I’m grateful for a chilly morning on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for sweatshirts. I’m grateful for letting what’s happened be. I’m grateful for the moments peace and calm shine through. I’m grateful for what is. I’m grateful to be sober today.
As you may know, I frequently tell people that Alcoholics Anonymous actually does work. I sometimes feel like I’m telling people a fairy tale or the plot line of a very weird movie. It’s a story that doesn’t really make a lot of sense at some critical junctures. It’s a story that doesn’t always make sense to me.
It’s a story of someone who was very hard working and relatively successful, but who managed to push everyone and every thing aside in favor of a succession of bar stools and absolutely meaningless days and nights. To the outside, his near constant drinking, erratic behavior, frequent avowals of new-found sobriety, the lies, the simply not showing up when promised, seemed like a big, huge f*** you to everyone who tried to love him, or even just like him.
In this story, the alcoholic tries literally everything and nothing produces more than a few months of white-knuckled but greatly-extolled periods of not drinking. Sometimes people left the alcoholic out of anger, a lot of times it was just resignation and sadness. The alcoholic started to think there really wasn’t a way to pull out of the dive. To paraphrase the Shawshank Redemption,
“You can live one day at a time or you can die one day at a time.”
This alcoholic was dying one day at a time. Then some more really bad things “happened,” and the alcoholic found himself smoking cigarettes on the back balcony of a sober house on 84th Street in New York. At this point, the alcoholic is introduced to another alcoholic and they begin to work the steps together. It’s the Fall of 2020, the Pandemic is raging and the “work sessions” are usually conducted on a rickety table in front of the Gracie Mews diner on First Avenue.
The alcoholic was 58 years old when he moved to New York, should have been at the pinnacle of a successful career, thinking of retiring in the not so distant future, getting that handicap into single digits. The alcoholic was living in a sober house and was breathalyzed every time he left and returned.
The alcoholic is told that writing a daily gratitude list might help change the really negative, bitter, angry attitude that is pretty observable and that seems to drive the desire to drink. The alcoholic begins to write a daily gratitude list and is going to meetings every day, sometimes two or three (this alcoholic had lots of time to do zoom meetings from the kitchen). The alcoholic suddenly had a year of sobriety.
One morning that Spring, the alcoholic woke up to a text from the Sponsor, the person who was showing him how to be sober, and it basically said, “I’m sorry.” The alcoholic was shaken to the very core. How could someone with that much sobriety, that strong a program, someone who ran a big daily meeting, relapse? The alcoholic realized that this was probably how the people in his life felt every time he relapsed.
The alcoholic was introduced to another alcoholic, who introduced him to another alcoholic, who said he could be a Sponsor. They read the book together for an hour every week. The alcoholic would read a page or so out loud and then the Sponsor would go through and tell the alcoholic what to underline and why. Basically, the alcoholic was to underline just about everything.
The alcoholic was told to write his story in the fashion that Bill W. told his in Chapter One of the Big Book. The alcoholic was told to read the story as closely as possible, to really dissect it. The Sponsor was a lawyer and so was the alcoholic, so this was easy. The alcoholic outlined Bill W’s story and looked closely at the narrative structure of those sixteen pages. The alcoholic noted that the story was not filled with debaucherous reminisces about drinking, it was filled with turning points and realizations.
The alcoholic began writing his own story, and realized the turning points and realizations were pretty much the same as the story in Chapter One of the Big Book, even down to the calendar. There was the recognition early on that he drank very differently than his friends. The recognition very early on that it would probably lead to his demise, in one way or another. The alcoholic saw his own failures to stop or control his drinking mirrored in Bill’s story. The alcoholic reached his own place of utter desolation, where he realized he couldn’t control his drinking, that nothing had worked, that if he continued to drink he would certainly die or be institutionalized. He kept drinking.
Then, like in Chapter One of the Big Book, another alcoholic (or two or three) showed up and said simply, “here’s how I did it.” The alcoholic fights this, explains why his situation is different, how he’s too sophisticated to believe in this simple program being described. The alcoholic scoffs at the naive beliefs held by these recovering alcoholics. He believes what worked for them couldn’t work for him.
The miracle, when it comes, is very subtle and quiet. It was not announced with the blast of heraldic trumpets or Roman Cavalry choirs singing. The alcoholic was listening to this song a lot:
The alcoholic is out walking one day and realizes that his entire life, the thing he has worked so incredibly hard to create, has fought so hard to establish, the kingdom he defended against hordes of orc-like enemies, was not built to last.
The alcoholic realized his entire world was built on pillars of salt, pillars of sand.
The alcoholic realized his kingdom had actually already crumbled. It was gone, washed away like it was always going to be.The story in Chapter One stared the alcoholic in the face, and these were the words that suddenly couldn’t be avoided:
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
That was it. The great miracle was not borne on eagle’s wings, it was the simple realization that the alcoholic was not actually God and that what had worked for other alcoholics might work for him.
That sounds like a sappy, highly-embellished and certainly kind of improbable story. To be snarky, it doesn’t seem like that much of a “miracle.” Except that it is. The alcoholic’s faith tradition very much celebrates the finding of the lost, the redeeming of the irredeemable. The image of a young, bearded shepherd carrying a lost lamb back to the flock on his shoulder is really beautiful, but here’s how that actually happened.
The alcoholic read the Book and realized that the story in the first sixteen pages was his story.1 The alcoholic, guided by the patient examples and steadfast love shown him by other alcoholics, realized that what had worked for them, could also work for him. The alcoholic ceded control of his will and his life to a great mysterious power that he doesn’t really understand, that takes him in directions he never imagined, and that speaks in weird sentence fragments at really odd times.
The story is certainly not Hollywood-grade, and may seem a bit underwhelming to the outside world. But here’s the thing: The alcoholic is coming up on four years of sobriety after years of not making it to four months.
The alcoholic knows that is a miracle and would like you to know about it.
There are 90 gazillion more stories in the back of the book if that first one doesn’t grab you.
One gift this program gives me is a good example of what having childlike faith looks like.
You just wrote my story, albeit much better than I ever could. I knew I was an alcoholic at 25, but didn’t make it to AA until my 54th year. Why? Because I was too smart for AA, I could manage it by myself...playing God. Now I’m 10 years into the miracle, still hard to believe it works.
I appreciate your daily shares, not many of us have the talent to accurately articulate what and how an alcoholic thinks, so it’s refreshing to read every morning.