Latest / Sober Readings / Came To Believe - Chapter 10 with Erin
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Came to Believe, the spiritual adventure of AA as experienced by individual members. Welcome to Sober Readings. Today is Sunday and that means another edition of Came to Believe. This week we're on chapter 10. And also this week we have a special guest reader. It's my friend Aaron. And so Aaron and I together are going to read the first five stories from chapter 10. So let's begin. Chapter 10, In All Our Affairs. Service gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we can fit and belong in God's scheme of things. These are the satisfactions of right living for which no pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions could possibly be substitutes. And that was written by Bill W. and that's from the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, page 124. Alright, so the first story in chapter 10 is titled We Walk This Way. And I'm gonna let Aaron start. After nearly 10 years of sitting on bar stools, backing away from jobs, and running from people, I brought me and my drinking problem to Alcoholics Anonymous. It was not the most thrilling end that I could think of for a newly married young woman, but I had to admit that an unmanageable life would not be helpful to the baby I was expecting. Still, since my husband had joined AA before we met, life seemed to be really complete once I became a part of the fellowship too. I had been sober three months when our first child was born. One year and one month later, the second child arrived. Our third AA baby was born one year and four months after the second. So my progress in AA was marked by three little girls. I couldn't imagine anyone feeling more fulfilled than I did on the third anniversary of my sobriety. Then came a turning point. All of a sudden, I felt completely at odds with the AA way of life. A doctor confirmed our worse fears when he answered that something was seriously wrong with our youngest child. Muscular dystrophy was suspected, but hospital studies disproved that diagnosis. We were left with a vague definition of our little girl's problem. The doctors who had been called for consultation categorized her disability under the heading of cerebral palsy. None offered hope for her recovery, and an orthopedic specialist told us flatly that our daughter would never walk. In the face of one pessimistic prediction after another, I wilted. Certainly I knew that this was a time when my daughter needed whatever strength her mother could muster. I seemed to have none. My husband retained his faith. He had a positive belief that the doctors would prove to be mistaken. He never doubted that our daughter would walk. Our AA friends also had this positive belief in the child's recovery. They did their best to revive my fast-dying energies. and these positive forces of loving faith caused me to reassess my progress in the AA program. I was sober, but had I turned my will over to the care of God as I understood him? What was I doing about conscious contact with my higher power? Was the 10-step part of my daily life or only a once-tried effort? Most of the answers were negative. This meant that while my daughter might be in a hopeless situation physically, I was functioning in a way destined to retard any progress she might make spiritually and mentally. There was no other solution than to get out of the child's way and work on myself. In the years that followed, my AA activity was increased. I reached out for my higher power, God, as I had never reached out before. Then one day, our daughter walked. I had accidentally let go of her hand. Our reaction to this was the same as the reaction of the people in the scripture to the lame man's walking. Wonder and amazement. At this point, she was 12 years old and medical authorities have called her progress unprecedented. I am still haunted by a neurologist's statement that her coordination is controlled by her mental processes. So long as her spirits remains free and alert, her physical activity is enthusiastic and unhampered. When her spirit is dampened, activity falters. What better lesson could I need? This child is my textbook on how it works. From the day that I let go mentally to the day that I let go physically, she progressed beyond anyone's fondest dreams and hopes. I now try to follow her lead in working my AA program. As a profound thinker once said, self-reliance is ultimately reliance on God. How can this truth be denied when personal experience shows it to be so? Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. All right. So the next story is titled From Loneliness to Solitude. I'm lonely, I'm lonely is the cry of drinking alcoholics all over the face of the earth in a lonely room, in a crowded bar, in the heart of a family gathering, on a street in the midst of hundreds of people. Then in contradiction, people would get on our nerves and we would go off by ourselves to get away from it all. But this didn't work either. We could not endure for long the burden of our dark thoughts. We tried hard to remove our aloneness with the bottle and for a little while we could, but not for long. When we hit bottom and realized we could not go on as we were, by the grace of God, we found ourselves thrust into an unbearable aloneness, separated from everything and everybody. Thus separated, we were able to look at our lives, our problem, the hopelessness of our situation. Only now could we ask questions and give answers and make decisions. Now we could make a decision to do something about our drinking and living problems. There are two sides of man's being alone. In our language, loneliness expresses the pain of being alone. Solitude expresses the glory of being alone. What happens to us in AA that makes it possible for us not only to endure, but to enjoy moments of solitude? What changes our loneliness to solitude? The love and understanding we find in AA are a protective curtain between ourselves and the aching aloneness of our drinking days. The first few weeks, some of us spent most of our time in an AA club talking with others. Then it becomes evident that we must go to work and somehow meet the demands and responsibilities of our daily lives. We are afraid. Will the old loneliness hit us again when we are out of the actual presence of other AA members? Sooner or later, by practicing the principles of the 12 steps, we find in ourselves a very precious thing, something inside that we can be comfortable with regardless of whether we are at home by ourselves or anywhere else that life