Carl J. and the Spiritus Contra Spiritum – Mari G.

I would just like to sit and listen to Sherry talk about me, I mean it's a thank you so much Sherry and thank you Sonia, I love your music, you know God sings his song through you, it's beautiful. My name is Mary and I am an alcoholic and I'm so grateful to be here and grateful to be sober. My drive date is the 10th of August, 1984. My group is a Markham Village group in Markham, Ontario. I have a sponsor, Clancy. I sponsor people and I am an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I would like to thank Dick and Barbara for having this again this year. It's just, I've been here a few years and it's just kind of unique. I just love it. It's really special. And I know there's a lot of work that goes into it. And, you know, I think that they just deserve a bit of applause for doing this thing. I would also like to thank Lee for the service you always provide for us, Lee. Thank you so much. And I would like to thanks Steve who came to the airport at 11 o'clock on Thursday night to pick me up. He went to any lengths. And thank you so much, Dave, for picking me up. It was a good service. And so I am here to speak about Step 4. You know, Step 4 to me is... Step 4, 5 and 6, what they are like to me is they're the pre-op. They're the Pre-Op preparation before the soul surgery that goes on in Step 7. Because in Step 8, Step seven, we're asking for things to be removed. The things that have been blocking us. And step four is the beginning for me of a lifetime process. I'll tell you how I did step four the first time. I had had a slip. And after being a few months in Alcoholics Anonymous and I had called my sponsor at the time and blamed her and she fired me and I remember going into my group you know the people in Edmonton, Alberta where I got sober they just loved me And, you know, even after my slip, they were with me all the time. And, uh, you knew I was in really bad shape after that. They told me I was shaking so much strangers were waving back at me. And I was sitting in the meeting shaking and, uh... On the night, the day after my, uh slip, um, a little gal had spent the night with me and, ah, given service and she'd done the third step with me And something very profound happened to me during that third step process. And I'm not doing the third step because it was covered very beautifully by our last speaker. And so something so profound happened to me. I got a sense of mea culpa, that everything I had ever done or everything I hade suffered, losing my children, losing my femininity, femininity, losing my humanity, having lived on the street. Everything that I'd ever done and had happened to me was my fault. And I truly believe that that was just a little period of grace I had. And, I wanted this thing with every fiber of my being. I desired it. And after people spending days with me and being with me, and because I was coming off a lot of medication, I spent a lot time in mental institutions. And from my dry day the 10th of August 1984, I had never ever had any more medication, but they all stayed with me to make sure that nothing happened to me. That was my choice. I'm not a doctor, I'm not prescribing for anybody it was my choice and then I got shingles and I'm lying in bed and a thought came to me why don't you do your fourth step and the wisdom in Edmonton, Alberta at the time was that before you do your fourth steps you make an appointment to do your fifth step because too many times people have been caught drunk carrying around their four-step in their back pocket. At that time, I still had a great trouble with trust. I felt that a lot of you in the rooms had never been where I'd been and seen what I'd seen. There was a certain arrogance to how far down I'd gone. You know, I thought the rest of you were just toast burners. But you know, the pathological, fearless, fearful person I was, I just didn't trust. I had a problem with trust. There was a Jesuit priest in the program who was in recovery, and he also had fifth steps. So I called him. His parish was downtown Edmonton, and I made an appointment. And then I remember reading about Bill sitting with a piece of yellow foolscap when he was doing these steps and Bill was my hero and I got out a piece of yellow fools cap. And with shingles, no medication I prayed to God. And you know at that time because I was in this state of grace, this mea culpa, I couldn't think of resentments that first time. Because it was all my fault. So when I was reading Bill I think he said on page 3, 73 that we wouldn't get well until we told somebody all of our life story. So what I did was I started writing my life story, the reason being that long before I drank, I had been morally bankrupt, spiritually bankrupt, emotionally bankrupt. because, you see, my problem was that I was a liar, a cheat and a thief and I'd never had a drink yet. Nobody ever taught me to be a liar or a cheat or a thief. It just came natural. It just became natural. My stealing started at age seven. It began with an apple. I was born in 1943 and our food in Scotland was rationed until 1952. And when I was seven, the