The Last Chance Texaco

Archive for the ‘Faith’ Category

There will be an end to this, right?  I’m still beating myself up for having been blind to, or simply ignored, all of the red flags that went up with The Bullet That I Dodged.  They were there in front of me all the time, from the very first time we met, and somehow I managed to dismiss them from my mind.

It’s a tricky little machine, isn’t it, our minds?  I can be going along fit as a fiddle, right as rain, and ready for love and suddenly, WHAM!  I become blindsided by something that had been clearly in view; something obvious to everyone but me.  At 41 months sober I feel like I handle most things pretty well.  I’m not sure I “manage” them, but they don’t manage me anymore.  Then along comes something like the notion that perhaps romantic attachment may still be possible for me and I experience all over again the same kind of insanity that accompanied my drug use.  I think this time will be different.  This time it won’t hurt me.  This time will be worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

My sobriety anniversary is very important to me and it’s coming up here soon, but it doesn’t quite move me the same way December 13th does.  December 13th, today, happens also to be my birthday, but my God, I’m 44 years old.  My “birthday” is not really a big deal anymore.  No, the anniversary I celebrate tonight, the reason this day is important to me, is that on this night, three years ago, I suddenly saw myself clearly and suddenly had a little hope that recovery would be possible.

The first two years were easy.  This last one has been a bitch.  There have been times recently when I have wished that I had died back in May.  It would have been so much easier.  I’ve even, at times, tried to tell myself that if that illness had killed me that I would be a hero.  I would have died sober.  I would have died doing the things that I was supposed to be doing.  My family and friends would mourn me, sure, but there would be something happy underneath the sorrow; the knowledge that they had known me and that in my last years I had been sober.

Lately things have been much, much harder.  I’ve had to return to being medicated to stop the insanity that has been going through my mind.  The medicines are working, so that is good, but I still have a ton of stuff to face.

Somehow, in spite of everything, I have remained sober.  In fact I’ve been sober longer now than I have ever been since I was 14 years old and I attribute it to that moment at the corner of 6th and Pueblo, under the street lamp, in the snow, when I finally understood that the pain I was in then was the very best that I could hope for, unless I got sober, and when I suddenly believed that it would be possible.

” God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.  Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do Thy will.  Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love and Thy Way of Life.  May I do Thy will always.  Amen”

“Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.”
-Alcoholics Anonymous, page 58

Some of us have tried to hold on to them without even knowing that is what we’re doing, until it bites us.

I was thinking about my conversation with Chris Lawford a couple of years ago.  The last question he asked was, “What does God look like?”  He asked all of us the same set of questions and you can discern that from a close reading of the chapters in “Moments of Clarity”, and he has included the answers to that question from a few of the people he interviewed.  I remember Susan Cheever’s being particularly moving, though at the moment I can’t remember what it was.  Mine was not included, which killed me because I thought I had been so clever.

In the first place, I thought the question was kind of obtuse.  How, really, can one know what God looks like?  We can’t even agree on a definition of God, let alone agree on God’s existence, so how would I know what God looks like.  And that is what I said.  I said, “I don’t know, but when it is my time to go I hope He holds me in his arms and whispers something funny.”

It is a good thing it was not included, actually, because it is  not even an original line.  I stole it from William Finn; a line from the song “You’ve Got to Die Sometime” from Falsettoland. (None of my material is original.  Go ahead and check.  That’s not entirely true.  I did coin the term Googlyize, meaning to glue googly eyes on to something, but I digress.)

The thing is, at that time and though I wasn’t even conscious of it, I was still in the grips of an old idea about what God is, and though intellectually I professed something more abstract, my spiritual experience in the early parts of my recovery had never been inconsistent with the ideas of God which I had been given as a child.  I was taught to believe in God at approximately the same time I was taught about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, and he was given a personality and a face, the same way those other fairy tales had.  (When my parents told me the truth about the Easter Bunny I proudly walked into class the following Monday and announced to everyone that, “My daddy is the Easter Bunny!”)

