Daily Reprieve

I was doing alright at the beginning of this day.  Then I went to a meeting.  I managed to talk, to “share.”  I wanted to connect.  But I left feeling more distant.  Something came out in this vain attempt.  Seven days ago, I went to an H and I meeting at Bradford.  I got to lead the topic.  I did it.  And it was definitely some rambling regurgitation.  I really hate hearing me talk for the most part. 

The room was packed with desperate souls.  After I set the ball to rolling, I noticed that a lady had been looking at me.  I thought she was smiling, or maybe it was a grimace.  Then she introduced herself to the group and stood up, “I have to stand because I am so short.”  Bullshit.  Then she began to testify about her faith in Jesus and how she had been married for 3900 years and how wonderful and powerful the love of her god was.  Her jaw was fixed.  She was testifying, defending her faith.  I was her satan.  I had told the blind men and elephant story.  I had mentioned my own problems with religion, and my difficulty in swallowing Dr. Bob’s writing. 

After she took her stand, she acted as if she was coughing, and left the meeting.

I had played it down, and didn’t realize that this was still bothering me.  I thought that I had come so far in developing tolerance.  Is it because I wear dark clothing or maybe I just look dangerous?  I don’t know. 

Sometimes I just absolutely hate god.  I hate the concept of him, the social psychosis that some refer to as faith.  I hate it all.  So burn me at the stake.  Please.  Quit pretending that you give a damn about me and just do what it is in your nature to do.  Wipe me out.  Humiliate and destroy your critics.  Perform the genocide necessary to build a beloved promised land of blithering idiots.  Flood the earth.  Consume another Sodom.  Kill the Canaanites, men, women, and children.  And build an eternal hell for the majority of the people you created.

And then call me satan. 

How do I overcome this resentment for god and religion?  Why am I so angry?

I will hate myself in the morning for this dribble.  It is where I have landed tonight.  10th Step.  If I am disturbed it’s because I am a pile of shit, not the other person. 

Time for bed.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

I am sitting in a meeting, and I hear another version of the “the boy whistling in the dark,”  another sally of false confidence in the face of past failures.  Someone who has relapsed speaks up and says that they understand that they should have been working this program harder.  The week before he was talking about a new sponsee he had just picked up, and how the Higher Power had made it possible, and the magic of self-sacrifice, and the triumph of prayer over insecurity.  He was saying all the right things then.  He struggled to just keep saying them now.  I touched him on the shoulder after the meeting and said, “glad you’re back.”  But he was in too much of a controlled panic, a mode of forced socialization, to even acknowledge my attempt to connect.  It appears to me that he is on the edge and he is trying to say the right things, trying to assure himself that he is actually back among the living.  But I see the fear in his eyes.  I have felt this before.  And unless he finds something of more substance, the right words will be read over the corpse of his tragic end.  I turned away and went home.

Was the meeting helpful to me or him?  I don’t know.  For me, it definitely lacked genuineness, and I could not put my finger on it.  Everyone was saying the right things, speaking highly of spirituality and encouraging desperate ones to do the work, follow the clear lead of the twelve steps.  They talked about how they came into recovery as selfish bastards and now their greatest joy in life is in serving others.  It saves them when nothing else will.  It was perfectly delivered to fidgeting legs, applauded by yawns of disdain.

If I am disturbed, there is something wrong within me.  And I have had something wrong with me in my response to helping others.  I am experiencing the inverse of what is supposed to be happening.  Helping other is depressing me.  If I do well sharing at a meeting and everyone is patting me on the back, or if I overcome my personal aversion to the telephone and give myself to connect with a co-sufferer of this disease, I spend the next three days recovering.  I drop into a pit of minor self-loathing.  I hunger for something filthy to wash away the sticky religious molasses goo of becoming good and learning to enjoy martyrdom.  I fear that this way of thinking makes me radioactive to new-comers, to those who are struggling.  Maybe even you, my reader.  But if I stay isolated, I will surrender to a tragic end.  So I share, not to help you, but to help me.  And there lies my freedom.  And maybe yours.

