“…teach them well, let them lead the way…”.

I want to share some reflections on Whitney Houston’s death.

Rarely am I interested in celebrities or their lives.  This is not much of an exception.  However, I was in the U.S. when Whitney Houston died and naturally, heard a tremendous amount of news coverage.  More than I would likely have heard in Canada.  So her death has been very much in the forefront of my mind which to me is an indicator that there is some meaning to be discovered in processing this through.

First off, her death is a tragedy.  A tragedy the same as any death.  No more, no less.  Certainly no more than the thousands of un-named, un-known people who died on the same day in the same, or more painful and unjust circumstances.  My heart goes out to all families of all people who died that or any other day.  Someone is hurt and crying over the losses.  My heart goes out to them the most.

I saw the news story recently about the cause of death still being pending.  Understandable.  It is a high-profile incident with huge legal and publicity implications.  Of course those involved are going to be careful to be able to back up everything they conclude or say.

A sad fact is that this is even necessary.  Or that it is necessary for a celebrity, but not for the others.  That legal and medical professionals need to be more vigilant for a celebrity death than a non-celebrity death.  I understand why, but it is still sad.

The common practice of Talent Worship comes to mind.  I contrast this with Character Worship.  Frankly neither should be worshipped but I am sure you understand my point.  We, the consuming public, send a message to our entertainment figures that we value your talent more than your character.  We show you by our spending habits that we pretty much only care about your talent.  Your characters mean very little.  We will overlook who you are, how you treat people, and what kind of example you are to society, including our youth, in order to hear you sing, watch you perform, act, play, or what have you.

We will let you destroy your life, and harm those around you, as long as you give us what we want.  Then, when you finally self-destruct, we will worship your legend, once again ignoring the fact that you exemplified danger and how to live a self-consumed life.

Tragically, Whitney Houston once sang the lyrics that make up the title of my post.  The more complete   lyrics are, “I believe that children are our future… teach them well, let them lead the way”.  I am not standing here judging and shouting ‘hypocrite’!  I am standing here noticing the sad irony of the lyrics, the lifestyle, and the end.  Who am I to judge?  An ex-alcoholic and addict?  If anything, I am grateful that my drugs and booze behaviour ended prior to death.  And sad that Whitney’s and other’s didn’t. 

Why, I wonder, don’t celebrities and the wealthy seem to “get it” as often as many of the rest of us?  Could it be because they don’t have to?  Does their wealth and fame let them continue by buffering them from consequences that others of us come to more quickly?  Could it be that we, the consuming public, don’t care if they get it or not, as long as they keep feeding us talent to worship? 

Obviously I am generalizing here.  I suppose it asks the question of why some who seemingly have ‘everything’ come to early and tragic ends when they seemingly have opportunities otherwise.

It is times like these that I look at the losses in my life with gratitude.  The losses were significant enough to get my attention.  So who is in a better position?  The ‘privileged’, or those of us with less?

To be blunt, and I truly hope this does not sound arrogant, insensitive, or judgemental, at approximately the same age as Whitney Houston, would those of us who are clean, sober, and still alive… would we not then actually be the recipients of the more ’privileged’ lives?

Is this not what we hope to teach our children to help build a better future?

My head is swimming in these issues.  And the last thing I want to sound like is judgemental.  I suppose I am shocked and rattled.  Maybe this is my mind telling me to just be grateful for each day and for all that has happened to bring me to a recovering life.

Your thoughts and reflections would be most welcome.

Ciao.

Chaz

Silent Envy…

Another emotion worth leaving behind is envy. 

Like anything we recover from, it takes time and practice to change our patterns.  In my experience, we develop many habits of thought and behaviour, particularly on the subconscious level.  Not unlike when our computers are running processes in the background, we don’t see them at work but they are having an effect and they draw energy from us.  These are the tricky ones to break free from.  But with time, help, and practice, I have found we have all the opportunity in the world to do so.

In my blog-buddy Debbie’s Two Minutes of Grace, http://bit.ly/A4rUPv we had some discussion around how we tend to do what comes naturally.  Well seemingly naturally anyway.  But what it often appears to be is what we have programmed in through time, exposure, and practice.  These are the habits of thought that the subconscious has mastered so we do them without thinking.  Including negative things like envy.

