The Point of Departure of an AA Awakening

Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be! 

“‘Wash yourselves clean, make yourselves clean. Put away the evils from your souls before My eyes. Cease from your evils. Learn to do good. Seek judgement and redeem the wronged. Defend the orphan and justify the widow. Come now, and let us reason together’,’ says the Lord, ‘although your sins are like crimson, I shall make them white as snow, and although they were as scarlet, I shall make them white like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good things of the land. But if you are unwilling and disobedient, you shall be devoured by the sword,’ for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 1:16-20).

My flight’s been delayed.

Twice.

I enjoy writing in the airport; it is a strange, liminal place where one can tap into a frantic, kinetic energy or get lost in it like a trance. We shuffle from one gate to another, mindlessly scarfing down blueberry muffins, Stephen King, and sleep aids. We’re surrounded by European accents and confused Midwesterners all of them unraveling and put back together by the stress and glue of perpetual motion, lugging heavy bags from one end of the world to another. The airport is like a storm pouring on a wave pool with no ripple being exactly the same, but all of them similar in their addition to the vortex.

The bridges connecting the chaos to our life rafts blow a humid, warm Georgia January like vents and I am struck with a little madness by the gaslighting weather, enveloping the senses with a reality out of step with time.

Out of step as only the South can be which offers two opportunities to the one raised in such conditions: become an observer outside of the swirling swampland and mountainfolk or become a part of the madness.

It’s why Southerners make great storytellers as well as being prolific addicts.

The South is plagued by a hopelessness and generational trauma that manifests in a subtle untowardness making this part of the country inherently mean, but in a way where you wonder if everyone is just like that or if it’s just that no one likes you.

The South is a dirty, sweaty yesterday spending tomorrow’s pay on booze today.

I’ve only ever known it to be sleepy or violent.

There’s Mark Twain and then there’s everybody else sitting on a keg of frustration, liable to kick the shins off a man for the smallest infraction at the pool hall.

That being said, I have seen more passive aggressiveness down here than anywhere else, something the South and the Midwest have in common is the inability to express their feelings, avoid meaningful or helpful confrontation, and swallow themselves up in an effort to stay just a little bit angry with everyone around them. 

But I guess that’s alright since Californians don’t seem to have any feelings at all.

It’s a want. It is a strange inclination toward resentment that is wrapped around the Southern heart. It’s the same entanglement one finds with people who live with addiction—this resentment is, in some ways, a side effect of a defense mechanism that no longer serves any good. The hardness of our hearts was a part of what used to keep us safe, but now it keeps us locked out of the present, hardened to real change—stuck in the past, our own and in others’ past, too. We don’t want to change, we’re afraid of change, “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die,” as W.H. Auden so bluntly puts it.

Symbolically, the cross is pointing us toward spiritual apprehension that lies on its vertical and horizontal axis. Most of us comprehend the horizontal: theory. But that also means we can get stuck here, like anything that is familiar and mostly safe. Theory can take us a long way, but it’s the depth we need to assemble the cross that we carry, without a strong foundation we will have no possibility of ascending out of the illusion of our addictions where our habits and personality form around the endless cycle of self-loathing. 

We might be great at weaving a narrative, but the best stories contain truth.

The best jokes are honest.

The hopelessness and trauma are as good of a place as any to begin, because honesty is found on the other side of working through pain.

So, the next few posts are looking at working through where we are in the hopes of telling better stories. And working through pain is sort of like waiting on a plane, all we can do is be patient and trust that there’s always a way out. No matter how many times these flights get delayed, there’s a plane coming… 

God willing. 

The third step in the Twelve Step program initiate’s a process wherein we have “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”

The third step addresses something I feel is necessary to disentangle so to better arise out of illusion which is functioning martyrs complex and codependency. 

Our venerable and God-bearing Father, St. John of the Ladder wrote, “The vainglorious man is an idolator, although he is called a believer. He thinks that he is honoring God, but in actual fact he is pleasing not God, but men.” The martyr complex and codependence are an expression of the vainglorious temptation that builds upon our attachment to the things of this world and unhealthy habits including, and often fed by, our efficiency in self-directed hate. They are both forms of pride, self-absorption, and our natural inclination toward misery.

Misery is so much a part of how we get stuck in addictive behaviors that it might be well to consider it the core of what we’re most addicted, no matter how it manifests: drinking, sex, over-eating, and codependency all work to keep us living with misery.

We might make a little progress in the right direction, but because of our habitual inclination toward misery we find every reason to stop. Sometimes we might even punish ourselves for thinking we could possibly heal or grow.

Shame on us. 

Active addiction is rooted in a need to control and it is a blessing that we have the more expressive and destructive addictions like drugs and alcohol that present us with the natural conclusion to what a need to control leads to—loss of friends, loss of family, jobs, and a lot of passing out in strange places—if one does not surrender control life finds a way of wresting it from them.

The qualities of the codependent and martyr are not so perceptible as the stumblebum making up excuses for why the car’s in the living room, but they are both dangerously effective tools in keeping us within the confines of self-absorption and delusion. 

And just like the individual finds reason to backslide when progress is made, the codependent finds ways of enabling the people around them to do the same. Whether we’re stuck, and we want others to be stuck with us… or—in a cruel fashion—we watch others pick themselves up (without us) and try to pull them down so they continue needing us to help them. 

The ego needs to be needed. 

We would rather spend all our time putting out other people’s fire instead of working on ourselves. We’d rather find every possible way to drive another’s car while ours idles in the garage—slowly poisoning us in a sweet, luxurious gas of spiritual sleep. 

Speaking from experience, carbon monoxide poisoning is like walking through a field of poppies outside Oz. 

Furthermore, codependency is a sin, because it actively takes away another person’s agency which is an affront to God, Who respects the personage of everyone. It is idolatrous because the codependent walks through life acting as if the world needs them to be in control. Martyrdom is this mode of being that seeks an audience. Not only does it need the world to need them to be in control, it needs the world to see that the world needs it to be in control. 

The ego is deceptive like that. 

When a friend seeks recovery the ego of the codependent is threatened, because the mirror will change: the friend who begins recovering will begin reflecting back on the ego the idea that there is a different mode of being, there is a different way of seeing. Instead of the ego recognizing this new model as an accessible perspective it rejects both the friend’s recovery and, by extension, their friend’s agency. 

We don’t like to be alone. So much so that we might even kneecap our loved ones who try seeking a better operating mode through recovery. We hurt those around us by enabling them to stay stuck in their ways, stuck with us, we want them to stay stuck because then we might not have to look at ourselves. Ultimately, we are afraid of change, internally, so we do everything in our power to control our externals, and that means the people around us. 

Codependency and the martyr complex are both pretty demonic, honestly, because they are a corrupt expression of the Word of God, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23). This renunciation of the self is not unto God; this sacrifice is made to further our own glory here in this world, St. Macarius the Egyptian wrote, “Sometimes undertakings good in appearance lead to their ac-complishment for the sake of glory and human praise, but in God’s sight this is equal to untruth, thievery and other sins.” 

Active drug and alcohol addiction have a more explosive quality to them that appear much more destructive and toxic than one who gives up themselves to enable behavior in others that is self-destructive or habitually harmful. But they all concern themselves with perpetuating an endless cycle of self-loathing and aimless wandering, stuck on the horizontal road… Going nowhere. 

Dying to the world for the treasures of this world.