One of the great songs by the Roches is called “Married Men”. Maggie, Teri and Suzy sing: “Oh the married men, the married men. Makes me feel like a girl again to run with the married men.”
I’ve been humming that song all day. Last night in a women’s meeting the woman who chaired was celebrating two years of sobriety. She shared that she had been dating a married man for five years, and was now struggling with that and realizing that soon she’d need to end the relationship. Her shame and pain were palpable. Now, with two years of recovery she was experiencing the reality that sets in with clearer eyes. It’s less easy—though not impossible --to rationalize and justify having an affair when you are sober.
Being in a women’s meeting it was possible then for others to talk about this particularly effective way that we hurt ourselves. When I spoke I talked about the married men in my life before and, yes, even in recovery. For those who have not had an affair with a married man it is only another “yet”.
I was dating a married man when I got into recovery. I went to my first AA meeting with him because he was court-ordered and he had lost his license. I was helping by driving him to AA on Sunday mornings. We went to AA and then we went to “brunch”. Brunch was saturated with alcohol. But the gift was that less than a year later, when I was ready to go to AA for me, I knew where to go and I knew that the people were nice and I had a sense of the protocol of meetings.
I am tickled though that we all use the word “dating” for married men. When I was dating my married men, the court-ordered one and yes, the 13th stepping one in early recovery, there were no dinners, no movies, no flowers...so where was the “dating”?
Now, I must admit, as I said in the meeting, I still play in this dangerous water. No more affairs but I flirt, and I fantasize. What is that? I have had many other addictions: smoking, food, work, exercise but never, so I said, self-mutilation or cutting, but isn’t that what married men are for sober women? Ways we can cut ourselves or throw acid at ourselves? That is how great the pain is—and the shame.
So what to do with this addiction: I try to apply the same principles I learned to apply to alcohol to my desire for a married man. First, don’t romance the drink. Stop the fantasies of romance and love. He can’t. End of story. Yes he’ll say all the right words. Married men always do. They can say “I love you” faster than any single guy because there is NO commitment for them.
Second, and maybe this should be first: don’t pick up the drink. It may be the first flirt, the seeking and accepting of the first too-intimate compliment or the first hint of “You’re so special”—bait I particularly crave. And then, as with all dangerous and addictive substances: recovery is one step and one day at a time: don’t email him today—just this 24 hours. Don’t call and don’t even check your messages hoping to hear from “Him”. For one day—and sometimes for just this hour—say no, call someone, pray, do service, call another recovering person, go to a meeting, and remember that it only gets worse not better when you talk to “Him” about it. As Susan Cheever writes in, “The Other Woman”, conversations about “Why we can’t have sex” almost always result in heated and explosive sex.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Plane Crash Fantasy
I am in an airplane flying home from Bermuda. I’m sitting over the left engine. I’m happy. I love to fly. I look down at the wing and love the miracle of lift; all that air flowing over and under the wing creating lift, allowing this big metal box full of people to rise into the air and stay there until the pilot changes that air current to bring the plane down.
We know that sometimes. .very rarely in reality…things happen and a plane can have a bad landing or a crash. That’s where my fantasy comes in. I have had this fantasy a long time. I always think “If this plane goes down, I die happy”. To die in a plane crash beats cancer and MS and ALS and cardiac deterioration and so many other things. As I’ve said, I love planes.
But another fantasy follows that one. I imagine there is the crash, the disaster, near disaster, the emergency landing, the lost engine—and I survive. I’m one of the survivors and as the fantasy continues I am able to help others. I can see the way out, I lead some people thru the flames; I unbuckle someone who is stuck and shout, “That way, go that way”. I survive this near-death horrible fate and I’m able to help some others to survive too.
I’ve had this fantasy for years and never told anyone shamed by the lack of humility in this fantasy: The hero is me. I survive and save others.
But then, in this plane on this trip I hear myself and I hear the words of this fantasy in my head: “I survive and I am able to save some of the others.” Then it hits me: It’s already true, that’s already happened. It’s happening now. I survived and I AM able to lead some others to safety.
It’s not a fantasy. Recovery from addiction is a gift and a miracle and we survive and have a chance to lead someone else to safety or at least point the way out. Recovery is a gift. I survived the crash.
