Through the Red Door Blog

The Four ‘N 20 restaurant in North Hollywood is a small popular eatery known for their pies. It’s one of those places that is better known by the locals than by the millions of tourists that visit Los Angeles each year. Other than the pies, the other menu offerings such as burgers, chicken-fried steak, and the rest of the usual fare you would find at a simple diner is not bad, but nothing to write home about. The charm and attraction to the place is not so much the menu but the history. It’s been there for decades and has become a connecting place for old friends, striving actors, and a gathering spot after the various recovery meetings in the area. I know, because for years I had drifted in-and-out of those meetings in what the program refers to as countless vain attempts to gain a foothold in recovery. It’s also located on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the North Hollywood section San Fernando Valley where I hustled dope and roamed the streets during the last seven years of my life in active addiction before I was able to get sober and allow myself to be rescued by God and the program of recovery. My darkest times were here in this land of oblivion between 1991 and 1998.

I had been sleeping behind the wall of a small run-down office building on a large-box piece of cardboard for a couple of weeks. It was hard and cold, but it was relatively safe. It was one of many spots where I hid away for the night in the area. I woke up – or should I say that I came to – one morning with the usual hungry stomach and sick with craving for alcohol and dope. So I did what I have done a hundred times before. I searched out a supermarket to target to lift some booze and maybe food. I decided on Gelson’s Supermarket on Laurel Canyon Boulevard across the street from the Four ‘N 20. I had my routine. I knew what to do and I was pretty good at it. I would go in, grab a basket as if I was a legitimate shopper walking the isles tossing a few things in the basket and along the way, stuff a couple of tall boys (16 ounce cans of beer) into the lining of my jacket along with some packaged sliced ham and small tortillas. As I casually left the basket abandoned and headed for the door, my heart rate quickened, partly from the risk of being caught, but also in anticipation of being able to pop those tall boys and get my morning medicine.

Just as the automatic doors opened and I was stepping out, there was a rush of activity and two security guards tackled me to the ground and began searching for the goods. They found them. I was busted. They led me back to the security room of the store and began the process of interrogation and humiliation. What was my name? Where was I from? Why did I steal? To my surprise, they didn’t call the police. Maybe they just felt sorry for me because I was so pathetic. Instead, they had me sit with the tall boys, ham, and tortillas in my lap and they took a picture of me sitting there dirty, with my stolen goods. This is the exile of shame. They told me to never come into their store again and they let me go. I walked out into the street, still sick and needing something – anything – to qualm the craving. I walked across the street and past the Four ‘N 20.

There is a row of tables and chairs inside the restaurant right next to the street side of Laurel Canyon Blvd., only about six feet from the sidewalk. I had sat at those same tables before my life went totally into the toilet. Now, I was standing outside looking at a man and woman sitting comfortably eating, laughing, and enjoying their slice of life. They seemed so happy and so content. Standing there on the sidewalk just a few feet away watching them, I longed for their life, my heart ached because I was just so very lost. Even though it was just a thin piece of window glass that separated us from one another, I felt a million miles away. So close yet so far away. Then suddenly, the couple turned and looked at me, clearly uneasy that I was staring at them from the other side of the glass. I looked away. I walked away. More shame. This is life in exile of addiction.

In over twenty years of recovery, I have stopped in at the Four ‘N 20 many times. I always try to sit at one of those tables next to the glass and I drink my coffee and eat my sandwich, sometimes with my friends in recovery. I remember that day all those years ago when I felt so lost and buried in shame. The supermarket is still there across the street. Keeping my promise, I have never been back inside. Sometimes this is what God’s grace looks like. 

