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Source: Tom W. (Father) – God 101 Talks – 1 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-w-father-god-101-talks-1-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:30:19
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My name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic. I was going to meetings for a little while and I remember being a little nervous about telling people that I was in the seminary or that I was a priest because you get some real interesting reactions when you say that at meetings. And I guess I was afraid of negative reaction and people saying, oh well, you know, negative stuff. And so I'd go to meetings a lot and just kind of listen.
And after a while I'd talk some about my own difficulty with God stuff. And they would say, well, what do you do? And I'd say, well, I'm a priest. And they would say, you're not supposed to have trouble with God stuff. And I think that's naive. My suspicion is that a lot of people become psychiatrists and psychologists because they think they're crazy. And a lot of people go into ministry because we have trouble with God.
I mean, it's a place to wrestle stuff out. And so with God I frequently have problems. And when people say, gee, can you have a resentment against God, I usually say, I hope so, you know, because I have a whole list. I find God to be problematic. I find God to be difficult. I sometimes think of God as being a kind of a huge overgrown underachiever who needs encouragement. And when I pray, I'll be doing that.
You know, come on God, come on, take care of this. Aren't you embarrassed? This hasn't been worked out yet. So I just want to say that at the start, because I'm not up here as someone who is a role model, again, of a spiritual and mental health. This is an area that I'm fascinated by because I have trouble here. And I find there are a lot of official God people who have a lot of trouble with God. There are a lot of official God people that I can't listen to at all.
They just make the skin crawl off my bones. And one of the reasons is because I just don't sense that they have any tension with God. And I just figure they're not paying attention or something or, oh well. I have some tension with God the Punisher. Not a lot, but some. I have a lot more resonance with the notion, not so much the high school bureaucrat, but rather a God who is very distant and far away, who is really wonderful for other people.
Who is really wonderful for other people. But when it comes to my case, is asleep. I think that the first experience that many of us have with a higher power is our parents. I find it interesting we talk about God the Father and Mother Church, you know. Dr. Freud, how would you handle that one? And I resonate with that. My dad is a wonderful man who was very busy with everyone else's life and would come home and have a couple of social drinks and pass out.
So for 20 years we never had the back fence that worked, you know. Because he could never get around to it. But anyone else's fence in town was fixed just fine. So when I came into recovery, one of the very strong notions I had about God was that God was just fine for you. But I just didn't trust it as far as I was concerned. I had a moment of clarity. It's possible that right at the beginning of recovery we get the full revelation and then we work on that for the next 90 years or so.
I think I like that idea. I sure had some interesting experiences around that line. I was newly sober going to meetings and I had a moment of clarity where I was going to put all God stuff and all church stuff and all dogma stuff way on the back burner.
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And instead of fooling around with that, I had to go find a power greater than myself. Much of my training, I knew a lot of good stuff theologically in five languages, but it was abstract, heady, you know, who cares. I had to find an energy that could help keep me sober. And I did find one. And the first place where I connect with that energy of the higher power is at a meeting. And it was at a specific meeting on Berkeley on Wednesday night.
I was 29 years old when I got sober and this was kind of a young people's meeting, not really, but kind of a young people's meeting. And I would go there every Wednesday night and feel unconditionally accepted and loved. And I went to a lot of other meetings, but when things blew up or fell apart, which they did like on Friday or Sunday or Monday, I would do damage control and then wait till I could get to that Wednesday night meeting where I was safe and where the higher power was just very present and obvious.
I used that a lot. I found in Alcoholics Anonymous that I had to let go of a lot of old ideas. Even some of the good ones, you know, I had to rework them. Here are some of the old ideas I had to let go about God. I just think they're silly now, but God as cop, God watches. I never found those words comforting. I don't know about you. God sees everything. Oh, no. God is cop. God is tyrant. I have no interest.
God is tyrant. I have no interest in arbitrary power or tyranny. My Thomas Jefferson rebellion comes up, you know. God as snoop. That's another one. I had to get the notion through my head. It's a Muslim notion, but it's that God is real big. Once I could say that God is real big, God is bigger than we think, it really helped a lot. Throughout the Jewish scriptures, there's lots of warnings and things and advice offered.
