Off with his head

Today is the memorial of the Passion of John the Baptist.  Some will call the day by its less euphemistic title: the Beheading of John the Baptist.  We've seen more than our share of the horrors of beheading in recent years, brought to us by the profoundly evil, the cold-blooded.  John's beheading was no less terrible, the result of evil at its most capricious.

Of course, I can't say how John reacted to being led to the executioner.  Nonetheless, John was a man who lived to disappear into his vocation, a vocation that was his from the moment of his conception.  He leapt in his mother's womb at the meeting of Mary and the miraculously pregnant Elizabeth.  He famously declared his desire to "...decrease that he might increase."  He saw his life as pointing constantly to Christ.  He baptized the Savior for whom he made ready the path.  He heard the voice of the Father, saw the Holy Spirit's descent.  It was what he was born for.  I have to believe that he saw his death the same way.

In many respects, he represents what we should strive to be: attached only to Christ.  Dedicated to Christ, we should strive to decrease so that he might increase, preparing for his return.

I look to get out of my own way, to find a calling that leads me -- no, compels me -- to how he wants me to make the path ready.  To find myself living a life that is motivated by the polar opposite of a cold-blooded idea, to know that I could do nothing else.

Thanks, Colin.

It is a cold-blooded idea.

I do not read the Big Book.  I know the Promises and where to find them.  I have more than a passing familiarity with the Steps, but I haven't memorized them.  I don't want to minimize its importance; it has saved countless lives.  Simply, the seminal work of Bill W. and Dr. Bob has not been central to my recovery in any kind of direct way.  My focus has been elsewhere, and it has been more successful than I dared hope.  So far.

Even so, I will attend a very small Big Book meeting from time to time.  It's a small meeting attended mainly by people with a lot of time.  We read the Big Book aloud, each person reading in turn until they pass to the next.  When someone decides they want to discuss, we discuss.

The last time I attended, we read from a contribution called "Our Southern Friend".  At one point, our Southern friend decided that he was done with sobriety, that he would buy some liquor and drink again.    He described this decision: "It is a cold-blooded idea."

When I heard that sentence, I knew exactly what our Southern friend was saying.  It was his ego supplanting reason.  He was describing what he wanted to do.  At that time, his focus was all on himself.  I know that focus all too well, and it isn't limited to drink.

In a general sense, the traditional Christian recognizes where the cold-blooded idea leads, and we call that sin.  It represents the refusal of God's grace, replacing the recognition of our reliance on his goodness with reliance on ourselves.

Over at Irregular Theology today, the blogger quotes Stanley Hauerwas.  Hauerwas is a theologian who is known as an outspoken pacifist and critic of liberal Christianity as well as Christian fundamentalism.  While it's hard to imagine that Hauerwas had recovery in mind, the quote is perfectly applicable to how we get sober:

Christians understand that our lives are gifts, not achievements. By that we mean that we are completely vulnerable, dependent, creatures of a gracious God who has “storied” us prior to any choices we might make. We call rebellion against our giftedness ”sin.” Sin is part of the story we must tell about our lives if we are to be truthful. Therefore we need friends in order to learn to tell the truth about our lives; otherwise we are tempted toward delusional stories about our righteousness.  Consequently, friendship for Christians in both a necessary activity for the discovery that we are less than we were meant to be and the resource to start us on the journey through which we become what we were created to be.

 We recognize our weakness.  Acknowledging our weakness, we turn our lives over to God.  Our brokenness may be expressed with alcohol, by lying, or by cheating on your husband.  We confess our sins, we acknowledge our weakness to another.  We rely on our sponsor, our priest, our fellow in the hope that they will ensure that we apply what we believe in all aspects of our daily lives.

Pain management

Well, let's talk about some healthy reactions to pain.  Years ago, a long-time friend went through a  really difficult divorce just before I experienced a much less difficult one.  Of course, I was really hurting.  I knew she had to be suffering, and she didn't have the luxury of wallowing in it or drowning the pain in booze.  She had two young kids to raise and a demanding job.  I asked her how she was coping.  She said that when she was really in pain, she let herself feel it for five minutes.  Then, she was done.  Back to work.  I was in awe -- and inspired.

In the same spirit, this week, the web has offered a couple of examples of people who reacted to their respective misfortunes with grace and amazing strength.

First, here's the story of a college student from Colorado.  Hiking in Wyoming, she broke her ankle -- really broke her ankle.  While she waits for rescue, she filmed herself talking about her situation.  She's funny, cool.  I hope that I would be so cool under a profoundly stressful situation.  Two warnings here:

1. Her language isn't always language that you'd use around your five-year-old.  She's sitting alone in the dark with a broken ankle.  You don't use language like that around your five-year-old, right?
2. Her ankle is broken.  It's not pretty.  

