

Lydia, I have been attempting to secure sobriety since 2006 and have never made it to 18 months. I have achieved a year 3 times, I think. I hear you that this has not been your experience. That you have had several years sober without sponsoring. I assume successful equates to sobriety in the context of our discussion. You can’t give away what you don’t have AND you can’t keep what you don’t give away. My mind set will not improve in isolated self-maintenance, which I can fall into even while parking my butt in the rooms. Maybe the answer for me is to be a friend and a temporary sponsor, and just drop the whole rigid concept of sponsorship. It does remind me so much of the discipleship movement in churchianity. That was a sort of proselytizing pyramid scheme popularized by groups like the Navigators.

I have never really met anyone in AA, including past sponsors, who I would deem as having a continuous and inspiring mind-set.  I think if I wait for AA sainthood, I may justify doing nothing.

Of course, it is quite possible that I am totally misunderstanding your words.  Communication is a fragile thing.

And the real crux of Endigar 319 was the question, “What am I missing?”  I was not really asking whether I should sponsor.  My sponsor, my support network, hearing me talk as I do, pointed this out as a deficit in my program.  I am in my head too much, and a sponsee that forces me to render the solution rather than dwell in the problem would be helpful.

Resonance from readings?

COURAGE TO CHANGE:  “When I am troubled about what lies ahead, I look back to see where I have been.”  This process is supposed to provide evidence of the progress I have made in the program.  Unfortunately, my memory only seems to pull from mental files that are shrouded in emotional intensity.  I can only recall what I was feeling.  The specific nuggets of magic that come with working the program of recovery are often lost in the fog of general feelings.  I do not gain much from this reading today.

HOPE FOR TODAY: “Gradually, by keeping an open mind and heart, attending meetings, and using the program tools, I became willing to have, and then actually yearned for , a relationship with a Higher Power.  This relationship allows me to share honestly, set boundaries, and express a full range of emotions.  I will be forever grateful to all those people in all those rooms who, while knowing their own truth, allowed me to find mine.”  I am grateful for this non-religious aspect of the program.  I am grateful to have recovered a relationship with Gomu (God of my understanding), that surpassed what I lost at the turn of the century.  Yet, I do not feel terribly close to the Goddess today.  My attitude toward the divine is very laissez faire, this morning.

DAILY REFLECTIONS:  “I can be free of my old enslaving self.  After a while I recognize, and believe in, the good within myself.  I see that I have been loved back to recovery by my Higher Power, who envelops me.”  Enslaving self.  That resonates.  I use so much time just trying to maintain myself.  It has and, unfortunately, continues to be a bit of a burden.

I wish I could just let go.  Even though my relationship with this Gomu is an improvement, it still lacks an ever-present relevance for me.  Or maybe I am just drained from drill weekend.  And from experiencing the same old problems of failure suppressing me.  No choice but to keep pushing on, and accept the fact that the Goddess may be indifferent to the things that are important to me.  Thus, acceptance sounds like learning to give up.  Just quit caring, lose ambition.

And now I have been reminded that if I hope to keep this sobriety, I must be able to give it away.  I must be able to sponsor.  So I will have someone else besides myself to lie to.  No real choice.  Conditional delegated power.

Tired of feeling this.  Faith continues to be a squiggly eel between my fingers.  It seems the best I can achieve is to not to blame Gomu.  A respectful disdain and distance and accepting It’s irrelevance in my life seems to be my path of progress.

“…there has been a revolutionary way of living and thinking.” page 50 of the Big Book.  “…they present a powerful reason why one should have faith.” page 51.

What am I missing?  The deity could answer this for me, but I am almost certain, will not.  Because my memory is filled with a lifetime of desperate appeals to pretty clouds, inspired by fantastic stories.  I have had to learn to be content with silence.  That is my experience.  It is what I remember today.

So, I will move on.  I have no other choice.  Not really.

I fear becoming someone’s sponsor.

All quotes will be from the chapter, “We Agnostics,” in the Big Book.

“Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another’s conception of God.  Our own conception, however inadequate, was sufficient to make the approach and to effect a contact with Him.”

I asked myself this morning, why would I want to make contact with God through an inadequate concept?  Obviously it is not inadequate to make contact.  I supposed it would be inadequate to sustain spiritual life and growth.

“So we used our conception, however limited it was.”

Why would my conception be counted as limited?  Limited and inadequate.  Why would I want to use such a flawed concept?  It seems the answer is ~ to effect a contact with Him.

Why is it limited and currently inadequate?

“Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”

If my concept of a Higher Power seems limited and inadequate to me, maybe I should see if it has been confined be my personal limits and inadequacies.

Is there some area where I am being just plain bull-headed?   Is the world having to tip-toe past my sensitivities, lest they incur the wrath of my judgment?  Are my judgments disconnected from my calm ability to reason?

Carried away from morning solitude to use for soul mastication throughout the day.

I am not happy, but I am grateful.  I prefer to suffer my discontent while sober.  My devotional readings talked of the advantages of sponsorship, its ability to take the answers I am giving to others and apply them to myself.  I also read of the power of the 10th step.  Something I am still working on.  Still need to finish my amends.  I do not want to start sponsoring until I have actually finished the 12 steps, ALL 12 of them, and I have re-secured a year of sobriety.  And finally, taking what I learn, the principles of recovery, and using them in my intimate environment.  My new AA sponsor gave me another saying to record; “Religion is God on the outside trying to get in, and Spirituality is God on the inside trying to get out.  This is a spiritual program, not a religious one.”

The Big Book

“read this book…” first three words on page 112

“To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.  For them, we hope these pages will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary.  We think this account of our experiences will help everyone to better understand the alcoholic.  Many do not comprehend that the alcoholic is a very sick person.  And besides, we are sure that our way of living has its advantages for all.”  ~ FORWARD TO THE FIRST EDITION (page xiii)

“It is the purpose of this book to answer such questions specifically.  We shall tell you what we have done. (our experience)”  See this in context on page 20 to find out what the questions are.  Basically, why does alcohol make us so sick, and how have we recovered from a hopeless condition of mind and body.  The quote is from THERE IS A SOLUTION in the Big Book.

“…Well, that’s  exactly what this book is about.  Its main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem.  That means we have written a book which we believe to be spiritual as well as moral. ”  from WE AGNOSTICS (page 45)

I went to one of my favorite AA meetings a few days ago and picked up a couple of sayings.

” If you share more than three minutes nobody is listening except you.”

“If you believe that isolation is a cure for loneliness, you may be an alcoholic.”

“An alcoholic is an ego maniac with an inferiority complex.”

The last one I’ve heard before, but I like it.

There is another saying, “You’ve got to give it away to keep it.”  I remember, right before going on annual training, this was being discussed in that same meeting.  And this is something I really need to work on.  I need to start sponsoring as soon as I recover that year of sobriety.  “Both you and the new man must walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress.  If you persist, remarkable things will happen.”  ~ page 100 of the Big Book.

Our discussion also looked at discovering God’s will.  Many seem to struggle with this concept.  I can remember the first time that I quit looking at the will of the Higher Power as a Mapquest of directions from point A to point B.  I was laying beside my Yobo in Korea, Hae Suk Kim.  I was a young Airman in the US Air Force in the early eighties and I was confused about God’s Will for me.  I was meditating on the single light bulb hanging from Hae Suk’s ceiling.  It came to me that God’s will was like the light energy within the bulb.  It was the natural product of our own transformation.  Even then, during my season of heavy drinking and running the ville, I was aware of the need to connect to an energy, a Power greater than myself.

So I guess the will of God is to connect to a power socket, in order to conduct and release the energy.   The steps provide me with such a socket and the recovery community provides me an environment to conduct and release what is given to me.