One of the greatest of all sins you can do in Deuteronomy and Leviticus is to create God in your own image and likeness. The reason that's considered deadly is because God in our own image and likeness is going to be real small and just isn't going to be able to handle anything. How do you know you've created God in your own image and likeness? When you discover that God hates all the same people you do, that's a bad sign.
But it's in the Bible. A lot of things are in the Bible. It's a big book. But it's, you know, while God shares my prejudices, I'm so grateful, it's not a comforting thought. I think God is big, I think God is mysterious, and I think a lot of people have difficulty here. We get all mixed up with spiritual, and we figure if you're real spiritual, you don't sweat or have bad breath. Or have bad days or diarrhea.
Or, you know, moods. I'll just have to get more spiritual. I listened to a fellow a few years ago who was trying to get real spiritual. I'm sponsoring someone right now who's trying to get real spiritual, and it's just a torture for all of us. His wife is going nuts. But he's going to be spiritual regardless of the cost. Anyway, this fellow tried to get real spiritual, by which he meant, you know, non-physical.
He wanted to transcend the body. And he went to a Trappist monastery back east. And the Trappists tend to take things a little seriously. And he was watching them work, and he was watching them live together, and he was watching them work in the fields, and he was watching them chant. He really got excited about their chanting. And after he'd been there for a couple of weeks, he went to talk to the abbot, the guy running the monastery, and wanted to join the monastery.
He wanted to be spiritual. And he was talking to the head monk about everything, and said, you know, I'm so impressed with this, and I'm so impressed with that, and here are my skills, and here are my abilities.
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Tell me, what are you looking for in terms of a new monk, you know? What do you need? And the guy running the monastery looked at him and said, right now we're looking for someone who can repair farm equipment. That's very important. Take the physical real seriously. We're glad that you sing like the angels, but can you do anything, you know? Do you have any skills? Do you have any abilities? Can you be practical? Is there a practical bone in your body?
That's a good thing. And I don't have a lot of them, so I'm always impressed when I find people who are practical. And I think when we're dealing with God, practicality is a virtue. Dr. Bob would say things like, keep it simple, and I think he's right. I read a lot of things, and some of them, I'm reading a book right now that I occasionally want to throw across the room, which I might do later on today, but it concerns a lot of spiritual topics, and it's just very difficult.
I think simple is better, especially in terms of God stuff. Sandy was talking this morning about steps one, two, and three, and I want to talk a little bit about that, and then I want to talk about contacting with God, and then we'll break and come back Friday and say some more things. But the second step of recovery talks about coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
And I think for a long time, I figured, what I have to do here is come to believe, and then I'll be restored to sanity. And that's not how it's worked for me. Like I say, I knew a lot of stuff, I just didn't believe very much, practically. My experience has been different. Once I started getting restored to sanity, then I started believing. What does sanity look like? I think sane people are people who are able to work, people who are able to love, people who are able to play.
When I was drinking and using, especially at the end, I wasn't able to do any of those three. I was busy. I was busy frequently, but I wasn't working. I would say I was loving, but I was more manipulating. And as far as playing, I was loaded. I thought it was play. But to actually work, love, and play, I came into recovery and had no idea how to do any of those things, and I learned how to do some of those things here.
I can remember clearly the first time at an AA meeting, I really laughed hard. It just shocked me. It was fairly early, too. I laughed really hard, and I wasn't even sure why I was laughing, because whoever was talking was saying the worst stuff I'd ever heard, and we were all laughing our heads off. Good sign. Good sign. And I found over time I was able to start doing some work, and I was even to start developing some friendships, although that took a much longer time.
When those things start happening in my life, what occurs to me is that there's a power greater than me who's involved in my life, and once I see that evidence, I can come to believe. So step two kind of worked backward for me. Sometimes I believe a lot. Sometimes I don't believe very much. When I first joined the Jesuit community, one of the fellows in my class was a poet. I mean, talk about impractical.
This guy makes me look like I'm an engineer. But Joshua was a poet, and he would write these poems that went on forever, and they were effusive and gushy and pious and not my style at all. And on one occasion, he wrote a big poem about the presence of God, about the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, in the Holy Communion. And it went on for stanza after stanza after stanza, and he read it, and I was trying not to have my eyes roll completely back into my head as he was doing this.