takes us. AA members are not emotional cripples who need someone to hold their hands every moment of the day and night to prevent their falling. We grow up with the help of God as we understand him and the fellowship of the group. and by applying the 12 steps to our lives. As the sober weeks go by, we can enjoy the treasure, the few moments of solitude we are able to find in the rush and hurry of life today. When we cease to fear loneliness and begin to cherish and use our solitude to advantage, we have come a long way. We realize a little solitude is necessary to think and to try to work some of the steps. In solitude, we take our inventories. In solitude, we admit to ourselves the exact nature of our wrongs. In solitude, our spirit seeks that power greater than we are. In solitude, we seek through prayer and meditation to be aware of God's will for us. Solitude can be sought and experienced in many ways. In the silence of nature, in reading poetry, in listening to music, in looking at pictures, and in sincere thoughtfulness. We are alone, but not lonely. Yet these experiences cannot answer all the questions in our minds. So we return to the world of man. Some of us long to become creative in some realm of life, but we cannot become or remain creative without solitude. One hour of conscious solitude will enrich our creativity far more than hours of trying to learn the creative process. Solitude is not easy. Sometimes we can find it only by remaining silent and allowing our souls to sigh without words to God. This we can do even in a crowded day and a crowded room, even under the most difficult external conditions. No one can take these moments from us. The center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness is elevated to the divine center and taken into it. Only in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from him to the other person can we find communion with others. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude can those who are alone reach those from whom they are separated. Our hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we love than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity. Houston, Texas. The next story is called Happiness. To arrive at a working definition of happiness in my attempts to apply the blueprint of AA to rebuilding a shattered life, I tried first to recall the happiness we chased in the old days. I suspected that for most of us, happiness was equated with bliss. In booze we reached for euphoria, released from even the faintest threat of responsibility. We wanted insulation against the urgent clanging of the world around us, a soft birth on a languid cloud. And for fleeting moments just before the curtain of oblivion cranked down, we did drift into that never, never state. Then they said, come into AA. We'll help you maintain sobriety and you'll know real happiness. The sobriety was real, but suddenly so was the world. A harsh and pitless place we had never fully faced before. Where was this highly touted stuff called happiness? A latter-day philosopher has said that happiness is not something we experience, it is something we remember. Still, at the risk of sounding unfashionable, I say I am very happy. Let me hasten to add that none of what I now possess came easy. For me, it has been and is a tough grind. Relinquishing the prerogatives of chronic brattery never comes easy, but early in the game I needed definitions. Serenity, a word we've used from the moment we struggled into our first AA meeting, was from the start a tricky one. It seemed to mean anything from sanferized, snag-proof, fully guaranteed bliss to the ability to maintain a stiff upper lip when things didn't go our way. I have heard the Serenity Prayer chanted as an incantation to wield a spell against temptation, a wand to wave away all unpleasantness. For what it's worth, my own definition of serenity evolved somewhat like this. It appears to me that most of the wrenching turmoil in people's lives, whether or not they are alcoholic, derives from too stubborn persistence in trying to resolve insoluble problems. That is why the philosophy contained in the serenity prayer is one of the most important guidelines I've found in AA. Accept the things you cannot change. So simple. If the problem cannot be solved, today, why simply drop it? I grant that this is not always easy. It takes self-discipline, a faculty infrequently found in newly sober alcoholics. On the other hand, problems which can be solved provided the real excitement in life. The daily challenge to grapple with and master the conflicts encountered from dawn to dark is stimulating. But the last line of the Serenity Prayer contains the clinker. the wisdom to know the difference between soluble and insoluble situations. As one who is most suspicious of his wisdom, since sobering up anyway, I find that substituting the word honesty for wisdom often furnishes the clue to the answer I'm seeking. The second tenet of the Serenity Prayer is too frequently slurred over. I am constantly amazed at the number of so-called obstacles I have overcome after giving them a second look. mustering what meager resources I have, then taking the hoe in hand. Serenity to me, therefore, is the absence of insoluble conflict, and it is up to me first to determine whether, after an honest look at myself, I can cope with the problem, then to decide whether it is to be tackled, passed over to another day, or dismissed forever. We can establish goals with realistic horizons if we maintain rigorously honest recognition of our limitations. Winning the daily skirmishes involved in achieving these goals is exciting. These are the real kicks. The Charles Adams house I am attempting to rebuild will never be the Taj Mahal, but it will be my own handiwork with all its quirks of do it yourself and built-in blood stains and bloopers of enthusiasm, unrelieved by any real talent in this department. I will never grow tomatoes the size of my neighbors, but my puny little produce tastes better on my table than his beauties would. For the first time, I'm giving an employer a fair shake, and I know the warmth and satisfaction of working on a team, of contributing my tiny share to a successful whole. The only gallery my paintings will ever adorn runs between our living room and the front hall. But dabbling in a new field is fun, and the things are improving, even if I'm the only one who can see the change. Our school budget was defeated, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing we put up a good fight. Imagine even being interested in such a thing in