Children at Last

“Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. ‘Yes yes yes,’ goes a voice in my head, ‘it was just like that for me.’ When we laugh together and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up.
-Paul Monette, Becoming a Man; half a life story

This book, this paragraph in particular, always takes my breath away because it describes so perfectly so much of the important experiences in my life. Monette’s story is about his coming to terms with his identity as a gay man, so of course I feel a strong identification with that, but because so much of my life is devoted to helping other addicts and alcoholics I frequently feel “astonished delight” when we share our stories of how we came to be in recovery. I can’t think of another place on earth where I can share stories like mine, in a general way or in detail, and know that I am completely understood. There is no place where I am so free to be my most authentic self as in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was finally home.

Being a Mormon and a Boy Scout and gay, I clean up pretty good. I spent much of my life as an incredible fraud. I knew how to play to whatever crowd I was in front of. 6’3″, auburn hair and a toothsome smile went a long way toward making people comfortable around me and the pressed khakis and crisp oxford shirt that was my uniform for years helped to deflect any suspicion that anything could be wrong. I showed people what they wanted to see so that I could get what I wanted. Inside I felt small and ugly. I was a fraud and I knew it. I never managed to take the mask down until I couldn’t keep it on anymore, and when if finally came down the only place I felt safe was in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Despite the various paths that bring us to recovery and the different ways we have of embracing it, there is a deep understanding among us that something important in the very core of our being marks us as one another’s companions. We’re great, we alcoholic/addict types, at sharing what it was like.

We’re not always so good at sharing the solution. We talk about ‘Higher Power’ and ‘God’ of ‘our own understanding’. At the beginning of every meeting we describe that power as ‘a loving God’. But very few new to the rooms get specific direction about how to come into conscious contact with that power. From the very start we need to share our experience.

My experience is that my original understanding of God was completely insufficient to keep me sober. I had to let go of all my ideas about a Higher Power and seek a completely new experience. I had to look for a God that was too big for me to understand; a God big enough to encompass all the ideas of God in the room. I was fortunate that Joe K. shared the following prayer with me.

God, please set aside everything I think I know about myself, my disease, the Big Book, the 12 Steps, the Program, the Fellowship, the people in the fellowship, and all spiritual terms, and especially about you God, so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please help me see the Truth. Amen.

Every sentiment in this prayer is expressed in the book.

• “But the program of action, though entirely sensible, was pretty drastic. It meant I would have to throw several lifelong conceptions out of the window.”
• “We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results…”
• “When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you.”
• “Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things make us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will as prejudiced for as long as some of us were.”
• “We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion.”
• “Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.”

I needed a different God than I had before and all that I needed in order to start getting results was the willingness to believe in something. Something. And though the experience each of us has of that Higher Power is personal and unique, whenever I hear someone tell their story of finally making conscious contact with that power, something inside me says, “Yes, yes, yes. It was just like that for me.”