Unthink.

“It was a beautiful day when I awoke but then I started thinking.” A great line uttered by a strange man. Dave is ex-military, ex-cop and now drives a canary yellow VW Bug. He still pines for his mother’s affection, though she’s been dead for decades. Dave is 80 years old. He has become a fixture at one of your meetings and not a beloved one. You see the others roll their eyes when Dave shares. At first, you did too. Dave’s a slow learner. He repeats himself. At his age moping about his momma is weird. Now you listen to the coot, searching for gemstones in the mud:   … But then I started thinking.

Nearly 60 years old, the last 17 of them sober, you’d like to think you’re past the point of criticizing organized religion. Hating on the church is a cliché, though it seldom feels that way at first. Disavowing the sacred, calling it profane. It’s empowering. Then you start sounding like that snob who derides TV as a vast wasteland, or the Internet. Best to just get it out of your system. The man who keeps harping on the religion of his youth becomes no less tiring than Dave crying for his mother. Let it be. Popular religion is an opiate for the masses… the Budweiser of Higher Powers. Nothing wrong with it on Sunday. Most people in the program prefer a craft-brewed Higher Power. Spirituality is different from religion. Better than. Have they forgotten how outsiders view AA: a musty cult of chain smokers and book thumpers…Twelve Steps versus Ten Commandments?

Burning Question

The non-addict asks what is the meaning of life? The addict asks: Is this all there is? You called this many things: frustration, dissatisfaction, expectation… the yearning. Desiring something else. More. These unmet desires found respite in drugs and alcohol, albeit temporarily. But it was better than the alternative, or so it always seemed at the time, all the time.

When you finally found a church basement full of others like you, you thought: At last I am not the only one asking this question! It was the right idea, this revelation – a solid first draft. Alas, the yearning remained, humming like a generator, at times hissing, demanding, always there, always on.

Nor could you placate it with a Higher Power, not sufficiently. Your God wasn’t big enough. Is still not big enough. Would never be. But then came a realization as central as the question itself. It wasn’t that you stop asking: Is this all there is? But rather that you begin answering: Yes, this is all there is. And so be it.

Why Are You Here?

He was “a piece of shit junkie.” His words. Clean almost a year Jake begins a harrowing lead. His entire family are addicts (active or dead) and, not surprisingly, he had started using early in life, in the 5^th grade, whatever he could get his hands on: weed, booze, cocaine, meth… Then he tried heroin. And like so many others before him, junk quickly became the apex predator of his body and soul. The warm embrace was a python. It did not let go. He tried to free himself from its grip; spent nine months in rehab, only to get loaded within days of his release. “It was the same as ever,” he said, “only worse.” Jake’s mother, a methadone addict, gave him a piece of advice based on her experience: “Just stop trying, son. It ain’t worth it.”

Remarkably, he did not listen to her. Instead, he took the “rock star cure” and spent a brutal week detoxing at the Four Points Sheraton. Luckily, Jake had some friends left in the world. From the hotel, they drove him to a rehab and this time it stuck – so far anyway, one day at a time. Jake credits the facility’s emphasis on AA for getting him this far.

As is custom, he must now choose a topic for the group’s discussion. “Why are you here?” He asks.

Great fucking question, capturing the long-term implications of sobriety as well as its immediacy. This meeting. This evening. When you share you typically respond to the speaker’s lead rather than the suggested topic. This time you answer the question:

“It was 7:40 pm, the sun was setting, my family was out doing their thing, the dogs were asleep on the floor. I was alone. I had a few hundred dollars, a car, my laptop, and my phone. I had everything I needed to get into all kinds of trouble. I didn’t want to drink or get high but I wanted something. Desperately. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was… I never can.”

The Big Book calls it being “restless, irritable and discontent.” Yearning caused by the hole in your soul; something you used to fill with vodka and pills. Sober a long time now, there is still a cavity with a drain at the bottom and its pull is intense. You reckon with yearning every day and especially at night. AA suggests you ask God to remove its power, its gravitational pull, to fill yourself up with Him. God released you from the bondage of drugs and alcohol. Therefore, he can release you from the bondage of self.

“Alas, I’m not the praying kind,” you tell the group. “When the yearning washes over me I need to do something tangible. I need a safe place to go, a lifeboat. I need this group. That is why I am here.”

