The Last Chance Texaco

Posts Tagged ‘Service’

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. Read the rest of this entry »

If any feel that as psychiatrists directing a hospital for alcoholics we appear somewhat sentimental, let them stand with us a while on the firing line, see the tragedies, the despairing wives, the little children; let the solving of these problems become a part of their daily work, and even of their sleeping moments, and the most cynical will not wonder that we have accepted and encouraged this movement. We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them. -William D. Silkworth, MD

At 7 o’clock on the second Friday of every month I visit the Allumbaugh House, presumably to bring in an AA meeting.  The thing is most of the people in a county detox center have made multiple attempts at getting sober.  Most, if not all of them have been to meetings before; sometimes hundreds of them.  I went to hundreds of meetings before I ever got sober.  I had vast sections of the book memorized.  I knew what to say in meetings and I knew how to act and I knew what I was supposed to look like so that I would fit in.  I was good at doing that.  Standing on the firing line of recovery has very little to do with attending meetings.  It has to do with carrying the message.

Because these folks have been to meetings before and because they haven’t managed to stay sober in spite of it, I like to do things a little differently.  I like to go back to the very origins of the fellowship.  I like to go back to the first meeting between Bill W. and Dr. Bob.  The real power of what the program is lies in the space created between two addicts or alcoholics honestly sharing their stories with each other.  That isn’t something you can do at a meeting.  And let’s face it, who among us understood what the steps meant when we were two or three or even ten days sober?  What is the point of even reading it? Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing to save my life.  Even today, but most especially in the earliest days of my recovery the act of writing helped me maintain perspective and focus.  I wrote in a medium that was publicly accessible because I was so profoundly alone. The feedback I got really encouraged me and helped motivate me.

All I’d ever really been was fucked up, and somehow in the act of writing about trying to recover from that I attracted the attention of Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who asked if I would agree to be interviewed for a book about the moment that led me to recovery; the moment I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  I remember at the time being so flattered that I almost didn’t grant the interview. Seriously, if your fucked-upness has attracted the attention of a member of the Kennedy clan, you’ve reached your zenith. Read the rest of this entry »

and yet so stupid in others.  I sometimes wonder if it isn’t actually a function of intelligence to be able to block out information when we choose to; if you don’t actually have to be really smart to have a really effective denial mechanism. A certain amount of mental power must be involved in forcing oneself to Read the rest of this entry »

Hey! Are any of you going to the CMA World Service Conference in Park City in a couple of weeks?  I totally want to go.  CMA is super new here in Boise.  There have been meetings in Twin Falls, ID for awhile now and people have tried to start meetings here before as long as 5 years ago, but none of them lasted more than a couple of months.  Well a Friday night meeting started up here about 3 weeks ago and a Monday-Friday noon meeting started last Monday.  I attended the meeting on Tuesday, and while it was quite small, there was actually some pretty good recovery in that room. Days I’m not working I’m definitely going to attend. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a very busy week in terms of working with others. Friday I had the day off work and ended up going with my friend Robert on a 12th Step call. We drove from Boise to Eagle and picked this man up, drove back to Boise, and spent the rest of the day with him.  At 4 I had Dennis, the new guy I sponsor, come to where we were. We went to a 5:30 meeting, an 8 o’clock meeting, a 10 o’clock meeting. Robert took the guy home with him; he didn’t have anywhere safe to be. Read the rest of this entry »

There are parts of my experience at the end of my use and in the early part of my recovery that I have been hard pressed to imagine would ever be an asset; something I could share to help another addict recover, chief among them my relationship with Dan, the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband (IFX). Dan’s skill at using my lonliness at the end of my using days, his disappearance on my birthday, and most particularly his extrarodinary meanness when he got out of prison and started showing up in 12 step meetings places him at the center of some of the most painful moments of my life. Read the rest of this entry »