I suppose that's why, psychologically and spiritually, I get a lot of existential mileage out of the Triune God image. [bxA] Honesty is hard, depressing work. It involves becoming comfortable in some fairly dark spaces, learning that fear is a malleable thing. Given my need for inner overhaul, my God image had to be functional, or else be discarded as obsolete. With a bit of nuance, the Catholic Triune God image showed itself equal to the job. Combining the "inner family" language of Adult Children of Alcoholics, the energy and breath yogas of Hinduism, and the deity meditation found in most tantras, the Trinity becomes a tool for elevating and working with all of the aspects of my otherwise weird and uncomfortable incarnation. My hope, here, is to tell you precisely how and why that is.
When I began in recovery, I wasn't a big fan of how the word "Child" was used. Calling myself an adult child--every time I opened my mouth to speak-- felt infantilizing. An ACA will freely refer to his "inner Child"--initially that seemed like a grown man's excuse to eat paste and play with crayons. Slowly and eventually, though, I had to concede to the worth of the image. People like Jordan Peterson--commentators whose intellect I respect--would talk about the basic survival needs emerging in the psyche like they are little autonomous personalities who only want one thing. The more I listened to myself, the more I got to know a part of myself that needed to feel secure. The older I got, the louder his tantrums became. I can remember the first day I consciously turned my attention to those thoughts inside myself. They instantly went quiet. It occurred to me that's the first time I had deliberately and consciously paid attention to my own emotional life--I who so often think myself mature--and I felt embarrassed that it had taken as long as it had.
When I first got into recovery, my group in Charleston was wonderfully intimate--we had our weirdos, but a great many of us would follow our formal meeting with "the meeting after the meeting" at a local eatery. I don't often let people's advice in, but I allowed that group to challenge me, because I knew it was safe. Later, during the "Chicago years," I was having immense problem building connections in 12 step groups. I kept telling myself that the program "works if you work it" but time and again, when I would pick up what the program calls "the 1000 pound phone," no one would answer.
As the practice of "body scanning" and becoming familiar with my own sensations deepened, I learned to use physical sensation to get in touch with myself psychologically, and vice versa. It led me to fully accept the truth of the Hindu teaching about the Chakras--after all, Hindus say that "energy blockage" would manifest in exactly the same spots that I was "feeling my thoughts."
I eventually began to see what my higher power was doing. He was using the "external wasteland" to turn my attention on my inner landscape. I came to see that, if I didn't go to meetings with the dysfunctional family in my own head, going to meetings with other adult children wouldn't be effective. That freed me, as well, to build bonds: these days I forgive myself for not building bonds with a specific local group--but I am in frequent touch with adult children as far away as Canada.
There's a "God correlation" here. You see, the first "substance" I was addicted to was religious zeal. I connecting bits of religious theory to buttress a pious self image like most people collected baseball cards. Recovering Alcoholics in the big book, speaking of their own lack of emotional sobriety, would say things like "I was sober, except I was working myself to death on behalf of the Parent Teacher Association." For me, it was "I was sober, but I was working myself to death in the name of religious seeking." For alcoholics, periods of sobriety driven by self-will are often stopped in their tracks by a spree of drinking, a period of terrible remorse, and egotistical resolve to stop drinking--which would last until the next spree. I would work (while my resentment of the mild imperfections around me grew), crash, then compulsively eat and oversleep for a week before the cycle began again. And that recovery period would be full of rationalizations, like "Peter betrayed Jesus, so this must be part of it." My God concept did everything for me except allow me to see myself as subject to the same basic hypocrisy as everyone else.
For me, there was a "step zero." It was "Realize that the God you follow is of your own making, and entirely an expression of self will." The Big book changed my focus: I thought belief drove renunciation of self will. That led to years and years of my beliefs gradually loosing significance. It turns out, giving up self drives belief. And part of what self renunciation jettisons is the religious content my superego justifies itself with. St. Paul did something similar to this when he discovered the liberation of the Spirit, his name for the Risen Christ. The Law of Moses, for him, became dead ever after. The "rules of Catholicism" would eventually do that for me. But first, I admitted the truth: my faith was a lot of things, but never an act of surrender to a higher power.
Step zero made me give up belief. Step one helped me admit self-will was a problem. Step two and three helped me "relocate God" in whatever aided my self surrender. And here there were many aids. The Big Book talks about a bloke whose higher power was the lamp post outside his meeting. He'd hand his concerns over to the lamp post, and re-assume what he needed to as he left the meeting. For me, physical sensation began to work the same way. I found that concentrating on physical sensations diminished the cocktail of agenda and pious anxiety that ego and superego were selling to keep me hooked. I'd discovered the psychological practice of "grounding"--which many shrinks use to treat anxiety attacks. It's basically use of the body to empty the mind. But I'd discovered it in a way that, instead of contributing to a head full of psychobabble, was fueling my surrender to a higher power.
