Through the Red Door Blog

In one of my last meditations, I promised to bring some thoughts I had in my own recovery program about the importance of “speaking-out” at discussion meetings. Early in my attendance at my home group, when a “topic for discussion” was sought, I noticed often folks suggested topics touching on personal matters or events impacting their Program. They were seeking advice and counsel from the group about how they might handle similar problems such as: “I have a report date next week and I’m scared,” or “My spouse left me last night,” or “I can’t find a sponsor.” The rest of the group simply supplied how they dealt with the issue and what worked or didn’t work for them. Usually, the main comment was “Yes sir. I went through the same thing. Here’s what I did and it worked for me but may not fit your situation.”

It was an important realization for me that as a recovering alcoholic. I was still subject to the same old troubling incidents I had used to justify use of a substance to assist with my coping with those incidents.

I was learning that when life’s challenges arose in my sobriety, I needed to learn how to cope with those challenges without resorting to drink as I did as a practicing alcoholic.

So, one day, on the way to my regular meeting, I thought I would bring up an incident encountered that morning at work. It certainly wasn’t a serious challenge and certainly didn’t tempt me to turn to alcohol for relief. But, it was simple so I raised it as a topic: “How do we handle challenges like this simple example?”

Boy, did I ever get responses from the group! Everyone had a similar issue at one time or another and everyone had a suggestion: take five, call someone, pull out the Big Book, call your sponsor, bring it up to your next discussion meeting, let go & let God. Almost endless were the suggestions. This was another of those “it made all the difference” action steps learned at an AA Discussion Meeting.

Jim A., St. X Noon, Cincinnati

“The three were hermits on an island in the Black Sea, very pious and humble and loving to all men, but terribly ignorant. A bishop goes in a steamer to see them and teach them a few prayers but finds them too old and stupid to learn. At last, he gets—or thinks he has got—one brief and simple prayer into their heads and leaves the island, feeling rather contemptuous. When night falls, he sees a bright light advancing swiftly over the sea behind the steamer; it is the old men who have come, walking on the waves, to beg him to be patient with their great stupidity and teach them the prayer again.”—Tolstoy.

My husband sends me this story. He tries to read it to me but is so moved that he cannot speak. Alas, if all of us could be that way when we hear this story. I think of so many people I have talked with, hoping to connect them to their higher power. Instead, I often learn more about my higher power from hearing about their connection to their higher power.

I learn this truth first from recovery meetings, where I hear wisdom from people I would never have previously listened to.

Wisdom comes from those with no education who can barely speak intelligently. Wisdom comes from men and women who have spent a majority of their lives in prison. Wisdom comes from those who have lost their children because of their addiction. Wisdom comes from women who have lived on the streets. Wisdom comes from the homeless.

I also hear this wisdom at our Food Pantry, where people come each week for just enough food to survive. They, like we in recovery, know what a bottom looks like.

Gratitude and blessing are the most frequent words we hear.

They share what they receive with other families.

They teach us about how to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God. They teach us how to live in a community just as we in recovery learn how to be connected to a community. They know what a “we” program is all about instead of an “I” program.

May we continue to keep our ears open to hear wisdom in people at places we least expect.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Easter, I “celebrate” several years of sobriety. My surrender came when I was finally ready, when I finally realized I couldn’t get “enough,“ that I was tired of the damage to myself and others. My early months in the Program were filled with work, and study, and prayer—5 noon meetings a week, an evening meeting or two, writing a 365 day-by-day volume of meditations.

The hard part was what preceded that day when I threw in the towel. Since 1974, I’d had a couple long periods of continuous sobriety. But all I’d done was “white-knuckled it.”. I went to one meeting a week (that should be enough), did a bit of service work (that was hard since I knew my tenure in the Program was on very shaky ground). The price I paid for this false action was my anger, depression and self-centeredness “self-shame), and so forth.

This time around, I honestly believed I’d had enough and was willing to follow the necessary action. My noon meeting was a priority. I found a counselor to help with a couple difficulties. I studied the Steps and read and re-read the Big Book and Twelve & Twelve. I participated at discussion meetings. Importantly, I didn’t shout from the roof tops to anyone that I finally “got the Program.” I had more or less done that before, and it hurt them and myself greatly when I had to admit I had “gone back out.”

This time around, I was surprised with the ease with which I buried myself in the Program. I think that one of the key decisions I made was to attend discussion meetings as much as possible, not as I had done before when I only availed myself of lead meetings (about 5 or 6 months passed before I said a word during the discussions). [More about that in later submissions to Red Door.]

