Day 13 Memories of Christmas Eve 2014

Well it’s Christmas Eve.  I’m sitting in Traditional’s Christmas Alcathon 6PM meeting.  This is my 30^th year of attending alcathons.  30 years in AA, almost 60 years on this planet, and okay, my right knee feels like it’s 90 so I just hit the trifecta, 30, 60, 90. Ha ha.  This room is full with new faces, different faces and familiar faces.  Some people I can actually remember their names.  Others are just the faces I’ve seen through the years that smile and say hi and then they sit and listen.  I’ve known these people only through the chairs I’ve seen them sit in.  The names don’t come to me as they once must have but it’s the best I have and it’s all right.

So many stories in here.  Philip is the chair tonight.  He’s no longer homicidal, suicidal and now a lot more fun to be with.  He’s weathered the Four Horsemen, Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration and Despair and now has a life, entwined with God that he can live peacefully with.  He’s been around for 29 years.  You know, I still have an issue with God.  Or using the word God in our literature (AA literature).  The thrust of the program and its success is saturated with God.  Okay, you can say the safety word, Higher Power but God still slips in between ideas, shares, readings, steps, and sponsors.  Now then, do I have a problem with God?

Tonight, the topic of the meeting is, “What are the gifts you’ve received from the program?” Philip energetically threw out to us.   “One of the main gifts I’ve received is the gift of having God in my life” an anonymous guest retorts.  God.  Forgiveness.  Peace.  But God is number one in this room tonight.  What is this God?  Is the only evidence of God the Bible?  Yeah it’s the all-time best seller on the planet but what if “Stranger In A Strange Land” had that title?  Would we all be grokking each other to find happiness instead of blindly holding hands and praying after meetings?

A relationship to God.  What is that?  Is it prayer?  Is it accepting something or someone as a perfect parent and forever being the blessed child?  What good is that?  What if your only experience with being a child was horrid and just bat shit crazy?  How do you relate or equate that to a relationship with God?  Is it entering a dreamlike state, wishing this is how it should have been?  Just tape up these wings here, here and over there and I’ll never notice the difference.  And do you think you can create that almost perfect relationship in that poor broken, mended, scarred mind that brought you to this place finally?  I know you hear other people talk about their experiences with their God and how it has transformed them.  Can you truly transfer that over and absorb it as a living part of your newly healing mind?  Wouldn’t it be more like a streaming video always running some kind of comparison between what is good and what is you?

Good and bad.  If I’m doing this, from what I’ve heard, this is good.  So it’s good.  But how does that particular “good” feel?  Is it an organic thing?  Your cells all curtsy in unison and a wave of Old World Testament warmth rolls through you?  Or did I spy something in that stream over there that I think is similar as value having good?  Is it important to know the difference?  If you’re doing good, just go with it.  I’m all for spirituality but I’m not sure how you can take a canned version and open it up and call it yours.  It seems like a shared psychosis actually.  I know I’m just being flippant but humor my devil's advocacy.

If you had a perfect childhood, how would you be changed by accepting God?  This is an area I have no reference of.  My experience was of the torrid horrid type.  Indifference, intolerance, anger, hatred, distance, untrusting and just dangerous.  Yeah if anybody wants a perfect parent I would fight to be first in line for that daddy.  I’m not looking for victim points here just establishing a base point for where I’m coming from.

So let’s say I buy into this theory, what first?  Prayer seems the obvious choice from what I’ve heard in these rooms.  What prayer to say first?  What prayer do you say the most?  Is there a level of praying intensity that I have to set to get the most out of it?  I hear a lot of prayers in here, the Serenity Prayer being as popular as the Lord’s Prayer.  But truly they’re prayers of rote and I can’t imagine or can’t feel the passion generated by the same tones day after day.  Composed of beautifully poetic words and on occasion even evoking some strong emotions.  But like riding a bike to school every day down the same road, you know the color of every boring house, which windows are cracked, which lawns need to be watered, etc.  At some point you just stop noticing the details.  Ok, yeah, this is me and I’m not accusing the masses of having the same opinion but it’s my blog.  But to a degree we’re all the same as we are all unique.  I don’t have that daily discipline to get up and read, meditate and listen.  I mostly just get up and get ready for work, I’m not sure what my mind is up to during that period but it doesn’t go to the shrine consistently.

Here’s a line from a prayer about St. Francis that is beautiful, “to understand rather than to be understood.”  I understand.  I understand that you will never get me and I don’t have a problem anymore about wanting to be understood, it’s just not going to happen.  I have too many cells dedicated to self-absorption to completely get out of myself to fling open my Jesus robe and let you all in.  A person here, someone there, maybe a girlfriend if I’m in one of my lucky phases, but that’s it. 

“To love rather than be loved,” whoa, wait a minute.  Do I really want that?  That was part of that crap childhood I was talking about earlier.  What do you mean “rather than to be loved?”  Fuck that, I’m a human being.  I am sensitive here, fucking love me would you?  I want to be loved, that’s what I always wanted, just to be loved.  Now you want to me to pray to forget about that?  Maybe, just maybe after showering me with some of that love and knowing what it’s about then I can shoot it out to everybody.  Hell yeah that would be great.  God?  You’re asking me that?  Dad?  Please?  Give me love.  My version of that prayer might have a different soundtrack, like, love your fucking son like you signed up to do when you had him come into this world.  Do I sound a little jaded, perhaps shallow minded?  I don’t think that’s my real nature but I can rant, oh yeah, I can rant.  Ok I can’t take any more of St. Francis right now.

At the close of meetings the prayer of choice is the Lord’s Prayer.  I did not know this prayer when I came into AA but I kind of knew the rhythm so I just hummed along with it.  Then I memorized it (rote) and sang along with the other sheep like a good boy should do.  It’s harmless right?  After repeating it 1,000 times or more I realized I don’t even know what it means.  I didn’t go to Sunday School.  So I found some of my own literature are read up on it.  Not in any doctoral theses kind of study but enough to satisfy the curiosity in me.  I don’t want to go into all of the parts right now just one part for now.  It’s towards the end and it states, “…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Let that sink in for a moment and imagine what it could mean.

It’s telling us that the keys to heaven are found in this passage people.  If you want to find freedom this is what you have to do.  If I wanted forgiveness for all the shit that I did, sins, wrongdoings, not saying thou enough, just bad stuff I did against one or all I had to learn to forgive all of those fuckers that did the same to me.  (I just say fuckers for shock value here).  Now after all of that I have to come to a place in my mind that I can forgive myself for all the tapes that I played in my head over and over, believing what a bad kid, man I was.  I don’t think I’m ready to do all of that yet.  I think it’s a great idea if you and your God have discussed this and made some kind of plan.  I haven’t.  I haven’t entirely forgiven those who have trespassed against me.  I’m asking for entry into that heaven, hell yeah, but if I’m lying each day saying I’ve forgiven those people (or myself) I really think I’m making just more of a mess.  I’m contradicting the whole essence of saying a prayer itself.  I stop at that point of the prayer.  I stop.  And in that little space of stasis, I do say a small prayer that I know what I want to do.  

1.  I'm grateful that AA in Sacramento has alcathons during holidays.  Round the clock meetings to  get you through the night.
2.  I'm grateful that I've been graced with 2 guardian angels, not 1, but 2.
3.  I'm grateful that I recognize the battlegrounds today before the firing starts.  I'm better prepared to fight.