The present moment.

I just ran across a quote from Philo of Alexandria  ancient Jewish Philosopher.

"Today means boundless and inexhaustible eternity.  Months and years and all periods of time are concepts of men, who gauge everything by number;  but the the true name of eternity is Today."

I constantly search for peace and eternity somewhere else, managing always to forget that they are here now.

Glad Gethsemane - how soon I forget

This morning a friend asked me about my understanding of Fr. Ed Dowling's concept of Glad Gesthmane. To put it briefly, this is viewing painful events as opportunities to give to others.  Everything we do sends out ripples, either positive or negative.  I think Mircea Eliade said that when we speak we either bless or curse.  (Boy, is that one I remember far too seldom!)  

My favorite examples of Glad Gesthemane come from extreme situations.  People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent their time in German concentration camps helping and supporting other prisoners.  An AA I knew too briefly came to our meeting in his last weeks, saying his only wish was to die sober.  He gave us the tremendous gift of his courage.

The concept, however, applies to the small, everyday things that bother and irritate us. These are the spiritually dangerous times.  As a friend likes to say, it's not the elephants that kill us, it's the mosquitoes.  I find daily irritations a wonderful opportunity to complain and spread the negativity.  I should be viewing them as opportunities to, at the very least, share perspective (humility) and make clear just how small the small things are.

This bowl is broken

A friend of mine recently mentioned that a Buddhist teacher once, while holding his favorite (intact) bowl, said "this bowl is broken."  That is to say, look at it as already past, lost, broken and you won't be attached to it.

I need that kind of reminder a lot.  I remember when I first heard the AA bumper sticker "an expectation is a premeditated resentment."  What, aren't we supposed to have any expectations.  I twisted with that one for years before realizing that the answer was a simple 'yes.'  We can look to the future and plan, but to expect is to attach yourself to an anticipated outcome and attaching yourself is a dangerous thing.

Knowledge may or may not be power, but is sure can be an attempt at control

The doubt and fear that often overtake me come from a desire to know more than I can know.  To control more than it is my purview to control and to control it by know it, intellectually mastering it, neatly delineating it into questions I ask and answers I have.  I take on the universe, and try to make it human-sized, one person-sized, self-sized.  I persist in the notion that I can hold it all in my two hands, grip it tightly, make it mine.
Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power  (highly recommended!)

I've written before in this blog about how I've come to see worry as a form of control.  Hornbacher's comment prompts me to think about how much I have used knowledge as a form of control.  My academic background is in Philosophy, so it's no surprise that I have sought answers to the 'big questions' all my life.  There was a valid spiritual quest buried in there but there was also a hiding from reality behind pride.  If you really think you can answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing" you are assuming a pretty high -- let's face it, godlike -- status.  (Note for believers: the question includes within it the question "Why is there a god?").

The 'big questions', at least as I posed them, always set me apart from the reality I was trying to understand.  I was a separate being trying to understand reality rather than a simple part of reality trying to live it.  Living it, treating life as a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be solved, is humility.

So, I am working on a spirituality that is lived rather than merely thought.  I see what I'm aiming at as somehow related to Taoism, the spirituality of the Cloud of Unknowing ( a 14th century Christian text, one of the inspirations for Centering Prayer), and Dudeism, the path inspired by the movie "The Big Lebowski".  (That last is a good application of Rule 62*.  After all, if you can't laugh, you're not in recovery.)

The goal is wisdom, living a fuller, more loving life, not knowledge

*"Don't take yourself too damn seriously."  see Twelve and Twelve, page 149

The Second Step and Our Limits

I have written before about my misunderstanding the Second Step when I first got into the program.  Like a lot of people, I focused on the Power, demanding to know exactly what it was before moving on.  It took years for me to realize that the Step is fundamentally saying that there is a way out.  The only thing it says about that way our is that it is through a 'power greater than ourselves.'  So far, so good.  I had gotten beyond demanding a theological treatise, but I was still very much focused on that now fuzzy, ill-defined Power.

Over the last couple of days I've looked at the Step a bit differently.  I think it is valuable to see Step Two as a direct extension of Step One.  In Step One we said we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives were unmanageable.  We began to recognize our limits.  In Step Two we continue to recognize those limits and say "OK, there may be a way out, but it sure as Hell isn't me." 

For years as an active alcoholic I insisted that I was the way out.  I would use my tools -- reading, meditation, discipline -- and I would conquer this addiction and I would be happy.*  There is a saying in the medical community that the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.  Well, by that standard (and many others) I was a total idiot during my active alcoholism.

Moving from Step One to Step Two is a process of 'coming to believe' that I am not the only resource I can call on, that there are forces greater than me and that I can use their help in my recovery.  It is a gradual process and one that requires practice in every sense of the word.  Luckily, the First Step has relieved us of the burden of doing it all ourselves, since we just plain can't, and frees us to focus on our lives, our behavior and the people and things we encounter.  Gradually, through letting those powers in and doing the work we do come to believe.

