Professor Langley's flying machine

Did not Professor Langley's flying machine go to the bottom of the Potomac River? - Alcoholics Anonymous - p.51

As the Big Big enters it fourth quarter of a century (seventy-six years, to be exact) some of the reference are becoming more obscure and unfamiliar to many new members. It would be a good idea if we could read up on these references in order to make the points Bill intended in a more comprehensible way. Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about the above quote. What Bill is saying is that people often ridicule that which they do not understand. Or, worse yet, they ridicule it because they don't want to understand it.

Bill lived in an age when the religious culture of the United States was coming under heavy attack. It was the age of prolific scientific discovery. In fact, in Bill's Guest House talk he refers to the way in which Science was his God.

The point of his citation is that people deride what they can not conceive. Langley was a laughingstock because his failure reinforced the beliefs of people who did not think flight was possible. And rather than attempt to prove their point, it was easier to point to another's failure.

Christianity had been such an unspoken assumption in our culture for so long that when it became more acceptable to hold anti-religious views, the handiest expression of those views was to ridicule it.

⁶ “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.  - Matthew 7:6 NIV

It's not just that the pearls are wasted on the pigs, but rather that if you do that they will turn and attack you. It's an odd fact, but one borne out by experience, that spiritual things don't bounce off unbelievers but rather pierce them. And the reactions are generally disproportionately hostile.

And it was in this primitive mindset that I viewed religion in general and Christianity in particular. I was a pig and not only did I trample on the good things people tried to give me, I attacked them for even trying. It took nothing less than the complete collapse of my life to see through this irrational bias. And that's exactly what it was: irrational. I had always argued that rational people didn't believe all that God crap, yet my attack was entirely devoid of reason. It was visceral, it was mindless and it was, once I admitted it, embarrassingly shallow.

So rather than point out the ugliness of the trees, I could begin to see the beauty of the forest. Instead of laughing at the spiritual "Langley's" whose silly beliefs reinforced my prejudices, I began to see those who soared on the wings of the angels.

As a little footnote, I am soaring on the wings of a United Airlines 737 on my way back home and crammed into a seat too narrow to hit the "a" key on the keyboard comfortably. Why do I bring that up? Because despite his failure to demonstrate it, Langley was right, I wouldn't be sitting here if he weren't.

A couple of nuggets

When you stop running away from reality don't be surprised if you get rear-ended.

A camera can't take a picture of itself. It needs a mirror.

A Dubious Path

We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion. We have learned that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose and direction to millions. People of faith have a logical idea of what life is all about. Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves. - Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 49

I think it would be important at his point to ask ourselves just how we atheists and agnostics came to faith. I love that line about "cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs." That was a great amusing hobby of mine, an ego feeder for sure, but also a way of whistling past the graveyard. Keep in mind that my decision to reject God was not based on any facts or study. I merely decided that such was the case and I surrounded myself with people who reinforced that mindset. As I've said earlier, people who hate God and people who love God are both passionate about spiritual things. These are people for whom the issue of God and religion triggers either disproportionate hostility or an equally strong desire to share what they have found. Neither is lukewarm.

When I was in the former category it was not the people preaching to me that had any effect. In fact, I found them repulsive and, rather than winning my heart, they hardened it. Instead, it was the people who said nothing but rather showed God by the "stability, happiness and usefulness" in their lives. I wanted it for myself but I did not want it in they was they obtained it. To do so wold be to admit that I had been living my life based on an erroneous assumption and a malevolent one at that.

In order to effective in carrying the message, we must remember that "cheerfulness makes for usefulness" and that we ought to have stable lives. Remember that the Third Step prayer asks that our difficulties be relieved in order to demonstrate God's power. If we sit in meetings talking about the ongoing chaos in  our lives without sharing how much more stable we had become, we are carrying a very dubious message.