We know that sometimes. .very rarely in reality…things happen and a plane can have a bad landing or a crash. That’s where my fantasy comes in. I have had this fantasy a long time. I always think “If this plane goes down, I die happy”. To die in a plane crash beats cancer and MS and ALS and cardiac deterioration and so many other things. As I’ve said, I love planes.
But another fantasy follows that one. I imagine there is the crash, the disaster, near disaster, the emergency landing, the lost engine—and I survive. I’m one of the survivors and as the fantasy continues I am able to help others. I can see the way out, I lead some people thru the flames; I unbuckle someone who is stuck and shout, “That way, go that way”. I survive this near-death horrible fate and I’m able to help some others to survive too.
I’ve had this fantasy for years and never told anyone shamed by the lack of humility in this fantasy: The hero is me. I survive and save others.
But then, in this plane on this trip I hear myself and I hear the words of this fantasy in my head: “I survive and I am able to save some of the others.” Then it hits me: It’s already true, that’s already happened. It’s happening now. I survived and I AM able to lead some others to safety.
It’s not a fantasy. Recovery from addiction is a gift and a miracle and we survive and have a chance to lead someone else to safety or at least point the way out. Recovery is a gift. I survived the crash.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Bull Durham: Why We Love This Movie
The past couple of nights I have been watching Bull Durham. This is the movie from 1988 with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor leagues. This is a movie that appears to be about baseball and life in the minor leagues, the travails and hopes and desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living. It is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing and ass slapping and drinking and baseball lore. But no, this is really THE all time best chick flick.
Yes, we’d love to bed Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and the khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy,, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap", and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft wet kisses that last three days”.
Yes!
But there is a scene later that truly outs women viewers and fans for what they truly want.
“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but instead he sweeps all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor and spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling and clutching.
Oh, that is it: We want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time so much that he goes for it in the kitchen and on the table. We do want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is something else in this scene. I realized later that what we truly desire most—which is hidden in this romantic scene is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and leftover food hit and crash on the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a cloth or saying to her lover, “Hold on just a second, I’ll clean this up and then meet you in the bedroom.”
No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing everywhere under the fridge and cabinets, and she is not saying, “Oh dear God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table fucking her brains out.
Oh, to be that kind of woman and that kind of lover. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not a woman thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going down on her. Oh we do wish and wish for a partner with sweet abandon but Sarandon in Bull Durham shows us a woman who can abandon herself.
Yes, we’d love to bed Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and the khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy,, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap", and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft wet kisses that last three days”.
Yes!
But there is a scene later that truly outs women viewers and fans for what they truly want.
“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but instead he sweeps all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor and spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling and clutching.
Oh, that is it: We want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time so much that he goes for it in the kitchen and on the table. We do want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is something else in this scene. I realized later that what we truly desire most—which is hidden in this romantic scene is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and leftover food hit and crash on the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a cloth or saying to her lover, “Hold on just a second, I’ll clean this up and then meet you in the bedroom.”
No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing everywhere under the fridge and cabinets, and she is not saying, “Oh dear God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table fucking her brains out.
Oh, to be that kind of woman and that kind of lover. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not a woman thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going down on her. Oh we do wish and wish for a partner with sweet abandon but Sarandon in Bull Durham shows us a woman who can abandon herself.
Monday, June 25, 2007
A Glass of Water is Enough
I was listening to an essay on our local public radio station and a man was describing his experience of meeting Mr. Rogers and what it was like to be in his presence for an interview. The simplicity of him and the very simple centeredness. He described the impact of that brief meeting and how he later, after Mr. Rogers died found himself trying to be an entertaining dad to his own kids and it occurred to him that Mr. Rogers was simply himself, just himself and that was the message that he conveyed to little kids: It really, really is OK to be yourself. “There’s no one like you” Mr. Rogers would tell people, “no one just like you” and “I’m glad you’re my friend.”
Mr. Rogers landed on that paradox we know so well from being addicts and addicted people. That thing the Big Book talks about: the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And this message from Mr. Rogers is the perfect antidote to that complex problem/situation/personality dilemma: we want to be special but we feel like shit. Or we know we are nothing so we try to puff up and be a big big deal. “There is no one just like you,” he says and it’s all there: no need to puff up, you are special but so is everyone else. It’s like the statistical improbability of Lake Woebegone: Where all the children are above average. In a sense we are all above average despite what that does to the averages.
