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?