A single bird chirped hello outside of my room in the Old Friary. It was in February 1999 the last time I stayed in that part of this wonderful Graymoor Christian Unity Center. And the only reason I stayed in the Old Friary then, where the single rooms are a bit pricier than the doubles in the main retreat center, was because a buddy from Philadelphia made the reservations. Seems it was an Anthony de Mello retreat and a few of my Philadelphia friends, like me, are big fans.(That was the last time they had a de Mello retreat too – seems Mother Church grew to find his spirituality a bit too Eastern or dicey. His contention that our final barrier to God can be our concept of God is a bit much for an institution highly invested on our buying their concept of God.)
And as fate would have it, that weekend down the other end of the Old Friary, a group of Carmelite nuns were staying as their convent up in Beacon New York was being renovated. So because I did not obey the ‘don’t talk to the sisters’ suggestion, and asked for some prayers and I later got their address, for ten years now I’ve been graced with their prayers as I send them a few dollars and little stories and other things I’ve written. One year I even made it to their home for an October 1 celebration of the feast of the famous Carmelite, St Theresa of the Little Flower. Two days from now as it turns out.
There is more. Then I was only about six months removed from my latest relapse into my addiction to crack cocaine. Also then I was 16+ years in a job in a hospital finance office and I was summarily disappointed with my career choice. Writing was my dream and people repeatedly suggested to me to write and do my job, but for some reason I just could not do that. I could put together poems and little stories, but I just could not get started on this book I dreamed about writing. Somehow I knew that job had to go. The sense that pushing paper was not God’s will for me was with me at all times….and of course the fact that I’d really turned my life around but simply could not stop the pattern of relapse I’d struggled through for the preceding 4+ years was another part of my angst. And as fate would further have it, totally at random I picked a spiritual reading for a Lecto Devinia exercise that was very appropriate. Two years later I quit the job…a la the birds in the air and lilies in the field, I had enough faith that the Father would take care of me, one of his most prized possessions. When I boarded the plane to my father’s family’s homeland of Ireland, off to the first book and the rest of my life, I was six months removed from the latest, and God willing, the last relapse. It’s now nine+ years since I took that final fall.
The book was called You CAN Go Home Again and though it was anything but a big seller, it was my way of going Home to the loving protection of my Creator. Seems he maybe required that kind of faith to keep me clean.
So now it is fall 2009. The no work and then part time work honeymoon lasted until about four years ago. I now work in the drug/alcohol field and with its lack of monetary reward and dysfunction and paper work galore, it can be immensely frustrating. But at least I am helping some people. And I do have to pay the bills. My latest project involves taking the 12 steps to the non-addicted world. The book I wrote 12 Steps to Change Your World is my 6th but only the 2nd I’m getting published. It is a lot shorter and more accessible than the other. It was edited by a real editor and is far tighter and more focused. Still I got a rejection letter from the first traditional publisher I sent it to. That news and the difficulty I’ve had in getting a church or prayer group to try working the steps, has me quite frustrated. It is difficult to de-condition people that the steps are only for the addicted.
Alas the graces of places like Graymoor keep me plugging forward. As they buzzed through portions of the retreat, they gave no direction or reading concerning the Lecto Divinia that was on the schedule. I’d thought the ‘ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you’ would have been a good one for me. These instructions seem to be about working harder at the task at hand but for a lot of my life, instead of knocking when the asking and seeking went unanswered, I’ve crawled back under the covers…as I did this very morning after the retreat.
Funny the way it works out sometimes. The crawl back under the covers and failure again to do the quiet time and guidance piece I stress so in the step class, gave way to a far from blessed day for me. But I schlepped up to my weekly rosary group and then over to the local adoration chapel to do the closing portion of the Chinese meditation I do called Qigong. (I’d done the opening-imagining steps while saying the rosary). And the meditation seemed as flat and empty as had the rosary, but somehow the memory of the ‘at random’ Bible selection I chose for my own Lecto Divinia came back to me. I’d opened to Chronicles (I think) and to one of the happiest moments in the Old Testament when David is handing over the reigns to his son Solomon and giving him instructions on how to build the Temple. My dad was as good and upright a man as I have ever known, but he too suffered from the pangs of regret and procrastination. My whole Graymoor connection is about him. In 1940 he landed there in sort of pilgrimage to find himself. The first of 16 straight years I went there was my first sober anniversary in 1993. But as I sat in the chapel, I realized his grace and his blood are probably the most significant sources of my ability to go forward and to repel his regrets as I do so. For sure we are all connected but is any connection as strong and lasting and influential as that of a father and a son? His Alzheimer’s and my cold, empty, alcoholic mindset precluded any instructions to be handed down to me towards the end of his mortal days. But in the realm of God and grace and heaven and Eternity, the floodgates of love and progress are never closed.
