AA Grapevine August 1962 #essentialsofrecovery

Boy Lying in the Grass


A whole new world of spirit opened to a

WHEN I was a boy, a summer vacation in the country always contained a good deal of fishing, not to mention hunting craw-dads, shooting at crows with an air rifle, catching bull frogs, collecting old birds' nests and attempts to tattoo ourselves with ordinary pen and ink. But there were also hours of heavenly loafing, lying in tall grass, chewing a straw and listening to the insects making "a joyful noise unto the Lord."

It was heavenly just to be alive. Then, as the years wheeled by, the world seemed to fade. Things no longer glowed from inside with their own light, and the time came when a landscape had to be seen through a haze of whiskey before it spoke of peace. Even then it was only for a little while--a mirage that faded as the vision blurred and the booze conquered.

Summer then was a bitter mockery of the hints of heaven which had come to me in boyhood and I solaced myself with more drinks, as any alcoholic knows. I thought that the years of peace and wonder had gone forever; the years when little things--a butterfly poised on a porch rail, a scarlet tanager on a branch by the window, the taste of mocha cake with brown sugar filling--held so much excitement that the heart could stand no more.

When I was finally guided into our Fellowship, I thought it would be a dull routine at best, free from the tyranny of booze but lived under a constant sky of deadly grey. The surprise I got at finding the little delights of sheer living again was one of the treasures AA brought to me. But I know from conversations and from listening to speakers, that for many this happy innocence of a boy's view of life doesn't come back to all of us. And I've been wondering why.

I don't think the loss of it is confined to alcoholics. I think it is the spirit of the times which sweeps over us like a fog, obscuring the sun. For it is no news that this is the Age of Anxiety. One of the complaints of recovered alcoholics who have been in the Fellowship for some time is, "But what do you do with all your spare time?" It's a perfectly legitimate question. Not everyone likes to read. Not everybody enjoys or can go in for boating or gardening. Not everybody likes the movies. And if a man has spent every spare moment of twenty years in a saloon depending upon a chemically-induced feeling of fellowship to keep him amused and feeling safe and comfortable, what is he going to put in its place?
Old-timers in the Fellowship have the answer all ready: "Pitch in and do more Twelfth Step work. Keep active in AA. Get to a lot of meetings. Get yourself a couple of pigeons to work with. Then you can't get bored."

All right--for them it works. But sometimes I think that even they are whistling to keep up their courage, especially when they give this advice in an extra-loud tone of voice.
I think that under the boredom, which is the curse of our jet age, lies concealed panic. Let's be honest about it. We're afraid the Russians are going to blow us to kingdom-come. We're afraid of death, quick death at the ground zero area or slow death from radiation. The thing we have to come to terms with in our hearts is death itself.

This fear wears a great many masks. I think it lurks behind the current cult of noise. My own boy spends precious little time lying in the grass and watching the clouds roll by. He will lie in the grass on rare occasions but he has his transistor radio along. He doesn't know that he has a fear of silence. Nor do his friends. For in that silence, what whispers may come of guided missles through the stratosphere arching above the Pole?

When I was his age, the world was at peace and we who were young knew that we would never die. But today even the young fear death. Man's tinkering with the bedrock of the planet has killed a part of childhood. Some find booze early, fearfully early. And in the darker corners of our cities (and even in the tree-shaded streets of our suburbs) others find the greatest horror of all, morphine.

The thirst for excitement grows in each of us. Cars are too powerful and are driven too fast by people who have had too many martinis, and so the tangled wrecks pile up on the super-highways.

The world is in the grip of fear which comes out in a fear of silence, a fear of sitting still, a fear of the ordinary processes of consciousness, reporting God's world in little things.
Twelfth Step work is fine and necessary to keep our sobriety solid. But is it all we need? I don't think it is for all of us.

When we look about us in the Fellowship, we find people who have lost everything--homes, families, professions, jobs--yet some of these seem to be among our happiest members. And for them the hospital visit and the prison meeting are an outlet for their energies and a splendid antidote for loneliness. This is good and we love them for it. Some of them keep up an enormous correspondence with loners in far-away places. Some have portable tape recorders and run their own tape exchanges with loners and isolated groups. And this is great work. But it is not for everyone.