If you're squeamish about words or feet pointing in unnatural directions, you've been warned.

A tip o' the hat to Adventure Journal!

Next up is another story from Wyoming, this from WyoFile.  In the latest edition of the Peaks to Plains column, we read about Tom and Sarah Wilson.  Here's how the story starts:

Tom and Sarah Wilson finished the Lander Sprint Triathlon Saturday the same way they survived the last year and a half; holding hands, together. 

It didn’t matter that Sarah was the stronger swimmer and Tom the faster runner. It didn’t matter that it took them two hours and seven minutes to finish. 

What mattered was a year and a half ago they held their son, born at 22 weeks, long enough to name him David Thomas Wilson, before he died in their arms. What mattered was a few months later Sarah still needed two people to help her out of bed. What mattered was that even six months ago Sarah was still in so much pain there were days she couldn’t get out of bed.

Problems?  I have no problems.  Back to work.

Thanks, K!
 

More pain

Some of you may know that I have another blogging venture over at tumblr: From Today's Office.  One of the tumblr sites I follow is Screenshots of Despair.  Beautiful.  A recent entry:

Pain

Some times, it seems as though one theme is playing in diverse places and people at the same time.  This week it's emotional pain.

I'm not good at pain, and I know that's one reason why I drank.  Of course, this suggests one of the biggest challenges for those in recovery: how do you react to pain when you are working very hard not to dull it with drink or drugs?  Making matters worse, for many of us, our pain is the unavoidable result of our addictions: the broken families, the loneliness, the confused reaction to our environment that accompanies recovery.

This has been a bitter week for me for a litany of reasons.  It has presented a very real challenge, but not to my sobriety.  I have no desire to drink.  It's a more subtle struggle to react to adversity in a healthy way, in a way that is consistent with the faith I profess.

To me, Christ's Passion was intended to show us that we are to love through the suffering.  In the desert, Satan offered Christ comfort and power; Christ rejected these, maintaining his fasting and prayer in preparation for his ultimate act of love.  Even though he was tormented, he offered forgiveness.  Even though he felt abandoned, he gave himself to his father's will.

I don't know that Christians can expect more suffering than anybody else, but it seems that suffering is part of the deal.  Heather King pointed to a text from The Mystical Doctrine of St. John of the Cross:

O souls that seek your own ease and comfort, if you knew how necessary for a high state is suffering, and how profitable suffering and mortification are for attaining to God's great blessings, you would never seek for comfort anywhere...This is the way God deals with those whom it is His will to exalt: He suffers them to be tempted, afflicted, tormented, and chastened, inwardly and outwardly, to the utmost limit of their strength, that He may deify them, unite them to Himself in His wisdom, which is the highest state.

Where Christ asked the rich young man to give up his wealth, we live in a society where we are urged to buy more and more.  A sexualized society can only challenge, if not torment,  those who try to lead chaste lives.

For me, the most difficult lesson to learn in sobriety is how to react to days of profound sadness. Exercise helps.  A lot.  Perspective, for pain is the inevitable by-product of my brokenness.  Gratitude for how far I've come.  Most of all, I have to know that pain is the ground in which growth is rooted, that this is a time of great potential and beauty that I shouldn't waste.

And beauty pain creates.  Eve posted an excerpt of a poem this week, In Praise of Pain by Heather McHugh.  Here's the entire poem:

In Praise of Pain

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—

a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design   

refuse. The wine collects its starlets

at a lip's fault, sunlight where the nicked   

glass angles, and affection where the eye   

is least correctable, where arrows of

unquivered light are lodged, where someone   

else's eyes have come to be concerned.

For beauty's sake, assault and drive and burn   

the devil from the simply perfect sun.   

Demand a birthmark on the skin of love,   

a tremble in the touch, in come a cry,   

and let the silverware of nights be flecked,   

the moon pocked to distribute more or less   

indwelling alloys of its dim and shine   

by nip and tuck, by chance's dance of laws.

The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet,   

the moment cracked upon a bed, will last   

as if you soldered them with moon and flux.   

And break the bottle of the eye to see

what lights are spun of accident and glass.

AA?

If you take the first step toward recovery, you'll hear lots of advice about getting to AA.  My counselors in rehab always wanted to know how many meetings I was attending.  I think it's a gauge of how serious you are about getting sober.  Many counselors have taken this path themselves; they believe that AA works.  There could be some self-validation at work there, too.  Maybe the most salient reason the clinic encouraged me to attend meetings -- and the one that worked for me -- is that my health insurance threatened to pull the plug on covering my rehab if I didn't start attending.

