Daily Reprieve

I have a third sponsee as of tonight.  I thought I would share my paraphrase of the 3rd step prayer that I did on the 13th of November, last year:

To my Higher Power,

Because you are specifically interested in me, I desire to know you.  Because you appear to love me and give a damn about what happens to me, and because you are more powerful than my enemy, my disease, I will entrust the care of my life to you.  Because you seemed to be connected to everyone, and to be the representative of the web of the cosmos to me, the repository of universal wisdom, I will trust your guidance for my life.  Because the examples of your demonstrated will around me unfold in creative beauty and satisfy the hunger to truly live, I will subordinate my will to yours.

I have felt ignored and abandoned by you in the past.  I do not claim to understand you.  Or even to have your identity nailed down.  I struggle to hear your voice and understand your activity or lack thereof.  But I have given up the right, the need to argue.  I just need to live.  And you have found me now.  I accept your right to correct my way of life.  I accept you because you accept me.  Own me.  I am yours. 

These are the words I have a prejudice against and will need your help with as I work this program: surrender, willingness, dependence, weakness, good, total obedience, tame, beaten, honesty, homogenizing love, the apathy of peace, serenity, and contentment, predator, molester, bully, stupidity, culturally enforced ignorance, religion, balance.

These are the words that I like and I will also need your help with:  dangerous, strong, honorable, brave, powerful, intelligent, secrets reaper, high pain tolerance, endurance, persistence, pleasure, lust, adventure, vicious, cunning, creative, magic, superseding order out of explosive chaos, animal instinct, stoic, war, ambition, drive, adaptation, stealth, truth.

But I know that the logical conclusion of this disease is jail, insanity, or tragic death.

So I pray this – I am willing to surrender everything about me for you, my Higher Power, to become active  in my life.  I reach as I grow, I do what I know, I  let it all go.  Thank-you for one more apple to eat, a bite at a time.

The final question:

12.  Have you realized that God is doing for you what you could not do for yourself?

I find this question repugnant, as though it is not enough for an admission of powerlessness, but now you have to rub my nose in it!  No, I do not sense that there is a God magically spoon-feeding this program to me on any level.  But I feel that this God entity is partnering up with me, empowering me to do what needs to be done and making me effective, amplifying every effort I exercise. 

I believe this God entity needs me as much as I need It.

God was alone in the universe and it “was not good.”  This self-aware central force of the universe, the spider of the web that connects all, wanted others that could relate to It on a level no other being could achieve.  God needed beings that could understand the power of both order and chaos.  He created us, and he set us up to fall.  Perfection with a flaw was the design.  I am OK with this.  I have to express who I am to be a value to It, and It has to enhance my life to be of value to me.  Thus, our relationship has relevance one to the other.

Question 11:  Have you developed the ability to intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle you?

I would have to say absolutely YES.  I feel like I have stepped over the intuitive obstacles of religion and fear, the primary voices of my lower power.

My slave said that I am starting to sound like a preacher.  yikes!  I have had people assume that I am a preacher because I was ordained for a short time in a store front church.  That was a galaxy far, far away.

The recovery program did not give me a Higher Power, it gave me the freedom to seek and the imperative to find.  That is apparently all I needed.  The doctrinal baggage nearly killed me.  My Higher Power is not definable in my current state of existence, I do not believe.  I am at peace with that fact, and I am also at peace with the fact that this entity doesn’t give a dam about how I reach out, just the fact that I do.  He-She-It cares about me.  That’s all I need to live and to receive intuitive guidance.  I could be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Wiccan, Pagan, or some individualistic blend that helps me to be comfortable in my own skin.  There is no more “Us and Them” for me.  If you want to be the best You there is, there is a force in the universe that shouts AMEN to that desire. 

That is what I have found, and what has kept me sober this past year, and resurrected my spiritual life that died in the year of fuck-it, 2003.  I am a deeply grateful heretic.

Are you about finished with those questions?  Good grief.

Just a few more.  Here is the next one:

10.  Has the fear of economic insecurity left you?

No, not completely.  I know this is a trust issue with my Higher Power and I am actively working on this.  I received a promise tonight through an intuitive journal.  My one year tag is going to be a prosperity guarantee.  I know, that could be a misread on my part and if you hear God promise to move a mountain, make sure to bring a shovel.  I know this.  But when I can trust HP on this, the fear leaves me.  I actually look forward to testing the reality of this promise.  Ultimately, serenity must not be dependant on outer circumstances.  But I think serenity, this trust in the magic of the universe, does have an impact on the physical environment.  Whatever is happening on the inside gets reflected on the outside.  Such is my hope. 

