Dependence

One of my favorite, inexact quotes from the literature, I know not which literature, says something like, “no baleful consequences have resulted from dependence upon a higher power or an AA group.”  No consequences full of bale here!  I pictured a bale of hay but no, bale also means “something bad.”

I’m reading Five Days at Memorial about a hospital in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.  There, patients were dependent upon machinery to keep them alive.  Without electricity, they could and did die.

Am I dependent upon AA?  Yes, and I don’t know.  I couldn’t stop drinking without it and I could keep drinking and live.  But now, is it so much a part of me that I don’t need it anymore?

People comment here from time to time that for various reasons they don’t go to meetings.  There are places in the world where there are no meetings.  Would I drink if I lived there?  I don’t think so, but I don’t know.  Part of the function of AA meetings in my life is to remind me where I came from and where I would return if I drank.  No meetings won’t likely be an issue for me as long as I live unless something drastic happens to AA.  Also, I see the elderly and people who can’t drive being taken to meetings, and I hope someone will take me if I’m ever in that position.  I know that when people go into long-term care, like a nursing home, the meetings effectively stop.  At that point I probably wouldn’t be able to get alcohol, if that ever happens to me.

Drinking, I was dependent on my mother.  Granted, I was young, but I could not support myself and drink also.  That dependence wasn’t good.  I depended on alcohol to let me live even as it was killing me.  This is why I sought out AA and a solution.

When I finally stopped relapsing, I was so afraid of drinking and dying that I gladly depended on AA and it didn’t let me down.  Not everyone in AA is a good person, and depending on an individual in AA is not a good thing.  But the group will eventually steer newcomers away from harmful people. I hope it will.

So now, what do I depend on, what do I fall back on?  It is the things I’ve learned in AA over the years that keep me sober and so, alive.  I depend on the program to have the answers I need and I depend on the people and the literature to reveal those answers to me.  I don’t know if I still need them to live, but I believe I need them to live well today.  I’m lucky to be dependent on something to dependable.

October 11, 2015 (this day)

I was part of a “higher power” discussion last night with a young man who is hesitant to do the steps because he is an atheist.  As he talked about the difficulty with finding a higher power as an atheist, he mentioned yoga, which I understand is a mental, physical, and spiritual practice, much like AA is a mental, physical, and spiritual recovery from active alcoholism and alcoholic drinking.  I don’t know much about yoga, but I wonder if it can “restore me to sanity.”  Do I need some semblance of sanity to practice it to begin with?  Do I need that to practice AA?

I’m in danger of twirling in a complicated mental circle.  Like I said last night and like I’ve said here, I don’t know if there is a supernatural or supreme being.  I don’t need to know to be successful in AA.  Our books suggest making AA or the group our higher power at first.  Here is a group of people who have solved the drinking problem, certainly a power greater than me.  That worked for me at first, and it works for me now.  I don’t mean the specific people who gathered at the group with me last night, although the same young man had a question about how to treat his sister.  All of the people within earshot voiced their opinion and agreed that he should not give her money.  I mean all of the people of AA from the beginning until now, and the program as it is written in the books and practiced by the people I come in contact with.  It is a power greater than me.  It is a plan for how to live and it is concrete, immediate, free and sane help with the specific details of my specific existence, here and now.

I don’t believe our young man should make a sponsor or a person his higher power.  Individuals are famously and sometimes tragically fallible.  But the program, its history, its present and its people are a higher enough power for me.  Personally, I can’t completely identify with someone who claims to be 100% atheist because I’m just never that sure of anything.  I can’t understand how those people don’t have a tiny doubt, but that doesn’t matter.  A power greater than them can restore them to sanity, and it can save them from an alcoholic existence and an alcoholic death.

The Intellectually Self-Sufficient Man or Woman (Step Two continued)

Now we come to another kind of problem:  the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman.  To these, many A.A.’s can say, “Yes, we were like you–far too smart for our own good.  We loved to have people call us precocious.  We used our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others.  Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower alone.  Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn’t do.  Knowledge was all-powerful.  Intellect could conquer nature.  Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking.  The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers.  But again John Barleycorn had other ideas.  We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all-time losers.  We saw that we had to reconsider or die.  We found many in A.A. who once thought as we did.  They helped us get down to our right size.  By their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility first.  When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith, and faith which works.  This faith is for you, too.”

