The Last Chance Texaco

Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category

“Although financial recovery is on the way for many of us, we found we could not place money first. For us, material well-being always followed spiritual progress; it never preceded.”  -Alcoholics Anonymous

I’m still doing my usual routine, staying close to sober friends, attending meetings, writing inventory when it is indicated, seeing my sponsor regularly; the same stuff I’ve done for the last 38 months or so, yet I find myself in an odd situation.  As I have taken on a larger role and accepted more responsibility in the company I work for I have discovered that the reasons I have had my paychecks bounce in the past is only that my company is astonishingly mismanaged.  And that is unacceptable to me.  So I’ve written inventory about my boss and about my job.  I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed.  I’ve talked to my sponsor and with a small handful of close friends and family. Read the rest of this entry »

I arrived home Saturday night, slept most of the day on Sunday and I’m still tired.  Overall I had a wonderful time though.  There was a little tension with one of my travel companions who I found to be astonishingly self-centered, but I’m sure I played a part in that.  Managed, in the end, to discuss all that openly and reach some compromise and peace.

I called my sponsor from the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of anonymity.  I’m not altogether convinced that there really is such a thing; not in the absolute sense.  It exists in greater and lesser degrees and we see famous people straddle the line all the time.  In 12 step recovery we have secret code words and phrases that one can recognize easily as being part of this particular path, and in interviews those people will give themselves away by saying, “I had to admit I was powerless,” or “It’s just a one day at a time thing.”  Some notable people do it successfully.  Some don’t.  It seems the ones who don’t almost invariably end up being train wrecks again. Read the rest of this entry »

“Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.” -Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

I realized a long time ago that I can trace the decline of my spiritual health, and a decline in the quality and quantity of my writing, to the date I got a television.  For a good year and a half, writing was a form of prayer to me.   In writing I set aside time to examine myself and my experience closely and to open myself up to learn.

Television kind of shuts that down for me.  It is much like a drug in that way.  Television makes me a little bit numb.

I think it’s time to turn the TV off; time to read more and time to write more.

“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.

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.

It is so strange, and so strange that it is comforting to be again in the company of my family and among people who share my religious heritage. The Church (of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons) take a very dim view of homosexuality and of drug addiction. Now that the addiction part is under control, and now that my father and I have both worked very hard to heal our relationship, I’m a part of this gigantic clan again.

I have a cousin, Nicholas, who I’ve hung out with a little bit, who only ever knew my name before, not my face, and he knew that my name was always attached to trouble or heartache. “THAT Cousin Chris” is what he calls me. The younger ones figure out who I am and their eyes widen briefly. The little kids, and there are a dozen of them, all think I’m great. I think I’m just better adapted to talk to little children.

Another cousin of mine, Nate, was 6 years old when I effectively left the family. Now he’s a giant man with several children of his own, a wonderful wife, and a really cool job in Washington D. C. that affords him a ringside view of our government. (He really likes Barney Frank, whom he knows personally, and he also really likes Larry Craig, whom he knows personally, and wishes Larry would “just come out already.”) We are polar opposites, politically, but because he came by his beliefs through work and reason (as opposed to being brainwashed by talk radio and Fox News) we are actually closer than one might imagine, and honestly I think he’s really cool.

Being around these people, being in this environment, is so comfortable, and I’m only slightly ill at ease with that. I have some anger about what the LDS church has done to my tribe. I’m even more angry that members of my own family share the political view that prompted church members in Utah (mostly) to pump $40 million into California to pass Proposition 8. I don’t understand how people who love me, who claim to want the best for me, could possibly believe that a world where inequality is the law is morally right. I don’t want to be married in their temple. I am happy to live in a country where they are permitted to practice the religion of their conscience, and I believe in protecting freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is one of the civil rights that our country is built on. Equal protection under the law is another of the ideas that our country is supposed to be built on and until I am truly offered equal protection I will not really be one of them – one among my own people.

So I’m part of our family – but not a full part. Here, in this place I love, among people I love, I am considered to be an inferior.

I’m no closer to coming to believe that “a power greater than myself” is appropriate to turn my “will and life” over to the care of. I still think that “Higher Power” is an unconscious, impersonal, greater good –indifferent to my personal circumstance–the law of cause and effect if you will; cause and effect in a system too large for me to grasp. Perhaps if I were omniscient I could understand all of what has happened and what continues to happen. At the moment the power, I think, resides with me and within the group, and in my relationship with my sponsor. I refuse to concede that the Higher Power resides with and favors the saints and not the sinners –no matter what they believe.

It’s been almost 2 years since we were all together.  Grandma’s funeral doesn’t count, but 2 years ago my entire clan got together for a reunion (you can read about here) and we’ll be together again in a couple of days.  For the first time in decades I’ll actually get to SEE my father on Father’s Day.

The place we’re going to is right next to (what my sponsor says is) a great rehab, the Cirque Lodge. Considering my current state I’m not sure that my time wouldn’t be better spent there.  I’m sober.  I haven’t relapsed.  But the people that I’ve talked to assure me that it’s okay that I feel fucked up in the head considering what I’ve been through and the medication that was required.  I’m long off the opiates but my brain still isn’t working right.

Then there is the whole God issue. I went on a “mission” to Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy of “Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be” and I think I’m gaining a little bit of peace with the whole “why me?” mind-fuck I’ve been trapped in.  Healing physically certainly is helping, too, and even there I’m FAR from back to normal.

My ribs feel squishy.  They ache.  I get shooting pains and flames in my incisions.  Breathing is still hard; deep breaths. I can’t even describe what that’s like, to take in a deep breath and have half my body feel normal and the other half feel like it’s a different size on the inside.

Maybe being reunited with my father will prompt a little more shift in being reunited with my sense of conscious contact with my HP.  Maybe the scenery will help. Maybe the suggestions in Lama Surya Das’s book will help me let the flame back in.  Maybe I’ll return to my spiritual roots and become an active Mormon again.  I doubt it, but it could happen.

All I know is that as long as I stay sober there is hope that things will get better.  For right now that’s good enough.