I know, for there was a time, after I had been sober for a few years, when such "good works" seemed to fail me, too. You will say that I failed them and I won't argue the point. But the day came when I felt that I had heard all anybody could possibly say about alcoholism. My pigeons seemed never to sober up: they just borrowed money and vanished. And boredom came stealthily in, as subtle a progression as alcoholism itself. Before I knew it I was screaming with boredom, inside. So I got drunk. And I stayed drunk and away from AA for years.

When the desperation got bad enough, I was jolted awake and came back to AA, humbly and gratefully. Then, the speakers at the meetings seemed to be talking just for me. And the perfume of the coffee, drifting out on the night air when I was going down the stairs to the church basement to a meeting, had a heavenly aroma it had never held before. Something in me had changed, deeply and radically. I had tried everything else and I had at last given in and was able to "let God run it,"' because I was unable to "run" my own life any more.

With this upset of pride and the beginning of a clear perception of the true role of the ego, the little things came back, one at a time.

When I step out under the stars at night, they no longer seem cold or far away. They are a part of me and I am a part of them, for we are all creatures of the Higher Power. Or, as it seems to me now, we are not solid, three-dimensional constructions that move only so long as the mechanism inside is wound up. We are not robots. We are dancing reflections of God on an ocean which is God. All we can lose at death is the ego, for life itself is God and everlasting.

With this view, a diamond necklace in a shop window is beautiful only because it is a work of God and throws back a reflection of God's sun from its man-made facets. The dew on a spider's web in early morning is even lovelier. And I always hated spiders until I came to know them as children of God.

I did not get this view of the world easily nor through my own efforts. Grace is not a do-it-yourself project. It comes through prayer, but prayer for but one thing--the ability to remain open to God. With my new world view has come the realization that what men of our age thirst for is the knowledge of God. Their attempt to satisfy this thirst with excitement--speed, danger, love affairs, travel, display of wealth--defeats them. Like drinking sea water, it carries its own thirst.

Church membership and conspicuous piety have nothing to do with satisfying this thirst of the soul for God. Philosophy, even if the product of a genius, takes us not a fraction of an inch nearer to real inner peace. There is nothing we can do to get it--except stop grabbing for it. We can "let go and let God" as the saying has it. But it isn't always easy.

Can nothing help us defeat boredom and achieve real peace, except prayer?

I think there are three things which can help, or at least they have helped me:

1.    1) We can, possibly with some prayer to help us, stop chewing and worrying at the mysterious ways of God in apparently visiting tribulation on the righteous while allowing the wicked to flourish like the green bay tree. It's God's world, made from the very essence of God, every dust mote, mountain and mosquito. God will set your mind at peace if you can stop the squirrel-cage type of thinking. This again may call for prayer and patience. But it will happen--not by will power, just by asking God for help with it.

2.    2) We can cultivate the blessed silence in which divine guidance can come to us. And if we are afraid to trust our spontaneous impulses, to do something or to refrain from doing something, there is a simple test by which we can tell if the impulse comes from the divine self in us or from the ego--if there is fear or distrust buried in the impulse it is the ego speaking, not God.

3.    3) We can allow the sweetness of little things to register in our minds again--one drop of mist against the face can convey as much as all the sermons ever preached, if the heart is open. We can try, with God's help, to regain our sense of wonder at the infinitely complex world. And once we do we can recover, late in life, the worldless delight of the boy lying in the grass and watching the great, piled, snowy mountains of cloud roll over him, drifting before the summer wind.

Boredom, I am now convinced, is a mask worn by panic, panic of the ego faced with its own ultimate destruction. With God's grace the blessing of wonder comes back again--the flash of water in a puddle, shining with the hues of heaven; a stray feather cast by a robin tells us, in the perfection and rhythm of its tiny veins, that God made us all and made us wonderfully. And there is no pleasure quite like the delight the fingers find in a pebble, worn smooth by tumbling waters.

At first we "make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him." But as we progress in the God-oriented life, we come to know that "decision" has a special meaning. What we really gain is the knowledge--not the hope or the conclusion or the wish but the actual, intimate knowledge--that we already are in the care of God whether we have made a decision or not and whether we understand Him or not.

Little children play a game which is always new to every generation. One child creeps softly up behind another, puts his hands over the other's eyes and whispers, "Guess who?" I think this is the kind of game God is playing with us. He temporarily blinds our inner eye with the perplexities and supposed terrors of the material world. And all the time He is whispering, "Guess who?"

When I realized this, it was the end of boredom--and of fear, which is boredom's big brother.

L. G.
Ontario 

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