And so for the briefest of moments, the final tearful smote of this year’s Graymoor trek came over me. The beatific period on the end of a sentence peppered with so many splices of ecstatic connectedness…including all the wonderful new friends I had made. The ground I walk on that hallowed mountain walks with me as long as I believe it. I guess putting the one foot in front the other this rather blah day, and locking myself to this machine until this story was finished, netted a heart that had been indeed been knocked open.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Decisions…Decisions
Aldine Street near Frankford Avenue. When my drug/alcohol client told me that was where he lived, I could not help but remember that was the area where my first date lived…my first date almost 45 years ago.
She was very cute, blond, Germanic-looking and near as wet behind the ears about romance as I was. We dated a bit at the end of my freshman year in high school and were still on the cusp of the era where you waited until marriage before having sex. I actually never even considered having sex; I never even got around doing much petting. It was very strange - she went down the shore for the summer and we split ways but seeing her at a fall dance, it was very obvious she still liked me. But like has happened to me so many times in my life – particularly in the arena of romance and dating – something stopped me from calling her. Just like something stopped me from asking the best friend of my best friend’s date, to go with me to the senior prom. That one I wrestled with more. That one I really commiserated over. And that was maybe not the first, but it was near the beginning of a near endless column of delayed and then departed decisions that would mark the trail of my life.
Why didn’t I make that call? Why didn’t I follow up that contact? Why didn’t I go to that event? Why didn’t I respond to that letter? Why didn’t I write that story buzzing around in my brain?
Nine years ago, about 5 weeks removed from my latest relapse into my addiction to crack cocaine, the decision I was grappling was the walk from the job I’d had for 18 years. I wanted to live my dream, go to Ireland and write a book. Three years prior, and more than five years after I’d decided and acted on a decision to stop drinking and drugging, I’d fallen into a relapse run that marked 1997 as the most dangerous and near deadly year of my life. But on that year’s final day, I’d experience a profound spiritual experience that would change my outlook on life. The second of the 12 steps, came to believe that a Power Greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity happened to me with shakes, tears and a near-fall down stagger as the feeling overwhelmed me that More than luck was involved with the escape I’d just had from a prowl to get high. A broken heart from a romance jilt, in fact, had precipitated the prowl and the relapses that took place from the next April through August probably had something to do with my refusal to give up on that woman. I did give up when I met her with my ex-good friend with whom she’d moved in.
August of ’98 was the end of that particular run and that was the first of three straight Augusts where I’d threatened to leave that job. The relapses though scared me into staying. Plus I was in this Masters program at the University of Pennsylvania whose hospital had been my employer all those years. Indeed I’d gotten that Master of Liberal Arts degree in May ‘00, and when the safety net of a sort-of-promised layoff was removed, the fear and fret of leaving triggered the July 25 and August 7 relapses that year. None has happened since.
“No major changes until a whole year sober” was the advice my recovery program espoused. My more practical and down to earth friends and family told me I was crazy to consider leaving. But the more impractical, the dreamers, the chance-takes told me I had to follow my heart. Importantly my mom, without whose blessing it would have been very hard to go, while she did not exactly endorse the idea, did say, “Jimmy you have to do what you what you believe you have to do.” As it turned out my final day at that job, it was on her 81st birthday. I was about ten days into my Ireland pilgrimage when I first called back home, and the joy and blessing in her voice put a bounce back in my steps that had temporarily gotten heavy.
As I look back on it, perhaps that Higher Power had wanted my faith in His/Her love and protection to be the only safety net I required. Leaps of faith, they call them, and doubtless that was the most profound I’d ever taken.
So now it is nine years later. I work ‘in the field’. The wild, rambling, too long and poorly edited book did not sell many copies. The no work, or part time work honeymoon ended about 4 years ago as I have to pay the bills. I just finished my 5th book but this is only the 2nd I got published, and for this one I hired a real (and expensive!) editor. At 100 pages it’s near three hundred shorter than the first one and it is called Twelve Steps to Change a World. But some of the - what if? How come? where to? buzzards are circling around it and me.
I have a website and some hard copies of the book. But I’ve had little luck taking the non-addicted through the 12 steps which is the intent of the book. I’m fretting about the cover as a lot of people tell me it doesn’t work. (Including one niece who was in the first row of the ‘go for it’ crowd nine years ago.)
But the safety net of no return to the drug or the drink is now as solid as the rock called earth. Recovery was affirmed in me the day I walked out of that job and onto that plane and into the palms of my Creator’s will. As the plethora of things I cannot do with the pittance of time off I am allotted in this job I switched to 11 months ago, I am getting antsy again. But the money situation is far tighter than it was nine years ago and with this job at least I am helping some people.