Trinity said to Neo in the Matrix, “you’ve been down that road before. You know exactly where it ends.”

I have spent the last four decades of my life trying to be good and say the right things.  The great failure of my life was that I was so successful building an image of what I should become, according religious doctrines and family pride and personal fear of being vulnerable to ridicule.  That image took on a life of its own, and become my chief critic and task master.  And I was filled with secret hurt and resentment because I believed that my Higher Power was disinterested in me, and was only near me when I was near that damn image.  He loved it more than me, maybe even instead of me.  I performed faith gymnastics to appease Him.  Yet I was filled with a lust that I sought to strangle out of me, and promised the Lord God a life of celibacy.  That is what the image would do.  “They have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God.”  “If you even think it, you have already done it.”  “If your hand or eye offends you, cut it off.  Better to enter the kingdom of God maimed then to enter hell with your body whole.”  “I wish you were hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth.”  “I wish you all were as strong as I am, but because of your weakness, God has allowed you to marry.” 

That image I built was always compassionate, self-sacrificing, disciplined, devoted to the faith, and never had any thoughts of self.  That image loves God over everything.  But it was only an image.  It helped make me powerless and unmanageable, not useful. 

A chaos storm blew into my life in 2003 and I could not understand why God had allowed it.  As it began to pass over, I saw that the major casualty was that icon of perfection.  And you know what, I don’t think that my Higher Power ever really liked it anyway.  I don’t think Gomu (God of my understanding) liked the distance between us.  I was trapped by my success at being good.  I am extremely grateful for the freedom I gained through that failure.  I don’t want to enter the rooms to reconstruct another image, another task-master. 

Today I don’t have everything figured out.  The answers don’t vanquish every question.  They are just hints to push me forward as I  seek connection with the Unknown God.  And We, yes dammit, WE, that Mysterious Entity that the voice of religion would inadvertently declare as the universe’s greatest failure for creating the likes of me, We walk a path where I am alright with Not Knowing.  My Higher Power is not trying to make me a better person.  What I am is what I am supposed to be.  I beleive he desires the perfection of my freedom. 

I help others because the unfolding of your personal mythology strengthens mine.  The program utilizes my self-preservation.  It is not useful for me to hate myself.  I am lustful, but today, my lust is sacred.  Its expression is fulfilling.  Not damming. 

I am still up and down, second-guessing at times, powerfully confident at others.  But I am recovering from years of a life lived under self-condemnation.  I am not a good guy.  I am a free man.  I am more useful to you, and you are more valuable to me.  I think one of the side effects of no longer harshly judging myself, is that you are no longer a threat to me.  I don’t fear that your life will trip me up and cause me to miss the mark.  You are no longer a potential carrier of my destruction.  I don’t have to live in social quarantine because you don’t say the right things. 

If you find anything I said offensive, understand that was not my intent.  But I am not your Higher Power, your sponsor, your anything.   I am just me, and I hope something I said here is useful.  If not, thank-you for reading anyway.  It was useful for me.  It helped me understand an obstacle I was facing in my own participation in the recovery process.  And I love living in spiritual freedom and empowerment. 

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of art and science.  He who knows it not, or can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.” ~ Albert Einstein.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I can see magic in the mundane, and dance like a child inside knowing that I have a very real place in the unfolding drama of the universe. When I first arrived at my apartment, there was a toad that would come to my front door in the evenings. Frogs are symbolic of healing spirits to me, and boy did I need some healing. I actually began to talk with the frog, to recognize him, to say hello. I had the rather odd feeling that we were giving significance to one another. Several times he would come right up to me and stand between my legs, as if the child of earthly elements trusted me. They quit coming around, shortly after the apartment began spraying to ward off an invasion of ants. Invading ants have been symbolic of the alcoholic – addictive disease for me. Subtle, cunning, baffling and powerful in persistance.

