The Healing Balm of Truth & Beauty

The natural beauty of the autumn season on a warm, sunny day can hardly be surpassed. Today is such a day, and I am filled with gratitude for the Beauty I have discovered in the Catholic Church. I remember as an English major in college studying the poetry of the Romantics, who capitalized words such as Truth and Beauty. Perhaps this capitalizing of ideals was working in my subconscious and then began to surface as I searched for the right church home for me and my family.  I suspected that the secular idea of finding one's own, personal truth was faulty. "I have to speak my truth," people will say. And even in the sphere of religion this is true, for as Protestant denominations first broke from the Catholic faith, so they have continued to splinter amongst themselves, being defined more by the nature of protest from which the name of Protestant springs, than they are as a beacon of the light of Christ. Even among professing Catholics there is division, as some wish to join the secular parade of self-defined truth. Yet the Church herself cannot error in her official teachings, and she is indeed the last Christian bastion of Truth.

12 Step groups by their nature contain only a portion of the truth, as they by necessity must refrain from proclamations of absolute, God-given Truths. And so while spiritually based, these groups remain secular, and the fullness of healing cannot be found. Help can be found, yes, and there are those wise souls who speak the Truth for others to hear. They are models of faith and charity, and they selflessly share their experience, strength and hope. But perhaps the 12 step groups are like those places in the world that do not know the season of autumn, who have not lived through the physical transformation of color, smell, texture, and sound, the migratory flight of birds, the last call before what looks like death but is only dormancy. Winter is but a dark night of the soul, a waiting place before new life bursts forth from black soil into the light.

Some misunderstand the Truth of Catholicism as a starkness of black and white. They do not understand the both/and nature of the Church; they do not see the in between places where faith grows in stages, where the soul is transformed into a harmony of dazzling color and ineffable Beauty. They ignore the poetry because it is too subtle, too simple, too ordinary to sense the profound depths of the underground river of Life.

Lady Wisdom can be apprehended in the patterns and changing colors of autumn, in the fragrance of burning wood and the crisp air breathed on the night of the harvest moon. She invites us to wake up and taste the cider, put on a costume and dream of who we might be if we only had the courage, if only the wizard really could put valor into our cold, frightened hearts. Imagine for a moment that Beauty is real, and that she can lead you by the hand to Truth. Right here, right now, Love is ours for the asking. Knock, and it will be opened unto you.

Formal Process toward the Church

I am finally a member of R.C.I.A., the Catholic Church's Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults! I began my journey to the Church around this time last year, but by the time I inquired into RCIA, it was too late to join the group. Alas I have had to wait a long time to partake of Holy Communion, and I will still be waiting until the Easter Vigil. Happily, Easter comes in March this year, so my wait will be shorter than many have experienced.

I think I will share my RCIA journey on this particular blog, as the group experience is somewhat similar to what one might find in 12 Step groups such as AA and Al-Anon. In fact, I got a ride home on Sunday with one of the staff members after the class, and she mentioned that anything shared in the class is confidential and should not go outside the group. The RCIA leader is a former member of Al-Alon, like myself, so I was not surprised by this at all. Sunday's topic was faith, and one staff member shared her spiritual journey and how she came to be Catholic. This was similar to an AA lead. RCIA emphasizes taking this journey together and how each person is in a unique place, and we must be patient with one another. There is no pressure to join the Church at the end of the process. You can learn about the faith as you go and decide for yourself whether it is for you.

Our group will still take new members into October, so if you are interested in learning more about the Catholic Church and would like a supportive group environment in which to explore this religion, contact your local parish. What do you have to lose?

The Nature of Guilt

Unhealthy guilt lets us wallow in our emotions, self-hatred, get depressed. We indulge these feelings as a substitute for making concrete resolutions and taking steps to change our behavior. Guilt, then, can be useful, but it should lead to action and then be let go of.

— from When a Teen Chooses You


 As I have mentioned before, it would bother me when I would hear alcoholics talk about avoiding guilt, shame and remorse at all costs, as it would only lead to more drinking. It seems like a qualification is needed between healthy guilt and unhealthy guilt. Like physical pain that tells us that there is something wrong in our bodies, guilt can let us know when we have done something morally wrong or something to hurt ourselves or others. It is a signal to stop, look, and listen. Why do we feel guilty? What actions do we need to take to remedy the situation? Then we can make amends to God, to ourselves, and to others.

Unhealthy guilt includes taking responsibility for a problem you did not cause. We Al-Anons, and some alcoholics as well, can have the tendency to be hyper-vigilant caretakers and end up wallowing in worry and obsession. We may have a generalized sense of guilt just for being, as if we are not worthy of unconditional love just as we are. It may seem that no matter how hard we try, something always goes wrong. In this case, the action we need to take may be detachment from certain people or situations, as well as increased use of the tools of prayer, meditation, contemplation, and scripture reading. We need to attend Mass and partake of the Eucharist. We must take care of ourselves and our own business.

