Through the Red Door Blog

All things seek to return to their own path, and all things rejoice in coming back to their nature. The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.  Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius (477-524 C.E.), trans by Thomas Powers. PARABOLA Summer 2019.  90.

At age nine I was serving Mass in a village in Northern Ireland and the thought crossed my mind, “I want to be a priest.” I had no idea what a priest did then, nor did any of us have any idea as to the twists and turns social and religious life would take throughout the sixties. I attended catholic school and boarding school. Girls left me alone as the priest told them “he has a vocation.” I didn’t know he did that till much later.

I had no idea that the environment in which I was formed was unhealthy. I didn’t care for the controls but they seemed to be within the norms of other families in the community. While other boys got caught, I learned how to be perceived as “squeeky clean and upright.” I knew that the path I was creating was not the one my soul wished for me to be on and that was why confession was created. Weekly confession made all things right.

Then came college, seminary, my first drink and, simultaneously, my first blackout. Ordination to the priesthood, more blackouts. Some of my students in Religious Ed confided in me about their experiences on LSD. I began to read and learn all I could about drugs even as I kept a few fifths in a drawer “for when friends came by.”  It was my belief that alcoholic clergy drank alone. I was given opportunities to take courses in addiction and I felt sorry for those who were addicted and those who were on Methadone. While I was working with these folks, I prided myself that I did not have a problem. Meanwhile, I was in denial that I was at war with self, others and God. God was not fighting with me. God was more like a lifeguard pushing me into calm and shallow waters to get my feet under me. Thus, treatment, aftercare, continued denial and a four and a half year long dry drunk.

Were I to step outside myself and observe my behavior, I would say that I had been crying out for help all my life.  St. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”  There is no question, I was “Restless, Irritable, and Discontent.”

Then came the day of awakening—the experience of an awareness of sobriety. Something happened and I had a spiritual awakening. I actually felt happy. I felt a feeling that made a difference to me that some thirty -seven years later, remains as fresh in my mind as the day it happened. “All things rejoice in coming back to their nature.” All my life I was taught I was born in/with original sin. No. I was born in/with an original blessing, made in the image and likeness of God. My spiritual awakening was an awareness that I was returning to that place of blessing,

“The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.” The end of my denial and the beginning of sobriety are joined together. I can’t have one without the other. Darkness and Light. Joy and Sorrow. 

My addiction in and my sobriety are joined together and interlocked with my birth in God’s blessings and my return to God’s blessing. With the guidance of my Higher Power I have been returned to the path of blessings and, like the psalmist I can sing, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it.” “All things seek to return to their own path, and all things rejoice in coming back to their nature. The only law over things is that the ending should be joined to the beginning making the course of itself stable.”

Séamus D,

New Orleans

The liturgical year is one of the things I like the most about our church. My scattery brain likes the orderly progression of the seasons, reliably anticipated and solemnly marked. Now we are in the last weeks of Epiphany, our expectations met, and we soon move on to Ash Wednesday and then forty days of Lent. We continue on life’s path, one season following another, heading once more to Easter, Pentecost, Advent, Christmas, and back to Epiphany.

So it is with our Twelve Steps…we read, study and discuss a step a week (except for Twelve, which is very long and needs two weeks) and then we start again at the beginning with Step One. We admit, come to believe, make a decision and then trudge the road of happy destiny, one day at a time--never alone and never without guidance. Recovery is sequential, predictable…ye gods, did I really just write that?

The seasons of the liturgical year might be certain, the 12 Steps might be numbered, but our progression through them seems more helical than linear or even circular. We are always ascending or descending on this corkscrew of life--spiraling up or down. As we twirl along with the seasons and steps, we notice the same markers greeting us but with different suggestions. Hello Lent, what are you asking of me this year? Hello Step One, what else am I powerless over?