Sometimes Grace

Leaves in the pool…

You always try and view the Program through the eyes of a newcomer. Though many members feel otherwise, for you listening to the old timers has limited value. The rawness of someone in his first 30 days is why you keep coming back. You haven’t had a drink in 14 years and gave up pills soon after. You are looking for someone new. You slide back in your usual seat at the Living in the Solution meeting at the Loft, a small but airy room over the rec center atop a hill in Strawberry. You have a diet coke in one hand and three chocolate chip cookies in the other, both qualifying as “lesser addictions.” You have many more of those.

Joan, a 70-year old former model and fashion entrepreneur, is sharing about the ongoing struggle with her sister. She loves and hates the woman in equal measures.

You can relate.

Despite animus, Joan and her sister do not desire to break off relations. Instead they fought, enduring the pain each inflicted upon one another. Choosing it over abandonment. You guess sisters are different that way. They are bound in ways you’ll never understand. Your wife was tight as hell with hers.

At first you didn’t like Joan. She came off like a bored, rich lady in Marin (which she was); her petty shares struck you as “leaves in the pool.” She lamented the men who took over her company when she was too drunk to run it. Even though they had paid her millions. She cursed her sister for not giving her enough credit in building their fashion empire then blamed her for the drinking that lost it. Then there was the dog she almost ran over in her BMW, while drunk. Other indignities half remembered. Joan spoke in a drawl that made her sound both queenly and oddly still drunk.

This bothered you until it didn’t.

You came to realize that all difficulties were leaves in the pool: Yours, hers and everyone else’s. People fell in and out of love or had others fall in and out of love with them. Lost family and money (“romances and finances” as they said in AA) and more and so on. All was petty. But if a thing made you drink it might as well have been the apocalypse. You were wrong to have judged Joan. Furthermore, you had judged her wrongly. In a lovely turnabout, you and Joan became close. Developed a rapport. You admired her. She hadn’t relied on a man to get all she’d gotten. Despite the wine and cocaine (her drugs of choice), she’d done well for herself, by herself. She’d earned her house in Tiburon same as her seat in AA. Now you are glad to see Joan when she comes in the door. You save her a seat next. You smile at the smell of her perfume.

At the Loft, most of the regulars are at least 50, many much older. Words of death and dying take up evermore meeting time. Yet, Joan seldom goes there, another reason you liked her.  As for the specter of death, you’ve come to believe that if one is serene it too is just a leaf in the pool. But most people are not inherently serene. And you are no exception.

Joan concludes her share by saying she’s grateful for the “sometimes-grace” she’s received while dealing with her sister. It’s an ongoing struggle, she says, as most struggles are, but she is overcoming her resentment, and is staying sober, one day at a time.

Sometimes Grace.

This is what AA is all about. When things go sideways or even well, you don’t drink or use drugs. You keep sane. You know peace. You look forward to living another day.

Despite your troubles, the leaves in your pool, you’re glass is almost always half full. You are strangely happy. Was this grace? Unlike many AA’s, you doubt that it’s God. But you are certain the Program has something to do with it. People like Joan.

This afternoon, you don’t share your problems. Instead, you talk about your wife in favorable terms. “We have been married over 20 years,” you say, with genuine wonder in your voice. “And we have stayed that way, for better and worse. Through it all.”

For the record, you are petrified of death. How it will come for you. What you will have missed when it does. All the things you will never know. Those are the leaves in your pool.

Waking Up a ‘7’ / An Agnostic’s View on Serenity & Sobriety

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It’s easier to love the mystery than be smitten by a prophecy.

I used to wake up fearful, painfully wondering how I might endure the day, inevitably turning to drugs and alcohol to relieve my stress, thus beginning the vicious cycle of addiction another 24 hours. That was my reality. It is one every addict and alcoholic knows sadly and deeply. I was in the grip of a Higher Power that punished me and then saved me, over and over again. Evil spirits brought me to my knees, in a hideous caricature of prayer.

Is it any wonder Bill Wilson deduced that something stronger than spirits was required to relieve us from their bondage? He chose a spirit that was holy. God. Recovery is really just a grand replacement strategy (fellowship in place of barrooms, service before self, and so on), so I totally get the idea that only a supreme power can usurp another.

Only one problem: What if there isn’t a God?

In AA meetings, I joke that on good days I’m agnostic. Yet, measuring my serenity on a scale of 1 to 10, most days I wake up a 7. All days I wake up sober. How is that possible? Being reasonably happy and sober while being reasonably uncertain about God. Without question AA saved my life. With many questions did not God.

“God Is or He Isn’t.”