And, unbelievably enough, the addiction comes under control and I do end up happy.  Even better, I end up quietly content.

*I now find the statement "I am happy' a bit creepy, since happiness and contentment are not solitary activities.  But that's a subject for another posting.

Another benefit of addiction

There are two themes that consistently pop up at AA meeting that recently came together for me.  The first is how much time we used to spend drinking and how surprising it is to find that time freed up.  The second theme is how drinking was essentially a means of hiding from the pain of life, a way of anaesthetizing ourselves rather than dealing with the problems and joys of being human.

It was only a couple of days ago that I realized that it wasn't just drinking, the actual consumption of that gloriously deadening liquid, that allowed us to hide from life.  It was the whole package: the time spent planning our drinking, figuring out which store we could buy from today so we weren't repeating too much and tipping the clerk off to our problem, the time spent figuring out how to dispose of the bottles, even the time spent hung over ("I'm in no shape to deal with financial planning now!").  All of these thoughts and actions, all of this time, is part of the addictive behaviour of the active alcoholic.  It is all part of crawling into our holes and hiding.

Which brings up a scary thought.  What rituals, what time-wasters am I using now to hide?  We talk about time spent 'pencil-sharpening' to avoid decisions and tasks for which we can be evaluated at work.  How about the rest of life?

"May you live all the days of your life."  - Jonathan Swift

The need for approval destroys our capacity for happiness.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton points out that we are given all we need to be happy and yet "we are ashamed to do so. For we need one more thing than happiness: we need approval. And the need for approval destroys our capacity for happiness."

I think this is profoundly true.  I know that I daily damage my capacity for happiness by looking to the approval of others rather than to the values I actually value.  I find it especially distressing when I seek the approval of people whose values I despise and I allow the quest for that approval to make me ashamed of -- or at least embarrassed by -- the things that can make me happy.

If I were to list my addictions in order of preference, I think 'addiction to approval' would probably come in last.

I got better before I got well

I heard this at a meeting the other day.  The speaker was explaining his recurrent relapses over a period of 24 years.  Every time he stopped drinking things got better.  He felt better.  He was able to get a job.  He acquired material goods.  He developed relationships with women.  In other words, his sobriety was exactly what I imagined mine would be before I entered AA:  his prior life and values minus the booze.   The result, of course, was unhappiness and relapse.  

 AA is not about not drinking.  It is about living in such a way and following such values that you don't have any reason to anesthetize yourself with booze.  AA is about getting well.  I'm tempted to say that when you get well you can handle things getting better and in a way that's true.  The kicker is that the definition of 'better' changes.  You may get your job back or even get a better job.  You may end up in a nicer house with a nice car, etc.  But when you've gotten well, those things matter a LOT less.  Your goals and values change fundamentally.  To cite my favorite Flannery O'Connor quote: You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

Why do we get sober?

For the last little while I've been thinking about the AA slogan "You can't get sober for someone else - you have to do it for yourself" and, well, I'm not sure it's all that simple.

My bottom came when I collapsed with alcohol induced heart failure and was expected not to make it.  I certainly felt that if I let go I would die and, in fact, I thought that was a pretty good idea.  Primarily I thought my wife would be better off with a second husband.  The thought then occurred to me that I could become that second husband and if I did I could make a lot up to her, so I decided to fight to recover.  The next day my wife and I agreed to launch a project we still call "Brian 2.0".  So, I can certainly say (as I usually do when I tell my story) that I started my recovery for someone else.  For myself I was pretty content with the thought of dying.  If I had decided on the basis of living for myself I would have just let go.

Now I know a lot of people who started for themselves, usually saying they just wanted the pain to stop.  "Sick and tired of being sick and tired."  Yet as they grow in recovery they talk about living for others.

I think we learn that to live for ourselves we have to live for others and in order to live for others we have to learn to care for and about ourselves, sort of to do unto ourselves as we would do unto others.  If we're going to love people, the cosmos, God.... we have to love all people, the entire cosmos, all of God and his/her universe and I guess, uncomfortable as saying it makes me, that means we have to love ourselves.  However, the crucial point is that self-love is not the goal, it is just a small but essential part of our spirituality.

So, the reason we decide to get sober, to enter recovery, is generally not the reason we continue on the spiritual path.  We may start for ourselves and grow to live for something greater, we may start for one person and grow to live for all.  Whatever direction it takes, it is a process of growth.

Believe it!

We are incredible beings.
We live in incredible times.
That is not the issue.
The issue is whether or not we actually believe it.
-Hugh Macleod

In my last post I spoke of "the realization that while individual things might really stink and bad things can and will happen, the world remains a beautiful place"  and I attributed that realization to Faith.  Then I ran across this quote from cartoonist Hugh Macleod and I began once again to think about Humility.  I don't want to get into a chicken-and-egg thing here, but it seems to me that the most important virtues, Faith, Hope, Love and Humility, are deeply intertwined.  I know that the usual lineup is Faith, Hope and Love, but I wonder if any of them is possible without Humility.