In hindsight, I think this concentration on discussion meetings made all the difference. I could hear folks talk about their problems, which I saw were not all that different from mine. I could see progress—they kept “coming back.”

Yes, my anniversary date is a time I give special thought to, not to glorify it, but to quietly recall those times I was learning how to handle sobriety.

So, “Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy...”

Jim A. St X Noon. Cincinnati

When I got sober in January 2007, one of the first things I remember my sponsor telling me is, “Stacey, anything you put before your sobriety, you will lose.” I would look at her incredulously and say things like, “But Karen, I have to put my job first, my friends first, etc.” The list could go on and on, and whatever I said was the thing that had my attention at that moment.” She would look at me and smile and say, “Stacey, anything you put before your sobriety, you will lose.” It is just like what Mark 1:35 says, “In the morning, while it was still dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place to pray.” My sponsor Karen and Mark reveal the same message to me: keep the first thing, the first thing. Mark’s passage is a gentle reminder to me that even Jesus needed to spend time with God alone to pray.

Over the fourteen years I have been sober, I am grateful for the daily practices I have developed with my relationship with God. I look back to the early days and remember not being able to sit still to meditate for five minutes or being so rushed in the mornings that I did not have time to read from one of my daily readers. In some ways, I feel as though the person I was fourteen years ago is unrecognizable. And, although things today are radically different than what they were when I first entered sobriety, there are times when I can get lax about the practices that I know bring me peace and serenity. Whether I look at my life as a seminarian or my life in recovery, although it seems like I am eating, breathing, and sleeping God or working the heck out of my twelve-step recovery program, I forget the importance of taking time to fill my cup through quiet time with God.

With the year anniversary of the COVID lockdown and the coming of Holy Week, I find myself so grateful to be a part of the Episcopal Church and a Twelve Step program based on daily practices and rituals that bring me back to keeping the first thing, the first thing.

Stacey C.
Austin, TX

In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions we read: “Meditation is something which can always be further developed. It has no boundaries, either of width or height. Aided by such instruction and example as we can find, it is essentially an individual adventure, something which each one of us works out in his own way.”  I had no idea I was meditating when, as a teenager, I parked my bicycle next the church at the monastery, sat outside and listened to the monks sing. I did not know they were singing “Vespers”. All I knew was I loved the music, it lifted me to somewhere else and I felt at peace.

I entered seminary after high school and morning meditation happened before we were fully awake at 6 a.m. We stood for fifteen minutes, then knelt. There was no  music or choir to lift my spirits. I had no idea as to what I was supposed to do. Think about God, about my vocation, the missions, about Jesus. Whatever entered my head (except for those thoughts I was not supposed to think about – girls – was my morning meditation. Then there were books to enlighten us on the topic. Never did I dream or think I’d be like the folk I read about who had mystical experiences (and still don’t). Perhaps the only mystical experience came from taking what I was not supposed to take. What a trip.

On one of my earliest 12 Step calls, I went with a guy who was head and shoulders taller than I, long hair, tattooed from head to foot, and a former member of a dangerous gang. As we talked about the program, he told me that when he entered treatment some years earlier, “I couldn’t sit still for a second. Now I can sit long enough to watch the grass grow.”

I understood the words he said but I had no idea of the full meaning of them. I was in denial of my own addiction even after spending five weeks in a four-week program and committed to a year of “Aftercare.” Denial of my disease meant that I was still running my life which meant I was not meditating or asking God or anyone else for help. I didn’t need it. Oh, during this time I was quite religious. I went to my RC mass on Sunday morning and then off to “A service” at the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal or some other church. At this point I was a “Former/ex” RC priest and the custodial parent of my two-year-old daughter and interested in finding a mother for her – not a helpmate for myself. As for addiction, I had increased my nicotine, caffeine, and food intake. Of course, I was in denial of that also.

Then came (four and a half years in the program) the spiritual awakening and the admission I am an alcoholic. It would be five more years before I had my last cigarette and I am still fighting the battle of the bulge. (Those of a certain generation or history buffs will understand that last remark.)

Meditation came back into my life on more or less a few days a week and gradually became a way of life. Sometimes with coffee in the morning. Sometimes in the late afternoon. Sometimes while going for a drive.

Meditation grounds me in the moment, reflecting on the day, on a thought, on something I read. Meditation is that connection between my heart/head and the spiritual world outside of me. In meditation I can think, listen and feel the process that is going on. At those times when I can’t shut down the movie in my head, I have a meditation book nearby, a spiritual book, and a few sentences or a paragraph of that is sufficient to bring me back to focus on the here and now.

For those who do not yet believe in God or have not found a Higher Power, meditation grounds them also in the here and now -- how am I living my sobriety, how am I living this program -- how am I to live this step.