I went to my first Al Anon meeting tonight, with Sponsee One.  The speaker was someone I had just made amends to.  I think I need to take advantage of that.  He has invited me to a men’s only Al Anon meeting nearby.  Maybe so.

Next question;

9.  Has the fear of people left you?

It’s intensity has decreased.  During my drinking, I can remember having difficulty getting outside of the apartment.  I have always had difficulty connecting with others, but when I began to nurture my pathological relationship with alcohol, familiarity and closeness with others brought accountability I did not desire.  But, through the program, I have been able to connect with others in a way I never have.  I would say that it is even closer than the camaraderie I felt from being in the military, because there is no overwhelming sense of being judged.  I am understood on some very basic levels.

The fear of people has left me, most of the time.  Being annoyed with people is something I am still working on.  Progress prior to perfection, I guess.

I don’t know why I don’t give my sponsor credit for the experience and good advise he gives, and why I put so much my stock in my own isolation.  I got to talk to him this morning, when his cell came back into range and he discovered that I had been having a hard time.  I am trying to use a mind that is not yet healed.  I tracked back to a point last week when I turned my attention away from helping my sponsees to some more self indulgent pursuits.  I still have some issues about having to meet Sponsee Two at a church sponsored recovery program, and I think that it activated this fear of being sucked back into that realm of social and behavioral control.  I am no longer protected by my fierce anger.  But it all is beginning to make sense again, now that I have ridden the storm out and seen the tools of the program begin to bring me back into sanity.  Oops, the question man has returned:

Yes, we had only answered the first seven questions of the twelve I had for you, based on the ninth step promises.  So let us pick up the next one, now that you are back with us:

 8.  Has your whole attitude and outlook on life changed? 

Can I truly answer this question?  I have definitely had an attitude adjustment and my outlook on life is so much more positive and resilient than it has been.  But I generally shy away from all inclusive words and broad sweeping conclusions.  The phrase “whole attitude and outlook” is beyond my scope.  I am only able to answer because the question doesn’t add “completely changed.” 

So my answer is yes, with qualifications.

I am so tired; what a weekend.  I have restarted my reading of “As Bill Sees It.”  I came across a section in which he described the AA fellowship as Benign Anarchy.  It is an interesting concept.  I also think that Bill saw the fellowship’s purpose as transcending recovery and providing a new and brighter spiritual path or option.  That is what I picked up when I read the first forward.  “And besides, we are sure that our way of living has its advantages for all.”

I guess it becomes religious trite when I speak something I do not believe.  Something is helping me.  I should not be sober today.  I know what my response would have been in the past.  I am interacting with some force that is taking whatever I do and amplifying its effectiveness.  Some Higher Power is helping me.  Why do I struggle so with that.  I have acceptance issues.

See. That is the kind of crap I am talking about.  “Higher Power doing for me what I could not do for myself.”  That is so trite, such a religious bumper sticker!  I feel like I’m stuck in a clean padded cell with guards “doing for me…” and telling me that I will die and learn to  love it.  I think I might be a rotten poster child for recovery.

I went out with my daughter to the dollar theatre and saw the movie Hancock.  It was such a perfect parable of what I am going through and gave me some unexpected insight.  The PR rep is the good man that I do not want to be and for the reasons that were demonstrated in the movie.  Yet he is there and as persistant as that PR man.  And Hancock is that hard edge, the darker (sorry Will, that wasn’t a racial slur) side.  And of course sobriety is not his strong suit.  And the unexpected strength of the good man’s wife is Lady Recovery.  Go see the movie and you will see the unbelievable parallel. 

INSIGHT:   The good guy and the asshole can actually support one another, as long as the asshole maintains his distance from Lady Recovery.  It is not a one or the other prospect, a mutually exclusive inevitability.  I am amazed how many times the Higher Power uses movies to demonstrate profound truths to me.  Star Trek and Rocky have been canonized in my spiritual walk.  The raw Dominant is calm again, and Lady Recovery will have her way – a life with the good guy.

I think this qualifies as my Higher Power doing for me what I could not do for myself.