This section gives me goosebumps.  “Reconsider, or die.”  It sounds melodramatic until I put names to the concept.  Today I’ll add Kelly.  We talked to her mother last night.

I think I came a generation after the “God of my fathers” had already been displaced.  My parents were and are decidedly not religious and of unknown but not obvious spirituality.  My grandparents likewise were not religious or obviously spiritual, though my grandmother was very superstitious.  My Catholic great grandmother warned all and sundry who attended my father’s wedding in a Lutheran church that God would strike them dead.  They attended anyway, apparently unfazed, and many have died but some still live 55 years later.  Such was my upbringing and, as far as it goes, being smart was viewed as a good thing in family, and it still is.    The idea I try to impress on the young people in my turn is that smarts is a gift, something unearned and that, as the passage says, humility has to come first if a smart one is to lead a happy life.

“The spoils of victory” weren’t mine for the thinking.  I could not think my way out of my alcoholic drinking.  I tried, to some extent.  I read about alcoholism, things like that, but I did so while and drinking and the happy result for me is that I concluded I needed help.  The psychological help offered by my school and by the therapists my mother sent me to never seemed like any kind of solution at all.  The people in AA said they understood, and I believed them.  They said they were sober and happy, and I believed them.  In terrible desperation, the times when I fought to stop drinking, there was something in my that cried out to “God” but the people and the program were, to me, a much more understandable, provable, tangible higher power.  And it took some time of just refraining from drinking for me to move beyond that.  I was such a case that I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t think very much or very well while under the influence.

So, they showed me that humility and intellect could be compatible?  Yes.  Some have showed me this by example.  Certainly it is true for me that when I placed humility first, by admitting that the people of AA had a solution to my problem that I did not have, I was able to receive the gift of a faith that works.

But personally I find, sometimes, and anti-intellectual prejudice in AA (and elsewhere in the country, in the world) and I try to speak out about it every time I see it.  Yes, as this passage illuminates, you can be “too smart” for AA, if you can’t summon up enough humility to follow suggestions, stop drinking and work the program.  Reconsider or die.  But I think you can be too stupid for AA as well.  And by that I don’t mean having a low IQ.  It’s true for me that I need to still put some intellectual effort behind my participation in AA or I’ll get numb and bored and, for me, I think that could be dangerous and possibly result in my drinking eventually.  “A simple program for complicated people . . . ”  Well, it’s really not all that simple.  Which to me is a good thing.  I’m a complicated person (and I don’t mean that in a good way) and I need complications to engage me.  Or at least I enjoy having complications that engage me.  It’s worked for me so far.

Consider Next the Plight of Those Who Once Had Faith (Step Two continued)

Consider next the plight of those who once had faith, but have lost it.  There will be those who have drifted into indifference, those fill with self-sufficiency who have cut themselves off, those who have become prejudiced against religion, and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands.  Can A.A. experience tell all these they may still find a faith that works?

Those who have become prejudiced against religion I meet many of in the rooms of AA.  It’s a common occurrence and an affinity many of us have for each other, and it can take a little explaining to help people understand that AA itself is not religious.  I was very young when I started, and I didn’t know much about AA, and I didn’t have the “cult” perception that seems common now.  But I was smart enough to understand that they were praying and chanting and that did seem like religion to me.  For that reason I’m personally against chanting at meetings.  I politely stand there and probably no one knows I don’t chant.

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Those filled with self-sufficiency make me smile.  How self-sufficient is someone who shows up at AA due to a drinking problem?  Most newcomers I meet and some degree of terrible shape or they wouldn’t be at an AA meeting.  “Your best thinking got you here” applies in more ways than one.

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Indifference and defiance.  The long and short of it is that AA taught me a different kind of belief in a higher power, and different reliance on concepts outside of my own making than I had ever understood before.  Defying a higher power is just stupid.  It’s higher, it will win.  Alcoholism is also more powerful than I am.  If I fight it, it will win.  Me against it is a match with only one outcome.

