Service and Self Sacrifice

I was just looking at a friend’s Facebook page, admiring a picture of her and someone’s baby, when I noticed a quote on the sidebar; something about love from Dostoevsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov”.  Having just come from a meeting where the topic was Love and knowing how way leads to way I followed the trail of that quote as it has been used in several sermons.

The Dostoevsky story is the story of Father Zossima, the wise, self-effacing, good-humored orthodox monk that many people come to for spiritual direction. One day, a woman comes to talk with him. She has a big problem, she says.  She has lost her faith and therefore her reason to live. If Zossima cannot give her a reason to believe again, she says, she will kill herself.

The monk tells her to go home, and every day, do something concrete to love the people around her. If she does this, he assures her, she will find, slowly but surely, that she won’t be able to help but believe.  Love in action, he says, will change the way she sees the world.

The old woman isn’t especially impressed.  Basically she says, “That’s it?  That’s all you have?  I’m supposed to love the people around me?  I already do that.”

And to this Zossima responds with a line which has become famous: “Ah”, he says, “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. It may very well kill you”

Doing what is good for another can be really hard. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what would be good for someone as distinct from what would make us feel good.  And actually doing it is often very hard.  In recovery we know that to love other people until they can love themselves requires “work and self sacrifice” – and it is a requirement.  It is the foundation stone of recovery.

It is so important, in fact, that an entire chapter of the Big Book is devoted to outlining how to begin to love other alcoholics and addicts and it promises some pretty harsh and dreadful things.

“It may mean the loss of many nights’ sleep, great interference with your pleasures, interruptions to your business. It may mean sharing your money and your home, counseling frantic wives and relatives, innumerable trips to police courts, sanitariums, hospitals, jails and asylums. Your telephone may jangle at any time of the day or night. Your wife may sometimes say she is neglected. A drunk may smash the furniture in your home, or burn a mattress. You may have to fight with him if he is violent. Sometimes you will have to call a doctor and administer sedatives under his direction. Another time you may have to send for the police or an ambulance.”

Along with this we have to learn how to “carry the message and not the alcoholic”.

“It is not the matter of giving that is in question, but when and how to give. That often makes the difference between failure and success. The minute we put our work on a service plane, the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God. He clamors for this or that, claiming he cannot master alcohol until his material needs are cared for. Nonsense. Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth: Job or no job — wife or no wife — we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.

Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone. The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house”

The original topic of the meeting, when the person who brought it up, was really more than Love, as he had originally introduced it.  It had to do with the fact that he was in terrible pain, anger, and resentment over the suicide of someone whom he had tried, and failed, to help get sober. That others sometimes don’t make it is a harsh and terrible reality in recovery.  Loving another alcoholic is not always the thing that will make us feel good.  Knowing when and being able to carry the message to someone and then let go enough for them to grasp it on their own is sometimes incredibly painful.  So why do it?

Except that my continued sobriety is dependent on and built on a foundation of loving people this way, why do it?  Why not just find some other way of staying dry.  Or not.  Why not just drink?  The simple answer is that loving others in the program is sometimes, perhaps too rarely, the most glorious thing in the world.  Nothing gives me faith as much as watching and participating in the origin of someone’s real recovery.  Nothing feels so much like a miracle as a miracle.  Nothing gives me more faith than the experience of seeing God’s hand at work.

And that is what it is; it is a miracle of Grace that any of us really get the kind of psychic change that revolutionizes out entire lives.  And though we can work and must work to help bring others to the crossroad where that can occur, we really don’t have a choice in whether it happens or not.  None of us can tell another that they are ready.  Either they are entirely and without reservation prepared to be lit from within by grace in this program or they aren’t.  And if they aren’t – the program is really no place for them.  At least not yet.

“The gospel of light is the crossroads of indolence or action. Be ignited, or be gone”. -Mary Oliver