This is my first year of widowhood and I’m going through the seasons and the steps with altered eyes. I’m not alone: the pandemic has made us all the bereaved--Life-as-We-Knew-It is long gone. I was feeling unsettled and very sad the other day and my daughter told me something she has learned from families who have gone through adoption. Not only are anniversaries and birthdays acknowledged, but also trauma-versaries. Our hearts, our souls, our bodies remember and record distress, separation, disruption. Emily Dickinson wrote of how “a certain slant of light” evokes despair--how profound an observation that is--ask anyone with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was feeling unsettled and sad because my body and my heart, if not my brain, recognized that it was a year ago that my beloved became so very sick in what turned out to be his final illness. My mind knows the date of his death, my soul acknowledges the decline.

The extraordinary thing is that the liturgical calendar and the Twelve Steps are strong enough to carry us through these seasons. Our needs are anticipated before we realize we have them. There are solutions. We can get clean and sober and stay clean and sober no matter what obstacles or situations we meet because we have a strong foundation and experienced guides.

A beautiful long-timer said recently at a meeting that the thing she likes the best about sobriety is congruence: her feelings match what is going on in her life. She can live in reality: when she is happy, she laughs; when she is sad, she cries; when she is mad, she yells. She does not pretend to have no feelings. She does not ignore feelings and have them slam up against her from behind and knock her over.  She has the wherewithal to live her life in the present, acknowledging what is actually going on.

And that includes recognizing that trauma-versaries are part of reality. No wonder so many people fear “PMS”--pre-medallion slips. Recognizing and celebrating our sober anniversaries necessitate that we recognize and acknowledge that we hit bottom.

Lent comes before Good Friday comes before Easter. But Easter does come. And every Sunday is a celebration of Easter. 

-Christine H.

In an address to the General Service Conference in 1965, Bill W., said: “Yes, we drunks put A.A. together, but all of the basic components were supplied by others.”* In 1965, I was going into seminary and I was a committed member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA) and my only idea of a drunk was a neighbor who drank out of a bottle in a brown bag on a wall outside the house, got sick and fell asleep. I did not know A.A. existed. God took care of that three years later as I became involved, even as I drank alcoholically and remained involved on the fringes till God kicked me into the program. The “involvement” was God’s way to prepare me for the program. I came in, reluctantly, and believing I was going to be a great resource to “these people.”

I had much to learn. In time, the one- liners made sense, spirituality began to take hold, the steps began to become a way of life as, slowly, I became “one of us.” Being “one of us”, and being an amateur historian, I began to read any and everything I could get my hands on that was directly or indirectly related to A.A. -- how it came to be, (and I was told some weird stories about that), who and what influenced it -- and, I remain grateful for the time given to me by Sam Shoemaker’s daughters.        

Shoemaker was influenced by evangelists like Frank Buchmann (The Oxford Group), who was influenced by men like John R. Mott, Samuel McComb, Dwight Moody, the “new Psychology.” In 1908 there was the Emmanuel Movement in Boston were people suffering from what was then called “Functional Nervous Disorders” were treated at Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Emmanuel Church was the headquarters of the Christian Science Movement. The clinic was run by Revs Dr. Samuel McComb (associate rector), Dr. Elwood Worcester (Rector) and Isador H. Coriat M.D. with a Four Step Program – find a higher power, confession, help others, and the power of “suggestion” (from the new Psychology). These steps found their way via Shoemaker to Bill Wilson to the Twelve Steps in terms of Step Two, Steps Four and Five, Step Twelve and” Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program.

On my own, there is no way I could or would have had anything to do with this program. I came into the program with a lot of religious baggage, Shame and Guilt. I believed in God and was scared/angry of and at God. I wanted confession as a “quick fix” and I wanted to help others so I could look good.