Back and Forth

I just got off the phone with Pat. T. (Congratulations on twenty-two years!) I was expressing my frustration about feeling as if no one was reading this blog. She assured me that people were and that they missed my posts. I assumed from the absence of comments or emails that no one was reading. Yet I saw page hits and wondered where they were coming from.

I have been very discouraged of late about not becoming a part of AA here in Arizona. I took a position with intergroup (I am the web servant) but I have had little opportunity to sponsor anyone here. Couple that with the gnawing feeling that I am becoming more and more irrelevant to my friends in Michigan and you might sense some of my melancholy.

Part of this is due to the fact that it is difficult for me to be understood on the phone and it takes a lot of effort to talk for any length of time. It's not that I couldn't do it, but I shy away from it as an unpleasant obligation. To help with this I have started writing to AAs in prison and that has been a great help. But even there I can become lazy and discouraged.

So once again I am encouraged to return to this blog and ignore the fact that I am getting no feedback. My email still works (sclarkaz@gmail.com) so I would appreciate a note here and there. But my blogging will no longer depend on that.

Truth be told, it is actually the sin of pride that holds me back. I want to be recognized and praised and, of all the reasons there might be for doing this, that one is the least noble. So I will resume blogging as an act of spiritual discipline and assume that even if no one else reads it, God certainly is.

Traditions aside

Here's a post I wrote some time ago but never published.

Last Thursday I attended our local Intergroup meeting. It was a good reminder of how "a loving God may express Himself ion our group conscience." I wrote a little article for the newsletter on the subject, but since it is on my mind I would like to stray briefly from our walk through the Big Book to discuss an interesting way of looking at the first several Traditions.

The expression of God in our group conscience is anything but nebulous. If there were no tangible way for a Higher Power to guide the fellowship then all this talk about seeking and doing God's will would be pointless. When I was a newcomer, this idea that we could receive direct guidance from God seemed to be silly at best and a delusion otherwise. But I saw that AA had somehow survived all these years governed from below by a pack of fractious drunks. If I could understand how God managed that minor miracle, then maybe there was an answer to this question of guidance.

I grew up in a musical atmosphere. My home was filled with it constantly and my mother saw to it that her children knew the classics, understood jazz, could play an instrument and sing. Christmas was an especially musical time. We broke out all the Christmas albums and sang along with all the carols. Why am I telling you all this? Because I noticed something very odd. We had different groups, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, a couple of others I can't name, and they sang some of the same songs and they ALL SOUNDED ALIKE! How was that possible? How could groups of totally different people sound so similar?

I eventually found the answer in the physics of sound and human perception of it. (Stay with me here.) What was happening was very simple. Every individual voice was different, but when they sang together the individual differences cancelled out and what you heard was the distilled essence of human voices. And so it is in the AA group. In any group of people seeking to do God's will as they understand it, there will be differences, sometime great ones between people but if you listen carefully to what is common in the voice of the group you hear what I believe is the purified essence of the voice of God. That's why we can't trust our own direct guidance. It has to filtered through our experience in the group.

So this business of divine guidance starts to make sense in the context of the group and the Traditions actually provide a very clear model for how this functions in the real world. I want to examine the first several to show how this plays out.

Tradition One

Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

If God is to speak through the group, there first has to BE a group, a group of people who put unity ahead of their own personal agendas. The cornerstone of all the Traditions is this inviolable necessity of unity.

Tradition Two

For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

There it is in black and white. There is only one authority. And that authority finds its expression ONLY in the group conscience.

Tradition Three

The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

The unity of the First Tradition arises organically from our need for a common solution. If God is to express Himself in the group, then the members of that group must be clearly defined. We can't be all things to all people, but we must be one thing to ourselves.

Tradition Four

Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

If the group is to express the voice of God, it MUST be free from coercion. And the converse is true as well. No group can interfere with another group's expression. Autonomy seems like a troubling proposition. How can an organization composed of stubborn drunks possibly survive if all its authority is decentralized? Yet that's precisely why we have survived. Within the minimal confines of the Tradition, groups can express God's will. And if we are all growing toward God according to the light we have been shown, then we are growing closer together as well.

