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.