Daily Reprieve

I took a big risk last night.  I talked with my Higher Power about total surrender.  I guess a better term for me would be the idea of a spiritual swap.  I saw how well it has worked for my return to the military, and I became jealous of myself.  By that I mean that I really wanted to see that kind of serenity and strength in all areas of my life. 

I took all of my goals and aspirations that I have been struggling to bring to life and sealed them in a storage facility on the other side of life, the one we know so little of, but that I have been given the gift of faith to believe actually exists.  In return, the Higher Power will occupy the various expressions of me, here and now.  I practice doing everything with this realization, following intuitive guidance.

I really have nothing to lose.  If the Higher Power does reach out through me, and I experience the connectedness with It and my fellows, and a release from fear, my life will be greatly enhanced.  If nothing results from doing this, I will be left with the same frustrations I had before.  Self-enthronement was not working for me, but it is always an option. 

The risk is that I will yank back control based on some level of disappointment, and judge the Higher Power to be inadequate.  High expectations can lead to great discouragements.  So I must have a commitment to this course of action that goes beyond emotional highs and lows.  And the only way that is possible for me, is if the Higher Power truly takes me up on this offer to swap lives.  I believe It will and has done that.  I feel an excitement at the prospect.  

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I want to try something different.   That part of my life that is lodged in my heart, unable to achieve expression because of various ingrained fears, I am going to offer it to the HP to see if It can bring a level of life to it I have been unable to.  My premise is that if this Entity is creator, then there are certain things created in my being that It desires to see unfold, to live.  It would give me a hunger to fulfill it.  What if a “trick” to this life is swapping my place here for a more permanent and powerful place there, wherever that is.  The price tag is taking bits and pieces of my present existence and surrendering them to the will and care of the HP, as spoken of in the 3rd step.  I create the place holder within me by knowing myself.  Then I surrender this place to the HP.  The HP does with it whatever It wills.  “Not my will, but yours.”  In another dimension, my new existence awakens a little.  The more I am able to surrender here, the more powerful I become there. 

My slave sent me a text the other night, when she was overwhelmed and taxed at her job.  It said something along the lines; I have to get me into a real job or quit sending the real me to that job.  A seed planted and began to unfold as I studied the problem of fear and doubt in my own life.

I am continually drawn to serve our country in the military.  Yet I am getting older and the prospect of performing and failing creates excessive stomach acid.  The prospect of succeeding and being buried in overwhelming responsibilities that isolate me from others depresses me.  I am powerless over my offered service to this country and as a result my entire life has become unmanageable.  This surrender is a desperate act.  I need help living.

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Sorry about the verbal vomit from the last post.  Self-pity, resentment, anger, and ….FEAR.  The Higher Power turns around and simply says, “Come with Me, if you want to live.”

I do.  I will.  Today.

I stayed up all night, doing recovery homework, searching for the source of this current obsession.  Where did I pick this monster up again?  Sifting through old paperwork, looking at my old fear inventory, I found a self appraisal that might indicate that I am maniac – depressive.  I seem to bounce between spiritual ecstasy and carnal despair.  My girlfriend has mentioned this possibility.  So many memories dredged up.  So many nightmares that came true.  She was there in hell, waiting for me to appear. 

Will the Higher Power show up, empower me, because I am doing the best I know how?  My experience says that it is not likely.  My experience tells me that this Higher Power will remain irrelevant, sneak around, and lure me into harms way and watch my humiliation unfold.  The female aspect of god will mother and shower me with the ultimate cruelty, love filtered through pity.  Is the Higher Power afraid that I will attempt to build my own Tower of Babel?  The phallic self-expression must be assaulted with confusion and internal strife. 

As long as I lived a life of low expectations and focused only on recovery, the Higher Power seemed to encourage me.  But when I attempted to close the circle of my military service, this same Entity seemed to develop a cruel disdain.  I am ravaged by my own fears.  The recovery group is keeping me alive.  My slave is keeping my masculinity alive.   My children are keeping my hope alive.  I hate living on life support.  I have got to find my path regardless of god or love. 

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.”

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