With or without God or a Higher Power, meditation is important for us (for me) as it invites me to take time away from the “rat race” of work and lets me ponder my past insanity, be grateful for my sobriety, my peace of mind, allows me to acknowledge my emotions to myself, and brings a smile to my face.

Meditation lets me know I am not alone in this world or in recovery. Meditation lets me open my mind and heart to a world that is bigger and wider and deeper than I ever imagined and increases by gratitude for the sobriety I have to see this beautiful world.

Séamus D.
New Orleans, La.

“And who is my neighbor?” —Luke 10:29.

Ken Burns’ television series on the Civil War describes a remarkable scene that takes place on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1913, when what is left of the two armies stages a reenactment of Pickett’s Charge. The old Union veterans on the ridge take their places among the rocks, and the old Confederate veterans start marching toward them across the field below—and then something extraordinary happens. As the old men among the rocks rush down at the old men coming across the field, a great cry goes up—except that instead of doing battle, as they had a century earlier, this time they throw their arms around each other and embrace and openly weep.

In 1914, during World War I, German, British, Belgian, and French troops in the trenches mingled with each other along the western front during a brief Christmas truce and even sang “Silent Night” and other carols in solidarity. Recently we have observed something similar at World War II memorials such as Normandy, where German, English, French, and American soldiers have wept together and shared their stories. We have seen it also when American soldiers return to Vietnam to share stories with those they once bitterly fought against.

This repeated action of shared love and story can tell us something about war. Many of those who have fought on foreign fields can be our strongest advocates against war. They know what they themselves—and those who once were their enemies—have lost. They share a common life-altering experience that only someone who has been there can understand.

Those in recovery of any kind also know how awful their life of obsession was before their healing from addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, food, etc. They can relate to those who remain trapped in their addiction. Most of all, they can minister to those who are still suffering and offer them hope that their life can be different. They do this by sharing their story of what their life was like in addiction, contrasted to what it is like now in recovery.

Those who have overcome mental illness can become advocates for others who suffer from this common disease as well. People who were once homeless themselves can offer a restorative hope to those on the street. Cancer survivors can encourage and pray for others recently diagnosed and give them strength and support.

This story goes on and on and on. We are healed as we reach out of ourselves and share our story and listen to sufferers in situations we know all too well. We begin to realize “who IS our neighbor.” Some call this becoming wounded healers.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

He came in about 5 minutes before our Serenity Prayer opening. Standing in the doorway, he paused and looked around. Our noon group included the usual recovering alcoholics and druggies, each seeking some good ol’ AA Fellowship. Looking like he was satisfied he’d be OK, he found a seat at the edge of the group, took off his top coat and, carefully folding it and his paisley scarf, putting them on the empty chair next to him. When the group was asked for any first-timers to stand and give “us your name so we can welcome you after the meeting,” he appeared startled, as though he didn’t expect to have to announce to a bunch of drunks and addicts who he was ... but, finally standing, he mumbled his name, “Ron or Jon,” something like that, and quickly sat down and in doing so, knocked his top coat on the floor. He seemed rattled by all of this as he fussed with his coat, checking to see if his car keys were still there, carefully brushing off the coat and paisley scarf.

The Chair asked for a topic for discussion and someone spoke up: “We have a new person. Let’s talk about what brought us here.” “Ron or Jon,” seemed bothered, probably suddenly thinking he would have to address the group. Folks started to talk in response to the topic, sharing their own reactions to their first meeting. Ron/ Jon seemed to be listening.

After the normal close with the Lord’s Prayer, I went over, shook his hand and welcomed him. Very quickly, he mumbled something about a sick wife at home, with that, he turned, put on his top coat, paisley scarf, and left, but he stopped and turned, saying, “Thanks, I’ll be back.”

Driving home, I did feel we might see him again. I thought back to my own “first meeting.” Scared? no, I think a better word was “anxious.” I was hurting and felt little, no that’s not right, no self-respect. My entrance that time came when I’d decided I’d had enough. I’d tried quitting by myself but failed every time. I thought back to a couple folks I had worked with—well-to-do, no loss of job or spouse, no alienation of kids, nice vacations to neat places 2 or 3 times a year. It didn’t seem that Ron/Jon had really felt pressure from those he’d hurt to do something about his drinking. But even so, something inside had invited him to attend a meeting.

Often, it seems before one enters the Program and really makes a “go” of it, he will have suffered more losses and inflicted more pain than necessary. It’s a question of “when” you quit, and in a sense, how much pain do you have to inflict on yourself, family, friends, children, parents, before you seek help. An alcoholic is a selfish person who lives to see how close he can go to the edge of the cliff and the darkness our addiction promises us. Very sad.