Detachment

I recently ran across this comment by Thomas Merton:

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between "things" and "God" as if God were another "thing" and as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see.
-New Seeds of Contemplation. (New York: New Directions Books), p 21

Detachment does not mean abandonment of the world in search of a spirituality that is separate from the world.  It means perspective, and with perspective, humility.  As one of my favorite AA slogans says, if it's not practical, it's not spiritual.

I have spoken in this blog about the 'get sane quick schemes' I engaged in when I was drinking.  The various things I tried, such as  meditation and yoga, were good in themselves but they became 'get sane quick schemes' for me because I was using them in pursuit of a disembodied spirituality.  I thought there was some healthy pink cloud I could enter that would make me feel good about the world and (especially) myself without changing anything in the world or in myself.  I was seeing 'spiritual' detachment precisely as a separation from reality, rather than a principled, spiritual engagement with it, contributing to changing it and myself.  Unless I'm seriously misreading Merton, that is what he means when he talks about seeing and using things in and for God.

Some perspective

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness 

- Reinhold Neibuhr

Spiritual Materialism

In my last post I called using the AA program as a way to feel good a form of 'spiritual materialism' (also known as 'spiritual narcissim').  As I understand it, spiritual materialism (a term coined by the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) involves ego inflation rather than the AA goal of 'ego deflation in depth'.  We inflate our egos when we use our program as a source of temporary pleasure, as a tool for feeling good, rather than as a tool for changing ourselves in a fundamental way, surrendering to our higher power and facing reality.

God's joy, music, and foreclosures

I am a string in the concert of God's joy.
- Jacob Boehme
I love this quote.  I cannot define what I am refering to when I use the term "God".  For me it is shorthand for the ultimate flowing core energy of being, something that contains all of reality including me, but that's a pretty vague statement.  Whatever it is, I think its defining characteristics are love and joy, and both of those characteristics involve relationship, interaction between all the elements of reality.

Don't Keep Score

What I am saying is this: the score is not what matters. Life does not have to be regarded as a game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Thomas Merton. Love and Living. (New York: Harcourt) p. 12

It takes a long time

It takes a long time to become young. - Picasso
That is a good summary of my experience in AA.  As I mentioned in my reply to Maggie Lamond Simone, while it is possible to use AA as a sort of post-detox, a way to learn how to 'just don't drink', if a person limits their AA practice to that they are cheating themselves.  Basically, that makes being a dry drunk the goal and, while that's better than being a wet drunk, it still sucks.

Anonymity and shame

Maggie Lamond Simone recently published a column on the Huffington Post suggesting that AA drop the 12th Tradition, anonymity, and rename ourselves something like Alcoholics In Recovery.

Surrender and the Glad Gesthemane

We all know that the first three Steps are about surrender, culminating in our decisions to turn our wills and our lives over to our Higher Powers.  I, for one, frequently forget the progression in surrender represented by those first three Steps.  Initially we let go of our faith in alcohol.  For a long time we've known that our dear friend alcohol was turning our lives into pain filled shells but we saw no other way of living so we stuck by the booze.  In the First Step we jump off into the unknown.  In a terrifying leap we abandon alcohol and see what else, if anything, there is out there.  In the Second Step we go further.  We acknowledge that there is something greater than ourselves that can save us.  We give up our self reliance and in our culture that is one huge surrender.  Then, in the Third Step we go beyond just asking for help in restoring us to sanity; we actually resolve to surrender our wills and our lives to a Higher Power (in other words, acknowledge that we aren't in control of our entire lives, not just alcohol).  Now we are the ones helping in the effort.  The heavy lifting is being done by the Higher Power we are surrendering to.

Stop runnin', varmint!

For years I have said that as active alcoholics we anesthetized ourselves, cutting ourselves off from the joy and pain of life.  I'm beginning to think that it might be better to say that as active alcoholics we were running and hiding from ourselves, and that the deep meaning of surrender is a willingness to stop, turn around, and face ourselves.  I say "a willingness to..." because we don't surrender once and have done with it; surrender is an attitude that has to be acted upon every day, all day.

Connected

Recently I've been going through one of my bouts of feeling pretty ineffective - basically useless.  Unemployment can do that to you, especially when you don't have your spiritual ducks in row.
Now, I know the standard response to such a feeling is "get off the pity pot" or "get your ass to a meeting" or something like that.  That advice can be useful, but it also helps (me, at least) to try to look objectively at the situation and see just how much of the problem is purely in my head.  (I almost wrote "is real as opposed to in my head" but, as any alkie knows, a problem in your head can be a very, very real problem.)  After looking over the situation I may come up with a way to work on it or I may decide it isn't that much of a problem after all.