Faith…protection….love…guidance….change. The piece-by-piece, day-by-day, year-by-year way those 12 steps have taken me to a place of fulfillment and meaning is almost magical in its apparentness. And one needs not walk on the high wire of substance addiction to fall into the benevolent hand of this God who only wants for all of us to be happy.
May the good Lord help me to overcome the fear and the procrastination and the whatever and guide me to guide more of His children back into the loving bosom of His will.
She was very cute, blond, Germanic-looking and near as wet behind the ears about romance as I was. We dated a bit at the end of my freshman year in high school and were still on the cusp of the era where you waited until marriage before having sex. I actually never even considered having sex; I never even got around doing much petting. It was very strange - she went down the shore for the summer and we split ways but seeing her at a fall dance, it was very obvious she still liked me. But like has happened to me so many times in my life – particularly in the arena of romance and dating – something stopped me from calling her. Just like something stopped me from asking the best friend of my best friend’s date, to go with me to the senior prom. That one I wrestled with more. That one I really commiserated over. And that was maybe not the first, but it was near the beginning of a near endless column of delayed and then departed decisions that would mark the trail of my life.
Why didn’t I make that call? Why didn’t I follow up that contact? Why didn’t I go to that event? Why didn’t I respond to that letter? Why didn’t I write that story buzzing around in my brain?
Nine years ago, about 5 weeks removed from my latest relapse into my addiction to crack cocaine, the decision I was grappling was the walk from the job I’d had for 18 years. I wanted to live my dream, go to Ireland and write a book. Three years prior, and more than five years after I’d decided and acted on a decision to stop drinking and drugging, I’d fallen into a relapse run that marked 1997 as the most dangerous and near deadly year of my life. But on that year’s final day, I’d experience a profound spiritual experience that would change my outlook on life. The second of the 12 steps, came to believe that a Power Greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity happened to me with shakes, tears and a near-fall down stagger as the feeling overwhelmed me that More than luck was involved with the escape I’d just had from a prowl to get high. A broken heart from a romance jilt, in fact, had precipitated the prowl and the relapses that took place from the next April through August probably had something to do with my refusal to give up on that woman. I did give up when I met her with my ex-good friend with whom she’d moved in.
August of ’98 was the end of that particular run and that was the first of three straight Augusts where I’d threatened to leave that job. The relapses though scared me into staying. Plus I was in this Masters program at the University of Pennsylvania whose hospital had been my employer all those years. Indeed I’d gotten that Master of Liberal Arts degree in May ‘00, and when the safety net of a sort-of-promised layoff was removed, the fear and fret of leaving triggered the July 25 and August 7 relapses that year. None has happened since.
“No major changes until a whole year sober” was the advice my recovery program espoused. My more practical and down to earth friends and family told me I was crazy to consider leaving. But the more impractical, the dreamers, the chance-takes told me I had to follow my heart. Importantly my mom, without whose blessing it would have been very hard to go, while she did not exactly endorse the idea, did say, “Jimmy you have to do what you what you believe you have to do.” As it turned out my final day at that job, it was on her 81st birthday. I was about ten days into my Ireland pilgrimage when I first called back home, and the joy and blessing in her voice put a bounce back in my steps that had temporarily gotten heavy.
As I look back on it, perhaps that Higher Power had wanted my faith in His/Her love and protection to be the only safety net I required. Leaps of faith, they call them, and doubtless that was the most profound I’d ever taken.
So now it is nine years later. I work ‘in the field’. The wild, rambling, too long and poorly edited book did not sell many copies. The no work, or part time work honeymoon ended about 4 years ago as I have to pay the bills. I just finished my 5th book but this is only the 2nd I got published, and for this one I hired a real (and expensive!) editor. At 100 pages it’s near three hundred shorter than the first one and it is called Twelve Steps to Change a World. But some of the - what if? How come? where to? buzzards are circling around it and me.
I have a website and some hard copies of the book. But I’ve had little luck taking the non-addicted through the 12 steps which is the intent of the book. I’m fretting about the cover as a lot of people tell me it doesn’t work. (Including one niece who was in the first row of the ‘go for it’ crowd nine years ago.)
But the safety net of no return to the drug or the drink is now as solid as the rock called earth. Recovery was affirmed in me the day I walked out of that job and onto that plane and into the palms of my Creator’s will. As the plethora of things I cannot do with the pittance of time off I am allotted in this job I switched to 11 months ago, I am getting antsy again. But the money situation is far tighter than it was nine years ago and with this job at least I am helping some people.
Faith…protection….love…guidance….change. The piece-by-piece, day-by-day, year-by-year way those 12 steps have taken me to a place of fulfillment and meaning is almost magical in its apparentness. And one needs not walk on the high wire of substance addiction to fall into the benevolent hand of this God who only wants for all of us to be happy.
May the good Lord help me to overcome the fear and the procrastination and the whatever and guide me to guide more of His children back into the loving bosom of His will.
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