Angels and the 12th Step

On Sunday morning, I went to my favorite Step meeting where we tackled the last half of the 12th step in the 12x12. Because that chapter is so long and covers so much, this group covers it in two meetings instead of one. The woman who shared her story afterward, I'll call her Dee, was asked to chair the meeting because she was celebrating her 4th year of sobriety and the secretary wanted Dee to share her story with her AA family. What struck me most about her chair was how Dee talked so poignantly about the shame she carried into these meetings over four years ago---when she drank into oblivion one night and then passed out between her two sleeping kids. That shame.

The next day, as Dee sat at her desk at school, another teacher who Dee knew to be a recovering alcoholic, appeared at the door and asked how Dee was doing. Dee looked up from her desk and saw this other teacher as an "angel" --- Dee told her she had a problem with drinking and asked for help. The angel helped her get to her first meeting and begin down a path of recovery. In the early days of AA these angels were called sponsors: the ones who helped us get in the doors of AA.

This story touched my heart deeply, but before I could talk, another friend of mine who has maybe 15 or so years sober, raised his hand because he too was touched deeply by this story.
He's not typically one to get emotional, but Sunday, he almost lost it before he got three words out of his mouth. It doesn't matter what he said--in fact, I can't remember what he said--all I remember though was that this woman's story touched him to his core. Just as it had me.

I really don't remember much from this meeting because my mind was reeling during most of the meeting---remembering back to a time when I was in my early 20s. I had finished my four years in the Navy and for a variety of reasons had decided to become a Catholic priest. Toward that end, I became a member of a religious order called the Jesuits. Before I actually entered the Jesuits though, I spent a summer at a Jesuit retreat house in Los Altos, California called El Retiro.

That summer, I spent reading and walking and meditating on what I was planning to do with my life. While I was there, I met several amazing Jesuit priests. One older priest was quite strange though: he was brilliant, had a photogenic memory (could not only quote lines from books he'd read years ago but could go grab the book from amongst this shelves and stacks of books and could go straight to the page where that quote was located), was a very popular spiritual director to what seemed to be hundreds of women (religious and lay) a fact which struck me as odd because this priest seemed, certainly at first glance, a rather gruff and angry man (but they flocked to him regardless), and last of all, he was a fanatic about watching Mission Impossible every week. He loved Mission Impossible because, as he said, all those technical gadgets used on that show "actually exist!" Anyway, I got close to this guy over the months.

Anyway, this recent Sunday after Dee's chair, I remembered back to one night when they were having some sort of anniversary celebration for the El Retiro retreat house and had invited a lot of their donors to share in the celebration with mass, drinks and dinner. One couple who attended was a former nun and former priest who had both left religious life, fallen in love and gotten married some years before. They came to the celebration that night with their young daughter who was maybe 2 years old and the only child at the event. I saw right away that the girl was out of place and bored, so I offered to babysit her during all the events that evening. And with the blessing of the old crotchety Jesuit Mission Impossible fanatic, the parents agreed to let me do this for them.

I then took the girl traipsing through the hills, showed her all my favorite paths, trees and views. Showed her the decomposing things that I'd come across on these acres and acres of woods. Kids like decomposing things. We played games and ended the evening watching some kids show on TV. She fell asleep on my lap as all the adults were in the next room having drinks, telling stories and laughing. Sometime later as the evening was coming to a close, the old Jesuit came over to me and leaned down to me and whispered in my ear: "You know Mike, not many people know this, but shortly before Ignatius (founder of the Jesuits back in the 16th century) died, he told a confidant/friend that the way you could tell if someone was going to make a great Jesuit was that they would have all the qualities that would make them a great father or parent. Mike.... You're going to make a truly great Jesuit!" I remember being really touched by this comment. This guy wasn't known (to me) as being a kind, supportive or encouraging kind of person. But he was then. And I really wanted to be great at something!

But it wasn't until this recent Sunday morning that I realized that one of my life long dreams and desires has always been to be a good father. In fact, I eventually left the Jesuits because after four years of that way of life, I realized that I had never even considered marriage as an option for me. I'd never ever seen one work. All of the marriages I had seen, including my own parents, had ended in divorce, most of them bitter. I ultimately left the Jesuits because I needed to find out if marriage was an option I wanted to consider and within a very short time, I met a woman who would later become my wife....just recently for 28 years. With her, I became father to three wonderful and different children.