When sobriety happened to me, I was fascinated by the idea that God chose an atheist to bring the concept of sobriety to a devout Christian who, in turn, offered him the ‘Absolutes’ of the Oxford Group, and, with guidance they created the greatest social experiment of their century. Someone once summed it up in this way: “The Big Book is the writing of the Ages [Sages] written in Twelve Steps so a bunch of drunks could get sober.” This was put differently by Bill at the 1953 Conference: “Well, when those Twelve Steps were presented in New York, all hell broke loose. I had committed heresy; Why did we have to have twelve steps when six were just as good…We had a big hassle over those Twelve Steps…”*

Even the symbol of our society had deep roots. Bill said: “We had to have some sort of symbol and the circle seemed to indicate the movement or the group. The triangle suggested the three principal aspects: recovery, unity, and service.’ [When they settled on it] “some student of ancient history came up with this very startling announcement: he said that, in times gone by, this identical symbol was used by medicine men, magicians, wise men, whatnot, and every time they wanted to get rid of evil spirits, they just brought up and brandished this circle containing the triangle!”*

I like to think of our program as the confluence of thousands of rivulets from various hillsides and mountains that flowed down and came together to form a river into which I could be baptized, healed, restored to life, and sent off to suggest to others that real living is in becoming vulnerable, jumping in and trusting that the past will be washed clean; that we will continue with renewed energy, and we will live in gratitude for the blessings of rains creating rivulets which created our river of life.

• ·        OUR GREAT RESPONSIBILITY A Selection of Bill General Service Conference Talks. 1951-1970. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. 2019

Séamus D.
New Orleans

The Daily Lectionary gospel reading for January 21 included these verses from Mark: ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ We can also compare our Recovery to a mustard seed and this parable.

When we start attending meetings, we are small in many ways.  We are feeling fearful, less than, shameful, hopeless and helpless.  We have feelings of anger and guilt. When we stay where we’ve been planted -- right in the middle of a 12-step fellowship -- we soon start to flourish and grow.  Our circle gets larger. As we enlarge our base, our point of freedom rises. 

We not only have connections with folks in our home group, but also with our sponsorship sisters and brothers. (There is a little joke in my ‘sponsorship family’ that we are a shrub and not a tall tree because my sponsor and her sponsor, sponsor each other. So, we’re a big bushy shrub with lots or branches… another connection to this gospel reading!) We start out being of service in our group -- welcoming folks, making coffee, setting up the meeting, cleaning up afterwards.  Then we branch out and start attending the Area meeting, we hear committee meetings announced, and decide to check those out as well. 

Someone answered the helpline when we called.  We want to give back and do the same.  Someone maintained the website where we found the phone number to call.  We volunteer to help out with the website.  Someone came to the treatment center we were in and shared a message of recovery and told us about AA, NA, CA, etc. --when we had enough clean time, we wanted to do the same for others. And our branches eventually grow even more.  Maybe we ventured to other parts of the state, the region, the zone, or even on a worldwide level. 

Many of us, especially reading here, expanded our branches outside of a 12-step program, to our churches, particularly in Recovery Ministries and like me, volunteered right away to join and be a part of this wonderful ministry that blends our recovery and our Episcopal faith. 

We carry the message so that those who come after us will have a safe place, a nest if you will, a shelter from the storm that is addiction. 

January 21, 1987, was my first day free from alcohol and drugs, which makes 34 years of recovery.  34 years of growing from a tiny mustard seed, to a person with long term recovery. Someone who thrives on carrying the message of recovery far and wide.  It all started by getting to meetings early and helping to set up.  If I can make it a little easier for another hopeless, scared addict to find this life-saving program and have a safe place to grow, then I will continue to give away to others what I have learned in this program.  After all, we can’t keep what we have unless we give it away.

- Lucy O

Every year I am part of a New Year’s 12-Step retreat.  Usually, we meet from the evening of December 30 through noon on January 1.  It’s special to me because we gather people from all the “A” programs, so we get to hear wisdom from many different locations.  That retreat was where I first put together that I was eating like I used to drink.

This year was different – of course!  We couldn’t gather at the retreat house like we usually do.  We met on Zoom instead.  And that meant that people who couldn’t afford to come, or couldn’t travel, could attend.  There was a wonderful mix of familiar faces and new friends.