–Brother Dennis

12 Step Eucharist Luke 11:14-23, The Mute, the Demon, and the Hound of Heaven

Our congregation read the gospel of Luke and Acts during Lent and Easter with Episcopalians all over the world at the suggestion of our presiding bishop. A theme that kept recurring to me was how Jesus seemed attracted to demons like a cadaver-sniffing Scotch collie. He smelled them out and they without question knew his scent as well.  Jesus cast out a demon who came out of a man in the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath no less.  He cast out the multiple demons named Legion from the man in the tomb bound with chains and shackles and kept under guard in the country of the Gerasenes. As soon as Jesus reached the bottom of the mountain where he was transfigured to a dazzling white, he sniffed out and rebuked a demon who also immediately picked up Jesus’ scent and convulsed a young boy to the ground. Jesus released the cruel demons in the daughter of the Syrophonecian woman after her “crumbs for the dogs under the table” answer which prompted Jesus to extend his ministry to Gentiles, and of course Jesus cured Mary Magdalene of not one but seven demons.    

I remember being most moved in Luke 11: 14-23 when we read how Jesus cast out only a single demon from a person who was unable to speak. Usually those who cannot speak have the root cause of deafness as well. Since they have never heard speech, they cannot imitate the sounds. They most often have an amazing mind, but people think they are useless, “dumb” is the word, because their thoughts and intelligence are locked up inside of them like a bank vault with no combination. We can understand how the crowd is amazed when they hear the man or woman in our story now freely speak and communicate.

Perhaps classic movie fans have seen Johnny Belinda where Jane Wyman plays an isolated small-town Canadian woman who is deaf and cannot speak and is branded the unfortunate word, “the village idiot.”  Wyman is healed of her demon as she is taught by her country doctor, Lew Ayres, how to communicate with newly developed sign language. Wyman never speaks in her academy award winning performance and expresses herself with her hands in this classic 1948 movie about prejudice!

Of course, we have another chance to experience what it is like to be mute in this year’s academy award winning best picture, the fantasy drama, The Shape of Water, where a sea creature heals a mute “woman” named Elisa.  

My mind wanders from the movies and first century Palestine to think about where in our culture today are we mute and deaf and in need of healing? People in addiction cannot speak their truth and are mute because of the anesthesia brought on by drugs, alcohol, commercialism, materialism, or whatever is filling their God hole. I lost my voice when I became an alcoholic. I knew I could not speak out or otherwise people would know I had been drinking too much. Some addicts and alcoholics become loud and noisy, but what they say makes no sense. They also are mute and indeed do say and do “dumb” things.

Lent was a special season of the year to begin to ponder where we had been deaf and had not heard the truth, had been mute to the messages from God about being the person God created us to be.

We do not have to live with our demons. There is a way out. For those caught in addiction, people all over the world are recovering, being healed, in the 12-step programs.

Maybe some of us are deaf and mute to the needs of others around us who are suffering, and we have not spoken out with our voices and our hands and our feet against their injustices.  Maybe because of our social disease of busyness, some of us are deaf to those we live or work with, and have been mute, not telling them how much we care or love them.

My experience tells me that the finger of God can not only cast out demons in first century Palestine but also in twenty-first century Little Rock, on the other side of the scientific revolution.

I keep remembering that my prayers should be that the Christ within us releases the demons that keep us from forgiving others and ourselves, the demons that keep us from asking for forgiveness for the harms we have done to others. Christ, “the Hound of Heaven,” ¹ has stopped to rest just behind us waiting to heal these demons.  We only have to turn around and realize that it has been the outstretched finger of Love relentlessly following after us all along.     

 Joanna  joannaseibert.com

1Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven.

At the meeting the other day, we were discussing the meaning of ‘the surrender’, that moment we gave up and ‘really meant it’.  Let’s discard talking about those many promises we’d made in the past … perhaps we then sincerely meant it, but, as with so many other ‘promises’ in the past, the mind was strong but the body weak and nothing really changed.

I find my final “surrender experience” a joyous time for it was only on that occasion I felt this time “I really meant it”. this time. This had to come from beyond me … my Higher Power. I was on my knees in the bedroom. I rose up and immediately felt I had passed into a sincere honest life with the Program. I felt that with the Program with all it entails – my Higher Power, the Groups, the Steps and all aspects we are called to undertake – with all that assistance, I would have a chance to lick this disease. That was what I felt … and I couldn’t wait to start.

I’d tried working the program before. I knew what I was getting into. No! that’s not correct … I never had really tried to work the program. I just drifted along playing the game of attending a meeting once in a while and talkin’ its lingo. Fact was that I just hadn’t had enough of my gala alcoholism.

