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For a long time I accepted the concept of faith that I learned from the nuns in grade school. Faith meant the acceptance of a body of concepts and the more absurd seeming the concept the greater the credits earned by accepting it on 'faith.' I have come to reject that notion of faith. There may well be some truth buried in there somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can see it. This concept seems to me to be closed, stultifying, opposed to any creativity and with that opposed to any joy.
I have come to think of faith in terms of openness, of a spirit of adventure. Faith means walking forward into life recognizing that it is a joyous exploration of unknown terrain and not a grim conquest of thoroughly mapped and predictable territory. It is a joyous acceptance of the fact that we are not in charge of the universe, that we are always going to be surprised by life, no matter how thoroughly we plot, plan, struggle, and pout.
When I first got sober I embraced this attitude. Laying in a bed in Intensive Care after collapsing with alcohol induced heart failure, I decided that if I wanted to live (a debatable question that I finally answered in the affirmative) I had to begin a project I termed 'Brian 2.0'. It was clear that I was already past my 'sell-by date', that every day was a gift, so I may as well proceed to a new beginning. By accident I started a business that made very little sense but was tremendous fun for both my wife and me. It almost worked, but a combination of the economy and some bad decisions brought it down after 7 or 8 years. OK.
I had two career models. One was the King of the Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.Now, of course, all my castles seemed to sink, but what the hell – building them was a trip.
My other model was Horatio Nelson Jackson, the man who in 1903 on a $50 bet became the first person to drive across North America. No gas stations, no paved roads, no auto supply houses, just a thoroughly insane goal and a sense of humor and adventure. Now that's how to approach life! (If you get a chance, check out Ken Burns' film “Horatio's Drive”.)
After my business went under an old friend asked me to come to work for him in the industry I had drunk myself out of years before. I went, in large part because I wanted to see what it would be like to work in an office, in that industry, sober. I hoped I would handle things better than I had as an active alcoholic. Well, I did handle things better, at least from my perspective if not the company's, but the job still sucked. I, and as far as I could tell just about everyone else in the company, hated the place. After two years of accomplishing pretty much nothing I was included in a layoff. That was this past January.
Now came the crisis of faith. Rather than just saying to myself “Well, that time I built a friggin' outhouse on the swamp - thank God it sank and good riddance”, I sat on the side of the swamp and sulked.
Actually, I didn't just sulk. I wallowed in fear and anger over my lack of control of the conditions of my life. Not knowing what was going to come next, I assumed it would be nothing, that I'd never work again, that I would never again contribute to the world, which led to the thought that in fact I never had contributed to the world.... You get the picture. Pure self indulgent, fear based garbage. Living in the wreckage of the future – never a good idea.
For a long time I thought my problem was just fear and depression, but the other day I had a frightening experience. I thought about an incident at that last job and I got just plain batshit furious. That was a great wakeup call. After getting angry over a small incident from 8 or 9 months ago at a job I hated there was no way I could pretend I was in a decent spiritual state. And it all came down to control and faith – demand for one and lack of the other.
So, the goal now is to stop sitting by the side of the swamp but to get up and see what kind of castle I'll build this time. I almost wrote “decide what kind of castle” but that's missing the whole point. I don't decide or control – I happen upon an opportunity and, if I'm in a healthy spiritual place, I grab it.
Where to start my comments, faith or resentments? It seems that I could accept the premise that this post was written about faith, which I have no doubt that it started out as. Or I could jump write in at the end which was about resentments, which is what appears to have ben the driving force to Brian's examination of faith in the first place.
ReplyDelete"Resentment is the 'number one' offender" says the Big Book. Of course it's not just a throw away line when you consider how they wrote the book. The had an oral program, mouth to ear, that was some three to four years old. They then looked over their successes and failure and summed them up and wrote them down. Simple. And if you have sponsored enough people it gets easier to look back and say "Well, most of them hesitated 'here', or drank at 'this point'." So the founders saw that lots of people were unable to stay sober when they harbored resentments, whether they knew they had them or not. And as we all know, it's sometimes easier to see someone has a resentment even when they can't. So my guess is that they wrote that it is the "number one offender" before anything else including faith, because they found that even people who didn't had rock solid faith stayed sober longer than those who held resentments.
Faith it seems, is an essential requirement, no matter it's form. But they also state that faith is not enough to stay sober on. Faith must also be accompanied by efforts to help others the book again states - "There is action and more action. 'Faith without works is dead." In fact they even give us specific instructions on how to work with someone who has a faith deeper than our own, but who can not stop drinking - "His religious education and training may be far superior to yours. In that case he is going to wonder how you can add anything to what he already knows. But he will be curious to learn why his own convictions have not worked and why yours seem to work so well. He may be an example of the truth that faith alone is insufficient. To be vital, faith must be accompanied by self sacrifice and unselfish, constructive action." So faith it seems, while certainly a base essential of our sobriety, must be accompanied by only essential in order to complete the connection necessary to keep us sober. And we aren't the only ones who have found this to be true - "I sought my soul, But my soul I could not see. I sought my God, But my God eluded me. I sought my brother, And I found all three." - William Blake
What does all of this have to do with the post. I guess I just felt that, for me, faith is great and all. But if I am harboring a resentment it's quite possible all the faith in the world won't help keep me sober if I don't take care of the resentment first.