The Last Chance Texaco

Posts Tagged ‘God’

“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.

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.

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. )

My mom, God bless her, my mom saves wine corks. She saves them in white plastic grocery bags and she takes them with her whenever she goes up to her cabin. Should the weather be poor up at the cabin, she’ll crack open another bottle, bust out the hot glue gun, and set about to completely uhpolster the walls of the downstairs bathroom with wine corks. The last time I was up there, two years ago, she was nearly done. I suspect that next she’ll try her hand at siding the pump house with them.

Read the rest of the story.

I wrote a post over at the Second Road the other day about the hurdles we face in finding the Higher Power of 12 step programs. The idea for the post came from a conversation I had with a friend a few nights ago wherein he told me that the only ‘God’ he was willing to believe in, when he got to AA, was what he called “The God of Unintended Consequences”. The conversation was interesting enough to me that I immediately started researching the 2nd step observations of the early AAs and the neurobiology of belief.

I garnered some great knowledge in this, and I gained some really useful clarity about the roles of honesty, open mindedness, and willingness in having an effective spiritual experience. I understood, as I never had before, why it had been so important for me to cling to the alternate names of God we use; Higher Power, Creator, and Spirit of the Universe. Read the rest of this entry »

“Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure; having this seal,
The Lord knoweth them that are his.”
Timothy 2;19

If the meeting I was at last night was the first AA meeting I had ever been to, I am quite sure I would have ran out the back door and never returned. Perhaps I should lower my expectations since I live deep in the heart of Jesusland. It is one of the essential parts of any real 12 step program that we don’t shove some particular idea of “Higher Power” down the throats of newcomers. It is absolutely essential that we guide them toward a personal relationship with that power by taking a path that begins right where they are.

That’s why, well that along with the fact that I am a contrary, sarcastic, vicious, deeply egotistical mo-fo, when I hear people in meetings talk about the only real Higher Power being Jesus Christ, it is almost all I can do not to start talking about, “My Higher Power, whom I choose to call Lucifer,.” I’m afraid I’m not really that much better than I was when I was actively using. Some defects are only slightly diminished.

Here’s the thing. If you’re a Christian you know that the crime of heresy Jesus was executed for was the heresy of teaching that one’s relationship with God is personal. It didn’t require High Priests. Nobody needed to stand between you and God. So if you’re a Christian and you attend 12 step meetings, for God’s sake (seriously) leave Jesus at the door. He doesn’t mind.

I may end up being a Christian yet, but I’m pretty turned off by it every time someone brings up His name in an AA meeting, particularly when it comes with a warning about how other people in the room are selling false prophets. I got sober and I got sober without Jesus, thank you very much. I got sober believing that Jesus didn’t die for my sins but so that Mel Gibson could become a billionaire. I’ve been sober a few months and never even had the compulsion to place a name on God or feel like I needed an agent or broker to reach Him.

When I was new my prejudice was so powerful that if anyone had told me that I had to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour in order to get sober I would simply have said thank you, I’d rather be high. Ciao. Remember, that in AA, God expresses Himself in our group conscience, and for over 70 years that expression has told us that it is a God of our own understanding. So to all the freaks in Jesusland, Jesus says shut the fuck up. You’re killing alcoholics.

“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.”

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The light is not an illusion.
The tunnel is.
-unknown

I noticed this sign above the door of a meeting I occasionally go to and it just struck me. It seemed profound enough, but it wasn’t till I woke up this morning and read Sweet Pea’s post where she said, “secrets. they thrive in the darkest recesses of my mind and heart,” that I began to see the truth in the idea that the tunnel is an illusion.

I don’t know very many people, even the most spiritual or religious people, who come into the rooms of recovery, that have something resembling a useful and healthy relationship with a power greater than themselves that they understand to be infinite love. That was definitely true for me. I came in with a pretty traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the Celestial Father, the one I hear some people call the ‘bearded, bean counting, lightning bolt throwing bastard in the sky’. Sure, He was loving and merciful to those who groveled for his forgiveness, but there were things he wouldn’t forgive and I was pretty sure it was me – radical faggot political activist drug addicted rebel that I am. In the difference I perceived between me and everything else I perceived darkness and isolation.

Though it was never said in so many words, I was under the impression that God didn’t like little boys who wanted to grow up to be Mahalia Jackson and to bury their face in Parker Stevenson’s arm pit, which is a shame, really. People like me especially need God. In a world where getting love and acceptance from the closest members of your family is problematic, God can mean the difference between life and death. As a youngster I didn’t understand that my church turning it’s back on me was not the same as God turning His back on me and I responded in kind. I turned my back on God and began to move farther into the illusion of separateness from All that Is.

I realize now that experiencing this separation is part of the human condition; that “our stories align at the core, if not in the sorry details.” The book talks about alcoholics and addicts being extreme examples of living according to this illusion. It talks about self-will run riot, of problems being of our own making and arising in our selves, of a spiritual malady that centers in our minds. It also suggests that people like me reaching out for help need to choose between God being everything or nothing; at a certain point we have to accept spiritual help if we are to recover.

Many forms of spiritual instruction and many forms of religion inform my journey, one of them recently being A Course in Miracles. I am attracted to the course largely because at it’s core it talks about what we talk about in AA and in similar, almost identical, terms. It talks about God being everything. It says that what blocks us from God is a barrier created out of our own mind. It says “a cloud does not put out the sun.”

The tunnel is an illusion.

The light is not.

The tunnel is made out of me. “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us!”

I found God in AA. I found God when I was finally “beaten into a state of reasonableness”; when I finally got still enough to listen. And that is where I continue to find Him; in the quiet space in between the demands of living a “productive” life in the material world. Demands on my time have increased and finding, or setting aside, enough time to get still has been challenging recently. I experience it as anxiety, frustration, sadness. I experience it as separation; as the tunnel. I wonder what people want from me and I wonder how my needs will be met. I forget that the real question is “what does God expect from me?”

As you already know, I am not particularly Christian. The God I have come to know through AA is described to me most perfectly in Hindu tradition as “the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe.” But the symbolism of Easter is not lost on me. It really is the sacrifice of self that leads to eternal life, freedom from bondage, salvation and enlightenment.

Happy Easter, friends.