Returning once again to friends “in the Program” wasn’t the easiest thing to do but it came about easier than I thought. I believe this was so because I had done this for me this time, for me to undertake the Steps and all the rest. I had rejected the game-playing of my previous “surrenders.”

After a period of work on the Steps, when I reached the Steps emphasizing the spiritual aspects of the Program, I decided to put a lot of effort into these steps. I had a belief in a Higher Power since childhood, the nature of the belief having evolved. I hadn’t forgotten all I had experienced. I suppose the fact is that this time I essentially repeated my act of surrender … I truly accepted that old rubric, “Thy Will, not mine.” I went about studying, meditating, following the Big Book’s suggestions for prayer to my Higher Power, and I joined a Church group studying the Rule of St. Benedict thinking it may provide ideas for finding time to really quietly meditate.

I retired several years ago and all at once I had the time to undertake the things I really wanted to do.  People asked me, “How are you going to keep busy?” Of course, my reply was that I just “did it.” Among a number of other subjects, I learned that there is plenty of time to explore the spiritual aspects of our lives and for heaven’s sake to bore deeply into the Program … if we but choose to do so.

So, I suggest and say, that surrender can be and for me was a joyous time, one which sticks with me each day.

Jim A.
Covington, Kentucky

I seldom had a problem of taking the inventory of another. After all I was only telling the truth about that person. What arrogance and blindness! That’s bad enough for a lay person but I was an ordained priest. I knew better, but my friends, Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker and company only helped to make me laugh it off and bury the guilt and shame of my behavior.

I spent five weeks in a four-week program so I could complete my fourth step. To the best of my knowledge I had seldom, if ever, done any harm to anyone. “Bless me father, for I have sinned. I told (?) lies, I had impure thoughts, I was disobedient, I was angry (?) times……..” and the list I had memorized in childhood I could repeat with some minor variation.

“Seamus, the fourth step is not about getting ready for confession. It is about an internal evaluation of yourself; getting to know yourself, your strengths and weakness, your qualities both positive and negative.”

I had avoided getting to know myself for thirty-three years and had, I thought, done a good job at hiding behind a variety of masks. “If they only knew…..” “They” knew more about me than I knew about myself. My first attempt at a fourth step was superficial and, sadly, sufficient for me to graduate.

Recovery came slowly. I did not need a sponsor. With a degree in theology, courses in counseling, certified as an addictions counselor, I was going to be a “big help” to those in recovery. I read the Big Book to quote it at the next meeting and “look good.” God has a wonderful sense of humour. She sent angels to sponsor me. Two Bostonians, former jailbirds, and absolutely grace-filled people.

“What is a character defect?” I asked. “What is there about…..you don’t like?’ was the response and, without hesitation, I listed what I didn’t like about the mentioned individual. “Seamus, what we see and like in another is also in us. What we see and don’t like is also in us but we don’t like talking about it.”

So, with pen in hand, a legal pad, I began again my Step Four. I listed the Ten Commandments; the seven deadly sins, a list of virtues. I had many of my own gods. In fact, from what others shared with me, it seemed that I had become my own god. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. Me, myself and I were my Trinity.

No, I had not honored my parents, not the honor I believe now I should have given them. No, I had no murdered anyone but, Yes, I had seriously wounded some individuals with my tongue. Oh, my tongue was very sharp at times. I have stolen time from those who wanted my time. I was there physically but not always mentally or emotionally. I was jealous of the material things others had and I could not afford; I may have taken a vow of celibacy but “the spirit is willing yet the flesh is weak.”

The Seven Deadly Sins are listed as: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Laziness, Anger, Envy, Pride. These are considered “deadly” as they prevent us from being the Spiritual people we are trying to be. Anger and Fear are like a hand and glove. I did not want to acknowledge my fear so most people experienced my anger. It came out straight or sideways, or passive aggressively. I ate and drank to extremes. Not having the humility to ask for help, I prided myself in my knowledge. And the list goes on. Whatever Virtues I may have had I was much more aware of their opposite in my behavior.

