The Alcoholic Mind

vision of the universe as an egg inside the womb of God, Hildegard of Bingen

An alcoholic relative said to me, "I don't think you understand the alcoholic mind."  From here I am just going to meditate upon this idea as the thoughts come to me. What is this alcoholic mind of which he speaks? This is a special mind, it is implied, and indeed, AA is built upon this specialness. "We alcoholics," or the self-deprecating, "We drunks..." is foundational to the program and its tome, the Big Book. There is the alcoholic we, who are understood to be all the same in a certain way and are separate from others, those who are not of the we. It is self-will and ego run amok, the program says, the absence of humility that stands in the way of sobriety. And perhaps that is indeed a piece of the puzzle.

Yet is not the overly inflated ego merely the flip side of the coin of low self-esteem? Does the Alcoholics Anonymous program actually unwittingly encourage such grandiosity/self-deprecation? Alcoholics I have known imagine themselves to be unusual geniuses. They have secret meetings, a secret code of language, and secret gods who live in the the alcoholic's personal understanding. Those in the group compose a well insulated circle, and those who have "gone back out," or were never inside it in the first place, are regarded warily.

When I felt left out of the tight circle of a certain alcoholic with his special mind, I joined my own group, Al-Anon, with its own secret meetings, secret language, and secret gods. I might even have had my own, special Al-Anon mind. Beth, a friend of mine in the program, often spoke of being "in my disease." We had our own secret disease too, it seems! We had our secret club that other people couldn't understand because they did not know the language and what it was like to be married, or otherwise closely related, to an alcoholic.

I think that all of this specialness is counterproductive. It imagines that people do not already have as the ground of their being the fact that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God. Only another alcoholic can understand, can help... Really? Other human beings are such foreigners, have such different minds, that they cannot understand simply by virtue of their common humanity?

 Jesus in Mary's womb

I once picked a woman up out of the pouring rain and offered to give her a ride home. She had been waving her arms frantically in the dark. She looked like a normal woman. But she had no home. She was outside working, in the oldest profession. So I brought her to my apartment and discovered she had been wounded, dragged down an alley and raped. Her arm and chest were becoming infected. I drove out to Kroger at a quarter to one in the morning and got first aid supplies to treat and dress her wounds. The next day at the hospital the doctor (who thought I was either very brave or crazy) looked shocked when he took off the bandages and asked, "Who dressed these wounds?" He could do nothing better for them than I had done and just put on fresh coverings. I could not know the depth of this woman's pain, yet my hands held the power to heal her.

The woman's name was Joyce. Her dad had begun to pimp her out when she was 11 years old, and she had a long scar on her belly that she said was from an ice pick. Joyce loved my cat. She looked at fashion magazines with me. We shared a time together as any two women, any two friends with common interests and taste in clothes. She was more alone than I, but still, I too was alone, living by myself with my cat. We both just wanted to be loved and accepted and to feel safe. We both had scars, hers much more horrifying than mine. I gave her a bag of clothes and shoes, and she said, "No one has never been this nice to me." My heart broke indescribably. She was a blessing to me as well. For but by the grace of God go I, I thought to myself. How quickly I could go from living from paycheck to paycheck to being destitute. But I had a good family to help me, and great friends. Was my mind so different from Joyce's? Was my heart?

It is the illusion of separateness, of specialness, that is the problem. If we can stop trying to acquire serenity and believe that God the Holy Spirit desires to live within us; if we can, through contemplation, learn to live from the heart-mind, which is from a deeper place than our transitory thoughts and emotions, then we would know we are all connected. Even those who are not Christians, who are not part of the Body of Christ via the Sacrament of Baptism, are our neighbors. We all come together as the spokes at the center of a wheel, and God is the hub. But we typically live on the outer rim, and we perceive that we are disconnected from one another.

In The Reed of God, Caryll Houselander says that we must learn to see Christ in everyone. Not in some, or in most. Not only in those who seem Christlike, but in everyone, in every single person that we meet. If we do this, then we find in this union that purest actualization of what makes us each a unique expression of humanity. We become more of who we really are, at our root. Our personalities, our so-called "defects of character" do not fall away. But we find ourselves, and God dwelling within us, when we lose ourselves. When we die to ourselves.

St. Paul said it, about there no longer being Jew or Gentile, male or female, etc... but only Christ who is in us. In a similar way, I do not believe that there is any "alcoholic mind" or special "Al-Anon disease" when you get right down to it. There is no "god of my understanding". There is God, and there is Christ in God, and there is me in Christ in God, and there is Christ in me. And we are all in Him, enclosed in his womb, and He is in us.

 from God Picked Me, by Louise A. Andreae

“Beautiful is God, the Word with God … He is beautiful in heaven, beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb, beautiful in his parents’ arms, beautiful in his miracles, beautiful in his sufferings; beautiful in inviting to life, beautiful in not worrying about death, beautiful in giving up his life and beautiful in taking it up again; he is beautiful on the Cross, beautiful in the tomb, beautiful in heaven. Listen to the song with understanding, and let not the weakness of the flesh distract your eyes from the splendour of his beauty." --St. Augustine