reaching out

Some program literature is better than others.  Is it all great?  No, but it is all worth reading.  At the very least, it is a better use of time than the entire weekends I used to spend watching porn while high on meth.

So anyway, I’m reading “Came to Believe” today, and I ran across the following passage:

“I can see no beauty in art.  Sculpture and architecture are man-made and cannot rival the Creator’s work.  How can we hope to better the Master who taught us?”

There is so much so wrong with this.  While I can laugh at it today (and I did), I remember the first time I came into the rooms in 1992, and would just become enraged at such nonsense.  Why print something that would be so offensive to so many people on so many levels?  The list of groups of people who might be offended by this includes (but is not limited to) artists (and their parents, and the families supported by artists), architects, designers, etc.  Art and architecture are a big part of my life, and have been for a very long time.  I have never met an architect or designer whose object was to better a Creator.  

People without faith who have been called upon in the rooms to believe in some vague Higher Power (“make it the group if you have to,” etc) are called upon by this reading to acknowledge a Creator (with an upper-case C) and a Master (with an upper-case M).  It smells like bait-and-switch to a suspicious newcomer.  It did to me when I was in my early 20s.  It drove me nuts, and gave me an excuse not to work the steps—it was all bullshit to me.

According to a Gallup poll taken every few years since 1982, at no point in the past 25 years has more than half the US population considered the statement “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” true.  Less than half of us believe in the creation story in the Tanakh (Old Testament).  

Mucking up a perfectly good twelve step program with thinly (and poorly) veiled religious references is not useful, as far as I can tell (or at best, it may be useful for less than half the population).  For me, an upper-case C in Creator is that same old hateful God who said I am an abomination because I’m a homo, and my blood is own my own hands, and blah blah Leviticus blah.  That lame deity has no more purpose in my life or my program of recovery than Zeus or Pan or Vishnu or Whoever.  Also, any god that forbids bacon cheeseburgers (also Leviticus) is just whack.

I keep it simple today.  I can read program literature like that above, and while I can acknowledge how unserviceable it might be to those who do not want to be sober, I have to find a way to make it work, a way for me not to have a resentment against the person who wrote it, the people who published it, and my sponsor who gave it to me to read.  Because I want to be sober. Program literature can help.  I have to read it.  This is how I do it:

 First, I look for intent.  Is the person who wrote it actively trying to convince me to convert to some religion?  No, he is sharing his experience, strength and hope to help keep someone else sober.  (The same thing I am doing here—I have no religious or anti-religious agenda.)

Next, I look for what meaning I can find (regardless of the author’s intent).  Here, what is the meaning the author is trying to convey, regardless of his (poor) choice or words and (pious) capitalization?  Nature is beautiful and I believe in a power that created it.  Fine.  Everything comes from somewhere.  We agree and I can move on.

Finally, I try to find something humorous (it keeps the bile down).  In this case, it was the upper-case M in master.  If that author could only have known how many future online chat room Masters would insist on upper-case Ms in online chat with their online slaves, he would never have associated his Creator with that upstanding group of leather-clad lotharios.

In this particular case, I can’t really find anything humorous about someone being unable to find any beauty in art or architecture.  That’s just truly sad to me.  I hope I never get to that point in my recovery.  I don’t want what he has, and that’s ok.  Fortunately for me, that’s not the end of the book.