Americans, that's you, had sent big crates of beautiful apples to our school and I'd never had such a big red shiny apple and I remember eating this apple and already I wanted more and because nobody would give me theirs I decided to find out where they put it those that didn't eat it and I went out to the cloakroom and I stole apples from people's pockets who were saving them for later who didn't have the need for immediate gratification that I did so just like Eve in the Garden of Eden I started with an apple also at that time I had been stealing stealing money from my grandma and stealing money from my mother and my mother was president of the union of catholic mothers my father had been a franciscan monk who had left the monastery not for any bad reason just a theological dispute so I was taught nothing except about how to be a good girl and I just didn't have any capacity for it you know and I remember my granny saying to my mother when she has her first Holy Communion she'll be a Good Girl and when I had my first Holy communion my veil flew out the window and I stole somebody else's so I wouldn't get into trouble So it went on from there. And lying, lying just because you see I just there's a wonderful essay that Bill Wilson has written and it's called This Matter of Fear and in that essay he talks about the pathological feelings of being inferior, of being insecure, of just feeling he was not as good as the rest of the world. And his fear became so overwhelming that in the end he became aggressive. You see, we go from fearful to overly aggressive. When I was in the mental institution institution and the last time, the wonderful psychiatrist who'd been looking after me for four years, he said to me, you know we've given you all these diagnoses but initially you are a chronic alcoholic. And chronic alcoholics have abnormal personalities. There's just something wrong with a lot of you but we don't really understand it. And he said I'm going to send you for assertiveness training I said I don't need assertiveness train and I'm in here because I tried to kill my husband he said alcoholics don't have enough self esteem to be assertive they're aggressive you people are so neurotic and so paranoid and filled with fear that you become aggressive but way deep down it's because of your deep, deep fear and that was so true so I sat down and I started writing out all this stuff and I just I always loved Carl Jung and I remember reading Carl Jung he was doing a quotation from the Gospels of St. Thomas and the quotation was this if you bring out what is within you what you bring out will save you if you do not bring out what is in your heart what is with you then what you do not bring out will destroy you and I related that to the fourth step that is exactly what was going on with me because you see I had tried time after time after time after time not to drink and I couldn't I could not not drink why? there's a beautiful line from Moby Dick that I love you know Moby dick when I feel myself going grim about the mouth when I feel the cold November wind chill blowing through my soul and I feel myself wanting to walk out onto the street and knock people's hats off, then I know it's time to go to sea. For me, then I knew it was time to leave. Then I know its time for a drink. And I did not want that to happen to me again. Because my line in this book, More About Alcoholism, is the idea that someday, somehow, I will enjoy and control my drinking It's a great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Some of us pursue it into the gates of insanity and death. I had already done that. The only thing I hadn't done was die. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but you see we laugh at it. but I wanted to die but I didn't want to hurt myself that is true I wanted to drink myself slowly into oblivion but I was the living dead and you know when it says in this book again if we don't do this stuff you know, if we drink again we will die I always say you wish some of us live forever drinking. We do not die easy, but what we die to is the spirit, the soul. We are dead spiritually. So I have to get down to the causes and the conditions that were blocking me from God. Because you see, the third step is a vital and crucial step, but it won't have any effect whatsoever if I don't have a strenuous effort to get down to the things that had been blocking me. Step three would just be a decision. That's all it will be. And I knew from listening that if I did not do this step and then go on to the fifth, I would drink again. Because this thing that I am entering into and the thing that I have always fought against and the think that Don spoke about so beautifully is this escape from self. That's what it was always for me before I drank. You see, I had this unbearable, unsheddable burden of self. An unshedding burden of subconsciousness that everywhere I went, I thought everybody was looking at me and judging me and finding me not enough. It was a self that was absolutely claustrophobic within me. And I've never heard it described as well as I did by a poet called Anne Sexton, who died of alcohol-related