Daily Reprieve

And the answer to that question would be a resounding NO!  I need roles, mental compartments to find my place in life. 

My sponsee made contact with someone else in our recovery network and got a ride to a meeting.  This individual would make an excellent back-up sponsor.  I feel good for him.  He took a suggestion and ran with it.  It will benefit him. 

 There was a misunderstanding between my new sponsor and I, and so we missed each other.  I will have to attempt contact tomorrow.

75

I am due to see my new sponsor today.  I recently spoke to a priest to act as a spiritual sponsor.  Next week I in-process my new Army Reserve unit and see if I can get this 48 year old body to move once more.  Was the last physical training failures the result of my alcoholism or my aged body, or both?  I guess I will soon find out.  First physical training testing is on 13 December. 

Can I live without falling behind roles and losing myself? 

76

From the 12 x 12, Page 23:

When our membership was small, we dealt with “low-bottom cases” only.  Many less desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the admission of their hopelessness.

In the following years, this changed.  Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism.  As this trend grew, they were joined by young people who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics.  How could people such as these take the First Step?

By going back in our own drinking histories, we showed them that years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression.

A fatal progression.  How much evidence must be accumulated before the mind confirms that it is not a mere habit.  It can be gathered prior to being out of control.  Consequences?  The realization that controlled drinking is not satisfying?  A spotlight shinning on that still, small voice whispering “not enough…more?”  Once we gather evidence sufficient to see life and death, to leave the debate team behind, we have hit bottom.  But some of us, from time to time, feel the need to do just a little bit more research and the file is re-opened.  The list of things I haven’t done yet or that hasn’t happened to me yet becomes a reality. 

This is where helping others is powerful.  They have come in from recent field tests demonstrating that it still doesn’t work.  This protects our minds from the insanity that grows in isolation.

78

From the 12 x 12, page 90:

It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.  If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong, too.

But are there no exceptions to this rule?  What about “justifiable” anger?  If somebody cheats us, aren’t we entitled to be mad?  And shouldn’t we be properly angry with self-righteous folks?

For us of A.A. these adventures in anger are sometimes very dangerous.  We have found that even justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.

There are two things that I pull out of this axiom:

1.  The answer is in us (notice I did not say ME).  This must be true, because if we have to rely on controlling others to find sanity and recovery, we are fucked.  The disease desires that the solution be kept locked away, and my fortress called “never trust or risk hurt again” becomes a prison of living death. 

2.  The disease seems to amplify emotions meant to serve us into passions that overload good judgment.  I have experienced normal anxiety amplified into unbearable levels of fear.  Anger becomes rage.  A period of introspective blues becomes suicidal depression.  And the only cure my mind can produce is some form of self-medication. 

79

AA Comes of Age, Page 232:

There are those who predict that AA may well become a new spearhead for a spiritual awakening throughout the world.  When our friends say these things, they are both generous and sincere.  But we of AA must reflect that such a tribute and such a prophecy could well prove to be a heady drink for most of us – that is, if we really came to believe this to be the real purpose of AA, and if we commenced to behave accordingly.

Our Society, therefore, will prudently cleave to its single purpose:  the carrying of the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.  Let us resist the proud assumption that since God has enabled us to do well in one area we are destined to be a channel of saving grace for everybody.

I don’t think being a new spearhead and protecting AA’s single purpose are mutually exclusive.  The 12 step program has been applied to a multitude of compulsions and addictions.  Why not take the spiritual guts of the program and use it for the spiritual development we didn’t want but ended up needing.

The 4th Step prayer dealing with Resentments on Page 67:

We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him?  God save me from being angry.  Thy will be done.

The principal implied in this prayer is that those who offend us are “sick.”  The disease concept is thus expanded to include those demonstrating spiritual deficits, not just alcoholics.  Spiritual bankruptcy is the real disease, and it manifest in a multitude of ways.  12 step programs grab hold of one lethal symptom to lead to the root cause. 

Why wait for life threatening symptoms to develop?  Why not go ahead and connect with a Higher Power of our own understanding, seek a Vital Spiritual Experience by working the steps, replace the Judicial Damnation of the Sin Concept with the tolerate Disease model, and come to the realization that we are helping others for our own survival, altruism minus the social pretense of  religious offices.  Why not embrace these saving heresies before we get our collective asses handed to us?  Just a thought.