The end result of making ‘a fearless and moral inventory” of myself was freedom and peace of mind; putting my life in perspective and opening up to see myself as others see me; to see goodness and know that mistakes are human, that failure is an opportunity to grow, that’s being human, and Humans are spiritual people attempting to be human.

I believe that, for me, I had to return to Step One and accept the full implications of that step followed by a deeper understanding of Step two. Step three opened the door to trust and risk taking. All of this was the foundation that helped me realize the depth of what Step Four calls us to be and become. Yes, at times it is difficult to see ourselves but then, to see ourselves as our Higher Power sees us - it is a wonderful gift of love. 

Seamus D.

By the Grace of God and through 12-Step programs and fellowship, I am in recovery.

One morning I got a call from Tina, a friend of mine whom I had met at church when we were both young brides in South Carolina. She started with, “I was thinking about our conversation of last night…”

My heart sank. I had no memory of having spoken with anyone the night before. Apparently, I had talked about my family of origin, problems with accepting myself for who I was, and the overall melancholy I harbored despite being a “believer” and church-goer.

“I’m going to send you some things that I think will help you,” said Tina, who was a mental health counselor. I wonder if she knew that the bundle of typewritten sheets, pamphlets and books she sent me would change my life forever.

What she sent was information about the disease of alcoholism.

I was overwhelmed. I recognized myself. I was not alone. I felt a glimmer of hope.

The only way I knew how to celebrate was by drinking, so I did. I downed one after another until I could feel no pain…or joy, or hope.

After a few days, I realized maybe I should taper down on my drinking. Not because I was an alcoholic, for goodness sake, but because I diagnosed alcoholism in other members of my family. I told my brother my plan and Peter said, “Oh Chrissie, don’t stop all at once. You drink so much; it would kill you if you went cold turkey.”

A few days later, I called a rehab facility at four in the afternoon and told the intake worker I would like to come for the two-week program for children of alcoholics. As part of the screening, she asked me when I had had my last drink and I looked down at my hand. “Well, I’m having a gin and tonic right now,” I said, “but that’s not the problem…I can control it...it’s my family…” She suggested that I should perhaps come in for three weeks for the treatment of my own alcoholism. I heartily disagreed and hung up. Outraged, I called my sister and told her about the conversation. She said quietly, “I agree with her, Chrissie.” I swore at her and slammed the phone down.

How could I be an alcoholic? I was a well-educated woman, a teacher, the mother of beautiful children. I sang in the choir and was a lay reader at church. I never drank Scotch. I only drank my wine out of crystal stemmed glasses.

I started going to ACOA and then Al-Anon meetings, never discussing my own drinking with anyone. Then I read an essay written by Jefferson Airplane’s Gracie Slick in Courage to Change: Personal Conversations with Dennis Wholey. In it she said if you could go three months without a drink, you were probably not an alcoholic. Tapering off so I wouldn’t die as my brother forewarned me, I stopped drinking to prove to the world that I was not an alcoholic.

Since I was a teacher, I decided to go to the three-week Rutgers Summer School for Alcohol Studies to learn more about the disease that affected so much of American society, and undoubtedly was the cause of some of my students’ behavior problems.

During the second week I was there, I arrived at my 89th day without a drink. I was at the Jersey shore with six of my new friends, all alcoholics in recovery. The sky was blue. The sand was warm under my toes. The sun sparkled on the water. Gulls called to each other. Sailboats drifted by in the distance. There had never been a more perfect day.

And I started to cry. To sob. To shake.

My friends formed a circle around me, asking me what was wrong and offering comfort. I stammered, “To-to-tomorrow will be 90 days since I’ve had a drink…so I’ve done what Gracie Slick said and I’ve proven I’m not an alcoholic.”

And one of them said, “Congratulations, why are you crying?”

I wailed, “Because the only way I know how to celebrate is by having a drink.”

And another friend said, “Well, what do you have to do then?”

I said, “I have to say it…I have to admit it. My name is Christine and…I am an alcoholic.”

And they encircled me and hugged me and jumped up and down for joy with me. We left the beach and went to the nearest diner and ordered coffee and pie. And they in turn told me their stories. I was at my first meeting. I have not been without joy and hope since.