I guess this incredibly painful four month experience in letting go of that old idea, and the amazing relief I have at the moment having come through that and feeling again a spiritual wholeness, has me curious about what other old ideas I may be hanging on to that are standing in the way of my growth.

I suspect they will make themselves known when the time is right.

“We don’t want anybody up here. We just tell people this place is nothing but a bunch of queers and weirdos,” my sponsor told me.  There is a kernel of truth in it, of course, but there is a sweetness about the place and the people there that is hard to describe.

I exaggerated about the indoor plumbing/electricity feature of the town.  Most of the people have running water.  Some of them even have HOT water.  And there is electrical service in the town which is serviced by it’s own small hydro-electric plant, but people don’t use it much.  Even so, it is remote.  I haven’t heard quiet like that or seen dark like that in a long, long time.

The first night we grilled steaks on a campfire. watched stars shooting through the night sky, and had dessert with some neighbors.  During the next day I listened to AA speaker CDs, CDs about the Eightfold Path.  I enjoyed the hot springs and the wilderness.  We had breakfast with friends and went for walks.  I took pictures of dead pickup trucks which are allowed to remain there to deter the Sun Valley people from discovering how wonderful the place it.  I read and napped and practiced meditating.

Why did I have such a hard time realizing that having a Higher Power does not mean having a deity?  I am more and more convinced that having a Higher Power without having a deity is necessary for me and that my path back to feeling connected to that Power  will largely be the byproduct of practice.  The small time I devoted to the practice certainly led me to believe that, as the book Alcoholics Anonymous says, “we can but clear the ground a bit” and that clearing the ground through a practice of meditation may be the hinge upon which my progress turns.

I was in a great place to begin a practice, not having the usual distractions of home and office around.  Even so, focusing on mere breath is not as easy as it sounds

“Somewhere in the process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.  Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and helpless.  No problem.  You are not crazier than you were yesterday.  It has always been this way, and you have just never noticed.”  Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

That’s a relief.  If there weren’t passages like this in the guide I was reading I would be sure, as I have always been, that I wasn’t doing it right.

Anyway, I imagine that things are as they should be, and I imagine that I am still on track, even if it does not appear to me that I am.  I just know that

I bought a book the other day, right after I vomited my insanity here; Mindfulness in Plain English.  And I’m encouraged because I finally found a definition of ‘faith’ that I can work with.  No GrandWizardMagicalSantaClaus required.  What a relief.  I have some nice, plainly written instructions to make a beginning, and then there are retreats, with advanced instructors.

Reading the course application, I wonder if I could even do it at this point, but I believe I could get there.

I am also considering getting rid of my television and limiting my internet time just to help reduce the amount of noise in my head.  My sense is that television interferes with my ability to think clearly and hinders my growth.

I’m headed to Atlanta, ID with my sponsor tomorrow afternoon to enjoy 3 days in the mountains without indoor plumbing, electricity, paved roads or telephones.

I appreciate all the feedback I got from my last post.  Looking back I can see that this is really an issue that I’ve held on to for decades.  The appearance of an old friend from when I lived in Sweden reminded me that there was a time even then that I was desperate for there to be something I could  have real faith in, and being surrounded by a religion that made no sense to me at all.

It appears then that it is in my nature to yearn for an understanding of or knowledge of something that I can only understand or know through my own experience.  Faith that makes sense to me isn’t belief in something because it is written in some book.  It is belief in something because I have observed it within myself.  If I’m going to have a relationship with that I have a great deal of observing within myself to do.

When I was 12 I lived around the corner from Kris. He was the most naturally athletic kid I’ve ever met. He was fantastic looking.  He had 3 older brothers and they all had ‘toys’ – motorized toys.  Dirt bikes and snowmobiles and ATVs.  He was fearless and he was cool and I was intensely jealous of him, not that I would ever have admitted it.  I was too busy trying to be his friend.

When Kris was finished with it I took over his newspaper route.  When he stopped mowing our neighbor’s lawns to take over mowing the lawn of the church we lived next to, I started mowing them.  He shoveled half the sidewalks in our neighborhood with a snow blower.  I shoveled the rest of them by hand.  I bought HASH jeans and listened to Elton John to be more like him.