Years later I would find out it was also showing me I needed a new religious model. Devotional religious paths--like traditional Christianity--would often claim the ideal was outside a person. They'd claim the messiah was coming (at the end of time perhaps) or that the ideal could only fully be realized after death. These were claims to which I nursed no theoretical objections. But the delayed aspect of it aggravated the nervous bits of my psychology prone to hypervigilance and overwork. For a while I left Christianity entirely.
There's a bit in here I need to mention, but must be brief about--as it's a pretty deep rabbit hole. After leaving the monastery, I used drink to avoid grieving. I drank, at one point, a 750 mL bottle of wine nightly. It was terrifying, but I didn't know how to stop. I went on all the crummy dating sites one frequents after ending a seven year stint in a monastery. Eventually, though, all the terrible crumminess of that scene did introduce me to my fiancee. She made me want to live sober. But I didn't know where to start.
I stumbled on the obscure AA story about Bill W. using LSD to firm up his sobriety. I had a friend who had access to psilocybin mushrooms. I sought his help, and laid on his couch while a very small dose of psilocybin did its work. In the midst of a trip, which largely defied description, I heard the words of the book of Jeremiah, ones the prophet uses when he's watching the potter smash down a project to a formless lump, then rework it. "Can I not," he asks Israel, "do this much to you?"
I got the message. I'd made a god of my pride. I'd misused drugs that modified my consciousness. The message I heard on the couch that day--well, it was the True God asking me whether he's within his rights to become an addictive substance. He'd made himself literally present in the wine I'd abused--to come and find me. This was the True God asking me whether he's within his rights to use the illumination of psychedelics--which my both my religious training and 12 step history would reject--to make me sober. And I did, in fact, get sober. Over the next year, my need to drink gradually diminished. These days I drink about twice annually, and don't feel a compulsion to do so at all.
I mention psychedelics because they taught me that the "soul" Catholicism said I had was absolutely real. Other authors referred to it as the "energy body" or the "pain body." Not only did the soul function as a receiver of divine messages, it also stored all of the trauma I'd been through, waiting for a time when I was safe enough to deal with it. The soul courses with the energy of the spirit of God, but on such a subtle level that I'd not previously been able to perceive it.
By and by I discovered an alternative to devotional Christianity, the Tantric model. Tantra is a religious model common to both Buddhism and Hinduism. It claims that everything is already realized, that the ideal is within you, and that you already are what it takes to change as you need to. Tantric Models have a long tradition of use of "entheogens," a kind name for psychedelics that open one to God, to aid in dropping the ego.
When I was speaking with the voice of a healthy father, it felt different: physical sensations were located at the top of the head, and behind the eyes. My voice, as a healthy father was compassionate and observational. I was waiting to see how everything would play out.
When I was speaking with the voice of a Son, I felt sensations in the chest: here I was negotiating my perspective on my own woundedness. If I was trying to avoid it, that filled the chest with one sensation, if I was bearing it begrudgingly, I was filled with another, and if I was bearing it entirely with willingness, still a third. And this third voice is one of utter compassion for all who suffer.
It occurred to me that, as a healthy but wounded Son, I'm sent to all the parts of myself that need care: the wounded child who tantrums his way through life, the wounded adult who uses the wrong drugs and avoids both grief and responsibility--all of these needed my attention, and when I'm able to take full responsibility for my incarnational predicament, all of them are caught up in the energy of redemption.
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Because I've said a lot, I need to sum up: the shortcomings of the 12 steps made me realize I have a family inside me, and that I needed to meet with them regularly--to flex healthy relational muscles and tend to my own wounds. I couldn't find God when I had deified my own pride, or when I was using substances as a way of avoiding pain and responsibility. My problems with God made me abandon my selfish ideas about him, only to use my own physicality as a mantra to relocate him. My body itself taught me that the ability to store trauma is a mercy--it lets me deal with pain incrementally. My body itself taught me that I most certainly have a soul, that the soul is a tool for sharing in the work of the triune God.
ACA's 12 steps say "It works if you work it." What, exactly, we're working is no longer up for debate for me--but neither is it precisely what the 12 steps were driving at. The task of the steps is divinization: going within, in other words, and becoming, by humility, the very God who does all the loving. And all this takes place even as I remember my capacity to self-destructively ignore my shadow or to abdicate responsibility to it. I regret the chaos my life became as I realized all this, but at some point I have to simply allow that to be heart breaking, and allow it to connect me to others who suffer similarly.
God asked it of Ezekiel, and to all of us. "Son of Man," he said "can you make these bones live?" Ezekiel evades, saying "O Lord, you alone know that." When God responds, it's to all of us: prophesy to the flesh, preach to the breath. For Ezekiel, the bones were the whole house of Israel. If you're like me, it's perhaps just the skeletons in your closet. But the task, and the promise of life, is the same.