Conspicuous everyday-envy is easy to spot.  We see someone with something we would like, such as a home, job, physique, relationship, or what have you, and we experience conscious negative thoughts of longing for what they have, and a negative outlook toward them for them having it and us not.  We may even say something disparaging or dismissive about them for having it.  This is the easy stuff to deal with.  We know it is wrong and we can address the behavior, if not on our own, we can get help.

The tougher, yet still workable stuff, are the thoughts that we are less aware of that can be found bouncing around the ether of our minds.   They taint our attitude, draw from our limited amount of daily energy, keep us mildly depressed, rob us of sleep, and affect our demeanor and decision-making.  This form of envy is one of the roots of self-pity which to me, is the master mind of all self-defeating behaviour.

This subconscious, Silent Envy is what can keep us up at night and simply put an ambient sour feeling all over us.  We feel it, but we don’t often directly express it.  It tells us to make irrelevant comparisons of ourselves and others, and to rank people by criteria that is meaningless.  They are not us and we are not them.  We do not share similar neurologies, genetics, opportunities, talents, predispositions, upbringings, or life experiences.  So on what basis are these comparisons valid?  None that I have seen, yet our subconscious minds still often make them.

Sure we all know that we should not judge, gossip, or be petty.  Yet somehow we can develop these invisible patterns of thought that run in the back of our minds and keep us exactly where we do not want to be.

So what do we do about it?  I can’t speak for everyone, but the best way I have found is to continually retrain my thinking in new and positive ways.  Most importantly, I had to get a functioning understanding…. no, deeper than that… I had to immerse my thinking in gratitude.  I had to learn to see it, feel it, seek it, find it, embrace it, celebrate it, run to it, and embed it in my subconscious thinking as much or more than the threads of envy that once wove through. 

God as I understand him teaches that we can be “… transformed by the renewing of our minds”.  Sounds almost spooky yet is this not the process of any kind of personal growth?  Weeding out old, ineffective, toxic thought processes and planting and nurturing new ones?  How do we nurture them?  By practicing them.  By making a deliberate choice to take that awkward pathway of stopping an old thought then mechanically forcing ourselves (at first) to follow the new, chosen way.

It feels at first like wearing a new pair of shoes that are not worn in yet.  And our old thinking will resist it.  In fact, my old envious thinking started telling me, “it isn’t fair that I should have to learn new thinking, those other people didn’t have to”!   Really? First off, if they didn’t have to they probably will with some other thread of flawed thinking.  And secondly…. Who cares what they have to or don’t have to do!!??  They are not us!

The sheer insistence we apply to following a new pattern of thought or behaviour will be a key to creating a habit of it.  In my experience, a happy, functioning day and happy, functioning life is a result of living in happy functioning habits.

I continue to slowly give up this habit of envy at the subconscious level.  Life is so much better and my head is a far less noisy place.

Ciao.

Chaz

Amazing moment…

I had an amazing and unexpected moment today.  One that consolidated a number of feelings and confirmed my understanding of some of my pains and longings.

I took my elderly father to the Doctor this morning for a routine visit.  By way of background, Dad is in his late 80′s, a non-drinking alcoholic (on a dry drunk for a number of years due to lack of availability of alcohol due to his lack of mobility).  Dad needs assistance walking and uses a wheeled walker.  I am the youngest sibling and a very late child… my parents in their 40s when I was born.

Dad has been a very ominous figure in my life.  We did not have a conventional parent/child relationship due to him and my Mom being divorced and his working out of town.  In addition, his alcoholism and anger issues made him entirely difficult and complicated to be around.  He only passed through my life occastionally during my teen years.

My relationship with him, or lack thereof, has impacted and defined much of my life.  There were positive too.  I know that deep down he loved me and he did his best to express his love with gifts and whatever encouragement he was capable of.

Dad is also a WW2 combat veteran and former POW.  He seldom talks about these experiences and I can’t help but imagine how life-defining these were for him.  So I do my best not to judge or resent his behaviour, even though I have felt a lot of pain over it.

