I’m grateful for a quiet Friday morning. I’m grateful for the parts of Spring that are peeking out. I’m grateful for learning how to let things happen. I’m grateful for a program that simply asks me to find my purpose. I’m grateful for Easter and what it represents. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I know that I go on and on about how the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous is about spirituality and not religion. I apologize if it’s getting tiresome, but it’s way better than the dead horses I used to beat.1 But it’s Good Friday and Easter Weekend and I think I’m going to walk over to the other side of the plate and see if we can drop one in right field.2
I spent a lot of time in churches growing up. We were at every 8:00 am service of worship at Zion Lutheran Church during the 1970s. It gets pretty cold and snowy in Iowa in the winter and I’m pretty sure that if you were to examine the data, it would show that it is measurably colder and darker on Sunday mornings. My Dad occupied a number of service positions in the Church, so this meant we not only did Church, we did Sunday School, if there was a Potluck at noon, we were there for that and then we’d often come back later in the afternoon to count the money and make the weekly deposit at the First National Bank of Iowa City.
I would spend those afternoons prowling around an empty, quiet church, investigating all of the mysterious rooms with names like “The Vestry.” I loved sneaking into the “Adult Education Lounge” which was a weird, kind of swanky oasis in the basement of the church—the reason for its existence was never made clear for me.
I used to get that slightly-afraid, little chills going up and down my back feeling as I quietly reconnoitered the empty church. I guess I wondered if I was going to encounter God. Part of me already wondered why it was necessary for us to gather in this one particular building? And was 8am strictly necessary? I wondered if churches were kind of a “build it and they will come” type of thing?3 I wondered if there was some formula that God needed to hear before he would show up—is that why we recited the same things from the front of the Hymnal every Sunday? Also, weren’t there lots of other groups in lots of other very similar buildings doing pretty much the same thing?
More importantly, was it really God who decided that every Wednesday of my Junior High career needed to be spent in the basement of the church poring over Luther’s Catechism? I had Catholic friends who did the First Communion thing at a pretty young age and with no real knowledge required. I will tell you, getting confirmed in the 8th Grade was a real push—as a Lutheran, they require you to know shit and even recite it before you get to kneel down and sip (or shoot) those little glasses containing the representation of Jesus’ blood. Or Mogen David wine—which somehow seemed strangely ironic.4
True fact. We typically only had communion once a month at Zion and I dreaded it because it added about 15 minutes on to the service. But once I was confirmed, I actually began bringing chewing gum with me to church. I remember showing my friend Brett T. after church one Sunday that I now had wine-flavored Juicy Fruit. hahahaha. I was a little proto-alcoholic in the 8th Grade.
I used to sit quietly in all of the different parts of the sanctuary on those afternoons. We usually sat in pretty much the same place every Sunday, so sitting in the dark, empty church I would make bold experiments. I wondered what it was like to sit over on the side pews that ran perpendicular to the main, God-facing ones. See—you only ended up sitting over there on Easter and Christmas Eve and only if you didn’t know to come early to get the seats that actually faced God. I think the common assumption was the folks in those pews were probably looking at eternity in those same shameful seating arrangements. Norwegian Lutherans are tough; It’s not enough to believe, you also have to show up early.
Just as sobriety was beyond my imagination, so was God. The version I heard about on Sundays was very confusing. I mean, on the one hand, there seemed to be a lot of specific directions about how to live life and based on the readings, it sure seemed like God used to talk a lot more to folks. He used to constantly have conversations with various prophets and Kings and what not, and yet, anyone these days who reports having a “conversation” with “God?”
It occurred to me that the Bible, the thing that was supposed to guide my life with all of these specific directions, was a collection of stories that I would never, ever believe if someone told me in person. You killed a giant with your slingshot? Super Bad. My Dad administered the coup de grace: St. Paul, the guy who wrote all of those letters telling everyone what Christianity was—he never actually crossed paths with Jesus. He did claim to have had many supernatural chat-sessions that informed his views—so it’s all cool, I guess.
So what to believe?
Thomas Jefferson published a version of the New Testament where he put the quotes from Jesus in red—the idea was to separate out the divine from the prose around it. The stripped down New Testament has a different flavor. The thing that Jesus commands is mostly love. He boils down the heavy on livestock and coveting Original Ten to these two: Love God and Love your Neighbor as Yourself.5 When people ask, "How do I get to Heaven?" Jesus gives a pretty blunt answer with a kind of funny made-up-metaphor.6
I’m not sure I can really delineate everything I believe, and I think that “faith” is often just wanting to believe something. The reason I want to believe in the story of the New Testament is not because I think there is a literal resurrection coming or that eternal damnation awaits those who make a few too many bad choices. The part of the message that appeals to me is simply the humanity of it.