the old days. Wait until next year. I barely knew the family I lost to booze. My present wife and children, direct dividends of sobriety, give me the greatest joy. Never in my life before AA had I really done anything for anyone. Yet even today, I can't quite catch up, for I still receive more than I can ever give. There is only one thing as beautiful as the face of a four-year-old boy at storytelling time, and that is the face of his little sister. So happiness to me is fulfillment, the satisfaction gained from knowing that you did the best your honestly evaluated limitations would permit in all phases of living. Happiness is gratitude for the miracle which granted another go around at a life once abandoned. Happiness is growing up. It is learning to recognize all the things you really have. Happiness is for experiencing as well as remembering. New Hartford, New York. So next story is titled, A Lesson in Humility. God, as I understand him, has a sense of humor. One of the incidents that proved this to me happened in May, when I was asked to say a few words at our church service on Mother's Day. As soon as I began thinking about it, a few words became a sermon. After a few short hours, the sermon, which still had to be written, became one of the best sermons ever heard in our church. In a few days, as I started working on the sermon, it became probably the best sermon ever heard in North Bay. And as the week passed, it was quite possible that I would be asked to give several other sermons in our church. As a result, of course, people from other churches would come to hear me. I thought it quite likely that later on people from other places, even as far away as Salt-Saint-Marie, would be flocking to hear me. Less than five years earlier, one of my major fears had been that I would die and not one soul would attend my funeral. When the moment for my sermon actually arrived, God in his mercy and wisdom stepped in. I developed the most awful thirst beyond anything I'd ever suffered when I was drinking. I started my talk, but had to keep interrupting it every second sentence or so to take a drink. The water didn't quench that thirst. And soon as the thirst deepened, I was drinking more than I was talking. I felt an absolute overwhelming temptation to toast the congregation with a here's mud in your eye toss of the glass. And then the light came on. Then the message came through. God was telling me, you are an alcoholic. That is all you are. Not a preacher, not a teacher, not a speaker, just an alcoholic recovering by my grace. And that was that. A lesson taught with humor. A lesson I must never forget. The important thing is not what I do or where I live or what my name is. The important thing is that I am a recovering alcoholic by the grace of God through membership in AA. North Bay, Ontario. Getting ahead. Most alcoholics I have known, including myself, wanted to get ahead. If we didn't, well, there was nothing so rosy as the dreams of success and glory, which subsequently came out of the bottle. Such fantasies are the warp and woof of the active alcoholic's life. I think that one of the main differences between an active alcoholic and a recovering alcoholic can be expressed as a matter of tense. The active alcoholic tends to live in the future or in the past. The sober alcoholic using part of the philosophy he learns in his AA experience lives or strives to live in the present. The non-drinking alcoholic discovers in AA that you cannot get ahead until you learn to be here. We discover from our serenity prayer that one of the things we cannot change is time. The here and now is the only reality. Whereas in the unreal world of the drinking alcoholic, there was only yesterday and tomorrow. The grace of sobriety lies in accepting the fact that the past is non-existent and the future exists only in the present. I think of a certain morning on which I woke up and said to myself, I would not take a drink that day. I had done this many times before and each time I had failed. But on this morning, for some unaccountable reason, another voice told me I was a liar, that I couldn't not take a drink that day. Immediately the stage was set for what was, to put it mildly, the most unusual day of my life, the day on which my compulsion for alcohol was taken from me. The explanation is simple. When I said to myself, you are a liar, I was thinking in the present. I didn't say, if you go through the morning and take a drink in the afternoon, you will be a liar. Right then I was empowered to do something about my predicament because I recognized it as a present predicament and not a future one. So I sought AA and found the help I needed. In the very moment of acknowledging myself to be a liar, I turned out not to be one. In that instance, anyhow. Ever since I became extricated from the turmoil of alcoholic living, it has interested me to muse over this business of getting ahead. In the excesses of my alcohol-inspired ambition, I used to imagine that to get ahead, I would need to be like some... CREATOR natural bulldozer plowing its way upward and onward, plunging inexorably over the embankments of life, grinding, heaving, snorting, reckless of obstacles, impelled by the virtues of ambition and the seductions of success, the kind of success that comes effortlessly to us from a barroom bottle. I did not know then that if you want to get ahead with any degree of peace, you must first learn to stay here. takes guts to stay here. It takes self-discipline and resolution. Anyone with sufficient energy and a one-track mind can get ahead. Witness the robber barons, the dictators, the demagogues. But to stay here, you must know where you are before. You can know where you are going. You must seek before you can find, and you must ask before you really learn to seek. It takes humility to ask. Patience to wait for the answer and faith that the answer will come. These, it strikes me, are hardly bulldozer virtues. I like to think that staying here provides a clue to the practice of the 11th step. We don't improve our conscious contact with God as we understand him by projecting into the future. After all, even the hereafter begins with here. Manchester, Massachusetts. And so that's it for today's reading of Came to Believe, Chapter 10, the first five stories. Erin, thank you so much for joining me today on today's readings. Thank you for having me. So next week, join us for the remainder of Chapter 10, where there's I think there's four or five remaining stories. And I hope you will join me for that. 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