This writer on the radio said that he caught himself being a clown to his own kids and buying them things and trying to be a “great dad” when he could simply be “their Dad”
He said, in his closing and this shot me through to my core, “I realized I could simply be a glass of water instead of a can of Coke.”
I got it immediately. I want to be a can of Coke because I think I have to be. Because even after so many years there is still a part of me that does not get it that I am enough. Or I think of the next recovering woman, “Well, she may be enough, but not me”.
A glass of water rather than a can of Coke. I think I need to be shiny and red and branded and sugar sweet instead of cool and clear and simply the most thirst-quenching thing on earth. Is there anything truly more thirst quenching than a glass of water? Anything more relaxing to be around than a person who just is?
Yes, this is another way to say “Be yourself”, and “You are enough” or “Go as me”. But I like this question: Am I trying to be a can of Coke or glass of water?
A glass of water is enough.
Mr. Rogers landed on that paradox we know so well from being addicts and addicted people. That thing the Big Book talks about: the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And this message from Mr. Rogers is the perfect antidote to that complex problem/situation/personality dilemma: we want to be special but we feel like shit. Or we know we are nothing so we try to puff up and be a big big deal. “There is no one just like you,” he says and it’s all there: no need to puff up, you are special but so is everyone else. It’s like the statistical improbability of Lake Woebegone: Where all the children are above average. In a sense we are all above average despite what that does to the averages.
This writer on the radio said that he caught himself being a clown to his own kids and buying them things and trying to be a “great dad” when he could simply be “their Dad”
He said, in his closing and this shot me through to my core, “I realized I could simply be a glass of water instead of a can of Coke.”
I got it immediately. I want to be a can of Coke because I think I have to be. Because even after so many years there is still a part of me that does not get it that I am enough. Or I think of the next recovering woman, “Well, she may be enough, but not me”.
A glass of water rather than a can of Coke. I think I need to be shiny and red and branded and sugar sweet instead of cool and clear and simply the most thirst-quenching thing on earth. Is there anything truly more thirst quenching than a glass of water? Anything more relaxing to be around than a person who just is?
Yes, this is another way to say “Be yourself”, and “You are enough” or “Go as me”. But I like this question: Am I trying to be a can of Coke or glass of water?
A glass of water is enough.
Friday, June 15, 2007
In the Deep End on Father's Day
He was there at the end of the diving board. He would tread water for an hour, waiting and watching while I practiced my dives. For years this was our Sunday afternoon ritual and delight. I was four-years old when we began, and on those summer Sunday afternoons I believed that if he was there at the end of the board I could do anything.
My father would wait in the deep water, off to one side. He would look around and give me the sign that it was OK to dive and I would stroll to the end of the board, tugging my stretchy lavender swimsuit, and bounce before I dove in.
I would rise to the surface sputtering, and look for his face. He would hesitate a moment to let me right myself, and I would cough and beam. He would grab the back of my suit and give me a push toward the side. “Swim to the ladder,” he would say, and he would stay at the end of the diving board waiting for my next dive.
I remember the feeling as I paddled to the ladder. The world was perfect: I was diving in the deep end of the pool; there was no pain in the world. There was no need or want in my life. I was a perfect, grinning, sunburned, water-logged four-year-old, in love with the world, herself and her daddy.
He died when I was 18. In the intervening years life happened to me and to my father. By the time I was 13, he was traveling a lot, and when we did spend the occasional weekend together we did not speak of personal things. As a teen-ager I felt awkward with my father so I would interview him about his job. He would tell me stories about work, grateful to have something comfortable to talk about. I know a lot about industrial engineering. It filled our time.
On a July evening, when he was 56 years old, my father had a stroke and died. It’s been years and I still wrestle with those two men--the daddy who waited in the deep water and the father who left suddenly, without a word, when I was 18. Somewhere inside of me there is a four-year-old still wearing her lavender bathing suit. She is at the end of the diving board, leaning forward trying to hear someone say, “You are so special.” The hunger for those words is so deep.
