Latest / Sober Readings / Came To Believe - CH 6 Stories
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Came to Believe, the spiritual adventure of AA as experienced by individual members. Welcome back to Sober Readings, everyone. Today is Sunday, and that means another reading from Came to Believe. This week we're starting on chapter 6, which is titled The Search. And here's the intro. You are asking yourself, as all of us must, who am I? Where am I? Whence do I go? The process of enlightenment is usually slow. But in the end, our seeking always brings a finding. These great mysteries are, after all, enshrined in complete simplicity. And that was written by Bill W in a letter in nineteen fifty five. So let's get started on chapter six. There are seven stories. I'm gonna read the first four today, and then next Sunday I'll finish up chapter six with the last three. So the first story in chapter six is titled Breakthrough. For me, the narrow spiritual path has been one of many and seemingly endless frustrations. Three steps forward, two backward, or sometimes four backward. At first, words from the big book, from Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, and from other AA literature constantly harassed me. Finally, the pamphlet Alcoholism The Illness forced me to read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Bill W. spoke of the immense importance of this book to him. Who was I not to give it at least a look see? Just try it for size, an AA friend suggested. And by the way, there is an asterisk next to Alcoholism The Illness, and it says, now titled Three Talks to Medical Societies by Bill W. As I read the book, skipping over anything I did not understand, which was a great deal on the first reading, it seemed that I was actually beginning to discern my own personal conception of my own personal God. Now at least I saw a real possibility that I might come to know the difference between the spiritual life and the religious life. It was indeed this breakthrough that encouraged me to pursue the spiritual beliefs of AA. I began talking with people in the program who said they were agnostics. To me, it was interesting and most helpful to become aware of their thinking through private conversation. Apparently AA agnostics, at any rate, those I talked with, feel that when they speak out even at closed meetings, their true ideas and sincerity are often misunderstood. My attendance at spiritual retreats, held for alcoholics only, has been of immense value. Strangely, when I first started this direction of thought, I was It was inconceivable to me that there was or could be a God personal to me. Now, over five and a half years later, I believe that this God or higher power of mine actually and very definitely loves me. To him, I am a complete and total world. He loves me as though I were the only person on earth or anywhere else. It no longer is important to my big shodism to go around saying, I love God. Because I now know myself well enough to realize that I change. I am not constant. It is important for me only to have faith that God loves me. And that comes from Teaneck, New Jersey. Next up is a story called I've got it. For about three years in AA, I had sobriety and that was all. There was something missing, and I knew that it was the spiritual side of the program. I had tried to find it in the steps and couldn't, perhaps because of my inability to use them as I should have. So I drifted aimlessly along in AA, sober but resentful, negative and unhappy. After a glider crash, I was a glider pilot, which injured my back. I suffered from ill health, and my husband decided to take me away on a holiday. When we arrived at a little town on the east coast of South Africa, I was in a very bad mood. I walked along the beach and along a coral reef. I found a big blowhole where the water was sucked down and then spouted up, and the thought came to me that it would be a very good idea to jump into this hole and finish the life I was leading. I wasn't staying sober for anybody else. I was staying sober for myself. This I knew, and for myself I didn't see any reason to go on living, to stay sober only to reach the state of mind I was in. While standing there contemplating suicide, I looked out to sea and saw a cloud. This didn't impress me very much, because I knew what a cloud was made of. At the same time I saw the moon, a day moon away out at sea. And this didn't impress me very much either. But then it came to my mind that out there, somewhere, there were stars. I couldn't see them, and yet I knew they were there. This began to have a profound effect on me and my train of thought. I looked at the waves. I saw them coming in and going out and coming in again. I thought, how useless, how senseless. In and out for millions and millions of years, and all they achieved, it seemed to me, was to break up rocks into tiny pieces and make sea sand. And then I thought of the grain of sand. That grain of sand was made up of atoms. Take the atoms away, and there would be no grain of sand. Remove the atoms from the rock I was standing on, and there would be no rock. And I too was made up of atoms. Remove them, and there would be no me. Remove the atoms from the world, and there would be no world. What held all the atoms together? What held each single atom together? I realized that the power holding everything together was my higher power. This power had created me, and I had the audacity to think that I could destroy that which was not mine to destroy. Within that moment I changed completely. The thought went through my mind. You are negative no longer. You are now positive. A great feeling of uplift came over me. With the new joy that filled my heart, I ran down the beach toward my husband. Tears pouring down my cheeks, shouting, I've got it, I've