80

Letter from Bill Wilson, 1954:

“The idea keeps persisting that the instincts are primarily bad and are the roadblocks before which all spirituality falters.  I believe that the difference between good and evil is not the difference between spiritual and instinctual man; it is the difference between proper and improper use of the instinctual.  Recognition and right channeling of the instinctual are the essence of achieving wholeness.”

81

From Bill Wilson in the Grapevine, Jan 1958:

“In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics.  Not a one responded.  Yet this work kept me sober.  It wasn’t a question of those alcoholics giving me anything.  My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.”

82

AA COMES OF AGE, Pages 69-70

In my first conversation with Dr. Bob, I bore down heavily on the medical hopelessness of his case, freely using Dr. Silkworth’s words describing the alcoholic’s dilemma, the “obsession plus allergy” theme.  Though Bob was a doctor, this was news to him, bad news.  And the fact that I was an alcoholic and knew what I was talking about from personal experience made the blow a shattering one.

You see, our talk was a completely mutual thing.  I had quit preaching.  I knew that I needed this alcoholic as mush as he needed me.

“I had quit preaching.”  What a relief when others quit preaching, or when I no longer feel the need to do so.  Let’s just talk.  Be real.  Get honest.  Realize that we are all in this together.  I love the freedom and reality of this spiritual program.  I can also feel it when that religious spirit seeks to hijack the program into social acceptability.  People start saying the right thing.  We start verbally dressing up who we are.  And it doesn’t matter what group you are talking about.  Wiccans and Pagans do the same thing as Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  When we become fractionated into identity booster groups, filled with some form of protective religious pride, our fortress becomes an isolating prison.

OH MY GOD!  I am preaching about not preaching!  Ok, the reality for me is that I am free.  When I am not afraid or feeling guilty or angry, I really like who I am.  For me, it seems that gratitude is easy when I like who I am and when my disease isn’t right in my face.

83

From Bill W. in the Grapevine, 1962:

“I was the recipient of a tremendous mystic experience of ‘illumination,’ and at first it was very natural for me to feel that this experience staked me out as somebody very special.

But as I now look back upon this tremendous event, I can only feel very grateful.  It now seems clear that the only special features of my experience were its suddenness and the overwhelming and immediate conviction that it carried.

In all other respects, however, I am sure that my own experience was essentially like that received by any A.A. member who has strenuously practiced our recovery program.  Surely, the grace he receives is also of God; the only difference is that he becomes aware of his gift more gradually. “

From a letter written by Bill Wilson, 1960:

During acute depression, avoid trying to set your whole life in order all at once.  If you take on assignments so heavy that you are sure to fail in them at the moment, then you are allowing yourself to be tricked by your unconscious.  Thus you will continue to make sure of your failure, and when it comes you will have another alibi for still more retreat into depression.

In short, the ‘all or nothing’ attitude is a most destructive one.  It is best to begin with whatever the irreducible minimums of activity are.  Then work for an enlargement of these – day by day.  Don’t be disconcerted by setbacks – just start over.

I quoted Bill W. above because it seemed appropriate in the spirit of preparing for the holiday blues. 

I raised my right head today, to serve as a soldier once more, in the US Army Reserve.  It finally happened.  I went to a meeting tonight and there were many military personnel there from a treatment facility.  I hope that my experience dealing with this disease will be helpful to others in uniform. 

I do not feel brave.  I face difficult situations the same way I face a roller coaster ride at Six Flags.  I concentrate in getting in line, and just mindlessly walk forward.  Don’t consider the enter scope of what I am about to face.  This becomes increasingly difficult the longer I have to wait.  The building anxiety makes me impatient.  I don’t know how much longer I can restrain the desire to escape, to protect myself. 

It finally happens.  The moment of truth.  All I really have to do now is sit down in the seat and buckle up, the rest will work itself out.  The metaphor breaks down when comparing to military service as a leader.  Taking the oath is no longer just about challenging fear and feeling the exhilaration.  I am expected to lead based on my accumulated years of service.  Others will count on me to perform.  This roller coaster ride could be for several months, even years.  I am responsible.  I want to be responsible.  I want to do well.  But I have more faith in the manifestation of my shortcomings than I do of my strengths.

Maybe if I can take what I have learned in the program to this devotion, I will do better this time.  I help others because it helps me.  We work together because we will die individually.  Humility in order to insure connection.  Ask for help when I am in need.  Seems to fit.

84