Whatever the cause of guilt, it should be faced honestly and squarely, assessed, and dealt with appropriately. When we have done what we can to make any necessary reparation, then we must let it go. The alcoholic, then, should not avoid the guilt he or she feels, for example, as the result of the behaviors displayed during a relapse. It can't just be swept under the rug. Alcoholic drinking always causes a problem for the alcoholic and those around him, and amends therefore must be made to himself and those he harms. The friend or family member of the alcoholic, likewise, may need to make amends for the reaction he has to the relapse, such as screaming, verbal abuse, or other inappropriate behaviors.

Feeling guilt, shame and remorse may be a healthy reaction, telling us that we have lost our connection with God and need to get our lives back on track. It is the wallowing in guilt that signals narcissistic self-pity. Instead, we must be open to receive God's grace and forgiveness. But to receive, we must first ask. Guilt can humble us back into alignment with the will of God.

Contemplative Practice--Obsessive Drinking, Obsessive Thinking

I am currently reading two books on the subject of contemplation from a Christian perspective:  New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, and Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird.  I have no doubt at this point that the practice of contemplation is key to recovery.

I was thinking back today to a woman in the Al-Anon meeting that I once ran who often compared addiction to alcohol to addiction to sugar. She believed that all addictions were rooted in the same thing. The only difference was the particular substance to which one was addicted. I did not entirely agree with her. After all, I reasoned, sugar does not wreck lives and kill people. It does not take away one's ability to reason. But is that true? Scientific studies have shown that certain food products can be addictive, and sugar is the leader of this gang. If we look at rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses, food addiction surely plays a major part, and the death toll rises.

In the rooms of Al-Anon, the distinction was made that the disease of the alcoholic is obsessive drinking, and the problem of the Al-Anon person is obsessive thinking. So what is the common denominator here? Obsession. Furthermore, I am aware from speaking with the alcoholic that in cases of relapse, before he begins drinking, he first begins to think about drinking. Not being able to turn off the obsessive thought patterns, he succumbs to the temptation and begins his cycle of alcoholic drinking all over again. So we can conclude that in all cases of addiction there is at the root the problem of obsession.

Interestingly, obsession is not the sole domain of the alcoholic, other addict, or Al-Anon person. It seems rather to be the plight of human nature since the beginning of time. Look at Adam and Eve in the garden and we find obsession for the forbidden fruit and the yielding to overwhelming temptation. And who was to blame? Partially, it was the evil one disguised as a serpent. Granted, he was no common garden snake. We know from the Book of Revelation that he was actually a dragon, so surely intimidation played a part. We will be looking at the role that Satan plays in taking our thoughts for a ride on a runaway train as we progress in our contemplation of, um, contemplation...

Temptation and Fall, Michaelangelo

Luckily for us, contemplative souls have provided a path out of the loop of obsession. For example, in a sermon on the Third Commandment, keeping holy the Sabbath, we have the words of St. Augustine:

"The third commandment enjoins quietness of heart, tranquility of mind. This is holiness. Because here is the Spirit of God...Unquiet people recoil from the Holy Spirit...In their restlessness they do not allow the silence of the Lord's Sabbath to enter their lives. Against such restlessness we are offered a kind of Sabbath in the heart. As if God were saying, 'Stop being so restless, quieten the uproar in your minds. Let go of the idle fantasies that fly around in your head.' God is saying, 'Be still and see that I am God' (Ps 46). But you refuse to be still. You are like the Egyptians tormented by gnats. These tiniest of flies, always restless, flying about aimlessly, swarm at your eyes, giving no rest. They are back as soon as you drive them off. Just like the futile fantasies that swarm in your minds. Keep the commandment. Beware of this plague."

The seeds of contemplation can be found in the 12 Step Program, but they are not well enough defined. Step 11 says, "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out." But how is this accomplished? Tellingly, while prayer was frequently an Al-Anon topic, meditation was rarely discussed. When I once brought it up at a meeting, people offered various ways that they meditate, and certainly many practices can be helpful. Yet I think it true that most people know neither how to pray nor how to meditate effectively. And the topic of contemplation was never explored at all.

So what I want to do here is to follow this path of contemplation in the books I am reading and share what insights I gain in a series that will begin with the first part of the title of this post, Contemplative Practice. And while I acknowledge that there are varying degrees of obsession, and that alcoholism is a particularly potent form, I want to emphasize that this problem of the obsession of the mind is basically human, common to all people, rather than a special disease shared only by the unfortunate. Let's focus on our common ground and the hope of universal solutions.

 

Nothing More than Feelings

You may remember the 1970s sad love song, "Feelings" by Morris Albert.  Here is an excerpt:

"Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
trying to forget my feelings of love."