got it. He said, ⁓ my god, you're drunk again. No, I said, The old me just died. You'll never see her again. And the new one had indeed been born. To this day, he's never seen the old one, nor have I. She died there and then on those rocks. From that moment onward I started going from one church to another, seeking, seeking, seeking. One day somebody said to me, Stop looking. God has not left. He is here all the time. There I was, back on the rocky beach, and then I knew that all the time he had been there within me. And that story comes from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. This next story is titled A Glacier Melts. I had been sober eighteen months and felt physically and mentally in better health than I had for many years. I was very much involved in AA activities, but I remained agnostic about the higher power pit. I considered that I had come to AA for sobriety. I had sobriety, and AA was all I needed to keep me sober. Occasionally, I wish that I could say, as most AA members did, That my higher power was God, but the need for honesty had made a strong impression on me, and I knew that I would be unable to admit to a power higher than Alcoholics Anonymous until I was firmly convinced. One weekend I made special personal plans, setting the stage, and the man included in those plans disappointed me. The actor didn't arrive on stage on cue. Without warning and apparently without any sufficient cause, I was plunged into a fit of hysterical crying and continued to become more emotionally unstrung. I had been hospitalized six years earlier as a psychotic, and now I was experiencing the same feelings of sliding into a pit of hellish torture. I felt as desperate as I had when I made my call for help to AA a year and a half before. But this time I was sober. My daughter, aged fifteen, Became more alarmed than I had ever known her to be in my drinking years. She too began to cry from fright and suggested I call a doctor or some of my friends in AA. I said to her, Linda, no person can help me. I need God's help. That word God had come out automatically. Previously, I had been unable to say it aloud. Through tears, my daughter replied, Mother, I think God has forgotten us. This response called me to weep even more violently, and I sank into a hopeless depression. I had attended many, many AA meetings, and I had heard the ABCs in chapter five of Alcoholics Anonymous repeated so often that the answer to my problem was waiting for me in this time of need. I was convinced that God could and would help me if I would seek him. During the next six weeks at times when I could be alone, I was I made a concentrated effort to determine what or who God was and what my relationship was to Him. Strange things began to happen. I had thought I was happy in that first 18 months of sobriety, but now everything began to look brighter. People seemed nicer, and I had moments of tremendous insight. It was as if words and sentences I had heard all my life had a deeper meaning and were reaching my feelings rather than my intellect. It was as if my head and my heart finally had gotten glued together. I no longer seemed like two people in one, engaging in a tug of war. I experienced within this six week period a feeling of being totally forgiven, and never since have I felt the guilt that I had throughout my life prior to that time. More than once I had a sense of presence which I can describe only as being marvelously warm, uplifting, and comforting. Though I no longer cried while awake during this period, I awakened many times at night because my pillow was wet and cold. It was as if all this weeping were melting a glacier of ice around my heart. A glacier which had cut me off not only from the world of people, but from the real me. Afterwards, when I confided the strangeness of this time to others in AA, I was told that I had had the AA cry. It was a time of confusion, but I was particularly helped by seeing an appendix footnote in the first version of Alcoholics Anonymous, acquainting me with the book The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, whose philosophy psychology is a large part of AA's pragmatic method of gaining sobriety and having a volitional spiritual awakening. As an example, James states, summarizing the views of Dr. E. D. Starbuck. Now with most of us, the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the sin almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is a process of struggling away from sin rather than striving toward righteousness. As James described it, I no longer felt like a divided person. After this period of six weeks I was unified. Gone from my solar plexus was the time bomb that had always been there, waiting to go off. I believe that I had suffered not only from alcoholism, but also from grave emotional and mental disorders. Therefore, it was necessary for me to surrender not just to alcohol, but to something else. No one has said it better than Harry ⁓ Tebout MD in his pamphlet. The act of surrender in the therapeutic process. For a few, there seems to occur a phenomenon of what might be called selective surrender. After the effects of the initial surrender experience have worn away, the individual returns to pretty much the same person he was before, except for the fact that he doesn't drink and he has no battle on that line. His surrender is not to life as a person, but to alcohol as an alcoholic. AA provided me a means by which I could overcome the compulsion to drink, and more important, a means by which I could achieve a personality change or spiritual awakening, a surrender to life. Though I have had problems and deep troubles since that summer ten years ago, my faith has not been shaken. I cannot say that I have found God as I understand Him, but rather that I have faith in something