And, by the grace of God, I have not had a drink or drug since April 10, 1985.

-Christine H.

We are careful never to show intolerance or hatred of drinking as an institution. Experience shows that such an attitude is not helpful to anyone. Every new alcoholic looks for this spirit among us and is immensely relieved when he finds we are not witch burners. A spirit of intolerance might repel alcoholics whose lives could have been saved, had it not been for such stupidity. We would not even do the cause of temperate drinking any good, for not one drinker in a thousand likes to be told anything about alcohol by one who hates it.

Some day we hope that Alcoholics Anonymous will help the public to a better realization of the gravity of the alcoholic problem, but we shall be of little use if our attitude is one of bitterness or hostility. Drinkers will not stand for it.

After all, our problems were of our own making. Bottles were only a symbol. Besides, we have stopped fighting anybody or anything. We have to!

—The ‘Big Book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous, page 103

The chief priests accused Jesus of many things. Pilate asked him again, “Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring against you.” But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed.

—Mark 15:3-5

This is Holy Week, the annual Christian celebration of someone who never got into a fight.

You might disagree. Jesus cleansed the temple. He called the Pharisees hypocrites. He threw some shade at the Syrohoenician woman, who managed to get Jesus to expand his own understanding of his ministry (!). He got pretty mad at Peter when Peter balked at the idea that Jesus would have to be killed.

But these weren’t fights. The temple cleansing was a political move, a symbolic action. He was sometimes sharp with the Pharisees, but he didn’t get into brawls with them, verbal or otherwise, and he raised no objection, no word in his own defense, when they took him to the Roman authorities on false charges. When the Syrophoenician woman challenged him, he quickly saw her point, and praised her. His anger at Peter was more akin to anticipatory anxiety. Peter, like Satan in the wilderness, was unwittingly tempting Jesus to shrink back from his calling, to duck his own destiny.

I have reflected recently on fighting, the behavior, the relationship pattern, the way humans sometimes resolve differences. Fighting is sometimes praised, and perhaps rightly so. Politicians promise to fight for our rights, or our wealth, or our safety. In church we are often challenged to fight for justice, or (paradoxically enough) fight for peace. In the last couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people have marched through the streets to protest one thing or another, and it’s not entirely wrong to look at this behavior as a kind of fight, even though these protests have been nonviolent, and no one was injured.

I am an alcoholic, and page 103 of the Big Book has always been, if not my favorite page, the most relevant page for me. In my first couple years of sobriety, I felt resentful of people around me who were able to drink, and I was quick to notice the problematic role of alcohol in various social settings. As an Episcopalian, I watched with keen interest as a bishop in our church stood trial for taking the life of a cyclist in a drunk-driving tragedy. It seemed to me, when I honestly reflected on my motives, that I wanted the Episcopal Church, like the city of Nineveh, to sit in sackcloth and ashes, repenting our communal sin of celebrating the frequent use of alcohol in our social gatherings, and the central role of alcohol in our church culture.

I did not help anyone when I nurtured those resentments. It did not help my own sobriety, either. I haven’t taken a drink of alcohol for almost five years now, but that achievement is the work of my higher power, in spite of my small resentments, and my human impulse to fight. Sometimes I want to fight others, to win a competition for the wisest person, or be recognized as the better debater. Sometimes I dream of revenge: I want others to feel the way I sometimes let them make me feel. But indulging those impulses only brings me closer to my next drink.

If fighting works for you, even as a metaphor, then by all means use it, do it, join the battle, particularly if someone will be helped by your courage, strength, and grit. But for me, I have to seek justice differently, not because I am like Jesus, but because I’m not: in my hands, fighting leads to separation, destruction, and anguish.

May you find blessing, peace, strength, and new life this Holy Week.

I was about 18 months into recovery, beginning to rebuild some of my professional life. So, there I was, coming to the end of an organ recital, the first I had played in nearly a decade.

Most of the program went well (in my head, anyway), but I felt increasingly anxious during the last piece. So much so that, by time I came to the last chord, all I could hear was the voice in my head telling me that I had never – ever – played so poorly. “How in the world can I face this audience after such an abysmal performance?”