In romance we get some of that need met, but after a while no one wants to admire us every day. But when a four-year-old is anxious and needs repetition we search on. Another way to meet that need is with an affair. After all, clandestine romance is all about intensity of feeling and intensity of attention. Having an affair is a way that a four-year-old can twirl in a 40 year-old body and hear again, “You are the only one.” But satisfying the need that way begins to cost too much, and that kind of romance causes one to twirl faster and faster for fewer and fewer of those precious affirmations. And other people along this dervish path get hurt.
So what is the gift from a father who left when we were both too young? For a long time I resented the missing memories: no father-daughter chats, no drives to college, no adult conversations. But I have this other thing--a picture in my head and in my heart of my father at the end of the board. It’s a spiritual gift from the man who loved me but who left without talking. Today I believe in a God who looks around my life and says, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want anyone to get hurt”. Then, “Okay, go for it.”
Today there is a God at the end of my daily diving board who says, “Okay now, catch your breath. I’m here.”
My father would wait in the deep water, off to one side. He would look around and give me the sign that it was OK to dive and I would stroll to the end of the board, tugging my stretchy lavender swimsuit, and bounce before I dove in.
I would rise to the surface sputtering, and look for his face. He would hesitate a moment to let me right myself, and I would cough and beam. He would grab the back of my suit and give me a push toward the side. “Swim to the ladder,” he would say, and he would stay at the end of the diving board waiting for my next dive.
I remember the feeling as I paddled to the ladder. The world was perfect: I was diving in the deep end of the pool; there was no pain in the world. There was no need or want in my life. I was a perfect, grinning, sunburned, water-logged four-year-old, in love with the world, herself and her daddy.
He died when I was 18. In the intervening years life happened to me and to my father. By the time I was 13, he was traveling a lot, and when we did spend the occasional weekend together we did not speak of personal things. As a teen-ager I felt awkward with my father so I would interview him about his job. He would tell me stories about work, grateful to have something comfortable to talk about. I know a lot about industrial engineering. It filled our time.
On a July evening, when he was 56 years old, my father had a stroke and died. It’s been years and I still wrestle with those two men--the daddy who waited in the deep water and the father who left suddenly, without a word, when I was 18. Somewhere inside of me there is a four-year-old still wearing her lavender bathing suit. She is at the end of the diving board, leaning forward trying to hear someone say, “You are so special.” The hunger for those words is so deep.
In romance we get some of that need met, but after a while no one wants to admire us every day. But when a four-year-old is anxious and needs repetition we search on. Another way to meet that need is with an affair. After all, clandestine romance is all about intensity of feeling and intensity of attention. Having an affair is a way that a four-year-old can twirl in a 40 year-old body and hear again, “You are the only one.” But satisfying the need that way begins to cost too much, and that kind of romance causes one to twirl faster and faster for fewer and fewer of those precious affirmations. And other people along this dervish path get hurt.
So what is the gift from a father who left when we were both too young? For a long time I resented the missing memories: no father-daughter chats, no drives to college, no adult conversations. But I have this other thing--a picture in my head and in my heart of my father at the end of the board. It’s a spiritual gift from the man who loved me but who left without talking. Today I believe in a God who looks around my life and says, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want anyone to get hurt”. Then, “Okay, go for it.”
Today there is a God at the end of my daily diving board who says, “Okay now, catch your breath. I’m here.”
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Jesus Loves Me
This is about Step Eleven.
I’ve read and prayed and done a lot to define a personal Higher Power that is positive and not punishing. Before, during and well into recovery, I have punished myself too often and too much. So I wanted to find, and define for myself, a Higher Power/God that really loved me.
Being raised in a church-going family and having some Christian education as well, the obvious choice would be Jesus as a loving God, right? I mean, I actually sang that little song for many years in Sunday School and I know all the verses to Jesus Love Me. But even with all that, it never really felt like Jesus loved ME. I mean, the actual, real me. I know he loves all people and I am one of them, but me? Really me, individually and idiosyncratically me? I couldn’t get that.
One night in a meeting I heard a woman talking about her relationship with Step Eleven and faith, and she said, “God digs me.” I was stunned. That was exactly what I wanted. I wanted it that personal, and that warm, and as un-theological as that: “God digs me.”
How to get there?
