Joyous, happy and free! How is this possible? Drink brought me to this In sobriety I am able Connection is medicine
Every morning on ZOOMs I share with my friends Sometimes lasts all day I join in the evenings too! Last night I slept with WIMM
I’m good and calm and sweet A short time with family tests me I turn into a liar, thief, and a cheat I pray I still have a chance to see A happy—joyous, free stable me
When I take AA’s suggestions Working the program diligently There’re always good reactions Positive results give me hope Hope makes faith we can see
Recently a topic came from as Bill Sees It, page 86, where the headline reads, “Room For Improvement.” Upon reflection on that reading, I came to an awareness that literally the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous provide the room for improvement. They are the rooms for improvement. Early on my sponsor said the rooms of AA were practice for life. Learning to get along with one another in one’s homegroup is great preparation for the “world out there.”
While considering the month of July and the 7th step, “Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings,” I began to contemplate the principle of humility, a place needing improvement in my world, if not a complete overhaul. Humility was equated with humiliation. The last thing I wanted.
As time passed, new perspective brought the insight every humiliating experience brought me to where I am today, sober 34 years. Every one of those struggles of the past as well as the meeting room of yesterday, brings me closer to God. Eventually, I’ve come to bless it all.
Step 7 is a request to God to remove my shortcomings. Shortcomings are not like a headache to be taken away with Tylenol. What needs taking away is spiritual in nature. A spiritual disease requires a spiritual remedy. A remedy found in meetings – connection. A remedy found in prayer and meditation – another connection this time to God. A remedy found in making phone calls – connection to my sponsor as well as to others. More connection. Alcoholism is the big disconnect. Recovery is reconnection.
Having the humility to ask for help and raise the 1000-pound phone. To get over my ego and the fear it causes about how someone on the other end will respond. I’m grateful to the rooms for improvement; here as well as the rooms of other faith communities or the classes. The rooms of teaching and learning. And as we teach, we learn. Then what we learn we teach others, particularly in the 12 Step.
Room For Improvement encourages the reader to “step up the practice of principles.” Somehow, I instinctively balk at practice. I want to be Mick Jagger and not take guitar lessons. I want whatever it is now and not particularly have to work for it – as is said in our literature, “we often work grudgingly and at half steam.” How true!
The reading encourages us by saying, “with practice we begin to like whatever it is we’re doing.” As with going to meetings. Lord how I hated the thought of going to meetings every day. With practice I began to look forward to meetings. I began to miss the faces of friends and colleagues. I wondered how they are when I didn’t see them. Practice they say makes perfect. I don’t know about that, but I do know that practice keeps me connected. In the practice of these principles I come to gain the 9th step promises, sometimes slowly, most times glacially. They will always materialize if we work for them. After these last words you can often hear me mutter, “So get to work! That’s the catch.”
We are perfectly imperfect. An imperfection that fits with others and their perfect imperfections. So in the end, we are a great mandala. A spiritual mandala graced by God in connection with one another. Subtract one grain of sand, and the entire mandala diminishes. Our imperfections are like the stones to build a fireplace. Each stone has its own strength, its own weakness, supported by others’ strengths and weaknesses. Together we build a formation unshakable because of our connection through God.
Upon the qualification I did focus, That some amends could never be made, Trusting the ink of my list could vanish, hocus pocus Leaving the atonement owed, a debt never paid.
Sure I had meant it when I said I was willing to go to any lengths – almost. But what “rule,” oops what “suggestion,” had no exception? All else I had done, to make “A List of All” harmed I was willing – almost. But this person was different, the harm had been enhanced by their deception.
Betwixt I was, as upon “any lengths” no limits had been placed. Sainthood had not been required, just a willingness to progress the aim. Ever more attention did A List of All command, as around it I paced, The hell of a relapse, of death, the price to indulge my lethal bane.
When at last I saw my uniqueness as fantasy, my solution to surrender. Could “That” name be finally scribed and that step serenity render.
Growing up I had three sisters. My dad was a fireman, home away from work 48 hours but then gone at work for 24 hours, making every third day one with me being the only male in the house. Brotherly love was not a concept I grew up learning or knew. In the Fourth Grade, I was allowed to visit a classmate’s house alone, he and I hung out and interacted with his older brother. While that brother had been nice enough to me on the school playground, in the privacy of the family home, this brother was a terror to his sibling and, by extension, to me. That became my understanding of Brotherly Love. Years later when my parents “surprise” child was born, a beautiful baby boy, I left for college just when that boy was getting old enough to be interesting. He learned brotherly from me while trying to play a small joke on a Sunday morning by splashing water in the face of his hung over, passed out, older brother. I lashed out of my stupor and smashed the small but sturdy container [ironically – a shot glass I had stolen the night before] back at him. The glass survived unscathed. My ten year old brother had to visit the dentist the next morning to have his front tooth which I had chipped in my anger, capped. This was my practice of Brotherly Love.
But many things changed as I, so very long after that Sunday morning debacle, ceased drinking one day at a time. Our literature chronicles how these changes played out amongst its authors. Those now following their path are promised many things, some of which might even be considered extravagant, but even as to these I like most just reply in earnest “We Think Not.” My experience, and that of others too I think, is that the “juice comes with the squeeze” but we must be “painstaking” in the process. For if we are painstaking, we do find a whole new attitude and outlook upon life has taken us over and that we have lost interest in selfish things and have gained interest in our fellows. This is Brotherly Love as I now have come to know it, understand it and, buoyed by the training wheels of Progress, not Perfection, work daily to live it.
I have often been its unexpected recipient. This has happened too often to be a coincidence. Such as when attending a new meeting and, after overcoming the obstacles of finding the meeting room at the proper time, I walk in, see the literature set out, empty chairs available and think, “Ah, I’m home.” Whether in a foreign City or State for business or pleasure, the experience has seemed universal to me. I have heard many others say, almost to the word, this was their experience too. In my case, some of the men I interacted with at those meetings are still on my Speed Dial. This is but a facet of the aura of Brotherly Love that has been showered upon me by our program. Then COVID-19 hit and things changed again, just not like anyone ever quite expected, but by some was anticipated nevertheless.
For our literature tells us how the spiritual principle underlying Step Three had its “first major test” in WWII.1 Though not on a Salerno beachhead, anyone who has the disease from which I suffer I believe has been landed upon the Beachhead of Loneliness in the COVID-19 war and may, like me, be struggling to stay alive on it. I have found in that battle, my tool of Brotherly Love works as both a Sword and a Shield. Lucky enough to be able to Zoom to meetings, I have cut through my loneliness and that of others, by reaching out to be a virtual sponsor to those in need of one. While quite different from my experience in the most obvious ways, the power of service revealed in the effort has staved off more than one assault upon me on Lonely Beach where I fight my battle with my disease. At the same time recently, my brothers abroad, and in of all places New Zealand [home of my real passion, rugby, and the Greatest Side in the world], have been my shield against my disease and helped me survive numerous assaults. My favorite Zoom group, meeting daily [tomorrow], bright and early there, produces the same blunt honesty that so attracts me to my 7:00 a.m. meetings in the States, whether my Home Group or a venue I am just visiting. With virtual open arms they have welcomed this yank, and others too, sharing their experience, strength and hope with us visiting and hearing ours. They have exuded Brotherly Love through the two dimensions of Zoom but in that process have kept me living in the Fourth Dimension into which sobriety has so marvellously rocketed me. For their Brotherly Love and that of others in this Program I am and will be forever grateful.