It’s one of several lines in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous I bristle at. There aren’t many mind you. But this statement has always felt religious, not spiritual. Dogmatic. God didn’t make such a claim. He, She or It wouldn’t. A person did. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Almost every thought, if not word, in Step 2 belies the absolutism of God is or He isn’t. “Came to” and “could” seldom precede demands.

God, like truth and love, is a big idea – the biggest. But they are all concepts, human constructs open to interpretation and gradations of meaning. In 12-Step Recovery, we are beseeched to make amends to people we have harmed “wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” The truth, therefore, ought to be parsed. A homicide may be murder or manslaughter, voluntary or involuntary. Which is truer becomes a matter of opinion. Conditional love is still love, is it not? Maybe not pure love but better than no love at all.  Big ideas are not absolute; they are flexible. As is God and the belief in God.

The ultimate leap of faith, God remains improvable. “Coming to believe in a power greater than yourself” is a process, not an outcome. Many people have gotten sober without subscribing to an all or nothing God, including me. Scores have achieved long-term sobriety without God at all. They too wake up a 7.

Well before creating AA (let alone putting God into it), Bill W and Dr. Bob sat down to discuss their crippling malady. These intimate and honest conversations were crucial. However inadvertently, they had latched on to what is, in my opinion, the greatest tool in all of recovery: the power of one alcoholic talking to another. Kindred spirits. Fellow sufferers. Rubbing antennas. Call it whatever you want. But this, not God, was the wellspring of Alcoholics Anonymous. From here came the fellowship and sponsorship and a thousand million quiet conversations in Starbucks that has saved more addicts and alcoholics than God ever has. That’s what I believe.

For newcomers, skeptical of the “God thing,” even Bill W’s famously italicized line “God as we understood him” is still not enough to assuage doubt and cynicism. To them, I say replace the line with “God as we don’t understand Him (Her or It).” The pronoun bit goes without saying but it’s the “don’t understand” piece that changes minds. How can anyone understand something they cannot see or hear, let alone know? We knew what getting high felt like. We do not understand what getting God feels like. Why bother trying? That puzzle has been agonizing scholars for eons. What chance has a withdrawing addict? For me it is easier to fall in love with the mystery than be smitten by a prophecy. Love is abstract, too. Whether one has love or not few people doubt that it exists. In many a church basement I’ve seen written: GOD IS LOVE. One need not understand either of them.

There is a devout atheist at my gym. I know this because he always wears tee shirts proclaiming his atheism. I’ve counted three different shirts so far. It’s weird. Unsettling. I would feel the same way about someone wearing an overtly worshipful tee shirt. Promoting such a personal belief is off putting. That said, one of the atheist’s tee shirts made me laugh: In the beginning man created God and then all the problems started.Is it funny because it’s true? Maybe. Yet I still think wearing the joke on his sleeve is inappropriate.

Just because I’m not religious, does not mean I don’t appreciate the fables. I do. My favorite is the myth of Original Sin: the Christian belief that a state of sin has existed since Adam and Eve disobeyed God, consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Is this not a parable of addiction? You will remain content and happy as long as you don’t bite that apple. Oops. With free will we also got the baggage that came with it: pride, lust, envy and all the other character defects we addicts know too well. Since the dawn of man we have been trying to explain our impulsive natures. Maybe that’s why God was created in the first place. To teach us: “Just Say No.”

Look.

I have listened to the faithful, the agnostics and the atheists. And this is what I have come to believe: there is a fifty percent chance God exists and a fifty percent chance that he doesn’t. When all the rabbis turn to dust and the non-believers too it will still be 50 / 50. Is this a refutation of God? Or affirmation? Don’t know but this I do. If I could get those odds in the lottery I’d play it every day, twice on Sunday. Telling newcomers you might also remind yourself: Those are great freaking odds!

One can be content without drugs and alcohol, or a higher power. I am. I appreciate life’s great mystery. I cherish rubbing antennas with another addict or alcoholic. I try to replace the harmful things in my life with things that are better. One day at a time.

I wake up a 7 and can easily bump that number up. Or I can choose to be miserable. Free will is not purgatory, if used wisely. The closing lyric of U2’s anthem, City of Blinding Lights sums it up nicely: “Blessing’s not just for the ones who kneel… luckily.”

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Steffan has published two novels (available on Amazon). Having worked many years as a writer/creative director for several multi-national advertising agencies, he now serves as a Primary Counselor for the treatment of substance use disorders at Serenity Knolls in Marin County. Steffan has been clean and sober for 17 years. He usually wakes up a 7.