I began to read. I read Books on faith and recovery, lots of theology, and I read the Bible. The New Testament calls Jesus the Bridegroom. Having been married several times I get that totally. Richard Rohr says that we need an affectionate relationship with God. That begins to hint at having a personal relationship, but that still had a teeny twinge of the evangelical and born-again which I could not abide given the politics that seem to accompany that, as in:”Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior and those who perform abortions should die.” Uh, no. But I still liked the idea of an affectionate relationship with God. After all, we know he has a sense of humor and that’s a big part of affection. It certainly approaches a relationship in which one could say, “God digs me.”
But again, how to get there?
I continued to read, and to remember what I knew about Jesus. The dominate metaphor in the New Testament is Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Again, that’s a very good image, and a great deal of caring is expressed in that metaphor: He feeds his sheep, he goes all night looking for the one that is lost, he corrals, he cares, he shepherds. I understood the metaphor but I grew up in a large city, the only sheep I saw were in petting zoos. What in my personal experience expressed that same kind of caring, devotion, affection and acceptance to the point of seeing all my flaws and still loving me with a sense of humor. What, or whom, delights in me like that?
I knew at once: A Boyfriend.
I have always had boyfriends and even now, married for many years, I refer to my husband as my boyfriend. I much prefer that idea of a partner. So with some hesitation, and some trepidation that this might be sacrilegious, I said this:
The Lord is my boyfriend; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He restores my soul.
And with that I was home. Jesus, my boyfriend; a date for life.
I’ve read and prayed and done a lot to define a personal Higher Power that is positive and not punishing. Before, during and well into recovery, I have punished myself too often and too much. So I wanted to find, and define for myself, a Higher Power/God that really loved me.
Being raised in a church-going family and having some Christian education as well, the obvious choice would be Jesus as a loving God, right? I mean, I actually sang that little song for many years in Sunday School and I know all the verses to Jesus Love Me. But even with all that, it never really felt like Jesus loved ME. I mean, the actual, real me. I know he loves all people and I am one of them, but me? Really me, individually and idiosyncratically me? I couldn’t get that.
One night in a meeting I heard a woman talking about her relationship with Step Eleven and faith, and she said, “God digs me.” I was stunned. That was exactly what I wanted. I wanted it that personal, and that warm, and as un-theological as that: “God digs me.”
How to get there?
I began to read. I read Books on faith and recovery, lots of theology, and I read the Bible. The New Testament calls Jesus the Bridegroom. Having been married several times I get that totally. Richard Rohr says that we need an affectionate relationship with God. That begins to hint at having a personal relationship, but that still had a teeny twinge of the evangelical and born-again which I could not abide given the politics that seem to accompany that, as in:”Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior and those who perform abortions should die.” Uh, no. But I still liked the idea of an affectionate relationship with God. After all, we know he has a sense of humor and that’s a big part of affection. It certainly approaches a relationship in which one could say, “God digs me.”
But again, how to get there?
I continued to read, and to remember what I knew about Jesus. The dominate metaphor in the New Testament is Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Again, that’s a very good image, and a great deal of caring is expressed in that metaphor: He feeds his sheep, he goes all night looking for the one that is lost, he corrals, he cares, he shepherds. I understood the metaphor but I grew up in a large city, the only sheep I saw were in petting zoos. What in my personal experience expressed that same kind of caring, devotion, affection and acceptance to the point of seeing all my flaws and still loving me with a sense of humor. What, or whom, delights in me like that?
I knew at once: A Boyfriend.
I have always had boyfriends and even now, married for many years, I refer to my husband as my boyfriend. I much prefer that idea of a partner. So with some hesitation, and some trepidation that this might be sacrilegious, I said this:
The Lord is my boyfriend; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He restores my soul.
And with that I was home. Jesus, my boyfriend; a date for life.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
It's Not Just a Meeting
I am reading the New Testament. I had read—or been told—these stories for years, but now I want to know more. So I am also reading theology and criticism and history: Who was Jesus and who were these guys? The ones he hung around with and the ones who wrote about it later. Yeah, different guys. That’s the first eye opener --even after years of Protestant Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and years of church shopping in AA as part of working an 11th step. The Gospel writers are not the apostles. Maybe that’s a duh for you , but I swear no one told me that important fact in many years of my Methodist upbringing. So that’s part of the learning and the fun in this reading I’m doing.
