Quieting the Storm

Consider Matthew 8:23-27.

A woman I sponsor mentioned she anticipates storms in her area of the country today. That set me to thinking. Storms in large part are a matter of attitude--no matter which kind of storms we're talking about. When I went to graduate school in Nashville after growing up in the area and time about which Elmer Kelton wrote his classic The Time It Never Rained I was delighted that it sprinkled or rained almost daily in that part of Tennessee. I have a friend who dearly loves to sit out and watch the violent rainstorms we do occasionally have, though she was in a house a tornado skipped over when she was about five. I do love a good storm, though I don't like having a dog too big to easily get under (and our from!) the bed who cowers under it when thunder abounds.

But the storms we have to deal with in OA are those internal storms, and they're all a matter of mind over matter as well--or actually of getting your own mind out of it and turning it over to your higher power who quiets the storms within. Somebody I'm around often has a habit of saying to me, "God damn you!" Yesterday, my response was inspired. In a much calmer voice than the comment made, I answered, "God bless you!" You know, it had a much more quieting effect than those times when I've answered fire with fire. I've never invited damnation on anybody, but when that same person called me a b___ earlier in the long weekend, I called him a different "b" word impugning his mother. That one spattered out rather quickly, too, but not with the same quieting the storm effect.

Jesus' disciples were amazed. ""What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!"

Miracles happen with the 12 steps, too:

If you persist, remarkable things will happen. When we look back, we realize
that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were
better than anything we could have planned. Follow the dictates of a Higher
Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what
your present circumstances! (AA Big Book, page 100)

God bless you! May your storms be delightful rain or lovely shows of power, but may your serenity prevail no matter what your present circumstances!

Welcome, Lady Salsa

You'll find a new OA blogger listed to the right, LadySalsa in Australia posting about her "journey to me." Welcome, kindred spirit! We love you!

Continuing in my perusal of "We Agnostics," Chapter 4 of the Big Book, I pause reading:

• We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves.
• In the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the total failure of their human resources, they found that a new power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them.
• ...they were making heavy going of life. Leaving aside the drink [food] question, they tell why living was so unsatisfactory.
• The Wright brothers' almost childish faith....
• Logic is great stuff. We like it. We still like it. It is not by chance we were given the power to reason, to examine the evidence of our senses, and to draw conclusions.
• Hence we are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said, "We don't know."
• ...either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn't. What was our choice to be?
• We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow, we couldn't quite step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning too heavily on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.
• How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason?
• What about people who proved that man could never fly?

Of course besides the classic passage of God is everything or nothing stands on the opposite page from a powerful paragraph as well, the bedevilments. And yes, I often pause there, and I go back and seek them out to show people, to compare with the powerful promises set out in the text on Step 9.

Crutches, both physical walking devises and symbolic ones, serve a valid purpose. A speaker can have excellent command of a topic, yet rely so heavily on notes nothing but the bare essentials is communicated, passing on none of the passion or interest of the subject matter. As long as we work on not being hurt again, we don't strengthen muscles and reach full recovery, instead leaning on a walking stick or holding an injured arm close. After surgery on my shoulder, the stretching exercises inflicted sheer agony, even when I used the other arm to raise the injured one with a pulley device. Yet by going through that and learning not just to do it with a the device but later by creeping up the wall with my fingers, I reached the point the shoulder is actually stronger than the never-injured one.

"If I turn it over to God, who's going to move my parents, who's going to clean the kitchen, who's going to comfort my child?" The idea our world cannot function absent our control is a crutch. Telling God what he needs to do to help us is a crutch. Asking him for specific outcomes is substituting our will for his, a crutch of holding onto the control. Maybe there's some faith there, but it's about as helpless as the hurt arm. Turning it over to God is tough, like the Wright brothers getting in a machine and trusting it to fly. People had proven that was impossible! Had somebody not trusted beyond the powers of reason, we'd all be earth-bound. Unless you become like a little child, you can't get there, you can't find serenity, you can't find wings to fly beyond your wildest dreams.

In early 1974 I turned in my resignation to a wise man. I hated to do it, didn't want to disappoint him. But I was going to get married and leave that city. He made the conversation easy. He told me the hardest part of his job was getting and keeping good staff, but that everybody moved on sometime, and the enterprise would go on with somebody filling my role.

Today's For Today reading hits the nail on the head, speaking of turning over the responsibility for tomorrow's outcome to our higher power. At an OA meeting Saturday a gentleman spoke of the wisdom of his seven-year-old daughter. "What you're worrying about probably isn't going to happen, so I choose not to worry about it." We still move our parents, clean the kitchen, parent our child--but God controls the outcome and we can trust him.

God doesn't need us at the helm. He really can steer the ship. And he does it infinitely better than any of us ever could. Let's let him.

