The one consistent action that alcoholics in recovery (not to be confused with in abstinence) perform is putting all their troubles on the ‘table’. This is a physical or metaphysical place depending on the individual. If I continually overlook this process, I will inevitably find myself in pain: physical and/or emotional.
Today I know I need to go to the altar because I am burdened. Consciously I do not always know what I have been carrying around with me, but it is there, and it is gaining momentum. In early sobriety these were the moments I had to remind myself to breathe. I hated them. I hated that I was so ill at ease in the simplest of situations. I hated that I was an alcoholic. How was I supposed to recover with so much constant discomfort, so much relentless questioning living in me? It felt like a lose-lose more often than not.
In hindsight, I felt my traditional God had failed me. I had pleaded and prayed for release from my addiction. And still, I drank my bottle of wine on Sunday night. Maybe church would yield a different result next week. Maybe I didn’t need to quit after all. It wasn’t so bad.
It was bad. Or rather, it was as a bad as I ever wanted it to get.
I wasn’t surrendered when I quit drinking. I was exhausted when I quit drinking, but I was far from flying the white flag. I secretly hoped for the day I could drink with immunity. I capitulated upon realizing it was never coming.
Somewhere around month nine of no alcohol I was sadly, silently torn. How could I still be wavering? Why did sober feel so inflexible? And then it started to sprinkle in. It wasn’t that sober was stiff, it’s that life, being life, required flexibility. Not a quality I possessed.
And here … I found my altar.
It wasn’t in a building. It was in me.
It was that place where my Creator and I met—just the two of us (no matter who else was in the room).
It had been there all along I just didn’t recognize it. I had been too busy talking and telling. I had always shown up with a load of troubles, questions, agendas, issues of others, and the like. If I didn’t get the answer in my time frame, if I didn’t get the answer I wanted, I left the table—weight still in tow.
Come to the altar silent, was one of my first moments of sane thinking. Of conscious thinking.
And if I can’t come silent (as is most often the case with me) then I bring my consignment and set it down with the intention of releasing it. I allow it to be removed from the space between the two of us and then I can listen.
If love could speak to me what would it say?
This … this is what I listen for.
I am human, I don’t always leave the altar elated, but I always leave with more sanity.
And for today, that is a high, a drink could never possibly produce.