The summer between 6th and 7th grades my father rented a rototiller to till our garden and afterward he offered me the use of it, along with the vacant lot he owned next door to our house.  I took it and tilled the hard, dry patch.  I removed huge lava rock.  I turned in compost.  I plowed the patch into rows and I planted corn and squash.  All summer long I hoed and weeded and watered and waited.  Every day I tended my little farm.  By the end of summer I was selling corn, three ears for a dollar, out of a wheelbarrow in my neighborhood.

By the end of the summer I bought myself my first dirt bike, a little 125cc Honda.  It didn’t really matter that it was Kris’s old dirt bike.  It was new to me.  It was MY motorcycle.  I EARNED it, and I loved it.  The fact that Kris had a brand new bike didn’t even enter into my consciousness.  I have always been, I think justifiably, proud of that accomplishment.

If I am completely honest, though, I have to admit that I did not create that motorcycle on my own.  My effort was absolutely necessary, but my effort alone didn’t put money in the bank to buy that bike.  At the beginning I was given the tools  to accomplish that.  I was given a little patch of land and I was given the use of the tiller.  What I did with it was entirely up to me.

Even beyond my effort and the tools there was an underlying force I had to cooperate with, the force that germinates seeds and produces fruit; a force that can be described, but when examined to it’s origin is mysterious and miraculous.  In the end, while my effort was essential, it had very little to do with what was produced.  My input had less to do with the result than any other input and yet I feel justified in being proud of my input and I enjoyed the product like it was mine alone.  How much more might I have enjoyed it if I had humbly acknowledged that what I got was the product of a gift; if I had been more grateful?

I mention that because with all the difficulty I’ve put myself through over belief and faith, I have really been living in the insane idea that the important ingredient in my recovery is what I have put into it.  I have ignored the tools that were given to me and denied the power that makes it work.  It is as ridiculous of me to believe that I got myself sober and keep myself sober as it is for me to believe that I got that dirt bike on my own.

So, while I still don’t have any kind of “conception” of a Higher Power, I acknowledge that some power seems to exist; I don’t know what it is but I can describe how I experience it.  I also acknowledge that the tools are a gift; that in the final analysis, while my effort is essential, and while I think I am justifiably proud of what I put in to it, there are other forces at work that are also essential to my continued recovery.  My recovery would not be possible without the gift of the program and without whatever power it is that saves addicts like me from the hopeless condition I lived in before I got sober.  I am still proud of the effort I’ve put into it.  But I didn’t do it on my own.

What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if thou hast been able to understand what thou wouldest say, it is not God. If thou hast been able to comprehend it, thou hast comprehended something else instead of God. If thou hast been able to comprehend him as thou thinkest, by so thinking thou hast deceived thyself. This then is not God, if thou hast comprehended it; but if this be God, thou has not comprehended it.

-St. Augustine

A.

Atheist.

Two and a half years sober and I find myself so fucked off about the conception of god that I got sober with that I can’t live joyfully. In all likelihood I just haven’t given myself enough time to heal or something but at the moment it seems like the “power” that got me sober was an episode of magical thinking from which I have been medically released.

I’m two months out of surgery and I’m still in so much pain that I think I need to go back to the doctor. I’ve tried taking a friend’s Neurontin and it had no effect on the pain.

If there is no god then I must have had the power to get sober all along. I must not have known how to access or use that power but it must have always been there.

My sponsor suggested that I go to as many meetings in a row as I am able to until I believe again and I’ve been doing that – 2 or 3 meetings a day. All I really hear is some really soft thinking and bad logic.

Oddly, none of that means that I think that AA doesn’t work. It obviously worked for me, and I don’t think that not believing in god anymore should be too much of a hindrance. There are all kinds of higher powers I believe in. One of those is that groups can accomplish more than individuals.

I’m just tired of feeling like I’m supposed to believe in god to stay sober and tired of trying to make the magical thinking return.

(I just watched a TV commercial where the governor of Idaho said that meth “leaves a tattoo on your brain.” Seriously. )