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At this point in my sobriety I find it very difficult to keep going forward and to keep increasing my understanding of these concepts and what the universe wants from me.  Somewhere else in the literature there is a sentence something like, “this is the way to a faith that works,” or “a faith that works under all circumstances.”  I’ve shared before that my circumstances have never been all that difficult and I really haven’t been tested with big time hardship or tragedy.  So I don’t know if my faith would work then.  I do know that “God” does give people more than they can handle.  It happens all the time.  It’s happening now.  For what I’ve been through, the program has been more than sufficient.  For what’s to come I will have to wait and see.

Contempt Prior to Investigation

A quick search tells me this quote is misattributed and misquoted, and that it has moved around the Big Book.  No matter.  To me it’s an AA concept, one of those axioms that explains so much about the world and how I failed to relate to the world in a healthy and correct manner.

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Where it shows up in the book now, at the end of an appendix explaining a “spiritual experience,” I have mostly taken it to mean that people who arrive at AA skeptical of a spiritual program, skeptical of a higher power and skeptical about a program of recovery may and often do doom themselves to an alcoholic death.  I was certainly skeptical of all those things, though I didn’t begin to understand them at the time.  AA is a program of last resort.  We urge the skeptical newcomer to stay a while and give it a try.  We hope whole-heartedly that they will.

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Beyond that, now, for me, this concept has proved eminently useful and when I recognize that I’m being contemptuous of something I don’t understand, I can often stop and try a more open-minded approach.  As I get older, I find myself more set in my ways.  I know more about what I like, what I believe, what I want as time goes on.  So am I more stubborn about not considering alternatives?  Is it right that I be so?

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I’m grateful for this concept that will make me at least see my problem, and the example that something I once did not believe in saved my life.

. . . their faith broadened . . . (Step Two continued)

“All of them will tell you that, once across, their faith broadened and deepened.  Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they to came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of them began to talk of God.”

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It’s a wonderful thing that, from seeing the miracle of sober alcoholics around me at meetings, I could begin to count myself among the lucky success stories, just for today.  From drinking to destruction, feeling like I couldn’t live one minute without it, to not drinking at all, and viewing it as poison.  The earlier analogy of making AA the higher power holds true and works out.  Following their directions and advice lead me to a miraculous reprieve.

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Maybe that is “God,” whatever most of us mean by God.  Maybe there is a supernatural being controlling and directing, or maybe only watching.  Or maybe there isn’t.  It’s not critical to my sobriety today, it’s not critical to my peace of mind today to know the answer to that question.  I’m pretty sure I can never know the answer or the nature of God.  Does allowing that the higher power may not be supernatural make me an agnostic still?  I don’t know, and I don’t care.  AA, wherever it came from and wherever it is, saved my life, and gave me an excellent quality of life, and that is the truth, 100%.

The Sponsor Continues (Step Two continued)

The sponsor continues, “Take, for example, my own

case. I had a scientific schooling. Naturally I respected,

venerated, even worshiped science. As a matter of fact, I

still do—all except the worship part. Time after time, my

instructors held up to me the basic principle of all scientific progress: search and research, again and again, always

with the open mind. When I first looked at A.A. my reaction was just like yours. This A.A. business, I thought,

is totally unscientific. This I can’t swallow. I simply won’t

consider such nonsense.

“Then I woke up. I had to admit that A.A. showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding

these had been anything but scientific. It wasn’t A.A. that

had the closed mind, it was me. The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel. Right there, Step Two

gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I can’t

say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe

in a Power greater than myself, but I certainly have that

belief now. To acquire it, I had only to stop fighting and

practice the rest of A.A.’s program as enthusiastically as

I could . . . “

I knew I was going to write about this and I wanted to go beyond my own experience a bit.  I was very young when I first went to AA.  I was very anti-higher power, and my experience can be found within the history of this blog.  I Googled around a little and read explanations of how Bill W took the Christianity of the Oxford Group and expanded upon it for us alcoholics.  Magic.

