In a meeting the other night, a speaker told how once he had handed over his will and his life and found the Higher Power of his understanding, he felt no doubt or fears. How I wish this was always true for me.
Not a day goes by that I don’t pray and meditate and yet there are mornings when I wake up and that albatross is around my neck. I still fall victim to fear and indecision. I have problems of low self-esteem and moments of serious doubt.
These days I can manage it better and my life is not ruled by my old demons, but they do still lurk in the corners and accost me from time to time.
I listen in meetings and was beginning to worry that perhaps my sobriety wasn’t very good: if there are people in AA that walk so solidly with their higher power, why do I sometimes feel so miserably human and flawed. I do the right things, like get to meetings, pray, meditate, talk to my sponsor, keep busy, work hard and vigorously ward off resentment. So where is my pink cloud?
Last week, I was talking to a priest about all manner of things and the conversation ended up covering some of the concerns that had been troubling me. We talked about the dangers of relying on a “pink cloud” feeling.
Many newly converted Christians, believe that the initial euphoria was how they were supposed to feel all the time. When the emotion stopped, they come back to a place of being grounded and feeling out of touch.
This priest, who performs Mass at least once a day and has dedicated his entire life to serving the God of his understanding and his parish, told me that for him it is about doing the next right thing and having times of grace and a feeling of oneness with God once in a long while. Mostly, for him, it is about doing the work of God, as he understands it, regardless of how he feels on any given day.
That was a eureka moment for me.
Now, I take nothing from any religion that I cannot reconcile with what I have learned in the rooms of AA, so this is how I applied it to myself:
It does not matter if I don’t feel connected to God all the time. I am not perfect. All I have to do is work at my programme and progress along a spiritual path. Something that is guaranteed if I follow the recommendations of those who have gone before me in Alcoholics Anonymous.
If I take the right actions, then I am doing God’s will for me. It is not possible for me to always feel the heightened emotion of someone who has just found their God.
It doesn’t matter.
I am an alcoholic. This means that I am in fact mentally and physically defective. If I wasn’t I would not have needed alcohol to live. It is enough most days that I live without a desire for alcohol, that I work hard at being an honest and dependable person.
I do not always need to live in an emotion, or state, of bliss. Gratitude for my new life and the people I have in it is more than adequate on most days. Even this gratitude is not always obviously present. There are times when I have to sit down and write a list in order to get myself on track again.
Every one of the great spiritual beings that have walked upon this earth has experienced moments of doubt and fear, from Jesus to Mahatma Ghandi. It is OK. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. It is experiencing doubt in the moment, but working through it.
Alcoholics Anonymous gave me God and I am grateful for that.
It started me on a life of trying to be a better person – the one God intends me to be. It gave me the first real evidence of a miracle when my desire (nay, desperate need) for alcohol was removed.
Yet I have many years of bad actions and negative tapes in my head that also need to be worked on, erased and replaced with better things. Obviously reliance on God is key to my leading a sane and sober life. But that is not the same as a feeling of God, it is the actions I take that count.
It is the constant vigilance for my defects because they lead me away from God.
For me it is not enough to just not have the first drink.
I must grow and change or I could find that the next drink becomes a lot more attractive in a few more 24 hours.
I must work the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous because I have been told that if I do that I probably will not need to have a drink. I must not pursue a permanent spiritual high, because if I do, there will be a crash. What goes up must come down.
When life just feels like life, it does not mean I am doing something wrong or that God has deserted me. I am doing something wrong when I let ego in and my multitude of character and behaviour defects take over. The only way to prevent that is to work very hard on myself and to be quite harsh on the defects.
Yes, in a perfect world I would feel no fear because I now live in faith.
But it is an imperfect world and I am definitely an imperfect person.
My entire life was built on fear – the default wiring in my head is one of fear. Each of my defects of character is firmly rooted in fear.
I have to work at remembering that whatever happens is God’s will; that He will never give me more than I can cope with on any given day. This is about retraining my brain. I suspect that will be a lifetime journey.
Yet it is comforting to know that I am not the only one, not by a long shot, that struggles with this. It is not any harder or easier for me because I am an alcoholic, it is simply the human condition.
For me, as a sample of one, living in God is not a feeling, it is a series of sometimes difficult actions.