I figured that if I had to do this meeting thing, I'd find a meeting or two where I was comfortable.  It wasn't easy.  After attending quite a few, and asking people about their favorite meetings, I found one that meant a lot to my early recovery.  It was a men's meeting early Saturday morning.  It was joyful, brutally honest.  No place for coddling, they cut you off if you talk to long.  With 60 minutes and maybe 60 men -- and everybody shares -- too long comes pretty quick.  In any event, I felt like these men let me know that sobriety may not be easy, but it's not a joyless enterprise.

There were plenty of meetings that I refuse to attend.  In some meetings, I heard disturbing anti-Catholic bigotry.  Let me make this clear.  I grew up Catholic in a small Oklahoma town.  I'm used to the name-calling, the Jack Chick pamphlets, and worse.  I dated an Episcopalian girl whose mother didn't want her getting serious with a Catholic boy.  What I heard in these meetings, if you uttered about another religion or a race, would get you placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, and the Southern Poverty Law Center would be trying to determine which hate group you belong to.

These remarks angered me at several levels.  I was angry because there was no effort in the meeting to walk back from the remarks; no objection implied acceptance.  More than that, I could just imagine a Catholic alcoholic attending his first meeting at such a place, finding it repulsive, and refusing to attend any meeting.  More generally, if an institution harbors such intolerance of any sort, it cannot effectively perform its mission.

One of my most fundamental issues with AA is the "I'm (your name here), and I'm an alcoholic."  I understand the reason why this is the drill in AA.  We share an affliction.  Whether we're rich and powerful or homeless, we are helpless, and we need God's help and the help of others.  Of course, I think that's true if you're an alcoholic or not.  We are all sinners and, absent God's grace, offered directly or mediated through the work of others, sinners we will remain.  Nobody introduces themselves to you in the context of their sin.  Even so, "I'm so-and-so, and I'm an adulterer" would be one memorable introduction.

Ultimately, I don't think it's productive to be defining myself in terms of my weaknesses or, as more formal Catholic language would describe them, my disordered desires.  I think even Luther might agree as he told us that we give Satan power over us by focusing on our sins too much.  If alcohol does hold power over us, describing ourselves in terms of its power over us does nothing to reduce its sway.

Cognizant of some AA's foibles, I still would advise someone who wants to stop drinking or the newly sober to go to some meetings.  See where -- and with whom -- you're comfortable, where you find support, laughter, tears.  Really, these meetings are for you, newcomer.

So why would old-timers attend?  Well, I find inspiration in Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians:

Praised be God, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation!  He comforts us in all our afflictions and thus enables us to comfort those who are in trouble with the same consolation we have received from him.  

About last night

... when I noted the similarities between conversion and recovery, I didn't discuss one of the biggest differences between the two.  While conversion and recovery may both produce all kinds of healing - emotional, spiritual - physical healing is an integral part of recovery from addiction.

When I stopped drinking, my body changed and changed again in ways that I never would have imagined.  Some of the changes were by design, as I knew intuitively that gaining strength was essential to my recovery.  Some of the changes were the natural result of reducing my daily calorie intake by the hundreds or, maybe even a thousand, and the stress of divorce and all that entails.  I lost 30 pounds that needed to be lost and gained 20 that I could use.  It was great to be 50 and to require new clothes because the shoulders of my suits were too small and the waist of my slacks were too large!

As edifying as these changes were, they paled in importance to the healing of my brain.  These changes were mystifyingly difficult to manage.  If you stop cold turkey, you feel the brunt of withdrawal: the sleeplessness, the thickheadedness, worst of all, anhedonia, the complete inability to feel any sort of happiness or joy.  As bad as it is for alcoholics, oxycontin addicts seem to have a long and especially difficult period of anhedonia.

Having gone cold turkey once, I knew I needed help, not only in the form of counseling, but in the form of detox.  It was a real blessing.  Sleep came right away, my blood pressure didn't spike as it did before, and the sense of joylessness was markedly reduced.

Not long after I started rehab, I noticed something else.  During rehab and meetings, I heard over and over: no relationships for a year.  I didn't have to worry about that, but I was puzzled.  Why?  I'm not drinking any more.  Doesn't that mean I'm more capable to make decisions like these?

The answer is no, and I discovered why as I looked for a place to live.  After fits and starts, I found a place that I knew was right for me.  Spacious, airy, and bright, it was perfect -- until I went back to sign the lease.  The complex, so appealing on first sight, was dingy the second time around, worn and ill-kept.  It looked as though somebody -- residents?  management? -- didn't care much about the place.  The interior was nice, and I had made a commitment, so the lease was signed.  I learned that any judgment based on my perception stood on the shakiest of ground.  Well, any judgment at all was pretty unreliable, for that matter.  So it remained for a number of months.