Not too long ago I was lamenting the empty concrete outside my front door in the evenings. I was in need of healing once again. I opened my front door and there was a tree frog sticking to my door frame, looking at me. Looking right into my face. I could not help but stop and welcome him. Then I saw a perfect web in the corner with a medium spider, beautiful…

“can see Beauty even when it is not pretty”

When is beauty not pretty?  Paradoxical statements demand a deeper thought.  They act as a red light in the busy traffic of my mind. 

So what is this hidden beauty?  Is it the kind that can only be recognized if you quit living life in a controlled panic.  Is it only seen when you refuse to start off the day skimming across the surface, moving by force of habit.  Thus it is seen “every day” because you see it in the moment you live in.

And seeing this hidden beauty of life is neither frivolous or insignificant, but is the source of your entire being.  In my morning meditation I can gratefully whisper to the universe, into the listening ear of a Higher Power, that is where I come from, that is what I am about.  Hidden beauty unfolding.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

This is my favorite part of the poem.  I have a few other quotes that go with this for me:

”This above all: to thine ownself be true,
 And it must follow, as the night the day,
 Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
                         -Shakespeare-Hamlet

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.

~Robert Fulghum, The Storyteller’s Creed

I love the paradoxical statement “If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.” 

I can take this thought down so many streets and alleyways.  But if I were to limit it to recovery, I would have to see that if I am to ever learn to be truthful with others, if I am to ever have anything of substance to offer, I must be true to who I am.  And that is a big part of the process, digging out the clutter of co-dependant shoulds and fearful pretense to find the best version of me.  I think most of what I would say in the company of these quotes would be distractive ramblings.  I just like to breath in the reality these words express.  Freedom.

I finally finished that 8th step today. And I picked up my 90 day.

The Big Book study went on for about three hours.  Ten men gathered.  Someone made a comment that I had not heard before, but made me think. 

“If you have been able to live a life that accommodates the disease of alcoholism or addiction, you have had to become very good at one skill in particular; the ability to lie to yourself, and convince you to believe that it is true.  The process of being free from the domination of the disease is the process of fearlessly facing truth and smashing self-delusions.  And we are so good at this one skill of self-deception, that we cannot be free of it on our own.  Effective truth can only be received in a context of trust and fearless self-appraisal.”

I am tired and am going to let this be the last word of the day.  I am exhausted.  But it has been a really good day.  Even if I missed seeing Dr. House.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

I don’t know.  Sometimes.  Most of the time I am afraid of making a mistake, doing the wrong thing.  I second-guess. Double-check my motives.  alot.

How does someone become this free?  Can you just decide, screw it, I am going to be happy even if I don’t know how to explain why?  It is my understandering that according to the Big Book, it is the will of the Higher Power, that is, the strong desire of the Higher Power, that we be Happy, Joyous, and Free.  But there are a lot of folks who cannot or will not claim to be HJF.  Does that mean that the will of the Higher Power is limited by the expression of our will?

So wherever the Higher Power is, It has It’s own first step:

1.  I, the Higher Power, am powerless over making people Happy, Joyous, and Free and as a result everything has become unmanageable. 

Something is wrong with that picture.  I think the above strips the HP of omnipotence.  And if you are going to deal with a world full of drunks, addicts, and self-will run riot, you damn sure better be all-powerful.  Let’s try it a different way:

1.  I, the Higher Power, have CHOSEN to be powerless over making people HJF, and as a result everything has become unmanageable.

Hmm. What do you think?  Better?  But the final aspect of that statement does not engender trust.  Why would I want to take step three with an entity that abdicates power for some unknown reason, allowing everything to become unmanageable?  There must be …wait.  Who are you?

“I am HP and I have come to speak for myself thank-you.” 

Ok, but why do you look like Harry Potter? 

“We have the same initials and it is easier to get through airport security this way.” 

OKaaa.