We Agnostics or Whatever

Reading on in Chapter 4 of the Big Book Alcoholics Anonymous I pause at:

• "Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?"
• Faced with alcoholic [compulsive eating] destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol [food] was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process.
• Everybody nowadays, believes in scores of assumptions for which there is good evidence, but no perfect visual proof. And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof?
• ...our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out to convince ourselves it isn't so. 
• ...thinking we believe...
• ...our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn't it?
• Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting....
• ...a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.

People whose job it is to sit through trials, both jury and non-jury, know well the reliability of eye-witness testimony. How reliable is it? Not very. Yet those people who have attended few trials, who find themselves in the jury box, put heavy weight on what people think they saw. Many wrongful convictions have occurred in that manner. "And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof?" 

A while ago, some friends of mine worked with an email message going around wherein an animated gif (a moving drawing) appeared to be spinning in circles. Depending on how you perceived it, she could be turning clockwise or counterclockwise. A friend of mind, unable to see her turning right no matter how hard she worked, was significantly impacted by the branding as a left-brain person. Yet it's in staring at an optical illusion, trying to analyze it and mentally conquer it, we reach frustration. It can't be done intellectually. 

I don't think it matters whether you approach finding the God of your understanding from a position of steeped in theology and doctrine or one of adamant disbelief in one aspect. The thoughts and convictions previously reached stand in the way of making it not a matter of working on understanding but of accepting like a child, just grabbing hold of the parent's hand and going, trusting. And I don't know how a sponsor helps a person make that leap from the head to the heart. My words don't seem to be doing the trick. 

So, have I fully made that leap? I firmly believe that's true. I believe it in my head, but MUCH more importantly, I believe it in my heart. Comments and suggestions as to what to tell a person sponsored, though, are mightily welcome.

"I'm a Christian, and...."

Working on Step 2, I read the first three pages of "We Agnostics" this morning. Several phrases caught my eye:

• Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves. Obviously....
• And it means, of course, that we are going to talk about God....
• ...even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God.
• The Realm of the Spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive, never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men.

The BB reading juxtaposed itself beside a snippet from an otherwise productive conversation last night. That snippet was, "I'm a Christian, and...." Now, the conversation was not in a void. But that statement, from a person my new sponsor has already identified as having very solid footing on my resentments list. Why is it the people who have to point out they're a Christian don't seem to be? And why do I feel a lot freer to talk about my history in the church--that I've been church staff in three churches, have a degree in Christian ed, wrote UMC literature--and I would tend to choke on the words, "I'm a Christian, and..." in casual conversation.
OA Tradition Three says the only membership requirement is a desire to stop eating compulsively. There are those who would list a set of prerequisites, a plan of salvation, for the right to say, "I'm a Christian," but that list grates like the phrase to me. A convicted felon said, "Don't you fear God since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong." And then, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." That was enough. Asking. Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise." (quotations from NIV, Luke 23:40-43)

An earnest desire. It's enough. "It is open, we believe, to all."

I walk on my side of the street. I have no obligation or right to clean up the other side. If she asks my assessment of the spirituality of her walk, I can make suggestions, tell how habits she thinks are supportive come across as one-ups-man-ship. She hasn't asked. The character defects that bug us in others tend to be our own. I'm haughty. About my religious credentials, about all kinds of things. But it's a character defect God can remove from me, from my side of the street.

I'm having trouble finishing this because God's working a miracle in my family right now! My son has an interview for a dream job! Thank God!

An Overload of Hopelessness

What a way to turn a phrase! "An overload of hopelessness." It belongs to Peter G. Lindner, M.D., who also said:

• Submission implies no real acceptance of one's inadequacy; on the contrary, it demonstrates conclusively that the struggle is still going on. Submission is, at best, a superficial yielding, with the inner tensions still present. When the individual accepts, on an unconscious level, the reality of not being able to handle compulsive overeating, there is no residual battle. Relaxation ensues with a freedom from strain and conflict. This freedom is the aim of the OA groups, and complete surrender is manifested by the considerable degree of relaxation which is evident in the behavior of those who have achieved it.
• ...constructive action takes the place of skin-deep assurances that will merely comply temporarily until the memory of their suffering and self-pity weakens and the need for compliance lessens.
• Surrender, then, is an unconscious event.
• ...after all, it is our thoughts that precede our emotions, and it is our emotions that make us eat inappropriately and become physically obese. (all from Appendix B, Overeaters Anonymous, 2nd ed.)

A woman steeped in the wisdom of AA gave me a copy of Overeaters Anonymous, and I surprised myself by reading it--at least I read the stories. That was in December of 2006, and reading the stories softened me up and led me at that moment when I cried out for help, telling God, "This is stupid." It was kind of by way of saying grace over that last sweet roll and large vending machine cappuccino December 17, 2006, the day I found OA (or, I think, OA found me.) Now another kind woman, steeped in the wisdom of OA as well as AA, pointed out to me those pesky sections I hadn't bothered to read, not then, not ever until yesterday and today: The appendices. (I also read the Foreword, but I think I'd actually read it when I first got the book.)