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After writing this entry, I found myself wondering what would happen if I put my address into mapquest and entered the destination as God’s Will.  The first result was

The Chaplain’s Find

I have returned from my Army Reserve annual training. This year, like last, we flew all the way to California and settled in to work on our “fieldcraft,” as my commander likes to call it. Last year I was going through some major relationship issues and welcomed the trip into the wilderness of Fort Hunter-Liggett. It was three weeks with some major geographical distance from homeland insecurity. I imagined it would be like going on a date with my Higher Power.

I read a book called “Letters to Jenny,” and took pictures of the foreign landscape, and listened. Nature has always been the most spiritually resonant meeting place for me. The surrounding mountains became my sacred cathedral. At least, initially.

But as the time passed, Lady Loneliness came to me and tucked me into a bed of infirmity with a blanket of futility. I would bring home her lullabies of death and fall into another session of alcoholic relapse.

This year was different. I returned to the same fort, but a different FOB (Forward Operating Base). It was called Milpitas. Of course, the soldier slang name for it became “male peters.” I looked it up and found that it comes from an Aztec word meaning “little cornfields.” The dust was in a state of duress, being constantly kicked up by natural gusts of wind and unnatural movement of military vehicles. Many soldiers went to sick call for respiratory issues.

I arrived on site after I had just picked up 9 months sobriety (again). Last year’s relationship issues were on the mend. And I knew I was on a good path for me internally. When I got on the flight and there was a pretty little female in the seat next to me who was willing to talk, and she was showing cleavage, I knew the Goddess was smiling on me. Teacher at a local cosmetology school. Gets to travel to Cali in order to tweak her skills. I was envied by my comrades.

And yes, I always express gratitude to my Higher Power for the creation and display of cleavage. It is a sacred sign of blessing.

Yet, after my first week on site, the loneliness and sense of futility began to take me. I began to withdraw into myself, and silently scream into the invisible abode of God. “What is going on?!”

Then it dawned on me, or maybe was given to me. I am an alcoholic. This was a dry manifestation of my disease. I had a choice to make. I could attempt to white knuckle it like I did last year. Or I could seek help. I decided to choose differently. I asked to see the chaplain and told him I am an alcoholic, and I need to attend meetings if they are available. I think he was dumb-founded that someone was taking responsibility for their own spiritual life. But he assured me that he would check into it. I told him I would be willing to chair a meeting if I was unable to leave the site. I told him that if he could even find me a Big Book (yes, I left it behind – but it is on my packing list from now on), that would be helpful.

We parted ways and I continued to face my daily duties. But asking for help, regardless of the results, made a difference. It seemed to mark a spot in my psyche that proclaimed the value of my sobriety. I was able to connect with others again. The futility vanished. Another reprieve.

The chain of events: The meeting of a second chaplain while on assignment with battalion who wanted to hear my story – both chaplains finding a meeting on fort, the first holding the scribbled contact information like it was the Holy Grail – The second chaplain going with me to this meeting to learn and see if he could bring this back to his unit in Washington state – meeting the tall, bald, solitary gatekeeper who kept the meeting from going black, because this is what he does to stay sober even with 27 years under his belt.  His name was Vernon and I was so grateful he was there. We had a meeting with this gruff old-timer in his motorcycle vest, who waved his arms splattered with tattoos and periodically dropped f-bombs. I felt at home.  The chaplain asked him about his personal commitment to be there and Vernon gave the minister a Big Book and simply said, “page 181, I can’t say it any better than that.”

It is from Dr. Bob’s story and he had the chaplain read it out loud;

I spend a great deal of time passing on what I learned to others who want and need it badly. I do it for four reasons: 1. Sense of duty 2. It is a pleasure 3. Because in so doing I am paying my debt to the man who took time to pass it on to me. 4. Because every time I do it I take out a little more insurance for myself against a possible slip.

The next Sunday, I made arrangements with Vernon to go to another meeting off post in a rustic little Episcopal church. (www.stlukesjolon.org). There were about ten of us altogether, including a dog who was quite friendly and seemed to embody the wide open spirit of the land. They had coffee, and they passed around watermelon slices. I listened, I shared, I was refreshed. And my personal recovery network found a western connection, my own Manifest Destiny (historical reference, not illusions of grandeur), from Georgia to California – Atlantic to Pacific.