Tradition Five

Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

The group carries "its" unique message. The group should certainly strive to carry the AA message, but it does so in its own voice. That is its primary purpose. And we should never criticize another group's message, no matter how wrong it may seem to us. Unity is the inviolable principle here. Trust God to carry His message, even if it is filtered through human weakness. That is as true for the groups I agree with as it is for those whom I don't.

As I have heard, the Steps keep us from killing ourselves and the Traditions keep us from killing each other.

Centered

We talk about ups and downs. "Ups" are good, "downs" are bad. But we can never quite reconcile in our minds how God can be in the middle of all of it. How is it that my faith can be so strong at times while at other times the word itself seems like a cruel taunt?

Part of the problem stems from what I wrote about recently: the need for emotional assurance. It's not enough that I know God is there. I need to feel He is there. And early on in our spiritual lives God does allow odd things to happen to let us know that there is more the our reality than just the surface. As time passes I've found that these experiences become fewer, not because God is withdrawing from us, but because He expects us to mature. We weren't meant to live a spiritual life of constant reassurance any more than we were meant to live on mother's milk forever. And what God is weening us from is precisely this need to feel emotional assurance every step of the way.

This doesn't solve the problem, of course. We still lack something and we become frustrated when we fail to receive what we think is essential. My experience is that people of high spiritual development almost universally experience these times of emptiness and alienation. And just as universally come out the other side with a more profound relationship with God.

And here lies the crux of the matter. We swing from elation to desolation and back, and we manage to convince ourselves that God is behind all of it. What we fail to realize is that God is just trying to get us to stop swinging. A pendulum eventually comes to rest because friction and gravity compel it to the center. And the essence of mature spirituality is not the constant feeling that God is present, nor is it the constant struggle to stave off the feeling of alienation. It is not about feeling at all. It is about resting.

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." - St. Augustine

I often hear about people who are trying to be "centered." Good news: you are already "centered." You may be self-centered, or you may be centered on the drama in other people's lives, but centered you certainly are. And, like a pendulum perturbed by a magnet. it is a centeredness that exposes the forces acting to deny us rest. So we use the term "God-centered" and never really ask what that means. 

"God-centeredness is not a state of mind. It is not an emotional state. And it is not, in the sense that some use it, a spiritual state. It is not, in fact, sensible. It is a state of being. And when we begin to surrender this childish demand for feeling, we begin ever so slowly to rest. We are pendulums that swing ever more gently to the point of equilibrium.

Assisted Living

I looked at my page stats in some amazement to see continuing page views in the total absence of any output. Someone is reading this but I have no idea who. I don't know if it's a technical problem or some other cause, but there are no comments on my posts and no emails either. So, absent any feedback, I'll just continue blogging away on unrelated topics.


At today's meeting an older woman shared the major changes in her life as she moves into an assisted living facility after the death of her husband. She spoke of how grateful she was that there were people who now look after her needs freeing her from the anxiety of caring for herself as her health declined.

A young woman spoke after her and comments that she would like to move there herself, and I realized that most of us would love to be in that state, but none of us would be willing to give up the control of our lives that would be sacrificed to do so.

We were born dependent and it's a natural state to which we all long to return. But I believe that impulse comes from a need to be feel assured that our needs will be met while still maintaining our freedom. Adolescent rebellion comes when the need for autonomy begins to conflict with parental care. Of course, adolescents still seek assisted living in their total surrender of autonomy to their peers. 

There has been no time in my life when I did not need assistance to live. But, unwilling to give up total control of my life, I found the feeling of security in drugs and alcohol. Again, the conflict between security and autonomy.

Trusting in a higher power I have found complete freedom and complete autonomy. I live in assisted living facility today: God who both cares for me and frees me.