The liturgical year is one of the things I like the most about our church. My scattery brain likes the orderly progression of the seasons, reliably anticipated and solemnly marked. Now we are in the last weeks of Epiphany, our expectations met, and we soon move on to Ash Wednesday and then forty days of Lent. We continue on life’s path, one season following another, heading once more to Easter, Pentecost, Advent, Christmas, and back to Epiphany.

So it is with our Twelve Steps…we read, study and discuss a step a week (except for Twelve, which is very long and needs two weeks) and then we start again at the beginning with Step One. We admit, come to believe, make a decision and then trudge the road of happy destiny, one day at a time--never alone and never without guidance. Recovery is sequential, predictable…ye gods, did I really just write that?

The seasons of the liturgical year might be certain, the 12 Steps might be numbered, but our progression through them seems more helical than linear or even circular. We are always ascending or descending on this corkscrew of life--spiraling up or down. As we twirl along with the seasons and steps, we notice the same markers greeting us but with different suggestions. Hello Lent, what are you asking of me this year? Hello Step One, what else am I powerless over?

This is my first year of widowhood and I’m going through the seasons and the steps with altered eyes. I’m not alone: the pandemic has made us all the bereaved--Life-as-We-Knew-It is long gone. I was feeling unsettled and very sad the other day and my daughter told me something she has learned from families who have gone through adoption. Not only are anniversaries and birthdays acknowledged, but also trauma-versaries. Our hearts, our souls, our bodies remember and record distress, separation, disruption. Emily Dickinson wrote of how “a certain slant of light” evokes despair--how profound an observation that is--ask anyone with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was feeling unsettled and sad because my body and my heart, if not my brain, recognized that it was a year ago that my beloved became so very sick in what turned out to be his final illness. My mind knows the date of his death, my soul acknowledges the decline.

The extraordinary thing is that the liturgical calendar and the Twelve Steps are strong enough to carry us through these seasons. Our needs are anticipated before we realize we have them. There are solutions. We can get clean and sober and stay clean and sober no matter what obstacles or situations we meet because we have a strong foundation and experienced guides.

A beautiful long-timer said recently at a meeting that the thing she likes the best about sobriety is congruence: her feelings match what is going on in her life. She can live in reality: when she is happy, she laughs; when she is sad, she cries; when she is mad, she yells. She does not pretend to have no feelings. She does not ignore feelings and have them slam up against her from behind and knock her over.  She has the wherewithal to live her life in the present, acknowledging what is actually going on.

And that includes recognizing that trauma-versaries are part of reality. No wonder so many people fear “PMS”--pre-medallion slips. Recognizing and celebrating our sober anniversaries necessitate that we recognize and acknowledge that we hit bottom.

Lent comes before Good Friday comes before Easter. But Easter does come. And every Sunday is a celebration of Easter. 

-Christine H.