problems. She committed suicide. And she said, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my mind, but it is out of the question. It is written in the tablet of human destiny that I am stuck here in this human form. That being so, I'd like to call attention to my problem. All my life before I drank I was trying to call intention to my problems. I'm stuck in self. I'm claustrophobic. I'm my own self-contained ecosystem. How can I get out of self? I don't know how to get out as self. And it used to give me panic attacks just like Bill. It used to gives me this obsession with death just like Bill. And I was always looking for people to understand and help me. Can you help me? I didn't know a drink would help me I didn'T know a drink would relieve me from the consciousness of this never ending consciousness of self this isolating factor I remember when I went out on my first date and at the end of the night I don't know if you're like that in where we are now, Georgia. But in Scotland when you go out with somebody at the end of a night they want a reward. And I remember at the end of the night being with this fellow in Scotland and he's getting very passionate and I'm just there kind of observing him thinking about myself. And at the height of his passion, I said to him, so what do you think about death? Because no matter who's in my life, I'm thinking about me because I'm trying to keep myself together. I knew that if I did not do this, I would not be able to bear the consciousness of daily living because of all the things I had done. All the things I had been doing and I was age 40 when I came in here I had lost my children and my heart has never ever healed my mother and father were both dead by the time I got to AA my father died walking out in the street thinking about me at 3 o'clock in the morning not knowing where I was my mother died of ovarian cancer my last talk to her was on the phone drunk I had done so many things I had hurt so many people I'd done things that I knew I'd never tell anybody and if I could never tell anybody then I'd have to drink because it's the only way I had any forgetting oblivion I need oblivion to live that's why I love being in the mental institutions because for a while they treated me as a manic depressive and they'd give me all the yum-yums the lithium, the valium the librium, the yum yum and I would get oblivion I would get oblivian so I did all of this this is the way I did my first and I went down I went down to the priest and it was downtown Edmonton and Edmontons right downtown there's some big big buildings and there's a lot of it in shadow and for many years I had been walking in shadows I was so ashamed of my life I was so ashamed of myself I was so ashamed of the things that had happened to me my life on Skid Row was like going through a sewer in a glass bottom boat and I never thought I could lift up my head again I never thought I could walk in the sunshine again but I am so grateful for the gift I was given the gift of willingness to have this at any cost. You see, I had this burning desire to get rid of this stuff from within me that I would be able to go on and do the things I had to do in the steps to get to be like you because I saw what was happening with you and I wanted what you had. You looked free to me and this was all in these halcyon days of my early sobriety and I went down to that priest and I sat and I read out this stuff that I never thought I'd tell anybody things that my darling mother and my darling father would never believe I had done that wasn't even within their imagination I don't believe and I had had no conscience about doing. All that moral stuff came whenever I stopped drinking. When I'm drinking, I don't have a moral code. I will do anything when I'm drinking. I used to go into Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario which is a maximum security prison. And I remember this fellow telling me that he woke up one day in jail and he'd been in a blackout and he thought he just had the normal stuff in a fight with a policeman. And he'd killed his wife and daughter. And he was never coming out. And I think, my God, that could have been me. That's the wonderful thing you get from doing this fourth and fifth. You get to see it could have be me. You got to walk in somebody else's moccasin. You begin to develop empathy and compassion. You begin even to think about yourself a wee bit better than you were. Because that priest said to me, Mari, you are not a bad person trying to be good. you were a very sick person and now you're trying to get well. And I thought that this priest would be so ashamed of me. And he wasn't. And he reminded me how these steps came about. He reminded me, he said, these are God-given gifts to Bill Wilson. And then he spoke about Father Ed Dowling who was a Jesuit. And I don't know if you remember the little story, Bill is up in his office and he's in one of his depressions and the janitor comes and says there's an old drunk here to see you. He looks like he's on the phone and he was in bad shape because he was stumbling and Bill said send him up because Bill was in