But, applause requires response and, as I worked up the nerve to drag myself off the bench, I heard another voice. Having lived a long life of perfectionism, this voice felt new. Well, maybe not new, exactly, but certainly unheeded.

Then, in those several seconds that it took to get off the bench and turn to face the audience, it happened. IT. One of those moments of spiritual awakening, of grace, that so many of our companions in recovery share in their stories. On that day, it was no bolt of lightning, but a still, small, urgent voice saying, “you know, you could be wrong.”

Wait… What? Wrong?? And, in yet another moment of grace, I let the voice talk. “Yes, I know that you think you’re the expert in how you played. And, sure, it wasn’t perfect.” (Again, more grace, no mute.)

“But, what if, instead of listening to yourself, you listen to them; to what their applause is saying? The music you played meant something to them, and they are thanking you for it.?”

The very thought seemed transgressive. After all, I was the expert on me.
It couldn’t be that easy. But, what if it was?
What was there to lose in the trying?
Somehow, I became willing to take the risk. That day, taking the risk meant that one neurotic knot in my bondage of self was loosened.

That day, I understood what Herbert Spencer called “contempt prior to investigation.”
That day, perhaps for the first time, I became willing to listen.
May it continue to be a practice each day.

Paul J.
8 March 2018

Bill Wilson, a salesman, settles his vision of the benefits of sobriety in the Promises, we shall realize only if we “painstakingly” work the steps.   They follow the narrative on the 9^th step in the “Into Action” Chapter Four of Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book (pp 88-89).

“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway 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.”¹

These promises lyrically describe “what we have”, mapping prospects that contrast vividly with our addictive psyches and circumstances, our litanies of disappointment, guilt, fear and shame, our mutual pain.  Wilson makes them conditional; we must be willing to go to any lengths to attain them.  Attain what, exactly, in a word?  Self-Respect as Children of God.

Christ, who came to share our plight, our fight, our night², made one promise to the Samaritan woman at the well: living water that “will become… a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She replies, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”³  Christ understands her relentless thirst and offers more, a “living water” that quenches every human craving. 

Recovery strives to ultimately resolve the spiritual thirst that ignites our addictions.  Our life in recovery and our life in faith are as progressive as our disease.  Together, we employ the steps and our religious practices to refresh ourselves and one another.  We may arrive late in the day, drained by spiritual aridity, clumsy and wasteful, tripping on resentments, spilling this lifegiving treasure.  Living water is God’s gift to us, who are His creation.  The notion of self-respect acknowledges that we are sparked into being  by God’s unconditional love.  Our SOUL: Source Of Unconditional Love. 

We progress in recovery, working the steps, engaging our faith through scripture, tradition and reason to encounter God, regardless the chinks in our “understanding”.  Christ also told his parched friend, “God is spirit, and worshipers must worship in spirit and truth.”

We probe for truth, the “rigorous honesty” AA invokes as we work through the steps.  Step Four’s heavy duty inventory creates a baseline of sorts, but each and every step entails honest examination of our behaviors, motives, aspirations.  We seek progress, not perfection.

Destined for perfect union with God, we seek to return where we began as Children of God, and “know the place for the first time.”⁴  Our daily tenth step reckons our progress in returning to a God who calls us to come to him as His Children.  That is the “Self” to whom we must be true, the words imprinted on every AA anniversary token.  That is the “Self” we come to respect, the Self that is the measure of our days and ways, our responsibilities in a complex society:

HEALTH: sleep, diet, exercise, teeth, check-ups, grooming

RELATIONSHIPS*⁺: principled, capable, honest, generous, attractive/positive

FINANCES: priorities, ledger, reserves, credit, foresight, restraint

WORK: competency, capacity, relationships, productivity, rewards

CIVIC: politically informed & engaged, duty, community service, social advocacy

GROWTH: intellect, culture, technology, aptitudes, interests

SPIRIT: recovery, resources, practices, discipline, and the expression of our faith

*spouse, family, intimates, colleagues, clients, acquaintances

⁺give and receive

Bill Wilson’s attractive  promises inspire us, and the Steps are the gears and levers we engage to recover and grow as Children of God.  Menus for self-improvement in recovery abound, yet the central question remains, what do we want so dearly that we will direct our sober selves to any lengths to possess it?  God invested each Self with singular gifts and graces that we may serve Him, as we are, where we are, with the resources He places before us.  Each day we examine our Self in a mirror, asking:

God made us as children who develop and mature into whole men and women, fully alive in grace, at peace among others, and at peace with our Selves. This is His promise to us, and ours to Him.  Our recovery covenant.