Each year there’s a theme, something we can all share.  This year the theme was “Going to Any Length” – appropriate for this extraordinary time in all our lives.  We traced our histories – what lengths did we go to in order to maintain our addictions?  What lengths did we go to in early recovery, or whenever times got hard?  And then we considered: what length am I willing to go to this year?  What scares me about that?  What hopes do I have for this year? 

I got some inspiration from someone who told me a slogan I hadn’t heard.  This is, again, one of the gifts I get from being with people beyond my normal range of meetings – so many slogans!  This year I got “Q-TIP”: Quit Taking It Personally.  This spoke right to me.  I take so much personally!  I assume that everyone is noticing and intending everything they do, so if the woman I live with doesn’t clean the coffee pot, she meant to leave it for me.  If any chore is left, anything “obviously” out of place, she must be expecting that I’ll take care of it.  There’s a resentment just waiting for an excuse.

Over time, I’m learning how to have conversations that clear things up.  I’ve learned that my companion honestly doesn’t see everything I do, and doesn’t particularly care about the coffee pot until the next time it’s needed.  It’s not personal.

I don’t need to “protect” myself by fostering a resentment.  I need to protect myself by noticing my reactions and assumptions, and asking God to show me a better way.

So now I have a Q-Tip on my desk, in the lap of my little stuffed lamb Agnes Day.  As I write this she’s holding it, reminding me that I am loved and I am safe – even if the kitchen is not as neat as I’d like it to be!  I don’t have to drink, or eat, or rant about it.  I can decide what to do.  Sometimes I’ll clean the pot.  Sometimes, now, I too let it sit until needed.  But if the little voice of resentment starts up, I remember: this coffee pot is not about me.  My companion’s difference in temperament and observation is not about me. 

This year one of the lengths I’m going to is to keep that Q-tip close.  I’ll call my sponsor and other recovering folks if I start to think it’s personal – whatever it is – from the coffee pot to the state of the environment.  What’s personal is my thoughts, my actions, my relationship to God.  If I pay attention to that, I will bring peace and healing to my corner of the world.

In her book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison writes: “From the night of my first buzz, I didn’t understand why everyone in the world wasn’t getting drunk every night… Scientists describe addiction as a dysregulation of the neurotransmitter functions of the mesolimbic dopamine system, which basically means your reward pathways get F’d up. “It’s a “pathological usurpation of survival impulses… When my drinking passed a certain threshold… it plunged me into darkness that seemed like honesty. It was as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false and the desperate drunk space underground was where truth lived.”

It’s just over four decades since my last drink and I can still remember my first drink which became a heck of a drunk. It was like I couldn’t get enough of everything on the table. An hour and a half earlier I had been the designated barman and all I drank was Apple Cider. When I was told it contained alcohol, I read the percentage of alcohol – slight – I decided, “I might as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb” and began to drink. I tasted every bottle of alcohol on the table, got sick, blamed others for the mess in the bathroom which I proudly acknowledge I cleaned up. The following day I purchased a motorcycle, learned how to ride it, and took myself to the nearest pub to celebrate.

I didn’t drink every night, but when I did drink, I drank alcoholically. I also assumed that everyone in the establishment was enjoying alcohol in the same manner. It would be nearly twenty years before I appreciated the learning by scientists of the destructive consequences of alcohol on my brain and in my body.

From the night of that first drink/drunk, I believed I could handle it. Alcoholics go to meetings and I was helping them find new meeting rooms in the city of Dublin at the time. I went to some open meetings, listened to the stories and knew I was not like them. [Although the first meeting I attended was enough for me to leave and get a drink. They were talking about “Honesty” and I thought they were talking about me.] Alcoholics don’t have jobs. I was a full-time student with reasonably decent grades. Alcoholics, no matter what they did or didn’t do, I was not one of them. After all, I was teaching the students about the danger of drugs and alcohol. I knew what I was talking about.

