Daily Reprieve

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ”

• This and variations on it have been attributed to various different sources, including Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, an old Chinese proverb, and Rita Mae Brown.

Luke 11:9-10 (Amplified Bible)

Let me clarify my feelings on religion.  Speaking from my grieving heart may not be understood by those listening with their analytical minds. 

If you practice religion, gain from its ritual, are devoted to your deity, and it unites you with the rest of humanity, and helps you to live out your own personal mythology, I am for you.  What I personally condemn is turning to these practices out of fearful pretense.  Even though it is effective to scare people into the boundaries of religious practice, I believe it hinders the development of personal mythology and thus the evolution of the collective conscience. 

My son Zack believed in a more universal and inclusive God.  I feared that if he did not say the right things, acknowledge god correctly, that he would be ultimatley rejected by this deity I wanted him to love.  I had to try to sell devotion to this being with the realization that most of humanity was going to be diverted into eternal torment.  And that I wanted him  to enjoy this great heaven while friends and loved ones screamed in torment.  So we would have to learn to turn a deaf ear to their sufferings throughout eternity.  I ask, who is really in hell? 

And these decisions must be made while those who are devoted to the god of hell argue amongst themselves about the correct format for appeasement and that sinister god remains silent and strangely distant. 

I have come to believe that there is something there, something that seems to have a love for us.  I have my reasons.  I also believe that I can interact with this being and still remain true to myself.  This being seems to withdraw only when I try to live falsely with him. 

I used to say that if I was going to look for demons in this modern world, I would camp out in a church.  Most religion is more motivated and inspired by darkness, fear, and evil then it is by a God of love.  And I am often no better.  I have felt this before, still do.  I am more afraid of what I could lose, than inspired by what I could gain. 

So this program of recovery invites me to step out of my comfort zone.  If I feel fear and continue on, I am not bowing to the worst aspects of my past religious indoctrination.

I dreamed of Zack last night.  If there is a heaven where someone as beautiful as my son is rejected, I want no part of it. 

I believe that this God is real in some fashion that we are not able to conceive.  The more I try to say I know, the more I reveal my fears that cause me to be intolerant.

What if God wanted to give us a test.  For me, a test given by an all-knowing being is not for the purpose of his education about an individual.  A test is given so that the individual can look in a well crafted mirror and know himself better.  The God of my understanding wants us to be true to what he created within us. 

This test is a simple question – can you accept a universe in which most of those people around you are going to be destroyed, because you know if it is true, you are safe?  Is that alright with you?  Can you sing songs praising the fuhrer of the heavens as a train of helpless humanity is paraded by you, screaming?  Do we just get up and shut the church windows so that we might not hear them?  Business as usual while the skies are lit with their hell fire?  Is this reality acceptable?  At least Adolf’s flames brought death and not eternal torment.  What sadistic mind would conceive of a fate for his beloved ones, and claim a Father’s heart?  Only one who is totally insane. 

I think that you pass the test if you can risk losing your personal spiritual safety because you will not help such a reality to perpetuate itself.   People are significant.  When we can label one person as insignificant, and discard them with the morning trash, we cannot lay claim to a special place in this world for ourselves.  Someone is holding a garbage bag with your name on it.  Tomorrow they may take over the moral sanitation department. 

Sometimes I can feel that callous aspect of religious pretense seep into the recovery rooms, and I hate it.  Sometimes, I can feel it in the temple of my own mind and heart, and I hate it even more. 

From the Bible paraphrase, the Message:  If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.  [1John 4:20]

From Buddha:  Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

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I had a dream with my now deceased Mother in it.  We were traveling north, it was mountainous terrain, like in Tennessee.  There were cell phones scattered below rocky escarpments along the road.  I assumed people had dropped them walking around atop, and would just discard them.  I seemed to feel very good about myself.

Back in the neighborhood Mom, Dad, and I were visiting there were a couple of individuals who had come to see me.  Pete Ross, dark haired and wearing a blue and white racing jacket, like the motorcycle racers wear.  And an artist that came to my Mother’s art studio when we lived in Centreville.  His name was Dusty Rhodes (looks nothing like the wrestler). 

I never got a chance to talk to either one of them.  I felt like I needed to prepare myself first.  Mom wouldn’t tell me why they had come.

Zack was the first non-faculty winner of the Life Raft debate at the University of Montevallo.

[http://www.liferaftdebate.com/]

I will never be religous again.  Never.  He didn’t deserve that.  People don’t deserve that.  Never again, my son, never again.