Submission is superficial yielding; surrender yields a considerable degree of relaxation. I've written here on surrender before. (Surrender, among others.) But had I figured out what surrender means? Wasn't my surrendering in Step 1 conditional? I know it was. My first defined abstinence, (after the get-through-Christmas-and-New-Years-trip period) was pretty much a particular program, but I could take one bite of anything. I lost weight that way, felt righteous and yet not "deprived." When I got a new sponsor six months later she said give up sugar, and I did. Pretty much. Almost completely. The one bites were REALLY exceptional. Then there was the hard candy. But not much. Surrender? No, that was submission. My idea of years in OA at my ideal weight were always going back to eating a bite of anything I wanted to. Certainly the struggle, subdued though it's been, persisted.

I am part of the "we." We admitted we were powerless over food. I admit it. That's the part I glossed over. Admitting my life was unmanageable? Easy. I think. We'll see how long that conviction stands. No sugar today. None yesterday. Gosh, God, do you really mean no more dates as long as they have the sprinkles of sugar?

And how do you plan an unconscious event?

About Resentments

The counselor, in suggesting I work with the old humiliation/shame feelings, directed me toward the story in the AA BB on page 544 (4th ed.) "Freedom From Bondage." I'd read the particular page she mentioned, 552, yesterday morning but with more time today I read the whole story. Boy, does it speak to me. Bits and pieces that tug at me:

• I am a result of the way I reacted to what happened to me....
• ...aware of emotions I'd not counted on: restlessness, anxiety, fear, and insecurity....
• ...I had acquired an average amount of intellectual training in the intervening years, but there had been no emotional maturity at all....
• ...necessary to escape from myself, for my remorse and shame and humiliation ... were almost unbearable....
• With deep shame came the knowledge too that I had lived with no sense of social obligation nor had I known the meaning of moral responsibility to my fellow men.
• ...reality too has two sides: ... but now I had a chance to learn about the pleasant side as well....
• "happy are ye who know these things and do them."
• "The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it."

So. Those will guide my today. Yesterday? During a long download when my computer wouldn't do much else, I opened and played the sudoku program. The pull wasn't there, and I didn't get the rush from the addiction, but that was playing with fire and with God's help won't get repeated. And I ate lots more cheese yesterday than I should have. (about 2 ounces.) Today will be better, because I'm walking with God and have asked him to control my thoughts.

Moving Forward

I worked with a counselor on the issues that caused the inappropriate eating Wednesday. I had indentified it as embarrassment over a fact I knew and forgot I knew and said I didn't know if I knew. The only people aware of my being wrong already love me and don't think less of me for being forgetful. But it bothered me. And the counselor put her finger dead center on just why it might bother me so. It's a long-standing character defect I can't quite pinpoint. Oh, I know exactly what it is. I just can't name it. Something like "embarrassment/humiliation/don't look at me/don't notice me/let me fade into the dirt, please." And the counselor suggested I write about the times I remember that being triggered. I did. Well, I don't guess I finished the list. I stopped at 84 of them I think. Just to give you a few examples....

• I was 1968 summer youth director for a church in a town owned by a petroleum company that was not Texaco. By definition, every family I worked with had at lesat one adult employed there. Before supper in a home one evening, I commented about the nice crystal glasses but went one step too far, saying at home we just drank from Texaco glasses.


• My kindergarten teacher had me sit in the corner for scratching the red vinyl top of a folding table, something "everybody else" had been doing--and stopped in time not to get caught.


• At a concert in a high school auditorium with my college band (class of 1969) I had an F handbell in one hand, a G in the other, and they were in the wrong hands from those intended. I played the wrong bell at the wrong time and was chastised by the first chair alto sax who sat in front of me.

I usually write rhymed, structured poetry to work through feelings and attitudes. This isn't rhymed or structured. But it's real....

Humiliation

Like two claws hinged
encompass my heart from behind
squeezing, gently but steady
cutting off
turning in
imploding the chest.

The warmth starts
from under the chin
creeping toward eyes
invisible hands
shielding my mortified face.

Don't look.
Don't see.
I'm not here.
I'm not me.

"How dumb can you be?"
"Stupid!"
"You arrogant, ignorant wimp."
"Who are you,
pretending to be somebody,
pretending to matter!"
"You can't do anything right."
"You're pitiful.
An imposter
masquerading as somebody.
Just quit.
Don't bother the world.
Enough of your crud."

Don't look.
Don't see.
I'm not here.
I'm not me.
For shame.