And he got to the end of his poem, and gee, that's very nice and so forth, and someone said, Joshua, do you really believe that stuff? And he stopped and said, And he stopped and said, you know, I probably believe it one out of every three times, and
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I think that's wonderful. Well that put a little light on in my head. Sometimes if I can believe anything at all, it's real good news, because I have a tendency towards cynicism and discouragement that will take over. And just a little flicker of faith or a little flicker of hope makes a big difference for me. I was at a meeting when someone said, you cannot have fear and faith. Oh, I do all the time, I just want you to know that.
And sometimes I have huge amounts of faith and a little bit of fear, and then I have huge amounts of fear and a little bit of faith. And I discovered, and this has to do a lot with spirit, you know, I don't need all that much faith to take action. I just need a little bit of faith to take action. And I sometimes figure with all the fear in the world, with 2% faith I can take action. Otherwise I'm in one of these situations where I feel fear and I say, well, I'm not working my program, I'll just wait until I have no fear, then I'll take action.
I don't take action. Someone explained it to me like this, you know, if the door is shut and you open the door just a little bit, the door is open. And in terms of faith, it works like that for me. Just a little bit, and I can start going back to more meetings and doing some writing and getting some quiet time with the higher power, whatever it looks like. Kind of convinced that it's not going to work because I'm special and unique and doomed, but maybe 2% it might work.
And I find it starts working. One of the reasons I go to meetings is because I need to hear how it works for you. And I especially need to hear how it works for you when it's real bleak. We had a guy in Berkeley who was going to meetings a lot, sponsored half of North America, and then he stopped going to meetings. And I bumped into him somewhere about three weeks, four weeks later. I said, where have you been?
And he says, well, I've been having a really bad time. I said, what? He said, my wife's left me, I'm out of a job, you know, and I said, well, why aren't you going to meetings? And he said, I said, are you drinking? He said, of course not. I said, well, why aren't you going to meetings? And he said, well, I don't want the newcomers to think that the program doesn't work. Let's talk. You're having difficulty and you're not drunk.
The program works. I need to hear about how the program works when it's difficult, not just everything's fabulous and I'm getting laid regularly and I'm so grateful for every one of the 12 steps. I don't relate to that, you know. So where do people seem to connect with the higher power? Sandy mentioned it this morning. I've heard others talk about this and it always, I think some of us have seen too many bad movies where scenes were described by people who don't pray.
And we think that that's the way prayer is supposed to be. There's one that made a very important impact on me. Diana Ross played a nun and it was in the middle of the Wild West and they were, you know, covered wagons and they were going across the prairies wherever they are. And there was no water and there were locusts and there were bandits and they were doomed and there was no way out and the snow was coming, you know, and what are we going to do?
And there were a little group of nuns there and they said, oh, Sister Diana, what should we do? And she, in the middle of the crowd, she fell on her knees and put her hands in prayer and squeezed her eyes real tight and just kind of did a mild aerobic exercise in front of everybody, you know, scrunched up. And then about nine seconds later, she started relaxing and she looked up at heaven and light came on and she said, I have the answer.
Now I know what we'll do when she saved everybody. That scene is written by someone who never prays. Dropping acid works like that. Prayer doesn't work like that, no. And if you've done both, it's easy to get confused, I understand this. But I find that a lot of this, this, you know, connecting with this higher power, this energy, this force, this very big life thing, over the last 90,000 years or so, women and men
[00:20:11]
have gone to some pretty regular places to connect with the higher power. And place number one that an awful lot of people go to is they connect with their higher power in nature. This is real important. If you're like me, rather than doing that, you'll have a tendency to run to your room where you can figure it out by yourself one more time. Resist that tendency and go out and connect somewhere with water, with mountain, with soil, with something.
I mean, it's with nature that people make connections. It's a place I use a lot. And it's a place where, for those of us, you know, well, do you pray and meditate very much? And you think of Diana Ross, you know, there on her knees. A lot of us do a lot of very simple prayer and meditation on the beach, you know, on the mountain, in the desert, among the palm trees. We connect. I think that's a real good place.
A second area that a lot of people connect with the higher power is with other people. We say this all the time. This is, by the way, why we're encouraged to go to meetings, you know, leave your room where you're busy figuring it out and go to a meeting. I find I'll be having trouble with some crucial issue that no one else would understand because I am special and unique and I'll go to a meeting and I wouldn't mind it if God spoke through someone that I liked or at least someone whose program I respected.