For me and some of my rehab cohort, that number was six.  For those of us who were close, we all agreed that, six months in to recovery, it was like the world around us had suddenly become clearer.  We knew that the healing had been taking place over time, imperceptibly, but at six months it became so apparent, it was as though some sort of quantum leap had taken place.

Those first six months were hard -- very hard.  I had to find a new way to live, new ways to recreate, new friends.  Even though the last thing I wanted to do was spend my time in rehab or in meetings, the experiences were critical.  In a lot of respects, rehab and the people I went through rehab with were invaluable.  I found a good AA meeting where I learned that men don't have to get drunk to have fun.  Over time, with work, alone and with others, The Promises that I discussed last night had become credible.

By their fruit you shall know them

Sunday night, I was driving to the store, channel surfing on satellite radio.  I tuned to the Catholic Channel, just in time to hear the start of a program called Christopher Closeup.  I took my foot of the accelerator when I heard that my friend, Julie Davis, would be the guest.

Julie is a convert to Catholicism.  I listened with interest as she told about the changes that occurred as she began to embrace her new faith.  She talked about how a friend found her, shall we say, easier to be with.  Julie was surprised.  She wasn't seeing these changes in herself.

Conversion and recovery are so much alike.  Both involve surrender.  Both produce, encourage, and are catalyzed by gratitude.  Each one can represent a tenuous, but strengthening, hold on a new and better reality.  Conversion, like sobriety, represents a daily reprieve, contingent on the maintenance of one's spiritual condition, as they say in AA.  I might say "deepening" as opposed to "maintenance", but that's just me.

Really, the two - conversion and recovery - go hand in hand, although your local Twelve-Steppers may object.  As I've mentioned before, to me, sobriety is part of the way, not the destination.  It's a necessary, but not sufficient condition for me to become who God wants me to be.

That person would be a saint, by the way.  Not a guy whose likeness appears on holy cards.  Not someone who can bi-locate, or read minds, or bear the stigmata, like Padre Pio.  Not even somebody who kept ice cream frozen in a desk drawer, like Solanus Casey.  He wants me to be happy in His presence, but I digress.

I've mentioned the Promises before.  They describe what we should expect if we work toward sobriety, through the Steps or another approach.  They are contained on pages 83-84 of the Big Book:

"If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.  Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them." 

Hey, Julie!  Sound familiar?

Father Kennedy, reprise

I have written about Father Kennedy before, or, at least, the novel in which he appears.  An ex-drunk, heading up a parish past its prime, he is afflicted with a severe case of acedia.  He approaches his parish and his responsibilities with apathy, if not disdain.

The climax of the novel leads him to a choice.  He is offered the opportunity to become the pastor of the parish in which he was raised, a parish that knew him and of his alcoholism.  It was a parish that was certainly move vibrant than the parish he led.  He decided to remain and to become a real pastor to his parishioners.

Earlier, I had watched and enjoyed Of Gods and Men.  The movie depicted the true 1996 story of Trappist monks in Tibhirine, Algeria.  The monks had been threatened by Islamist terrorists, and they had refused the protection of the local authorities, who also suggested that the monks should leave.  The Trappists were torn, many wanting very much to leave.  Ultimately, they decided to remain and continue ministering to the people of Tibhirine.   The critical line of dialogue: "Je reste."  I'm staying.

This line pretty much foreshadowed decisions I would be making.  When I encountered each of these works, I was hoping on hope to move away.  I desperately wanted to move West, especially to Denver.  Each time, I had opportunities; each time, the opportunity vanished.  I half-jokingly - okay, less than half - noted that these works suggested that I was to stay here.  I glossed over why these men were staying put.

What on earth does this have to do with the newly sober?  With the alcoholic who wants to stop drinking?

I think that, much as I wanted to go West, Father Kennedy would have liked to have gone to a shiny new parish.  The Trappists would have preferred a life of safety if not comfort.  Unlike me, they realized they had work to do: Father Kennedy, in his parish; the monks, in Tibhirine.

Getting and remaining sober requires you to do your work, as well.  Like Father Kennedy and the Trappists, you probably don't want to do it: the rehab, the meetings, getting a sponsor, working the steps, a lot of prayer.  Surrender.

Note that sobriety isn't the end game.  Like Father Kennedy and the Trappists, the work is what you do to become who are truly are.  To paraphrase Thomas Merton, another Trappist, the work is to identify what we are living for and what is keeping us from living for what want to live for.

I have my work to do, as well.