The problem was I had no idea my brain had been hijacked, rewired, and in relationship to alcohol and other drugs, I was blinded to the negative impact on my thinking, behavior and values. All of this happened without my permission, and clearly, with my permission. I had been told that I was an alcoholic and I blew it off.

“It’s a pathological usurpation of survival impulses.” I would not have gotten into a car with a driver who was blindfolded or blind. And yet, I believed myself to be a safe driver even though, the next morning, I had no recall as to how I got home. I look back now and have a great appreciation for my angel guardian.

I wish I could have gotten into Recovery as suddenly as I got into Addiction. That I was not an alcoholic was so entrenched in my mind, I could not see myself as being “one of them.” Five weeks in a four-week program followed by a year of Aftercare and individual therapy barely made a dent in my denial system.

Today, I thank my Higher Power/God for those men who cared enough about me that they took me under their wing and guided me. Recovery, for me, was a slow process into accepting myself as an alcoholic. Looking back, it seems so strange to admit to inappropriate behavior while under the influence of alcohol and drugs while denying being addicted. But such is the nature of the hijacked rewired brain. Early recovery was a time of confronting memories; listening to others tell me what it was like to be with me when I was under the influence; working and reworking the steps and learning the meaning of “Living the program.” In other words, getting my brain unwired from the alcoholic thinking and rewired to healthy and appropriate thinking based on the spiritual principles of the 12 Step program.

Little did I know I would one day be amazed that the AA “promises” would become for me a reality and I would realize that God did and is doing for me what I could not and cannot do for myself.

Happy, Sober and safe New Year to all.
Séamus D.
New Orleans, La.

You know who they are—the gang that met at The Antlers after work, the neighborhood lush and expert outdoor griller, the brother-in-law, the couple you spent those skiing weekends with, and on and on. They’re the ones who will notice you aren’t drinking. They may ask “why” did you stop? They may really quiz you about this for the unspoken truth is that they fear they may be on the same slippery slope.

This is what I think about all this stuff. When I came in, I decided to cease fraternizing with those with whom I drank—close friends, been through a lot together, maybe a sister or brother, roommate. You spent a good deal of time baring your soul probably with that garbled fuzzy drunken lilt.

Quickly, I learned I should be deciding how to deal with my past “people, places and things.” The Program tells us we need to start looking for new friendships—ones who empathize with your illness, who are not afraid of developing a spiritual life, people who are aware of the trials and tribulations of others. In a word, you want to start associating with those who are interested in developing a higher quality of life whose values aren’t focused essentially on an alcoholic self-destruction. For the truth is that the unchecked alcoholic’s life will be destroyed by his or her alcoholism. There simply no other way out of this quagmire.

Where do you find these new friends and companions? At the thousands of Alcoholic Anonymous meetings. And don’t tell me “they are not like me”—no job or education degree, some don’t have any visual means of support, or an education degree, maybe their spouse just left and took the kids, or they live in a half-way house, I have a “hard time just conversing with them.”

Well, don’t sweat it. They’re drunks just like you. All that sadness is right out there. It’s knocking on the front door about to come in and turn your life upside down. You’ve earned all that grief by your alcoholic abuse of substances.

Just as you found that your drinking habits were easier protected by sticking with others of similar ways of living, so you need to shift your daily routines from folks like yourself who have learned to manage their lives without the haze this addiction provides. No, you need to find a new pack to run with, a sober one, one that is seeking new ways of living, who really do have a desire to grow a spiritual life, whose lives aren’t dominated by that daily endless cocktail “hour.” 

So, get rid of that that old life and the people in it and get on with working the Program. Keep coming back for it really does work if you work it.

Jim A/St X Noon, Cincinnati

This time of year, “Surviving the Holidays” is a frequent and necessary topic at meetings. And with all the family reunions, neighborhood parties and business receptions, the traditional gifts of wine or fine malt whiskey—the traditional Holiday temptations placed before the recovering addict are many and varied and sometimes bring back warm feelings of past celebrations. .

