To Work is to Pray

I genuinely like and admire who I am because of my work.
-GrrlScientist

I alluded recently to the Benedictine motto, “Ora et labora.” That is actually only a derivative. The actual motto is, “Orare est laborare, laborare est orare.” To pray is to work, to work is to pray.

It is not exactly accurate for me to say that I have ever prayed without ceasing unless the diligent willingness to try to cast aside my ego in favor of coming to know God can be called prayer. If showing up in meetings, examining my character, sharing my experience with others is prayer, then I pray a good deal of the time. It is tricky. An amazing amount of selfishness can be found in the most (superficially) unselfish acts. Worse yet, when you realize THAT little nugget of crap the stakes change entirely.

That’s what has been happening with me lately. My understanding has shifted and the stakes have changed. My conception of “infinite” as it pertains to my H.P. has, this sounds weird, grown. Infinite is bigger. The edges are falling off.

The IFX (to those of you new here, he’s the boy who broke my heart - the catalyst of my ‘moment of clarity’ that got me to recovery) came to the clubhouse of the meeting I was at tonight. I had heard from a co-worker/former customer/mutual friend that he is out using again; using and hanging out with gay men. I had hoped it wasn’t true, of course, but he’s obviously taken this path before, with me for example. Sober he always maintained that he is absolutely straight and went out of his way to be rude to me.

He showed up at the clubhouse but he didn’t come into the meeting, choosing instead to go upstairs where he could buy a coffee and be near the fellowship without being scrutinized by a crowd under florescent lights. I worried that he may not be coming into the meeting because he doesn’t want to face me. Heaven knows I’ve been in those shoes. More than once it has been all I could do not to run out of a meeting because he was there. My sponsor (his old sponsor) went upstairs to talk to him and I stayed in the meeting, tears streaming down my face for him, and for me, and for what was and what will never be; all the kinds of things one might anticipate of the grieving.

And I suddenly realized that there was nothing truly compassionate in it. I was sad for me. The fact that he hasn’t yet committed himself to sobriety yet makes me think that we are different from each other, and by extension, that I am superior. I seem to sit in judgement of him by making him a “will not” rather than a “cannot”. Grieving for him is really a way internalizing my judgment of him; of making it about me. Obviously I need to keep trying to take a look at the points where I block myself from experiencing love, serenity and peace; to keep rooting out the causes and conditions that make me want to judge him and judge others in the room who haven’t yet been relieved of the compulsion and obsession.

It’s easy for me to remember today what life was like before, to recall the hopelessness and the pain. It is harder for me to differentiate that I was a would-not and not a could-not. But I was a would-not. The same as my friend. And the program really has nothing to offer a would-not except to maybe show them that there is another way of life available. I genuinely like and admire who I am today because of the work I’ve done. I like the life I have because of the results of that work. I have never met anyone who became miserable or who’s life fell apart because they committed themselves to a spiritual path of some kind, but I’ve seen a number of people suffer because they believed the lie in their minds that they couldn’t.

Image credit: Jorieke Putman