¹ Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book), AA World Services, Fourth Edition, 2002
² “Incarnation”, Michael E. Moynahan, S.J., Hearts on Fire – Praying with Jesuits, Loyola Press, Michael Harter, S.J., Editor, 2005
³ John 4:1-42, New International Version, Zondervan, 2017
⁴ “Little Gidding”, Four Quartets, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1942

I've been meditating a good deal lately on the alcoholic death, and how so very few of us experience even the beginnings of recovery.  I've heard so many stories about our kind drinking ourselves to death, killing ourselves in drunken car accidents, falling down flights of stairs, suffocating because we can't come to, or taking our own lives in lost hope. Such a small percentage of us can reach the precipice of insanity and death to discover the turning point. We come to know complete defeat - egos perfectly crushed by alcohol - and realize we've backed the wrong horse. Through a barely lucid surrender, we allow the spirit to take the helm. 

So, why do some of us keep crawling into death?  Those of us who live are not special, unique, or chosen. It could have gone either way. I’ve settled on redemption after death.  Why would God's grace expire when our spirit and body have died?  It seems to me that those of us who cannot reach God on Earth can find recovery after human death.  God never gives up on any of us ever, even when we have given up on ourselves and our own lives.

Lee H.

I mentioned recently how I came to undertake a careful look-see at the nature of my spiritual life in the program. Step 11 certainly called me to do so and, for that matter, the Big Book contains much on the subject. What troubled me, specifically, was how do I identify His Will. Most of the time I'm pretty careful when it comes to figuring out what the next "right thing" to do might be. I'd like to think that "the next right thing" might be God's thoughts on the matter, but that can't be all there is to it. After all, my ego can take on many different disguises and insert itself as the answer to what's right and what's wrong. I am aware of comments in the Book which call us to improve our moral fiber, to elevate our moral standards, and, importantly, to abandon reliance on my ego to guide my actions. Several years ago, my wife and I joined a group at our church devoted to study of the Rule of St. Benedict. After many discussion meetings centered on sharing thoughts about the previously selected book, a couple of retreats at cloistered spirituality centers, I've come to some conclusions that for me, at least, make sense and seem to provide comfort as I encounter life's bumps and grinds. 

First, effectively using mediation to find God's Will in a specific case; it's a process. I don't just email or text God and ask for His help. It's a process that entails daily contemplation. I don't pretend that that daily process is taking place in my basement in a cloistered enclosure, but maybe a moment of silence and isolation assists. I believe, like our daily thoughts about the program, our surrender and the litany of working the Steps and each piece of the whole program provides a backdrop for finding Him and His Way. For many, daily maintenance of our program is always present, a daily habit. Accompanying those thoughts and action steps is, in my case anyway, a repetition of the Serenity Prayer ... I ask for "His Will for us and the power to carry it out." 

Second, how do I identify His Will, which option do I select as His Will?  I've found that the search for "the next right thing" assists --  it's a good starting point. 

Third, listen. Listen to others. Don't think you have all the answers and know His Will. Listen to experts, your sponsor, the group - bring the issue up as a discussion topic, and - be quiet and listen. When I do all this I have found that His Will, his answer, is the comfortable one, maybe it is usually that "next right thing." After all, the program calls on us to "improve our spiritual life, to discard the old thought processes and elevate our moral being. His Will is a calming feeling to me --  a serenity. "It just feels like the right thing to do in this situation."  And isn't this what the Program is all about. Isn't the basic program intended to bring not only sobriety, but serenity? ... "you will know peace and find serenity" ;the Big Book promises this if we but work at it. 

Jim A.

Covington, Kentucky