This year is different. The past norms of the Season don’t seem to be appropriate, maybe not even possible. Look, most of us haven’t been to any gathering of folks since mid-March. We have wrestled around and decided to make up for this absenteeism by using computers to speak to one another. 

Sort of a gimmicky means of communication, but it’s better than nothing.

One particularly sad fact is the necessary curtailing of family gatherings. We saw plans for Thanksgiving cancelled at the last minute, driven perhaps by an escalation of the number of cases in the hosts’ city, or someone contracts a seasonal cold or youngsters may have been exposed at school. All eyes were focused on aggressive defensive measures to avoid the tragedy of this raging pandemic.

So, what do we say to all this curtailment of the usual past joyous Holiday customs?

Our old reliable prayer gives us this answer. Its answer is avoiding worrying about those things we can’t do anything about.

To meet this, I need to remember the teachings of the Program, “Into action, do something you can do, be grateful for what you still have, reach out to those who have been damaged.”

Here are some additional ideas. Work on the spiritual aspect of your life, take your own inventory and work to correct what needs to be corrected. Look for the fellowship of folks busy searching for the “way, the truth and the light,” read a chapter in the Big Book or 12 and 12, call a troubled new member, chair a program for those confined to jail or an institution, write a meditation for “The Red Door,” spend an extra amount of time with your spouse and children, attend a Holiday Breakfast sponsored by the local general service committee.

But when we do run into that wall, and you’re over-whelmed, what can we do? We get to a meeting, read the Big Book, call our sponsor, work with a newbie, make the coffee, lead the group discussion for a month, talk to that new person.

And remember, “we never give up.” We know that if we keep coming back to the Program, it works for us and we need not suffer those Holiday Blues again!

Jim A/St X Noon, Cincinnati

“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level…” Isaiah 40:3,4

At this time of the year, we hear a lot of talk about “prepare the way of the Lord.” For those of us who attend church, depending on the church, we are liable to hear about going to confession, about cleaning up our act, etc. Until about eighteen months ago I gave little to no attention to the first part of the phrase, “In the wilderness…”

I was preparing to attend a retreat for those of us in the program and began to reflect on the phrase when it hit me “fair and square” as is said. I first landed in the wilderness the night of my first drink and began drinking alcoholically. From the beginning I experienced blackouts and, as my values deteriorated, the wilderness became increasingly empty and, at times, downright frightening, even as I projected myself to be sound in mind, body, and spirit.

The wilderness, however, which I later appreciated, was the wilderness in which I began to work and live the steps. Preparation for this wilderness was to acknowledge my powerlessness and unmanageability; came to believe in a power greater than myself that could restore me to sanity; made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood God.

These three steps were the baptism that opened my heart and mind to hear God saying, “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”  It was out of this baptism that I was able to begin the remainder of the steps, the one that took me deep inside myself to look at the wilderness in which I had lived, to write about what I saw, what I remembered, what I heard I had done while under the influence.

I didn’t care for this wilderness. My addiction told me I was a great guy, the life of the party, the center of attention. In the wilderness I was able to see that I was neither the life of the party nor the center of attention. In this wilderness I came to grips with my moral bankruptcy; with my emptiness and the sticks and stones with which I beat myself. I came in contact with my EGO - Easing God Out – attitude of the trinitarian Me, Myself and I.        

In this wilderness I dug deep into the commandments, the seven deadly sins, the Ash Wednesday litany from the Book of Common Prayer and came face to face with the behavior and attitudes that resulted from my addiction to alcohol and drugs.        