God doesn’t appear in that story as some impossible to conceive, impossible to ignore countenance. He shows up as a carpenter’s son. Joseph, his own earthly father, is not entirely convinced that Jesus is even his son, but he loves him like one. That’s a beautiful part of the story that doesn’t get talked about too much—the example of unconditional love set by Joseph for a boy whose real father… Well, it would be an interesting story today and hopefully would not involve Maury Povich.
Part of the reason I got sober was that I was finally able to imagine a different life, a different worldview. Instead of a lonely, barren place where it was up to me to forge an existence and it was ok to take what I wanted or thought I needed, I came to believe I inhabited a world animated by some weird, inexplicable force. This force rewarded acts of selflessness and love with more opportunities to be selfless and show love. Even though I was a Lutheran, I didn't think this was a world where someone just put a list on the door and told everyone to pay attention—he’d be back.7
A story that is near the center of my conception of my Higher Power is the wedding at Cana. Is this story true? That’s not the point. As we lawyers like to say, “it’s not being admitted for the truth or the falsity of the matter asserted,” it simply shows a conception of a higher power. It’s about love and humanity and kindness. As the story is told, Jesus is at a wedding with his Mom, they’re friends of hers and they catastrophically run out of wine! Mary starts wheedling: ”this is such a shame, there must be something you can do?” In my head, I can hear young Jesus let out an exasperated, “Mom?!” Mary’s not going to let go, “You’re telling me there’s nothing you can do? I’ve seen what you do in the backyard.”8 Jesus relents and reluctantly turns water into wine. It wasn't in service of some dramatic bold principle other than this:
It was an act of love for someone he loved
For me, that’s the belief at the bottom of my conception of a higher power, that acts of love generate more acts of love. That acts of love often result in miracles. The story that illustrates my higher power’s characteristics isn’t about obedience or justice or punishment. It’s not about right or wrong. I’m not sure this is how God described some of the powers that he was imbuing Jesus with before sending him on the mission:
”You’ll be able to cure the halt and the lame, raise the dead in some situations, calm storms on the ocean and improbably feed thousands with but a little food. Oh, and if you need to turn water into wine, just point your finger…”
When you look at the “miracles,” it’s just love at the bottom. Love for his friend Lazarus, love for the child-like weirdo hanging from the tree, love for his scared friends on a boat, love for his mom. That’s the conception of a Higher Power that helped me get sober, helped restore me to sanity.
I really love Easter. I love the flowers, I love the philosophy of Spring, I love the music, I love the little kids all dressed up, I love the candy and the Easter Egg Hunts. Not because they are cogent, organized parts of my religion or because they illustrate the tenets of my faith. They mostly remind me of acts of love from my family. Ecclesiastically, they remind me that all I need to do is love the people around me, including myself. It’s little acts of love that got me sober and it’s little acts of love that keep me sober.
In my case, it was love that finally turned the wine into sparkling water.
I’ve never “beaten” a horse alive or dead, or any other kind of animal for that matter. In fact, I think I can say that no animals have been harmed as a consequence of my sobriety (unless you count frozen Reese’s Miniature Cups as “sentient”). I did play a game with my Labs called “Dog Professional Wrestling,” but that was mostly a lot of rolling around and snarling. The dogs, of course…
I know I switched from the singular to the plural in that sentence. Isn’t that part of my right to select my pronouns?
Fun fact, “Field of Dreams,” was based on a much, much superior book “Shoeless Joe,” by W.P. Kinsella set near Iowa City. The corporeal “Field of Dreams” is located just outside Dyersville.
Another true fact: My first “drink” was actually a mouthful of Mogen David wine from my grandmother’s refrigerator. I was seven and looking for the grape juice and it was a pretty unpleasant surprise. It does make you wonder if “irony” is a sacred trait.
“Neighbor” never seemed like the right word, particularly to someone who found Mr. Rogers just a little bit hinky.
“Camel through the eye of a needle” is a catchy visual.
My mom employed a similar approach with the “Chore List” on the refrigerator.
This is not the actual Gospel account.