depression thinking about himself and Father Ed came up and when he took off his coat he saw he had on a collar and Father Ad said to Bill where did you get these steps from and Bill said they just came to me and Father Red says do you realize that these are very closely aligned to the disciplines of Ignatius Loyola exercises that the Jesuits take on a yearly basis for transformation So I knew that I was on the road of transformation here. The priest asked me if I told him absolutely everything. I had told him just about absolutely everything, and he went outside to go and get a cup of tea or something, and he said, just leave me alone for a minute, and then he came back in and again I got that I believe it's a gift if I come out of here and don't share these last couple of things that were related I will drink again I just believed I would because they were the worst things in my inventory things that you think you can never tell another human being and I told him and he said let's say some prayers now you've left this stuff here he said when we finish praying I want you to go home put this big book because I had my big book with me put it on the shelf and then take it off again he says you seem to be somebody who likes ritual and I said I was and he asked me if I was feeling shame and humiliation at that point I had been feeling shame and humilation when I went in but after completing this exercise it was like he had exercised the shame and the humiliation he'd taken it from me which is I think what happens with our sponsors they take it from us this admission of all these things to another human being I am amazed at how many people don't want to do it because of fear or because they think nobody will understand. There is nothing you can tell us or me as a sponsor that I haven't heard before. There's only so many things, as my sponsor said once, there's only some so many thing you can do with your body. We hear everything. we hear about everything and this step is very necessary for ego deflation isn't it strange that people, someone like me who has such low self esteem who absolutely thinks that I'm just worse than everybody else, who absolutely thinks that in Scotland when I used to fight with some people because I was always fighting with people because I was so weird that nobody liked me very much and I was so fearful that in the end if they didn't look like they liked me I'd just punch them I remember them saying to me you're just a waste of good skin and I remember feeling like I was just a waste a good skin and yet we have this ego low self esteem and inflated ego that is bizarre you know anyway it comes back that ego comes back you know so anyway I did what he said I should do and I went home and I took out my book and I made sure that everything was alright that everything was in place the way it tells you in the big book and then step six am I ready to have God remove all these defects of character am I ready well again in the halcyon days of my early sobriety when I was given this gift of grace by God because that's what I believe I was ready to do anything you know to have the desire the desire to do all of this with no reservations there is no spiritual Viagra you cannot create desire for this stuff this desire comes from a place of brokenness, despair and hopelessness the brokenness despair and hopeless that William James spoke about in the varieties of religious experience. And it's such a spiritual thing we have and the way we have been given it is, I don't know if you know this, but in 1906, I think it was 1906 Sigmund Freud was invited to speak at Clark University in America and he brought his acolyte with him Carl Jung. Carl Jung was still his acolyte. And this thing that Freud had been asked to speak at, William James had just come from Edinburgh in Scotland giving the Gifford Lectures on the varieties of religious experience. That's where they came from. and William James Young started to talk and he spoke about amongst other things alcohol, well they didn't call it alcoholism then but this strange thing that we have and he shared with William James and William James shared with him about the group of drunks he'd investigated who'd been skid row bums hopeless written off by their family winos he called them sots no future ahead of them and almost overnight they had become upstanding members of their community and when he asked every one of them he found the common denominator was hopelessness and despair and being able to talk to each other about the things that had gone on. That is what has filtered down to us because I don't know any alcoholic who doesn't have this burden of guilt and despair and self-hate from doing things that we never ever thought we would do. We didn't want to do it. I didn't wanna drink and do all the things I did, drink and lose my children, drink and get into the life of immorality that I had gotten into I didn't want to do any of that but I am an alcoholic and it seems to me that this soul surgery because the old timers used to say that what we have is a soul sickness and I believe that I believe that to be true so this spiritual work