This is excerpt #2 from, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith". On the back cover comes this recommendation - "In a world river by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, sceptical testimonies and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt, of religion lost and found and lost again."
"Zen Mind, Alkie Mind" by Martha G
Martha says she didn't go to AA to get sober or find God. She was 21 and she went to meet guys. She wasn't big on the serenity Prayer or the the Our Father which she had learned in Latin in Grade 1 and never really used since. Neither could she go with the goddess which worked for some of her female AA friends.
Eventually she realized she was damaging herself with alcohol and needed help to stay sober. God still didn't make sense to her and when her father died she no longer tried to make that connection.
On reading that, I wonder if maybe that will change in time. Jung says that for many people the spiritual journey does not make sense until the second half of life. But maybe Martha is already on that journey.
After 21 years of sobriety, Martha says, "It matters less and less what I believe and more and more to me that I show up, a day at a time in my life, and listen to the stories of others doing the same thing...AA is short on absolutes...but the AA Big Book suggests that if you stick around, your life will change and get better."
That rings true for me. Like many others in the church, I am less concerned with exactly what I believe and more concerned with having my life change in a good way. That church community can help us with that day by day transformation.
Peter
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