I'm sure you can also find this on youtube!  When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me a beautiful wooden jewelry box.  My dad told me that he had chosen it and that it played "Feelings".  It was an especially meaningful gift, because my younger brother was in a 28 day rehab program for alcoholism, so he was not at my graduation or party.  One day after an Al-Anon meeting, I was driving home and started crying like a guest on Barbara Walters' talk show.  The tears would not stop flowing.  For 15 years I had not fully grieved the absence of my brother on that special day.  High school graduation was bittersweet for me, and I went to live with my grandparents that summer before starting college.  I still have the jewelry box, 25 years later!

Recently on a Catholic radio station I heard the program host say that just because you still have feelings regarding a painful situation does not mean that you have not forgiven the person who caused the suffering.  I was relieved to hear this, because I was pretty sure I had forgiven a particular person in my life, but sometimes the hurt would come flooding back.  I just kept praying for the willingness to forgive and for the healing of my broken heart.

Feelings are transitory, and they actually have little to do with Love.  If we read 1 Corinthians 13, we learn that Love is not a  feeling, but rather a state of being.  Please allow me to be an English nerd for a moment.  After the word Love in this Bible passage, the word is (or is not) always follows.  Love is patient, love is kind, etc... "Is" is a form of the root infinitive, to be.  Nowhere in this famous treatise on Love does it mention it being contingent upon feeling a certain way.  Love is ultimately about selflessness, sacrifice, and commitment, and it is unconditional.  We also know that God is Love and that those who do not love do not know God.  "Beloved, let us love one another..." (1 John 4: 7,8)

So when we forgive those whom we love (which includes our enemies, for which we have no fuzzy feelings), we may still feel the occasional sting of their wrongdoing (at least, they were wrong from our perspective).  Continuous resentment, on the other hand, usually tells us that we have not yet forgiven.  But perhaps forgiveness is a process and is not accomplished all at once, in a single moment in time.  It helps to realize that we hurt ourselves the most when we won't forgive, and we do feel so much better when we can put our sorrow in the past.  First love, then forgive.  Only then are we free to come to The Lamb's Supper and be healed by the body and blood of our Lord.

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

Contemplative Approach to Recovery

This blog was first called "Catholic Twelve Steps" and later, "Paths to Grace".  With a new look and a new name, Garland of Grace Recovery Page, I want to once again pull focus and better define the shape this page is taking. Originally I thought I might draw up a new set of 12 Steps for recovery from a Catholic perspective, but as I have been writing, I have basically set aside that idea altogether. Instead, I have reflected upon what I have learned of Catholic teachings so far and applied that, along with the helpful tools I picked up as a long-time member of Al-Anon, to provide an alternative approach to healing. I have brought out the limitations of programs such as AA and Al-Anon and am proposing that a traditional Catholic way of living the sacramental life holds the fullest possibility of permanent sobriety and restoration of wholeness.

There is still much questioning to be done regarding the assumptions of the 12 Steps and teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which Al-Anon is based. I feel led now to a contemplative approach to solutions for both the addicts and those loved ones affected by such illnesses as alcoholism (and those conditions sometimes concurrently present, such as mental illness and depression).

Contemplation is defined as a) concentration on spiritual things as a form of devotion, and b) a state of mystical awareness of God's being.  For me, such contemplation ultimately relies upon Marian devotion, the "old school" devotion advocated by St. Louis de Montfort, of the to Jesus through Mary tradition. My personal practice of Catholicism also centers on the contemplation of Holy Wisdom and the wisdom tradition found in the Bible in books such as Proverbs, Job, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon. For the fear of the Lord is the root of Wisdom, and by Wisdom we learn to practice true religion.

In my opinion, the contemplative, sacramental life is the supreme path to joy, wholeness, and a state of divine grace. You can begin simply with a daily time of prayer (the Rosary or reading from a Marian prayer book is helpful) and the reading of passages from the Wisdom books and from the Gospels. Regular attendance at Mass is crucial, and this blog will continue to give a more precise shape to the "Paths to Grace" (I will continue to use this particular name) program as we proceed.

With the help that I receive through the love and wisdom of the Holy Spirit, I hope to use my gift of language, by God's grace, to provide hope and understanding to others, as well as to make better sense of my own experiences. We can't expect an exemption from suffering, but we can learn to unite our sorrows to Jesus on the cross. We may not be able to be happy every moment of every day, whether or not the alcoholic is still drinking. But holiness is our goal, not freedom from pain. To drink of the eternal wellspring of joy daily is possible, while happiness will come and go. We must learn to know the difference. Let us not be satisfied with merely being "spiritual" in the new age way of indifferentism. Let us rather bring back Religion and seek the one, holy and apostolic Truth of the Church founded by our Lord and Savior.