When we arrived at the Dr.’s office, Dad had to walk the length of my truck to get to his walker awaiting on the sidewalk at the tailgate of the truck.  Parking was tight and the walker would not fit between my vehicle and the one beside us, so Dad has to walk bracing himself on the two vehicles.

At one point, the vehicles on either side were not reachable so I held my hands out.  Dad grabbed my forearms and I grabbed his so he could walk with my assistance.   I walked backward as we held forearms for about 6 feet which took maybe 30 seconds.  This was the amazing moment.

Having felt a sense of absence of my father during my childhood, and always having had a longing for a father and guide throughout my adult life, I finally had a moment with my father where we had physical contact and walked essentially arm in arm. 

Now I know our roles are by now reversed, where I assist and care for him, versus him caring for and assisting me, but the connection still happened.  This brief moment represented to me what I always wanted… to walk arm in arm with my father.  To be there for one another.  To share strength in a time of weakness.

In that moment, I felt no pain, no regret, no longing or loss.  In that moment, I felt, “Wow, I have a Dad, and he needs me right now, and I can be here for him”.

It didn’t matter that he was seldom there for me growing up, or that I spent most of my young adult life looking for male role models to fill the father role in my life. I was just grateful and happy in that moment.

I have a son too.  He means the world to me.  I catch myself trying to be everything to him that I wish I had when I was his age.  I often parent him out of my own pain.  I know this is dangerous ground.  Yet I know he knows I am there for him as much as I can.

I am so grateful for that moment with my Dad today.  I know I can never forecast when God is going to drop an amazing moment on me or what he will show me in it.

Ciao.

Chaz

The past…

Recently, I have reached a new level of surrender with respect to painful events of the past.  Mainly with regrets of my own behaviours.  On a much deeper level, I am learning to let go of these regrets that at one point, used to bounce around inside my head like a ball of “flubber” (fictional flying rubber from the 1963 Disney movie that would bounce perpetually, never losing energy).

More than ever before, I am finding it an automatic response to place painful memories and regrets of the past where they belong…. in the past.

It is a typical characteristic of an alcoholic to ruminate self-destructively about regrets and resentments so I know I come by it honestly.  Throughout my life, I had trained myself to assault myself over and over with the past.  It was not until I began to understand recovery that this habit began to lose strength.

Today, when pain of the past comes to mind, I envision myself picking up the event, and placing it in a container labelled, “The Past”.  I close the lid and walk away.  Knowing full well and resting in the fact that there is nothing I can do to change the events of the past. 

Furthermore, God as I understand him assures me that he casts my wrongs into his “sea of forgetfulness”, which tells me that God actively practices forgetting that which he does not wish to remember.  If I am created in his image, should I not seek to do the same?  So I envision God as the keeper of The Past container… this is my process of surrender.

There is a widely held belief that we cannot forget our past.  But really though, is this completely true?  Can we not progress toward forgetting by removing the emotional charge from what were once painful events of the past?  I believe we can learn to.  I have found I have made progress in this area over the years and that those once painful memories begin to dim.

And as I fill my mind with new and positive things, the painful past dims even more.  To me, this is not denial, it is moving on.  And like a highway sign fades in the rearview mirror, so I believe our regrets and resentments can if we learn how to let them go.

Just this week, an event of the past came to mind that at one point had hit me like a torpedo.  It was something my ex-wife had said to me as she was walking away from our marriage.  When it was said, I felt like I had been punched in the chest and had the wind knocked out of me.  I felt this injury over and over again for years.

My recent realization of it was that I had actually for the most part forgotten it happened.  There is virtually no emotional sting to it anymore, and my life has been so full in the past several years of new and wonderful things for which I am deeply grateful for, that that once life-changing hurt that I centred my life around for a time actually faded completely.  And when it did reappear, it had almost no sting and I was able to envision picking it up and placing it in that place called The Past yet again.  And there it sits losing even more of its power, and I will probably forget it again as life moves on full of new wonders, challenges, and victories.

So are we sure we can’t forget?  I am convinced that we can, through practice and repetition, actively and progressively forget.  For me, it is largely by keeping the past where it belongs… in the past.

Ciao.

Chaz

Legalism

As mentioned in previous posts, I am re-reading, “What’s so Amazing About Grace”? by Philip Yancey.  Yancey examines the function of grace and how it does or doesn’t tend to be applied in our lives, particularly in North American church cultures.

The book discusses many observations of legalism.  Meaning the application of ever-tightening rules and laws intended to manage behaviour in a way that presumes to please God.

The discussion of legalism has been bouncing around inside my head for weeks now, and have come to see how much I have been allergizing over it in reflection of my church-going experiences.

Why is it I wonder that we humans tend toward legalism?  Is it easier for us to understand and impose on others?  Why is it I wonder that the organized representation of the most famous man in all of history, whose message was centred around grace, is known largely by its reputation for legalism?

Why the repeated drift toward legalism?  How many times throughout history have there been enlightenments of the legalism we find ourselves in, then a reformation of some sort, only to drift back into legalism.

And this is certainly not limited to churches and the progression of church cultures.  I see it in other faith systems too.  And in AA.

We seem bent on penning ourselves in with legalism over and over again.

My journey continues to prompt me to wonder, why?

Thoughts?

Ciao.

Chaz

Recovery Superstars

Duh.  I attended a “Treatment Centre” years ago that allowed opportunity for a number of us to be featured in speaking publicly about our recovery.  This was in very early sobriety, perhaps a few weeks or months.

The program was frankly a disaster.  The relapse rate was very high and drugs were used in the centre.  We were paraded into local churches and shown off by the “Executive Director” (note the impressive title) of the program.  He was praised for all the great work he was doing… followed of course by a plea for support from the congregation… which of course he got.

What a load of crap. 

Why do I bring all of this up?  The memory of my time there came up in a recent blog dialogue I was having with another blogger.  And it simply brought to mind a few key ingredients that I believe made for a successful recovery for me…. and what ingredients didn’t.

One that really DIDN’T was the opportunity to pump up my ego when it should have been squashed.  The program I was in published profiles of the “students” (guys living in the centre… so much for anonymity) and highlighted the higher points of our bad behaviours prior to being taken under the wing of the program.  We were then put in front of crowds of people to share our testimonies.  Egos ran wild as people came up to congratulate us for staying sober for what, a few weeks or months?  We were portrayed as recovery superstars.

Most of us with drug or alcohol problems have an underlying ego problem.  We are either over-confident or under-confident and drink our way around the unreality of our perspective.  How on earth can one gain a perspective when made into a small c celebrity… especially in the first few weeks or months of sobriety?  Our egos took over and many people, before they got any measure of recovery, went back out.  Why?  Probably because we thought we were all that.

In my experience, “Sobriety” and “Superstar” are oxymorons.  And people who try to be or make Recovery Superstars are just ordinary morons

Subsequent to this experience, I got my ego, my teeth, and my butt handed to me on a silver platter.  I crashed so hard that there was little ego left and no place left to fan the ember into a flame again.

Today, I am grateful for a program of recovery that limits opportunities to feed my ego.  And were it slips in, God seems to serve up people and circumstances to remind me that my ego is getting a little big for its britches and a dose of humility is in order.

Ciao.

Chaz

Distilling the Gospel?

A profound quote from author, Philip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?

“It has taken me years to distill the gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it”.

This sentence sums up so much of where I am at with God as I understand him today.  I find the subculture in which many of those who profess most loudly to represent God are entrenched distasteful.  Not meaning to criticize it too harshly, but it is simply not for me and I find little meaning or value in it at this point.

His phrasing and choice of words, particularly, “distill”, is especially thought provoking to me as a recovering alcoholic.  Almost ironic really.

And leaves me wondering how many more people would have a taste for who Jesus was and what he taught if he wasn’t presented as often by a subculture that they find unpalatable?  Yet somehow we often presume we are helping God out by creating systems and cultures for him.  Is that what we are doing?

Ciao.

Chaz