Six Years of Secular Salvation

For a long time, even as my life got worse, I sneered at the idea of salvation. In my early twenties I declared the idea to be wildly immature, unlike me, and then proceeded to drink my way to the brink of total ruin. I went to support groups, early on, but thought that all of them there were stupid, that any amount of chaos and suffering was preferable to letting myself be turned into one of those drooling dead-eyed cattle. Later, lower down the ladder, I believed myself to be somehow incapable of being rescued - that maybe indeed there was hope for many people, but certainly not for me. 

I’m writing this now because I did get help, on August 13th of 2016 - I admitted that I needed help, I believed that help was available, and I went out of my way to get it and keep it. That’s the essence of the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, in my opinion. For others, the first three steps are all about getting a very specific kind of help, the help you get from having a living connection with God. Failure to connect with God is a failure of openness, humility, and imagination. 

Ouch. 

Early on, I thought people who believed God was the only way to salvation were awful and full of shit. I don’t really think that anymore, for the most part. I believe that many and maybe even most religious people are sincere. They had their experience of being saved, and I have mine. They practice their ways over there, and I practice mine over here. 

Over here, my salvation came in the form of other human beings - their stories, their insights, and their commitment to love me and accept me and be there in my life no matter what. I showed up when pretty much every relationship in my life was either dead or on fire, and more than anything I needed people to not freak out and push me away when I talked about what was really going on with me. And those needs were met, and here I am, still sober today. Maybe you can infer the presence of a loving God behind everything that’s happened in my life, behind every transformative conversation. 

But you don’t have to, and that’s the point. 

Have I changed? Of course I’ve changed, I wouldn’t be alive right now if I hadn’t. But in many ways I haven’t. Everything within me that kept me drunk is still within me, waiting. I say that without judgment, without cursing or condemning myself as somehow especially flawed. It’s just a matter of fact: I drank because alcohol worked, because it did something for me. Its effects were consistent and immediate in a way that nothing else really can be. Of course, addiction being what it is, it worked less and less as time went on, until no matter how much I drank I couldn’t make myself feel ok. 

So I know that phenomenon of helpless and hopeless craving is still down there, and that I have every reason to believe I’d be back down there before long if I started drinking again. There really isn’t a rock bottom waiting for you, eager to be discovered and bounced off of, guaranteeing that your life can’t get any worse. There’s only the place you stop digging. 

What definitely hasn’t changed is the need for human help. You don’t need to believe in God to believe in human finitude, to acknowledge the tragedy of being limited and bound in our capabilities and in the time we have to exercise them. There will always be things I can’t see or understand, there will always be strength I need that I can’t conjure on my own. I will fall short in my commitments, and will always have some sort of cleaning up to do. My work will never be done. 

Perhaps such a vision is tragic, but I think it’s only tragic so long as it’s resisted. A perfect being could never experience the profound joy of changing for the better, nor the joy of helping others change for the better too. It is through helping others that my story, my suffering, gains its meaning. My past is what gives me the power to show someone down in the gutter that, yes, I really do know how they feel, that they really don’t have to be alone in their pain anymore. 

Everything about me that once brought me shame and isolation now brings me love and connection. Those things haven’t changed, but what I make them mean has changed. All because other people showed me a different way of thinking about things. 

It’s trite to say, but it really is hard to put into words. There are lots of things to share that are almost certainly helpful to other people who haven’t lived what I’ve lived, but it’s also something that you kind of have to experience for yourself to really *get*. And that’s fine. Nobody has to be completely useful and comprehensible to everybody. 

That said, every little bit of support and understanding helps - from expressing “I’m proud of you” to reaching out to say “I need help too” or even just quietly being there, listening and reading along. 

So, if you’ve read this far, all I can really say is thank you.