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King Theodin in Lord of the Ring said that no parent should have to bury their child.   My mother prayed that she would never have to face this tragedy.  I should have done the same.  My Zack, my stepson.  I hate the title stepson.  I was proud of him.  I loved him.  I counted him as my own.  But I gave him religion.  I gave him appropriateness. 

Zack, I wish I could talk with you now.  Without religion.  I wish I could tell you of the heresy of this program. 

Regardless, I am proud of you.  I love you.  one more time.  How I wish that I could talk to you.  Your brother  turns legal age this month.  Your sister got her driving permit.   And I remember your body.  Cold.   Still.  How can I walk this life without you.  If I had known the heresies of this program before you left, we would have had … I remember New Orleans.  I remember when you ran for class president with a mo-hawk and won, and caused a disruption for the facility of Thompson High.  God, Zack, I miss you.

Your bio-father was an asshole.  He did not realize what a treasure you were.  I screwed up too.  I kept trying to save you.  What an insult.  I was saved just by having you around. 

I miss you.  So stupid.  I should have held you more.  I love you Zack.  I am so sorry that religion got between you and I.  I am so sorry.  Please forgive me.

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Another day, another night.  Where do I go from here.  Tools that are habits, so I don’t have to think on it.  ingrain it so that I do what I need to breath another clean breath

Others.  This now becomes about helping others.  But if you think I or my kind are really wonderful people for reaching out to others, think again.  Sobriety vampires.  I need others in order to live.  selfish altruism is the reality we can trust.  Expand my spiritual environment or develop another intimate relationship with powerlessness. 

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When my children were small, beautiful, trusting faces looking to me for guidance and empowerment,  I enjoyed telling them stories as if they were real.  Their reactions were priceless.  But then, I noticed that they would invest faith in what I said, and I would have to go back and correct what I had done.  How would they know when to trust my words?  Was I doomed to sacrifice the role of story teller so that they would know that I would always tell them the truth.  They needed that from me.  But they needed the interplay of the imagination as well.  I was left with the choice of two roles because of this conflict; Father of Integrity or the Mischievous Story Teller.

A third way appeared to me.  I sat down with them and explained my dilemma as best I could.  I told them that we would have a code word between us.  If I was telling them something, and they wanted to make sure it was true, they would just say the word, ‘CRICKET,’ and I would continue my story but include crickets in it, or I would just come out and tell them it was a fictional account.  This safeword gave them the best of both worlds.  That way, if I was telling them something I believed to be true, and they said cricket, and I continued to tell them that this was a true story, they could count on it.  I never violated this arrangement with them, and I never intend to do so in the future.  And yes, they have used this safeword even as teenagers.

It is hard for me to accept an either / or proposition.  Give me two doors to chose between and I am looking for the secret panel hidden in the bookshelves.  There  must be a way that synthesizes the two apparently contradictory perspectives.  When I am told that this is the way, walk ye in it, I begin looking around for hidden treasures.  All the time I spent researching scripture I had a hunger for the occultic meanings tucked away between “Thee” and “Thou.” 

I understand why Jacob struggled with God, and demanded to know His name.  He really was just looking for his own safeword.

This is a selfish program.  It has to be, in order for it to be truly successful.  Anything that I really do well appeals to some aspect of my selfishness.  “Go after recovery like you would go after your drug of choice.”  I pursued my DOC with unbridled selfishness by seeking the fulfillment of my personal interests, and casting a blind eye to the wants and needs of others in my environment, even my lovenviron. 

Yet eventually, the program redirects my attention away from the recovery of addiction or alcoholism or compulsion, and says that I should now focus on overcoming selfishness.  And that is really confusing.  I have tried to adapt to this double talk by dividing the word selfishness into the concept of self-enthronement and self-interest.  In my mind, when we talk positively about selfishness in the program, I say that we mean self-interest.  And when we talk about it in a negative way, I see self-enthronement.

I think I understand that there are two primary levels to recovery.  Recovery from my substance abuse, and recovery from my selfishness, or self-enthronement.  Now that I have recovered from the obsession of the disease (not the disease itself), I am no longer in panic mode.   And I am presented with a choice yet again.  The path of Bill Wilson or the path of Ebby Thatcher.  Bill’s path was to seek a complete surrender to his Higher Power through the abandonment of self-enthronement.  Ebby Thatcher could surrender the alcohol and bring the disease into remission, but he could not recognize that he was also powerless over self-enthronement.    He could not see that this powerlessness would manifest itself in his  recovery that lead to some form of periodic relapse, either a return of the obsession to drink or through the overwhelming manifestation of his short-comings.  My first step thus becomes;  We admitted we were powerless over self-enthronement, and that our lives had become unmanageable. 