that we do this thing of the spirit I'm doing it so that I never have to drink spirit ever again so that dictum from young spiritus contra spiritum spirit against spirit that's what it's all about for some reason I am one of those that William James spoke about when he said there are six souls who have to be born again they have to be twice born I am one of those who had to be twice born and I think that the baptismal water for me was liquor because if liquor hadn't worked for me I would have spent the rest of my life, I believe either in an institution or heavily medicated for the rest of my live that is what I believe so that was how I went through my first goings in with the fourth and fifth it's a lifetime job so eventually I knew I would because what happened was after that original beautiful thing of mea culpa I love everybody I have no resentments it was all my fault all my fall God nobody else I forgive all my ex-husbands. You know? So then, I start living in the now. I start living on a daily basis. I have a sponsor. My first sponsor was Carol in Edmonton. And then I start going to a lot of meetings. A lot of meeting. And after a few months, I start thinking about my first husband that I had forgiven. What is the true nature of forgiveness? Because I would say, well, I forgive him, but I'll never forget. That's not forgiveness, right? and then I think about other stuff about my family in Scotland about the teachers I used to have about the people that never truly understood me you know about everybody that did me wrong and then I'm getting to a place in my first year of sobriety where I love AA and I'm still doing everything I have to do but all of that stuff before wasn't my fault wasn't My fault so I talked to Carol Carol said well, I think you've got some resentments you have to look at and I did it the way she said here and the way in the book in the four columns and then I started seeing resentment was the number one offender I had been granted a little bit of grace where I hadn't seen that but suddenly now I see it and you see the resentments I used to have were not resentments, they were hate I hated I didn't know the word resentment I realized I had a lot of hate in my heart because of the feelings of difference I'd had and blaming everybody for my life and I went through the book the way it says here Clancy there's a my second sponsor when I moved to Toronto was a woman called Rini D. Rini died with 53 years sobriety. And when I was about eight years sober, I found out that my two sons had been put out of their father's house in Jamaica and were living with their old grandmother. And Rini said to me, it's time to go back. So we went through the steps again and she said it's time to go back to Jamaica because she got me up to 8 and 9 and make amends to the island and I became full of fear again absolutely paranoid with fear I thought if I go back to Jamaica that's where I started drinking I'm going to drink again it was from Jamaica I went and ended up on the street in Miami I'm gonna end up on this street again I'm going to end up in a mental institution I was riddled with fear about this move at 8 years sobriety and Rini said to me look honey I've never been in a mental institution right but I know somebody who, I've not been in I've ever been on the street but I knew somebody who has and his name is Clancy she said when you get to Jamaica call Clancy and the job I had at the time was flying up and down to the States. So I called Clancy when I got to Montego Bay and he said to me, write a little bit about your life and fax it to me. That's how long ago this was. So I sat down and wrote him my life story more or less and then a little while later the phone rang and he says, Mary, it's Clancy. I thought oh my god he's read this and I'm too sick for him he said I thought I should ring you and tell you this immediately after reading this I thought it was very urgent that I called you I've got to tell you this, I said what he said you really shouldn't drink and he was wonderful to me because I really thought I was going to drink again at that stage at 8 years I just felt overwhelmed and he saved my life one time I flew up to Delray Beach and he had rented a car we were just talking about it and he drove me around there's a space Cape Canaveral he drove me around Cape Canoveral and I was doing my fifth step a mini fifth with Clancy in his car and afterwards he had to go and get his ears syringed no really I thought he was pulling my leg I think he needed that before he heard my step but anyway you know it's a wonderful thing to have this freeness but I truly believe we I live my life the way I was sponsored and I sponsor the way i was sponsored and I'll tell you there's a situation came up a couple of times when I've had to go through these steps again and I truly believe every now and then in going through all these steps again. It's just the way that I was sponsored, and it's just what I believe. But I'll tell you about something. I thought I had done everything there was to do in the fourth and fifth step. I felt like I was doing it right. There was nothing left for me