But with some regularity, God will speak through a jerk who has bad program and bad attitude. And the person will say something that will literally save my bacon for the day. In fact, sometimes now that I'm now, I'm a 16 year sober, I go to meetings and sometimes I have the oldest sobriety in the room. You don't know how anxious that makes me. But all of a sudden someone like a year, you know, will say something real crucial and I'll write it down and it will say, God speaks to us through other people.
Therefore, as part of my spiritual program and my conscious contact with the higher power, I want to be in places where I can hear other people talk. It's one of the reasons I go to meetings. It's real important for me, therefore, to go to some meetings I usually don't go to. It's surprising what other groups talk about. Sometimes I only go to the same meetings all the time and things get real dull.
I predict what's going to happen. It's a sign for me to hit some other meetings. So nature, other people, God also speaks, the higher power frequently also connects with a lot of us through things that are written down. I do believe that reading and writing are spiritual activities. And this is why a lot of us are encouraged to read the book. What is the book about? It's the story of how a group of people stayed sober.
It's an important story. And I want to get familiar with that. There are other books I can also read and do read, but reading really helps connect me. And another area, and this is just the fourth area and there may be more, that people seem to make contact with the higher power is through music and art. Music and art make a difference in people's lives. And I found that's been real true with me. I'm very verbal, I'm very oral, and I can hear people talk and I can listen to speeches and I can talk myself and I can do a lot of things like that.
But every so often if I listen to something musically, it touches me in a place that catches me completely by surprise. And this is very good. The same thing is true with art. There might be a painting or a graphic or a sculpture or a photograph that touches me by surprise. And one of the things I have gotten to believe about God is that God frequently works by surprise. From the person you least expect it, from the place you least expect it, on the day you least expect it, something comes through and a difference is made.
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I was listening to someone talk a while ago about spiritual experiences and how do you distinguish spiritual experiences from hallucinations, which is a real good subject to talk about with your sponsor. I used to go into churches needing spiritual experiences and I knew which spiritual experience I needed. What I needed was for the statue to wave back, you know, that's the spiritual experience I wanted.
And sometimes they did, quick little waves, you know, and then they'd sit down again. You know it's been a real spiritual experience if over time your behavior changes for the better. That's the test. If over a period of a couple of years you are less of an asshole on a daily basis, it's a sign you've had a spiritual experience. If you're stealing less this year than you did last year, it's a real good sign.
And I'm someone who believes in gradual. I know there are folks who have sudden upheavals. I'm more than willing to let folks have sudden upheavals if over time their behavior changes for the better. But I really like that educational variety of change and slow change. And then I figure, my goodness, something really has made a difference in your life. Something real is happening. There is a spiritual experience.
You've had a great connection with God. Last point. Connecting with the higher power doesn't make us perfect. A friend of mine said that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. I like that a lot. You know, we're not good until we're perfect. That's not perfection, is the way we can have real lives. Perfectionism is deadly. It crushes and kills us left and right. So if getting perfect isn't the sign of being in contact with God, what is?
And I think it's this, and it goes way back to Genesis in the Jewish and Christian traditions and Muslim traditions to name three. People who have a real experience of God have a profound experience of liberation. The experience that made a bunch of slaves a bunch of people was the experience of liberation. Once we were slaves, today we're free. We're out of Egypt. It is an experience of liberation.
The same thing happens to us. What is this business of getting clean and sober? It is the experience of liberation. Where once we were addicts, we're active alcoholics, we're slaves to our addiction, we can't stop the behavior, and for some reason we're now in a position where the behavior has stopped. We can look at each other as free women and men. This is liberation. Day at a time. So when someone has had a spiritual experience, what do you do?
The Buddha talked about it. Someone said, Buddha, what do people do before enlightenment, before liberation, before sobriety? What do people do? And the Buddha said, you chop wood, you carry water. You have a life. And then he said, well, then what do you do after enlightenment? And the Buddha said, you chop wood, you carry water. We're not special, unique, and different. We're one of the folks. Sometimes I think that now that I'm sober, I shouldn't have to pay taxes on time.
That red light isn't for me. I just listened to someone's fifth step, I'm different. I shouldn't have to stand in line at Safeway. I shouldn't have to do these ordinary things. But the good news of liberation is we're free to do ordinary things. And it is through the ordinary things of having a life, of working, of loving, of playing, that we connect not just with each other, but with our higher power.
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So There. Later.