Jim A/ Covington, Kentucky: St. X Noon

I’m writing this on Shrove Tuesday.  Tomorrow we will pray Psalm 51 and pray the litany of penitence.  I will spend the day turning again to God, doing my best to show up, to own my faults and sins, and to open myself to God’s healing grace.  Sounds like a typical day in recovery!

This past weekend I heard a sponsee’s Fifth Step.  She shared all the things she didn’t want another to know, didn’t really want to know herself.  As she did, we noticed the patterns, the particular potholes into which she has fallen over the years.  As we moved through the list of resentments, she’d say, “Yuck. I really don’t want to talk about this one.”  But she did.  It was a moment for me of watching God’s power and love, as she walked into the places she didn’t want to go. 

When she was done, we talked a bit about Step Six.  I sent her to our literature to ponder her readiness.  Later that day she reported that she was walking on air, so filled with freedom and joy.  She had indeed found the “Broad Highway,” and she was “walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.”

Of course, life keeps coming.  The next day she began to allow herself to notice real questions and doubts about her life, things she had avoided through substances.  She’s not on a cloud anymore - but she’s not where she used to be.

This is the spiritual journey.  We begin by admitting that we need God, we can’t conquer our addictions alone.  We turn to God as best we can.  We admit our faults, and ask God to remove them.  We turn toward others, facing everything that stands in the way of our honest communion.  As we go forward, each step feels like death to the ego.  “God forbid!” Peter cries to Jesus.  “Surely I don’t have to go that far!” I cry to my sponsor.  But the answer has been given.  This is the path of life.

Lent seems like the season when the rest of Church joins those of us in the basements and parish halls (and Zoom lines and phone lines) in seeking God, cleaning our messes, and turning toward God-knows-what possibility awaits us. 

May you, may we, trudge the road of happy destiny, trusting in the promise of new life.  God bless us all.

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All things seek to return to their own path, and all things rejoice in coming back to their nature. The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.  Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius (477-524 C.E.), trans by Thomas Powers. PARABOLA Summer 2019.  90.

At age nine I was serving Mass in a village in Northern Ireland and the thought crossed my mind, “I want to be a priest.” I had no idea what a priest did then, nor did any of us have any idea as to the twists and turns social and religious life would take throughout the sixties. I attended catholic school and boarding school. Girls left me alone as the priest told them “he has a vocation.” I didn’t know he did that till much later.

I had no idea that the environment in which I was formed was unhealthy. I didn’t care for the controls but they seemed to be within the norms of other families in the community. While other boys got caught, I learned how to be perceived as “squeeky clean and upright.” I knew that the path I was creating was not the one my soul wished for me to be on and that was why confession was created. Weekly confession made all things right.

Then came college, seminary, my first drink and, simultaneously, my first blackout. Ordination to the priesthood, more blackouts. Some of my students in Religious Ed confided in me about their experiences on LSD. I began to read and learn all I could about drugs even as I kept a few fifths in a drawer “for when friends came by.”  It was my belief that alcoholic clergy drank alone. I was given opportunities to take courses in addiction and I felt sorry for those who were addicted and those who were on Methadone. While I was working with these folks, I prided myself that I did not have a problem. Meanwhile, I was in denial that I was at war with self, others and God. God was not fighting with me. God was more like a lifeguard pushing me into calm and shallow waters to get my feet under me. Thus, treatment, aftercare, continued denial and a four and a half year long dry drunk.

Were I to step outside myself and observe my behavior, I would say that I had been crying out for help all my life.  St. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”  There is no question, I was “Restless, Irritable, and Discontent.”

Then came the day of awakening—the experience of an awareness of sobriety. Something happened and I had a spiritual awakening. I actually felt happy. I felt a feeling that made a difference to me that some thirty -seven years later, remains as fresh in my mind as the day it happened. “All things rejoice in coming back to their nature.” All my life I was taught I was born in/with original sin. No. I was born in/with an original blessing, made in the image and likeness of God. My spiritual awakening was an awareness that I was returning to that place of blessing,

“The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.” The end of my denial and the beginning of sobriety are joined together. I can’t have one without the other. Darkness and Light. Joy and Sorrow. 

My addiction in and my sobriety are joined together and interlocked with my birth in God’s blessings and my return to God’s blessing. With the guidance of my Higher Power I have been returned to the path of blessings and, like the psalmist I can sing, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it.” “All things seek to return to their own path, and all things rejoice in coming back to their nature. The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.”

Séamus D,

New Orleans

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.