Blog to be discontinued

This blog is going to be discontinued. It was an honest attempt on my part to bring my personal life into blogging in some demonstrable way related to how my Catholic faith has helped me maintain my sobriety. My good intentions exceeded my desire or ability and this blog wasn't taking off, neither in my posting or in readership. This also simplifies my online life, fewer things to worry about as I can now pay better attention to Sober Catholic or Catholics in Recovery .

Almost all posts will be transferred to Sober Catholic as new (or edited) blogposts or to Catholics in Recovery, as forum topics, depending on subject. Some may instead wind up on God's Merciful Love, a social network my wife started.

Any future posts that might have been intended for this blog will also show up on those sites.

Therefore, if you have been a reader of this blog, please subscribe to Sober Catholic or join Catholics in Recovery, if you haven't done so already.

This blog will remain up for a few months for any straggler readers to notice the change in plans, but probably around Easter or Pentecost I'll delete the account.

I hope to see you on Sober Catholic and Catholics in Recovery!

Resolution: One Day at a Time

As we begin a new year, we are often reminded of the popular cultural custom of making resolutions for the rest of the year. Always intended to be a means for self-improvement, they are ultimately self-defeating. We more often than not, fail to maintain our resolve for a new and better self because we do not have the endurance or discipline necessary to think in terms of an entire year.

And so as we learn in our recovery program, mostly a 12 Step one, that we must take things "one day at a time." We can more easily comprehend the next 24 hours, or at least the stretch of hours until bedtime, than we can the next 365 days.

And therefore this is what we do. "Today I will not drink. I will worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes." Jesus says in Scripture:

Matthew 6:34: "Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil."

(Via USCCB.)

Have faith in the Lord. He will carry you through this day and the next. He did not bring you this far only to cast you aside before the race is over.

A Worthy Wife

From the First Reading from today's Mass on the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time:

Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31: "When one finds a worthy wife,
her value is far beyond pearls.
Her husband, entrusting his heart to her,
has an unfailing prize.
She brings him good, and not evil,
all the days of her life.
She obtains wool and flax
and works with loving hands.
She puts her hands to the distaff,
and her fingers ply the spindle.
She reaches out her hands to the poor,
and extends her arms to the needy.
Charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting;
the woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.
Give her a reward for her labors,
and let her works praise her at the city gates."

(Via USCCB.)

A sign of recovery is being able to live amongst people without the need for the crutch of an addiction. As someone once said in an AA meeting I attended (a paraphrase): "Recovery does for me what alcohol used to: it enables me to live among people."

One obvious sign of success in recovery is marriage. Unless you're in early recovery and your decision-making process is still warped by the newness of sober-living and the inability to completely think things through, a major decision like marriage waits until things settle out and are clear.

When you marry at that point, it is usually because you have your "things together" and someone else has decided that you are "safe enough" to hitch along for the ride for the rest of their life. You are worthy to have someone share their life with you.

That happened to me in March 2008. A decision I am very happy with. She is "The One" and is described in the Scripture passage from today's Mass.

Here is the full passage from Proverbs: Chapter 31, Verses 10-31 (today's reading omitted some parts):

When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls.

Her husband, entrusting his heart to her, has an unfailing prize.

She brings him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.

She obtains wool and flax and makes cloth with skillful hands.

Like merchant ships, she secures her provisions from afar.

She rises while it is still night, and distributes food to her household.

She picks out a field to purchase; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.

She is girt about with strength, and sturdy are her arms.

She enjoys the success of her dealings; at night her lamp is undimmed.

She puts her hands to the distaff, and her fingers ply the spindle.

She reaches out her hands to the poor, and extends her arms to the needy.

She fears not the snow for her household; all her charges are doubly clothed.

She makes her own coverlets; fine linen and purple are her clothing.

Her husband is prominent at the city gates as he sits with the elders of the land.

She makes garments and sells them, and stocks the merchants with belts.

She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs at the days to come.

She opens her mouth in wisdom, and on her tongue is kindly counsel.

She watches the conduct of her household, and eats not her food in idleness.

Her children rise up and praise her; her husband, too, extols her:

"Many are the women of proven worth, but you have excelled them all."

Charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting; the woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

Give her a reward of her labors, and let her works praise her at the city gates.

Nightly prayer for the next day

"Lord, grant that I be treated tomorrow the way I treated others today."

Gratitude: Wanting what you have

One of my least favorite 12 Step meeting topics is "gratitude". Not that I am not grateful for anything in sobriety, for I have plenty to be grateful for. My main issue whenever this topic is brought up is that quite often the attendees just launch into a list of the things they are grateful for. Much of it is common to all even when the sharer does personalize it with special items. Nevertheless, such "gratitude" listings are boring (to me) and miss the point.