On the flight home, the Goddess blessed me with another pretty young female and an inspiring display of cleavage. We talked about her network of friends that allowed her to travel the world and her work at a Swedish furniture company in Philadelphia, that added to her litany of travels by sending her for training to Sweden. I never thought that a cosmetology school or furniture company could be a launching pad for travel and adventure.

I had been inspired by so many human connections because of my decision to take personal responsibility for my sobriety. I received two primary lessons for my recovery. First, that sense of loneliness and futility is the dry form of my disease and acts as a warning flag for possible relapse. The second lesson is in the power of taking action to value my sobriety and know that the action doesn’t require successful results to be effective. I gained faith that something out there cares specifically about me and will reinforce my actions toward sobriety with a sequence of events leading to spiritual freedom.

Oh, and just a side note…there was a mission I passed often in my commute from the FOB to the Battalion that I really want to visit. And I would love to be apart of the Archeological digs that I saw going on out there. (missionsanantonio.net).

I heard yesterday in a meeting a simple concept of steps 2 through 7.  Steps 2 and 3 we establish the God of our understanding, and in so doing, the characteristics we attribute to that GOMU (“God of my understanding”) sets the standards for what we regard as perfection of existence.

In steps 4 and 5, we establish a clear, realistic picture of what we really are, good, bad, ugly.  And in steps 6 and 7, we establish what we want to be, and set out on our journey to reflect the perfection of our Gomu.

The implications for me is that Gomu might simply be our higher self.  It might be the echo of our own perfection speaking to us from an infinite coexistence.  Or it might be a Deity, an Infinite Entity that has encoded within us an awareness of and desire for its nature, a hunger and deep need to connect to this Gomu.  For me, the difficulty with the later is the unique expressions our perspectives of the divine manifest.

There was a mention that the Big Book didn’t actually say much about steps 6 and 7, but in the later publication of the 12 steps and 12 traditions, it was discussed in greater detail.  The phrase “more will be revealed” was used in the meeting.  I know I have heard this thought in my traditional Christian years, and I have heard it in the rooms.  I assumed it was in the Big Book somewhere, and attempted an internet search for it.  I found the following: [http://anonpress.org/faq/files/read.asp?fID=470].  It is another concept that is inferred or maybe paraphrased from the AA literature.  But it does point to the prospect that not only does our individual perspective alter, but the understanding of the group consciousness also changes as more is revealed by…the group Gomu.

So, the pursuit of perfection in the program is subjective and individualistic in its specifics, and it is tested by the utilitarian functionalism in the interactive environment by such important questions as, “Does it keep me clean and sober?”  “Does it improve the quality of my relationships?”  “Am I achieving the state of being happy, joyous, and free as promised in the text?”

Another implication of the standard of perfection for steps 6 and 7 being based on the concepts of Gomu established in steps 2 and 3 is that the path toward perfection may involve the altering of the standard to match our spiritual evolution in step 11.  Our step 10 inventory work may be to adjust our course and relinquish obsolete ideas of perfection.

Whatever adjustments we make it is important to keep the core principles of the program in sight.  I have heard that this is a disease of perception (a disease that profoundly affects and is affected by your perception).  The principles are inferred from the 12 steps of the program listed on pages 59 through 60 in the Big Book.  I do not find them listed by the founders anywhere.  That task was left to their spiritual beneficiaries.  So I refer to this site for a good listing: [http://www.barefootsworld.net/aaprinciples.html].  I have created a page to capture that listing in case this link ever goes dead.

In listening to myself share in the meeting, I fail to use the steps.  I have been in the program long enough so that my experience goes beyond escape from the alcoholic obsession, and should include my own clear guidance through the steps.  My sharing should go beyond the reflection of my ego and point to the steps of the program.  I will soon have my year back and desire to sponsor.

And I need to find my own sponsor in Al-Anon, and continue work with the moon guide.  It will probably be July before I can work on this in earnest.  Gomu keep me until then.