to do. The rest was all just maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. But i'll tell your situation that happened to me, and this is about five years ago. so I was about what 28 years sober so I was working for this woman that God had put in my life to test my serenity and she used to throw files at me you know she'd get upset and she'd throw files at me and because I was in my AA mode of behaviour I used to say to her you really shouldn't do that you'll just upset yourself when really I could see myself visually taking the file wrapping it around a scrawny little neck and just waiting for that so anyway I put up with four years of this behavior and I was talking to my sponsor at that time Clancy had told me to get Norma when I had my kids back so for a couple of years Norma had sponsored me in Toronto and I called Norma and I was complaining and she said well do you need the money that badly and do you want to do you mean you need to do this and I said I need to do this until I retire and she said well I don't think it's a good thing I think you should leave I don't think you should be, but I didn't listen to her. So after about four years of this, one morning, you know we get in fit spiritual condition. I get in fits spiritual condition so I don' t do what Moby Dick and Moby Dick go and knock people's hats off and you know. I got to be in fits spiritual condition for the day to go out into the world because my problem has always been my relationship to the world. This relationship with other people. So one morning, I guess I was not in fit spiritual condition. And as I walked in the door, she threw a file at me. And it was just her and I in the office. And I said, God, I'll see you when I come out. And I closed the door. And I took her inventory from when she was born. And I lost it. I had a rage that I had no idea was still inside of me at 27, 28 years of sobriety. You know that terrible, overwhelming rage? And it lasted a few minutes. and when I finished she was cowering in her chair and she said, I think you should go home now. You're not feeling well. I said to her, you go home. I've got work to do because I just couldn't move. I was so shocked at myself. She ran out the door and I started to weep and I got down on my knees and I asked God to forgive me for treating one of his kids like that. I was so ashamed and I go on the phone to Norma and I told her what happened and she said, I told you. I told him. Didn't I tell you? You're always staying in relationships past the expiry date. She said, I want you to go in tomorrow and make amends and give her a week's notice. And I was ashamed. I really didn't want to go and I wanted to just walk out and never face her again because I'm ashamed. But I realized I had to do it or I'd live with it. So I went in the next day and I made amends and gave her a week's notice. And then Norma said, I think you've got to do a fourth on that rage because that's something that you've obviously had in there for a long time. So I did. I did an intensive fourth on rage and fear because it was fear that had generated the rage. And I realized that it had its genesis. When I looked at it, it had this genesis in something that had happened to me long ago, either real or imagined, that had made me feel the way that woman made me feeling, like I was worth nothing, hopeless, under her control. So it was a reason for me to do another fourth and fifth. and I'm so grateful that I have had the guidance that I needed to do this. What this walk has been about for me up until step six and then of course going through the rest of the steps is that God not only released me from the obsession to drink he has released me from the defects of character that I had developed because of my inadequacy of living in the world where I thought I always had to have an edge. That thing where I'll go into a room and if somebody doesn't look at me properly they'll make me feel less than. That thing where I want to control how you talk to me and how you look at me and how you smile at me. That childish sensitivity that one day just because you don't say yes to me, I'm going to obsess about you for three days. That incredible sick relationship to the world I have where one day if I'm not feeling right and I'm having a spiritual bad hair day, I'll go into the supermarket and tell people they're in the wrong line. Because I'm projecting to be free of that, to be free of telling my children how they should live their lives. To be free to allow them to be who they are. That is what I get from doing all of this stuff because now I know myself. Now I know what I am capable of. Now I knew that I never want to be that human being again. I know that without God, I am nothing. I know the God has done for me what I could not do for myself. I know God has recovered me from a hopeless condition of mind and body. I know That God has given me a way out of this entrapment in self. The self that was killing me. the self that was destroying me and everything I loved I am so grateful that I have been given what I have today and I want to thank you very much for having me here today, thank you