Then I traced the links in my blog’s stats.  This lead me to a blog I didn’t recognize, and it seems I commented about six months ago to someone who was writing about being send to AA by her therapist.  She had found the meeting to be OK and was going to look into agnostic groups in AA.  She lived in one of the biggest cities in the world and had those available to her.  Someone else in the comments had said that she had thought about looking into AA but the higher power concept was keeping her out.  She didn’t believe in a higher anything.  I followed that link to her blog and found that a few days ago, she had written in utter despair.  Life terrible.  Finances terrible, family terrible, mental state terrible.  Really terrible.

I don’t know what it was in me that let me continue in AA despite my antagonism toward the higher power concept.  Immediately the people there told me my higher power did not have to be “God.”  I understood pretty quickly that if I just could not accept that there was anyone or anything higher than me, well, I had problems other than alcohol for sure.  It makes me so sad that people will sink beyond despair and lives terrible, desperate lives rather than just giving the program and the concepts a chance.  Nothing to lose.  Nothing!

I don’t know many people who venerate science but I know quite a few who don’t believe in God.  The active alcoholic has just got to accept direction from somewhere, from someone, from something, or she is sure to get worse.  I know there are exceptions but I generally find AAs to be gentle about this part of the program and welcoming to unbelievers.  I’m sure many such unbelievers try and reject AA but hey, at least they have demonstrated to themselves and to others that they were willing to try.

I hope the blogger I wrote of does try AA and I hope she succeeds at it.  I understand, in the way only an alcoholic can, the feeling of choosing complete misery and failure over making an effort to live life on a spiritual basis.  I really do.

Advanced Humility

Still, however, God continued with my spiritual growth. He showed me, as F. B.

Meyer suggests, that even while I sang His praises, I was inclined to admire my own

singing. He showed me that, while my face shone with a new light, I was noting that

fact in the mirror. He showed me that, in my most earnest appeals to come to Christ,

I was greatly admiring my own earnestness. He showed me that I was proud even of

my new humility and that I congratulated myself on the knowledge of divine things

which other men might not possess.

Carole and I are reading “I Was a Pagan” by V.C. Kitchen.  This was published in 1934 and it describes well some of the Oxford Group philosophy that helped form AA.  Honestly, there are phrases and concepts that leap off the page at us as being extremely familiar, they are so similar to what we find in the Big Book and the 12 and 12.  This book I do recommend that others read, though I have to say I don’t think I could read it nearly as well alone as I do with someone.  If I didn’t have Carole to read these things with, I would probably look to form some kind of meeting to do it, and I would probably run into problems with “unapproved” literature, but she’s here so I’m not facing that.  But that’s a topic for a different post.

We are almost to the end of the book and yesterday we read the passage quoted above, and it smacked us both in the face for its truth and humor.  The book IS Christian, and AA is NOT Christian, so readers will have to be able to get past the C-word in order to profit from the book.  My personal translation of “come to Christ” would be something like “follow the will of my Higher Power.”  So ” . . . my higher power showed me . . . that, even while I sang the praises of God (my higher power), I was inclined to admire my own singing.  God showed me that, while my face shown in a new light, I was noting that fact in the mirror.  God showed me that, in my most honest appeals to know and follow God’s will for me, I was greatly admiring my own earnestness.  God showed me that I was proud even of my new humility and that I congratulated myself on the knowledge of things which others might not possess.”

I just ran this past Carole and asked her what it meant to her, and she said something like, “It shows me where I still need to grow.”  Something like that.  I read it and know I’m looking right at something vitally important to my continued growth, but I’m left feeling a little bit disheartened that I don’t think I’ll ever advance in this way.  I can’t imagine getting to a place where I don’t note that I’ve made progress, if I have, where I don’t admire my own earnestness.

I work with people who have developmental disabilities, and the needs are endless and profound.  There is a young woman I’m trying to help right now, and while it is my job to help her I’m doing more than my job calls for, because I want to and I can.  I’m regularly getting praise for this and the occasional satisfaction of actually getting something accomplished, plus a measure of hope goes along with the situation that I can really change something by the force of my efforts for this person, and I find the hope reinforcing as well.  That’s all well and good.  What I’m trying to describe and maybe bring to light is the positive emotion it all engenders in me.  I cannot understand, at the base of it, if it’s wrong for me to get pleasure out of the praise, the internal satisfaction, the feeling that I really helped change something for the better.