I will seek my self interests at the expense of others, even those in my lovenviron.  I see the world as I would like it to be, and in the intimate reality of my imagination, I am enthroned.  I set about working to make my kingdom come, on our earth, in our interactive reality, as it is in my heaven, my intimate reality.  In my heart, I am God.

The only way this is going to work is if all the others who live in the interactive reality bow to me.  And that includes all the power of the universe, so that no circumstance occurs outside of my control.  Ebby has already proved for us that his path does not work.  And that may have been his greatest contribution aside from sponsoring Bill Wilson.  He conducted the field research on this and demonstrated its futility.

But the half measures of self-knowledge avails me nothing in this process.  That just lets me know how thoroughly fucked I am.  I will enthrone myself again and again.  I feel I have legitimate reasons not to trust my Higher Power in all areas.  I can argue my points, but I have come to discover that it is really a matter of altering my perspective, not winning arguments.  I never win these arguments.  My acceptance issues are only solved by my acceptance. 

A friend of mine I met at Fort Benning once said, “Rick, I want you to hear me on this.  Please listen to me.  Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself, alone.  But if it dies, it produces many others and yields a rich harvest.  It becomes useful and powerful.  Anyone who loves his life loses it, but anyone who hates his life in this world, a life ruled by personal powerlessness, will gain a life that leads to an eternal manifestation.”  [Paraphrase of John 12: 24,25]

In honor of Ebby Thatcher who gave Bill and all of us in the 12 step recovery program the concept of following a God of our own understanding (GOMU – God of my understanding), the saving heresy of this program, I have written out a prayer for those caught in chronic relapse, which is based on Old Testament Scripture:  Micah, Chapter 7, verses seven and eight:

But as for me, I will look to the God of my understanding, and confident in him I will keep watch; 

We will wait with hope and expectancy for the God of our recovery;

Our Higher Power will hear us.

Rejoice not against me, O my disease;

When I fall, We shall arise;

When I sit in darkness, Gomu shall be a light to me.

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The circle is complete.  I have watched the Crystal Skull.  It is done.  I was neither bolled over nor disappointed.  There was the Ark from the original movie peeking at me, giving me a little wink as we escaped Area 51.  The wild little alcohol swigging winch from the original is now the mother of Indy’s bastard greaser son, Mutt.  And as in the Raiders, the eyes are still the gateway to the soul.  The beginning meets the end, as in the great Ouroboros.

“Let this circle represent what we can do together and never apart.”  I have heard this phrase from my first treatment facility to the last recovery meeting I attended.  And this thought was expressed when the alien throne room was discovered.  The aliens represent what we hope to be in the future.  They are the ideal human beings, who have advanced from individualistic struggles to the power of the group conscience.  This is apart of our next great evolutionary jump.  The 13th skull represents so many things for me.  But in the movie, it represented aliens willing to remain in limbo until they were all together again.  They did not leave a brother alien behind. 

A second aspect of this ideal human species is the understanding that the greed for individual knowledge can be as destructive as the greed for gold.  When I seek to gain knowledge so that I can rule over my peers, I am seeking the knowledge that is power for self enthronement.  That means that my self exaltation requires an attitude of disregard for others.  My need to be right carries a parallel need to insure that you are wrong, if you are different.  The aliens take a hit in many on line reviews for offering treasure, luring humans to gain power, when the only noticeable result is the melting of your brain.  But I believe that because these aliens were “collectors” as Dr. Jones noticed, the connection between human Russian and alien was an exchange of knowledge.  And as the alien became aware of the pure selfishness, the disregard for the life of her own species, the desire to cause all others to think as she thought, to use the knowledge to eliminate all voices of free thought…and ultimately, the fact that the alien was arrogantly approached by one isolated individual rather than the more advanced group conscience…I imagine this alien was more than a little disturbed.  Mac’s greed for self-enthronement with gold and the FemDom bitch’s greed for self-enthronement through knowledge act as an invitation to compare the similarity.  The fact that the McCarthy era was played up in the environment of the movie, the need to control the way others think, what knowledge they have access to, and the James Dean greaser look of Mutt, a voice for freedom in a new generation, the issue of free access to knowledge and a respectful sharing of others intimate realities became the central virtue of this movie, for me. 