And while I always tried to be a good father, the drinking became more and more of an obsession for me. Parenting and adulthood were stress-filled activities and I never ever felt up to the challenge without the assistance of something outside of myself. Alcohol ultimately became my primary, if not only, solution. The disease seemed to grow very very gradually in me. Over the first 20 years of our marriage, I think I probably had maybe 6 or 7 "incidents" where my drinking crossed a line and was out of control. Each incident ended with me waking up, not remembering what I'd done or said (my wife would, unfortunately, have no problem remembering...or sharing) and feeling tremendously remorse and shame over what I'd done. I'd swear never to do that again. And I wouldn't. Well, I would never do "exactly" that again....but I would eventually always do something quite similar to it sometime in the future. And the something similar always had something to do with alcohol.

Like the woman who told her story on Sunday, I hit my bottom with tremendous shame and guilt over the fact, or rather, the perception that I'd ended up being the most horrible and despicable father ever in the history of the world. The shame was most intense when my 15 year old son reached his bottom and began trying to get clean: the shame came from the fact that while I asked to stop drinking, both to provide him a safe place to live and to show him that his father could deal with life without chemical assistance, I simply couldn't.

There was simply no way that with all the stress in my life (most of it related to my son!) that I could go any number of days without alcohol to relieve the stress and get me through the day. And I didn't. For the next 10 months I drank in secret, without getting caught. Most often, I drank in bars after dropping my son off at his AA or NA meetings. In the short period of time I would have while Pat was in his meeting, I would rarely have time to get really drunk. But I would have time to have two large very dry gin martinis: and that would at least "tide me over". It was only those few times where I would say "Yes!" to the hostess' offer of a third drink that I would feel drunk, where I knew I shouldn't be driving and that I should avoid all close contact with my wife so that she wouldn't smell the gin.

Yes. I connected with this Dee's sense of shame. And when she talked about her "angel" I knew who my angel was: it was my son Pat. Pat was my angel not because he approached me about my drinking problem, but because he was getting clean and sober. He wasn't trying to judge me. The last night I drank, Pat did smell something on my breath (it was actually oozing out of my skin!) and asked me if I had been drinking. I so wanted to tell him the truth. I'd seen how compassionate he'd been with others who had relapsed and how forgiving he had been of himself for his own relapses (for the first five months, he couldn't stay clean for more than 5-10 days! I'd try to be encouraging and tell him that "relapse is sometimes part of this process Pat..." but he would smile and say, "Dad, I haven't really "lapsed" yet, so these aren't relapses!").

But I couldn't tell him the truth because if I did, well, then I would have to stop drinking! And I simply could not stop drinking! That was my hell! I couldn't stop! So I lied. Pat accepted that lie without judgment or recrimination or attack. He said, "Oh, I smelled something like alcohol and I had to ask. Someone must have spilled something on the ground around here."

So, this Sunday morning I was blessed with one of those miracles --- where our lives flash before our eyes and everything all falls into place and makes perfect sense. All I ever really wanted to be was a good father. And I was. And I am. All because of my angel of a son. I'm looking forward to May this year because he will, "him willing", celebrate 8 years clean time. A month later in June, he'll turn 24 years old. And, me willing (and with pure grace/gift), will hopefully celebrate my 8 years of sobriety in October.

How does all this apply to the 12th step? Contrary to what most people seem to believe, for me, the 12th step is not primarily about sponsoring people or getting other people sober even. And if you read the 12x12 carefully, I think that Bill would agree with me. The very first sentence in the chapter about the 12th step, talks about the "joy of living" being the theme of the 12th step. And then at the very end of the same chapter, Bill ends with a statement that "the joy of good living" is the theme of the 12th step. The "joy" Bill is talking about is not some legalistically conforming way of life. It's life to the fullest. It's honest, true, fragile, emotional, uncomfortable, painful, scary. It's in our face. Right here, right now! This is the joy that Dee saw in this other teacher, a recovering alcoholic, and it was the fact that that joy was evident in a person practicing recovery that allowed one young woman to reach out and ask for help. In effect, she was saying I can't continue doing what I'm doing and I see that you know what that's like and have found a way out. Help me!

And that's the joy I started to see in my son, my angel, as he began his own journey of recovery. And that's what let me reach out to him and ask for help. Without him, I wouldn't have come in these rooms as early as I did, if at all. And since then, others have come to me as their "angel" and I have done what Pat did with me: I've helped them into the safe rooms of AA and got them started on their own journeys of recovery. I think that's all 12th step work.

And this is how I got addicted to AA meetings.

Take care!

Mike L.