I’m not suffering in the helping.  It does bring me closer to a bad situation than I want to be, but I’m not made to visit her awful environment. I give up a small amount of time and no amount of money or material goods.  Sure many people in my place wouldn’t do what I’m doing, but I know they probably do other good things.  I’m not better than most of them.  I say most of them because I’ve known some bad people but not many.  I think I need to think about more and come back to it.  There seems to be some kind of root of humility that I don’t understand.

“Well,” says the newcomer . . . (Step Two continued)

“Well,” says the newcomer, “I know you’re telling me the

truth. It’s no doubt a fact that A.A. is full of people who

once believed as I do. But just how, in these circumstances,

does a fellow ‘take it easy’? That’s what I want to know.”

“That,” agrees the sponsor, “is a very good question in-

deed. I think I can tell you exactly how to relax. You won’t

have to work at it very hard, either. Listen, if you will, to

these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does

not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve

Steps are but suggestions.

Those are some of the most important words written in the AA literature about AA, I do believe.  Critics will say that individuals at meetings may disagree, and say that if you don’t believe as they do, you will drink, and die.  And a few individuals may say that, but this (to me) is the official AA line.

I hope newcomers or chronic relapsers (like I was) can take heart there, and continue on just that, if they need to.  I came to AA and I left AA (by drinking) and came back and repeated and repeated and repeated.  They did not demand I believe anything.

The group is surely a higher power.  Any group of people is a power greater than me, because I’m only one.  Any group of AA people was a power greater than me when they were able to stop drinking alcoholically and I was not able to.  People who try to skip parts of the program or skimp and parts will be warned, as they should.  I will warn them, if I can, because skipping and skimping meant I couldn’t achieve sobriety, and drinking meant I risked my life and the life of countless innocent others.

I hear that some people achieve sobriety with groups modeled after AA but minus the higher power concept.  That’s great.  I don’t know any of those people, but then I hang out in AA meetings, so I wouldn’t.  If those groups really are successful, they will flourish, and I’ll be glad.  So far they’re not catching on very well.  I also hear there are psychological therapies and medical interventions that succeed, and again, I’m glad.  Maybe the person next to me at work is the product of such a success, but I don’t think so.  Those things are expensive if nothing else, so not readily available.

AA does not demand you believe anything, or do anything, or say anything, or be anything.  AA’s will tell you what worked for them, and if you’re very fortunate, it will work for you as well.

Let’s look first at the case of the one who says he won’t believe (Step Two continued)

Let’s look first at the case of the one who says he won’t

believe—the belligerent one. He is in a state of mind which

can be described only as savage. His whole philosophy of

life, in which he so gloried, is threatened. It’s bad enough,

he thinks, to admit alcohol has him down for keeps. But

now, still smarting from that admission, he is faced with

something really impossible. How he does cherish the

thought that man, risen so majestically from a single cell

in the primordial ooze, is the spearhead of evolution and

therefore the only god that his universe knows! Must he

renounce all this to save himself ?

At this juncture, his A.A. sponsor usually laughs. This,

the newcomer thinks, is just about the last straw. This is

the beginning of the end. And so it is: the beginning of

the end of his old life, and the beginning of his emergence

into a new one. His sponsor probably says, “Take it easy.

The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider than you

think. At least I’ve found it so. So did a friend of mine who

was a one-time vice-president of the American Atheist Society, but he got through with room to spare.”

This was me, in that I wouldn’t believe.  I wasn’t all about science, not at all, but I was severely disillusioned with my quasi-religious upbringing and I just thought God and the church were ridiculous.  I absolutely rejected this spiritual side of AA.  I stood and held hands at meeting, but I did not pray.

No one laughed, for which I am very grateful.  And thinking back, it seems to me it was the language of the books that finally cracked my door open just a little, just enough.

I try to maintain this attitude today with many issues.  I am very stubborn.  It is difficult.  But I have such a shining, such a drastic example of how this worked for me in my past.  I wonder if there are any more new lifes for me to begin.