In this wilderness I got off my mountain of pride collapsed and I transferred to the valley of humility. For too long, I had walked on crooked paths. It was time to straighten them out in order to see the road ahead. There was an unevenness about the road. There was a ridge between what I thought of me and, what my sponsor told me was the real me. He had me review a list of positive qualities and identify which one I thought were mine. I picked a few of them and showed it to him. Then he made me aware that, at my core, all of them were who I am.  These were activated when I was created in the image and likeness of God. Because of this wilderness experience I learned to say, “I am loving. Sometimes I’m indifferent. I am truthful. Sometimes I lie.  I am…..but sometimes I…  It was in this process that the uneven ground became level, this was the balance I had been looking for in all the wrong places.

It was in this wilderness that my Higher Power assisted me with the help of good friends and a sponsor to make straight the highway necessary for a life of sobriety. The work in this wilderness gave me the strength to make amends, to forgive and ask for forgiveness, to seek through prayer and meditation what is God’s will for me and ask for the power to carry that out.

Like a sheep I let myself be led astray. Like a sheep, I wandered into the wilderness. And it was there the Shepherd found me and brought me home within myself so I could celebrate the Kingdom of God within me. I could live one day at a time and be at peace.

This is my first time writing for this blog. I’m excited, and a bit nervous. I’m full of self-centered fear, wondering if you will like it. Fortunately, I have a program that helps me with that.

My name is Shane. I’m in recovery from alcoholism, from compulsive eating, and from my family’s alcoholism. I’m a miracle – and so are you! That’s what I know from the rooms, and my life.

I grew up in an alcoholic home, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know our family was different from any other, so what I learned there I took out into the world. I learned that I couldn’t trust anyone to care for my feelings, that I wouldn’t be believed if I spoke my truth, that I could be shamed for showing weakness. I learned that I should make everyone proud, I should and could impress people, but that I would not be loved.

I was given room to develop my talents, but they weren’t a substitute for safety and love. As my rage built, I began looking for outlets and expressions of that rage. I found alcohol and drugs when I was 13, and I dove into the deep end. I went to all the places that the Big Book predicts – jail (juvenile detention), asylum (mental hospital), plus some that aren’t mentioned. By the time I turned 16 I had done these, I had gotten pregnant and miscarried in silence, I had tried to kill myself. I didn’t know that alcohol and drugs were helping me go to those places – I just thought I was crazy, and I didn’t care.

I got sober in 1985, when I was 28. Someone had me read the Promises at my third meeting. I cried because I couldn’t imagine ever experiencing any of them. It was like the universe inviting me to sing a song I didn’t know how to sing. But I kept coming. I wanted to feel better.

Since then, my life has been an adventure. I went back to school, got a Ph.D., taught for years. Then a new round of step work helped me leave and enter an Episcopal convent. After nine years, another round of work helped me leave there and serve a parish, and eventually found a new community with another woman. Now, eight years later, the community is flourishing and so am I.

When I got sober people told me to eat sugar if I wanted to drink. I did. I ate sugar long after I stopped craving alcohol, long after my weight became a problem. I didn’t get it. I’m an alcoholic, I’d say; food is not my issue. I just like to eat.

Finally, God sent some people into my life who helped me see that I was doing the same thing with food that I had with alcohol. I would try to control it, but it didn’t go so well. I didn’t diet, because that would be vain – and it would be hard. I thought, “I can use the Steps on this too,” but I never did.

Once I got that I had the same reaction to some foods that I have to alcohol, the path was clear. There was a place for me, another place. I could take all that I had gained in one and still learn more. Now I have the same freedom from compulsive eating that I had found from alcohol.

So, here’s the miracle: not that I entered the rooms, not that I stopped drinking and overeating. Those are indeed miracles, but the one I treasure is the hope, the reality of the Promises. If I will work, if you will work, the whole world opens up to us, to become the people God intended and dreamed of.

Whatever you have been through, whatever you’re struggling with, there are others who’ve been there. I’m one of them, waiting for you to reach out. Life is sometimes a struggle for me now, but only because I forget to use the tools offered by the programs. When I pick up the phone, the pen, the prayer book, I return to serenity. A new way opens up in the wilderness. One day at a time, miracles are happening.

Blessings on your journey, all year, every year.