“I, the HP, have decided to give you a shot at doing your own isolated disconnected thing if that is what you want.  I will not manage your life but will respond to the needs of the many over the needs of the few or the one.  Outgrow this life, don’t let it trap you.”

You know that “needs of the many” thing came from Star Trek. 

“Well didn’t you just get through saying in a meeting that you get a good deal of your gospel from the Star Trek and Rocky movies?  Besides, do you think you are the only one who has received a visit from Harry Potter?”

OKaaa.

“Rick, my friend, get some rest.  Remember that after work, your sponsor wants you to come over for a Big Book study.  He is trying to strengthen connections.”

But am I going to miss Dr House?  He is in recovery too, and I absolutely love what they are doing with this program.  Its going to be rainy too.

“Who do you think stands a better chance at being Happy, Joyous, and Free? – connected Rick, or isolated TV watching Rick?”

“Get some rest.  Connect and watch some real Hogwarts magic unfold.  Better yet, be that magic.  Happy, joyous, and free.”

ok.  Good night, Harry.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

You mean learn to feel deeply, especially feel pain deeply, and not hit the emotional panic button?  That has taken some time.  In my earlier days of recovery I can remember that intense emotional pain would really trip the internal alarms and scream for an quick fix, or to numb it, or make it irrelevant by finding a way to disconnect from my emotions. 

I guess the first time I began to attempt sitting with my own pain in recovery was the grief I felt from the death of my Mother.  I wanted it to be fixed by seeing her come back as a ghost and let me KNOW that everything is alright.  Yet I found out that this deep agonizing pain was testimony to the significance of her life and presence in my own. 

I have begun to see that the power of my life is found in trusting an unknown presence, an entity that does care about and for me, and in that relationship confidently walking the path of not-knowing.  Its alright to move forward without having a printout of all the answers first.

And it has been very difficult, but very necessary, to learn to sit with another who is in pain and give them only my presence.  I want to be someone who will not try and diminish the significance of their suffering, but to just stay with them.  I know that when I lost my pre-born baby in Germany, I would not and did not want to be “comforted.”  The life of that child was significant.  If someone had told me it was the will of god, or that this death may have prevented greater suffering down the road, or that there is a purpose for everything, I would have been angry and hurt. 

It is uncomfortable.  And it is alright, sometimes even preferable, not to have all the answers.  I guess that sometimes the only right answer is just being there. 

Of course, I hope that you understand that I am not saying to coddle self-pity.  There is no formula, only granted wisdom from an intuitive contact with the Higher Power, whatever that might be for you.

I have got to get that 8th step finished.  Maybe I will have some personally productive time this weekend.  I will quit rattling on.  Good night.

PS:  I made an entry on the Pegasusfleet blog tonight as well. [http://pegasusfleet.wordpress.com/]

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

I have taken this risk for all three.  And I would do it again.  Not impulsively, but if I was sure that it was a risk worth the taking, I would force myself forward.  But all my risks have been somewhat sullied by a persistent fear of living life in the open.  I am not consistently courageous.  I hope this is something that the program will work into me.

I had a strange desire to fight tonight.  There was something called “fight night” at the Iron Horse Cafe’ that really intrigued me.  I set in the parking lot for a short time.  This was not wisdom.  This is one of those times when Think, Think, Think (or pause, pause, pause, if you prefer) came into play. 

I went home and got dressed for the gym instead.  I worked out and felt somewhat better.  Now I am going to go to bed and talk to my sponsor about this episode tomorrow.  Good night.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

Yes, I believe I have been opened.  But I think this is an ongoing process, that fluctuates from day-to-day.  To me, this is one of the amazing aspects of recovery.  That I can be opened by life’s betrayals.  I am getting very tired now.  I must sleep.

I ache for the empowerment of my personal mythology.  And I ache for the empowerment of yours as well.  Of course, I believe that one feeds the other.

And yes, I do dare to dream.  Some days I am more daring than others.