Just a supplemental note, it seemed many felt the nuclear scene was out of place, and a contrived intrusion to the plot of the story.  But if you look at the fact that Indy sought refuge in what he thought was an ideal American community, that its inhabitants were all mindless props, and that an immature society gaining great knowledge, resulted in the production of the most destructive weapon ever imagined, then it makes a great deal of sense to include this.  At least for me it does.

Which brings me to a third and final point from the movie.  The message of generational transfer.  Indy looks longingly at his father’s picture in the movie several times.  As Indy begins to take responsibility for his son, he refers to him as Junior, a name he resented his father using on him.  But a name that he treasured in the end.  At the wedding, as the son seeks to capture the memory of lineage confirming marriage, the wind opens the church doors and throws the famed hat at the boys feet.  Was this a visit from Indy’s father from the other side of the veil?  Mutt picks it up in a moment of awe, almost gets it on his own head, and Indy smiles and takes it from him, reclaims the hat…and his son.  The right of passage has begun.  The rebel without a cause begins to get a sense of himself. 

I would like to thank my son for his encouragement to go ahead and see this movie.

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What is the use of powerlessness to the alcoholic, the addict, the compulsively enslaved?  From my own experience and from what I have read I see two primary uses.  It points out the futility of an isolated life full of individualistic bravado.  It causes me to look at the accumulated evidence of an unmanageable life.  At that point, I can and must quit struggling.  But I will not until I have gathered enough evidence to satisfy my personal examination.  Once I hit bottom, and I close the file on my field research, I can stop and rest.  And consider.

The second use of my powerlessness is that it reveals my true problem.  It helps me see my belly button.  I was created by being connected to an existing life.  My spiritual life in this realm has an umbilical cord that is supposed to be connected to the stream of life, or the collective conscience,  and with the Higher Power.  Unlike the physical  connection, how it connects is a product of my free will.  It must be.  Personal powerlessness points to the internal bankruptcy from leaving my spiritual umbilical cord flapping in the wind.  I cannot live life severed from the whole. 

When I die and leave this womb, I guess I will have a spiritual belly button, so that I can remember what it was like here;  perfection with a flaw. 

In this way, powerlessness can be specifically applied to addiction and compulsion and lead us to recovery.  But I believe that it can also be generally applied, because isolated human beings are perpetually and universally powerless.  They are powerless over an overwhelming plethora of external situations they cannot control, powerless over the frustration of their disconnect between fantasy and reality, powerless over other forces of life that surround them.   There are people, places, things, and situations that refuse to bow to our will. 

Sure, I believe that there must be a balance between individual achievement that is tested in usefulness to the group, and group interdependence should be there to protect and empower the individual.  But if powerlessness is continually haunting me, I need to work on my connections. 

Step One can easily be generalized:  We admitted we were powerless and as a result, our lives had become unmanageable.

A friend of mine once attempted to speak for the Higher Power concerning this when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened (powerless, unmanageable), and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke (my connection) upon you, and learn from me, (follow intuitive guidance in meditation), for I am gentle and humble in heart (qualities necessary to make good connections), and you will find rest (serenity), for my yoke is easy (keep it simple-simplicity opens the way for clarity), and my burden is light (a lot of freedom and not contrary to who you truly are – to thine own self be true)”

The rest of the steps in this program build a bridge between my fantasy, my intimate reality, and the interactive reality of the group conscience.  My mind opens commerce with the world at large, as I clear away obstacles that prevent me from making vital, life saving connections.  My final question becomes, “What can I pack into the stream of life?” (page 86 of the Big Book)

PAGE 417 of the BIG BOOK:   And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.  When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.  Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober;  unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.  I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

PAGE 386-387 of the BIG BOOK:  Here I found an ingredient that  had been lacking in any other effort I had made to save myself.  Here was -power!  Here was power to live to the end of any given day, power to have the courage to face the next day, power to have friends, power to help people, power to be sane, power to stay sober. ..I am deeply convinced that so long as I continue to strive, in my bumbling way, toward the principles I first encountered in the earlier chapters of this book, this remarkable power will continue to flow through me.  What is this power?  With my AA friends, all I can say is that it’s a Power greater than myself.  If pressed, all I can do is follow the psalmist who said it long before me:  “Be still, and know that I am God.” … My alcoholic associates fired me, took control, and ran the enterprise into bankruptcy…My alcoholic wife took up with someone else, divorced me, and took with her all my remaining property…one night my son, when he was only sixteen, was suddenly and tragically killed…I know that I’ll never again have to go through them (the bad times) alone.

Perfection with a flaw. 

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