This week I’m reading about Paul. Now Paul is a good story for recovering alcoholics. First he’s Saul, a Christian-murdering, self-righteous prick, and then Wham!, on the road to Damascus he is struck. He sees God and hears God, is temporarily blinded and he is then a changed man who goes on to the be the first major missionary. He gives up his good life: his status and safety and possessions. You can easily find recovery metaphors in Paul’s story of being struck, a spiritual awakening and surrendering and having a new life. We get that.
Now, a lot of that I knew. The “Used to be Saul, But now I’m Paul” story is interesting when you are a kid. But I didn’t know more about the man or what he thought about the things that happened to him. Now I’m reading Richard Rohr (a theologian and a priest who writes about addiction…check out his tapes called How To Breath Under Water which are about the gospels and addiction) and Rohr points out that God comes to Paul where he was and as he was. God saved a murdering prick like Saul, and God didn’t make Paul come to him. Translation (and this should sound familiar): we don’t have to get good enough for God, and he doesn’t need us to come to him. That’s the grace part: he takes us where and as we are. We don’t merit it or earn it, just receive it. Amazing grace, huh?
But then also this: Paul’s deal was then to organize and yes, proselytize. He’s a community organizer, he’s speaking and preaching and traveling to build the church and—Rohr points out: this church is the body. Christianity IS community. We “practice” our faith with others not alone, hence community. That’s when I began to hear the bells: Community equals fellowship. It’s a “we” program. I don’t get sober, we do. I need you in all your screwed up-ness and you need me and mine (you can read previous entries if you need evidence of the valuable brokenness I bring to the shared table)
I still haven’t found the church I feel natural in, but I am in churches all the time, especially in church basements and Sunday school rooms. We AA’s are in and out of churches all the time. What we are is a fellowship. We are the body of AA.
Here’s another thought I found provocative this week. At my Tuesday meeting a woman said: “AA is a fellowship, not just a meeting, so do you know the person next to you?” You can imagine how everyone looked at the people near them and when we said the closing prayer there were a lot of hands extended and many introductions taking place.
This week I’m reading about Paul. Now Paul is a good story for recovering alcoholics. First he’s Saul, a Christian-murdering, self-righteous prick, and then Wham!, on the road to Damascus he is struck. He sees God and hears God, is temporarily blinded and he is then a changed man who goes on to the be the first major missionary. He gives up his good life: his status and safety and possessions. You can easily find recovery metaphors in Paul’s story of being struck, a spiritual awakening and surrendering and having a new life. We get that.
Now, a lot of that I knew. The “Used to be Saul, But now I’m Paul” story is interesting when you are a kid. But I didn’t know more about the man or what he thought about the things that happened to him. Now I’m reading Richard Rohr (a theologian and a priest who writes about addiction…check out his tapes called How To Breath Under Water which are about the gospels and addiction) and Rohr points out that God comes to Paul where he was and as he was. God saved a murdering prick like Saul, and God didn’t make Paul come to him. Translation (and this should sound familiar): we don’t have to get good enough for God, and he doesn’t need us to come to him. That’s the grace part: he takes us where and as we are. We don’t merit it or earn it, just receive it. Amazing grace, huh?
But then also this: Paul’s deal was then to organize and yes, proselytize. He’s a community organizer, he’s speaking and preaching and traveling to build the church and—Rohr points out: this church is the body. Christianity IS community. We “practice” our faith with others not alone, hence community. That’s when I began to hear the bells: Community equals fellowship. It’s a “we” program. I don’t get sober, we do. I need you in all your screwed up-ness and you need me and mine (you can read previous entries if you need evidence of the valuable brokenness I bring to the shared table)
I still haven’t found the church I feel natural in, but I am in churches all the time, especially in church basements and Sunday school rooms. We AA’s are in and out of churches all the time. What we are is a fellowship. We are the body of AA.
Here’s another thought I found provocative this week. At my Tuesday meeting a woman said: “AA is a fellowship, not just a meeting, so do you know the person next to you?” You can imagine how everyone looked at the people near them and when we said the closing prayer there were a lot of hands extended and many introductions taking place.
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