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.

Life doesn't have to be justified

Life doesn't have to be justified.  It is the justification.
I was up for a job a couple of weeks ago that required knowledge of HTML, the language used to lay out information on web sites.  Since my knowledge of HTML could only optimistically be called rusty, I started giving myself a crash course in it and was surprised at just how much fun I was having.  Shortly after I started playing with HTML I was told that I would not get the job.

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

Contingent Promises, Learning to Play and Love

We are all familiar with 'the Promises' of AA from 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.

Dave, the other principal author of this blog, absolutely hates it when this is read at the beginning of meetings. He points out that it is always taken out of context.

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.

I am not my ego but my ego thinks it's me

One of the gifts of the 11th Step is a gradual (at least for me) realization that I am not my thoughts, emotions, character defects, character assets, in short, all those things that constitutes what I normally refer to as my self.

This bundle of naughty and nice makes up what Thomas Keating calls the 'false self', constructed through our confusing happiness with the gratification of the instincts of the child: security, power/control, affection/esteem, and approval.  The false self promises happiness but leads us to a necessarily unfulfilled life, in my case one where I was constantly slightly pissed off at the world and every bit as fun to be around as that implies.  But meditation shows me, in a very real, direct way, that while I have these characteristics they are not what I am.

Welcome Prayer

I ran across this prayer  this week.  I've been having a rough week and finding this is a gift I would like to share.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment
because I know it is for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions,
persons, situations and conditions.
I let go of my desire for security.
I let go of my desire for approval.
I let go of my desire for control.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person, or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God
and the healing action and grace within.
––– Mary Mrozowski

The Opposites of Joy and Sorrow

We can experience both joy and sorrow, even at the same time, for joy and sorrow are not opposites.  It is not joy and sorrow, but their opposites, that cause damage.   The opposite of joy is cynicism and the opposite of sorrow is callousness.  

Cynicism is rooted in the assumption that everyone is always in control and therefore everything bad that happens is the result of ill will or incompetence while everything good that happens is the result of someone's self interest.  

Callousness is the inability to feel that follows from the fear of losing control.

(I found this today among some notes I've made on Joy.  I think it is a variation on a passage from Thomas Merton, but I'm not sure.  In any event, I thought it was worth sharing.)

Happiness and Joy

We talk a lot in meetings about both happiness and joy, but we often fail to distinguish the two.  I hear a lot of people telling their stories saying things like "I could never be happy but now, in AA, I am."  I can understand not being able to experience much, if any happiness while drinking, especially in the later stages of alcoholism.  But being happy, while certainly not a bad thing, is not the point.  Happiness is bestowed by the world and like other things bestowed by the world (power, wealth, popularity...) it is transitory.  Circumstances can give it and circumstances can take it away.