which remains a mystery to me. And which I continue to seek. And that was written in Fresno, California. And the last story that I'll read from chapter six today is the seed of God. No one could have been more happy than I in my early days of AA. Before that, my fears had become nightmares. If I slept, it was a tortured, restless sleep, and I would awaken to my own cries. Often I could not sleep at all. So when I could once again awaken in the mornings with bright eyes, I felt like a young lad. Now I could laugh again, and I reached the point that I enjoyed this more than alcohol. Each day of sobriety was a testimonial of My attempt to become a human being. AA was right for me, but not the spiritual side of the program. I had already had enough of forced religious training. I was suspicious of the discussions on this subject. A part of a quotation from the Bible, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children of the third and fourth generation, encompassed me with fear of God's wrath. But my spiritual growth became stronger from the experiences of others. It was explained to me that I could freely choose a God of my understanding. At first I thought I was committing a sin by trying to change God, but I soon realized that God was constant, and the only changes that had to be made were in my sick mind. I learned that if you read that Bible quotation in its entirety, God promised to show mercy to those who love and keep his commandments. The decision whether to belong to the condemned or to the group enjoying mercy and compassion was mine. At that time I didn't have the requirements for recovery. Instead of complete surrender, I set up forced rules for myself. I failed to ask God for help and guidance and tried to follow these self imposed rules instead. But when I failed, I did ask God's forgiveness and I promised to do better. My AA sponsor advised me that to get help from our higher power, we ourselves must ask, in humility and sincerity. Another person, however good and wise, cannot plant the seed of God within us. God alone can do this. My problem was to find this sprout among the weeds in my mind. Is it not true that there is some good in each of us? To me, God's creations are works of perfection. Even I am a miracle. Developed from a tiny seed, which had concealed within it all of my own future qualities and even those of generations yet to come. A scientist is but a common laborer compared to the higher power. Science bases its knowledge on hypotheses. Compared to God's wisdom, man's has only remotely touched the truth. Still, I can believe in the scientific theories that all activity is electronic motion. And so it is very easy to imagine that we are governed by an even greater electronic force. God is alive, and the universe revolves around him, even as the electrons do around the core of an atom. I cannot comprehend what is inside a tiny electron any more than I can visualize what is beyond outer space. I know not how a cell is born, nor where I go in eternity. Scientists have said that the cells of the body are renewed. Every eight years. If this is true, then my body and I are separate entities, since I have survived the whole metamorphosis of my body over and over. The world too is changing constantly, and I am no longer afraid of this change. I want to be a part of it and its new developments. I have been shown and fully believe today that faith can move mountains. I once encountered many blind alleys, but today, as long as I have faith, my path is clear. This has all been slow progress for me. Like so many, I do not always surrender completely. I allow the cares and worries of the day to distort my thinking. But as I get back on the right track, I realize that I have everything I need. Whatever problems confront me, large or small, they can be solved wisely, or they can be solved my way. The choice is mine. If I want to know God's will, I must pause and ask, what would God have me do? Why then is it so difficult for me just to pause, to meditate, and to allow God to guide me? The reason is my ego. I know, though sometimes I forget, that by myself my capabilities are nil. I could not now or ever develop the most minute electron. When my days were filled with fears and I was trying desperately to hang on, I discovered that I could take the third step and be on firm ground. I have since taken this step countless times. I actually experience a sense of physical freedom when I give up the demands of life. To leave all and follow thee means for me total acceptance, even of that which I would not desire for myself, such as misfortune, poverty, illness, and even death. I completely surrender my life and my thinking to my higher power. After all, when the world comes to an end someday, it will do so. Without my permission. And that was written in Helsinki, Finland. And so we'll stop right there at chapter six. Next week, join me on Sunday for the conclusion of chapter six. It'll be the last three remaining stories. And so that's all for today's episode of Sober Readings, the Sunday Came to Believe episode. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope something you heard today stays with you and helps you throughout your day. If you'd like to join me next Sunday and help me read the conclusion of chapter six, you can find a link to my email in the show notes. You'll also find a link in the show notes to my website where you can learn more about sober readings and stay connected. And if you'd like to drop a dollar on the virtual donation basket, just click on the support page at that website and you'll find a button that says drop a dollar in the basket. So again, thank you so much for listening today. Remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day everyone, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.