First, the idea that anyone needs to hear something about gratitude. Does this person feel a nostalgia for the days of drinking? Are they taking their sober life for granted and therefore need to be reminded of what can be lost if they do return? Do they not see very well the things around them that they have attained as a result of their sobriety? Do they just want to boast about their sobriety ("Oh, look at me, see how much I'VE got!")

Someone at a 12-Step meeting with the topic of gratitude I attended long ago introduced something besides a list of what he was grateful for. He mentioned something along the lines of gratitude as being an attitude. He concluded with the notion that gratitude simply means that you want what you already have.

We alcoholics have an impatient streak. Even after a sustained period of sobriety we sometimes fall back into the "I want what I want and I want it now" attitude. We are impatient with what we already have and seek to attain or achieve something else that would make us better or happier. Just like back in the days of our drinking we needed "just one more", what we have now is not enough and we seek something more to satisfy a hole in our soul.

"Wanting what you already have" is a great way of humbly accepting that which has come into your life and genuinely appreciating it. It is also an excellent way of living a moderate life and not a life driven to excess and conspicuous consumption. In other words, greed.

Sometimes the words "and thanking God for it" are added to the definition of gratitude. "Gratitude means wanting what you already have and thanking God for it." A nice reminder as from where all good things come from, and to Whom we owe our sobriety to.

Drinking is Never an Option

I think it was about 4 1/2 years ago when I stumbled upon the notion of just ruling out the idea that drinking is an option. In the "One Day at a Time" concept of 12 Step Movements, you will just take the notion of not drinking, but just for today. "Today, I will not drink." This is because the idea of never taking a drink for the rest of one's life may be a bit much to handle. Therefore, take it in bite-size, one-day-at-a-time baby steps. Tomorrow is another story, another day.

While this is fine, and very successful, I found it questionable for my own personal abilities. You see, the "ODAAT" ("One Day at a Time" acronym) leaves open the possibility of drinking tomorrow. Advocates of ODAAT would respond by saying that you would merely resolve to do ODAAT again when tomorrow arrives. But for me, there would still be that narrow window of opportunity that would allow a drink to sneak in.

Therefore, I decided that drinking would never be an option. No matter how good, or how bad, drinking just wouldn't be on the table as a response. In the past, I would drink when things got bad, but also when things were great. Drinking was a lubricant, either quelling the pain or heightening the joy. Drinking was always a response to something. It was an option.

What had happened to get me to the idea that drinking would never be an option, no matter what was a day in April 2004 in which I was laid off from a job due to insufficient work. As I was the last hired, I was the first to go. I was depressed, I had thought that I had finally "made it" in sobriety, that I had finally landed a job that would last and that I was putting in the final building blocks of my sobriety. The initial struggling period would be over and I would just "practice these principles in all my affairs" and just live. But being laid off shattered that notion.

I drove home, and it seemed as every liquor store in my part of the state was between work and home. I resisted the urge to go into any of them, thinking all the way "ODAAT", and went instead straight to my old AA Home Group. I pondered stuff and I think that the topic was something about ODAAT. I decided that ODAAT wasn't good enough for me, or rather, not suitable enough. There was always that danger that the desire to drink would wedge its way in and that I wouldn't be strong enough the next day to do ODAAT.

So I decided to just remove drinking from the list of options. Not just for today, but forever. ODAAT preserves the notion that drinking is an option for tomorrow, and when tomorrow arrives, just push drinking off one more day through ODAAT.

My removing drinking as an option does not mean that I will resolve to never drink for the rest of my life, the scary notion that ODAAT evolved to ease. It just isn't on the list of response mechanisms I have at my disposal. It isn't something that I "do", or have to ponder with never doing. I am not facing the prospect of viewing the rest of my life without drinking, it is more like the idea that murder or rape is simply not an option for decent civilized people to deal with others, drinking isn't there for me to choose. I do not bemoan the idea that I won't murder or rape anyone in the future before I die, doing either of those things isn't a part or my character. Drinking no longer is a part of my character.

I did not arrive at this idea easily. I spent the entire month of April 2004 beating this into my brain. I was helped by many AA meeting topics that kind of reinforced this. I guess the Holy Spirit was working on me.

Jim Valvano's Nine Points to Ponder

In the spirit of yesterday's post about Crossing the Goal I decided to write about an inspirational speech by a sports legend. Jim Valvano was a basketball coach at North Carolina State University. He died of cancer in the 1993. Shortly before his death he was honored by ESPN at their annual ESPY Awards presentation.

He gave a very moving speech, and in it he gave nine points to ponder. There are 3 basic groups.

Coach Valvano said that every day you should:

1) Laugh
2) Think
3) Cry (as in be emotionally moved to tears by something)

The three most important things in your life to consider:

1) Family
2) Religion
3) Team (I suppose any social organization outside of the previous two would suffice. He was a Coach, after all.

Three important things that you should keep focused on:

1) Where you've been.
2) Where you are.
3) Where you're going.

Watch the video: