“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you.  You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”    –  Bob Marley

As a child who grew up in one of the many flavors of household, “dysfunction,” I can report emphatically that children always believe their parents are worth suffering for, over, about and instead of.  And, sadly, Amy Jade Winehouse was, probably unbeknownst to her, a victim of this particular scourge of western civilization, the cliché of the “dysfunctional family.”

We can see plainly that the tabloid monsters have wasted no time with their, “no-shit” anthems regarding the life of someone who publically displayed a death wish, rubbing our faces (and her parents’)  in the fact that no amount of talent can overcome low self esteem.  No shit.

Addicts who refuse recovery will die from their disease.  Again, no shit.

Troubled people lead troubled lives.  Where have I heard that one before?

People who come from troubled homes grow up troubled.  Thank you, Time Magazine.

True leadership is a matter of good breeding.  Screw you, Nathan Rothschild, JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.

My contribution, withheld until the last possible moment and kept relatively unheard from, has more to do with Amy Jade Winehouse atypical child warped by the typical damage caused by parents suffering in silence from their own painful mental illnesses and the toxic byproducts of their choosing to couple in order to heal.  Or find respite.  Or deal with their shit.

In defense of Mitch and Janis (nee Seaton) Winehouse, and parents everywhere, I can assure everyone that no parent ever passes on the full weight of the dysfunction under which they were born and reared through.  Every generation takes a bite out of their personal pain and moves heaven and earth to make certain that things turn out better for their children than they were for themselves.  I have no doubt that this is precisely what took place in the Winehouse Family and they can rest in a peace that our media will not be granting them for some time to come.

But mental illness is not about a single person facing a single challenge.  People with similar diagnoses are attracted to those who either share the same diagnosis, or who trumpet a solution the sufferer has been conditioned through shame to believe is where they must go. These kinds of personal problems, often hidden in shame from public view, must be vetted and viewed compassionately, if critically, if we are ever to afford meaning to the tragic death of Amy Jade and the hundreds of thousands, globally, who will share her story every year.

Mitch Winehouse believed, probably sincerely, that the solution to his mental and emotional difficulties would be found in the recessed world of polyamory.  He is not alone in harboring this delusion.  Janis no doubt believed that turning a problem over to “goddess Shiva” could only generate more chaotic consequences.  I sympathize with Mitch: sexual and emotional intrigue can lead to a euphoric state where depression is nowhere to be found.  I empathize with Janis: making a problem more complex cannot possibly result in an end state where a problem finds resolution.  Our various religious and moral traditions do nothing to help us attack our marital issues with open minds.  But to seriously entertain the thought that two adult women, willing or unwilling, would or could solve the problems of one charismatic, but gravely warped, male, was, and is, completely insane.

Into the fire and crossfire of sexual tension and emotional pain came the head of Amy Jade.  Filled with the shrapnel caused by years of abandonment, betrayal, stubborn foolishness and simple human cruelty, Amy grew up to honor her parents with the solution she believed she had found.

To their f*ing problem, not Amy’s.

This is what I, and many children raised in dysfunctional homes do: we take on the problems of our parents and, since they are not able to solve what to us seems like a simple problem, we will solve the problem for them.  The problem with our approach, however, is that we do not possess the full complement of an adult nervous system and a life of adult experiences where our judgment might be tempered with common sense.  And, in cases like the Winehouse’s and mine, we are compelled to allow adult reality to overwhelm us and drive us slowly, constantly mad with grief.

So whereas Mitch was driven by his delusional thinking to seek multiple life partners to soothe the ravages of what some might unfairly label, “ennui,”  he was also driven by guilt to seek a mother figure who would shame him into conforming to a standard of sexual conduct that had only left him in more pain on numerous occasions.  The impacts of chronic depression are quite well known, but my experience has been that it twists judgment and behavior into “pretzels” of logic where we can be compelled to do just about anything, including suicide, in order to soothe the pain that no one but us can see or even feel.  But the problem is simple: pain seeks pain relief.  Distraction turns out to be a fairly effective reliever of pain, if only temporarily.  Janis Winehouse, or any spouse with a whit of personal sanity left, would have none of this.  This left Amy, her daughter, wide open to the manipulations, rationalizations and justifications of an adult male driven completely mad by his own delusional thinking.

At the very least, Mitch Winehouse confided far too much in his growing daughter regarding his difficulties with her mother.  Such information to the immature brain and nervous system of a child could only trigger a stronger-than-steel resolve and commitment to ensure that her mother paid for her “crimes” against her father and that she, Amy Jade, became many times the woman she was raised to believe her mother was.  Where her mother had failed to keep the family together, Amy would demonstrate, once and for all, that her mother was some sort of emotionally crippled maladroit.

Janis Winehouse may have been emotionally crippled, but none of her difficulties were because she was uniquely and supremely guilty of crimes against her family or against anyone, for that matter.  And never could it be written that a mother deserves to sit powerlessly by to watch her lovely child suffer and die because of the twisted relationship she shared with her father.  Janis, like hundreds of millions of women every year, falsely believe they can provide a home so warm and inviting that no amount of male dysfunction stands a chance of survival.

Mitch Winehouse will spend the rest of his life tortured by his guilt and shame much as he was before he ever met and married Amy’s mother.  This guilt and shame will serve no useful purpose to anyone and is not an epitaph worthy of his heartsick daughter’s legacy.  I hope he rises to the occasion and walks through the fire of a stern look in the mirror and then returns to us with useful information that prevents this kind of tragedy from ending this way ever again.  He, too, is suffering mightily from the death of his beloved daughter, but it is his own mental illness that warped his judgment into believing that turning a child against her own mother was ever a justifiable act when dealing with a contentious adult relationship between two parents.

I hope both Mitch and Janis prove worthy of the self-forgiveness required to “repent” for the crime of bringing such an enormous talent into the world and then smiting it with their conjoined weaknesses.  This sin is not their’s individually but is a weakness of relationship chemistry that no one can reliably predict until after a relationship has been engaged.  When I saw a similar dynamic emerge in my relationship decades ago, I opted to avoid parenthood at about the same time Amy Jade Winehouse would have been conceived.  I did not regret my decision as regrettable as the circumstances under which it was made were.  I knew then, and I know now, that a selfish decision on my part could have far more tragic impacts on far more people than just myself and the woman I was involved with at the time.

A world bereft of children is a sad place, indeed, but a world bereft of meaningless tragedy is a more worthwhile goal by any measure.

A Course In Miracles, p. 421

Imagine a world where this might be true.

In the first place, being a country-born ideologue riding into the “Big City” on a white jackass to “learn them city boys some righteousness,” would always be contraindicated regardless of their obvious need for remediation. Mocking the power structure must always result in your untimely death at the hands of that power structure.

In the second place, lying to an entire civilization as to the nature and consequences of one of its pivotal, if manufactured, moments in time could have massively deleterious consequences.

My early tutelage in Catholicism taught me to not question authority, to always regard the Church as the “one truth” I could always count on to provide me the guidance any worthy human life could possibly require. If the solutions provided by church dogma did not provide me with the solutions, or relief, that a solution should, the problem was due to my as yet unreconciled defects of character. The Church was to be the pearl of great price in my life and conducting myself as if I believed otherwise must always result in being posthumously tormented for all eternity. Simple. Like all great solutions.

So, in addition to having a number of unresolved challenges waiting for me outside the doors and walls of various churches scattered across the country of my birth, I had the problem of hiding the fact, growing more obvious with each passing decade, that I was the Antichrist spoken of by John of Patmos in his Apocalypse. My blood boiled with unresolved rage, my life became awash in failed relationships and the world around me grew darker the more worldly “truth” I let come into my mind. Much was wrong within me and the more I tried to apply the solutions provided to me as a child, the worse things seemed to become. One would expect that the wicked should suffer so.

Quite naturally, a nice refreshing box of wine became one of my favorite escapes. Smoking some of the “sacred ganja” in combination became a daily lifestyle choice that lasted some ten years. But like most love affairs that burn hot enough to produce smoke, an inability in both acumen and desire to be a responsible motorist, or both, things ended rather poorly. Alcohol and ganja continue to work for others which is fine for them; I, however, have had my dance card unceremoniously punched out of existence. Time to go home, time for salvation, time to get down to causes and conditions wherever they might take me.

I am happy to report that my inflated opinion of myself regarding my ultimate identity was not true. Not entirely. It appears everyone around me is both christ and antichrist and how we choose to deal with this most confusing set of circumstances determines whether we live happily and usefully whole, or die according to some miserable bodily or mentally vanquishing upheaval. I believe I am on the mend, certainly in much better spiritual and physical condition than a person who began life on an unstable trajectory might deserve, but I am by no means completely free and clear of a formerly incessant desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Particularly in those circumstances where, like Jesus of Nazareth, I return to the Big City to mock the rich and well-heeled for the crime of maiming a large portion of my family tree, mostly before I was ever born. The Great Depression hit my mother’s side of the family tree especially hard.

The Catholics and Protestants of my youth, in many cases, would like to make the story of Jesus of Nazareth a tale about those who loved the spoken word of God made flesh, and those, “dirty Jews,” of the Sanhedrin, the Scribes and Pharisees. No doubt Jesus may have felt that way and may have “cleared the temple” for this very reason, but, according to A Course in Miracles, the problem that resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth was his own inability to believe that every human being is equipped with a divine spark that makes salvation and “seeing the Light” possible in the first place. Jesus lost faith in the ultimate humanity of his fellows and took to insulting and mocking them at just the wrong moment in history. The story of the end of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with “Jews v. Christians” at all, but rather rich versus poor. When one considers that for the majority of Christian history the only humans wealthy enough to own and operate a printing press might have had a vested interest in distorting the story of Jesus’ life and death, the scapegoating of more modern Jewry begins to take on a completely different hue. Especially if those Jews were also quite wealthy themselves as often becomes the case when slaves overthrow their masters and learn how to hold their former masters at bey.

And you thought being black, African, Egyptian or possessing more than a slight amount of melanin in your skin was cause for horror or concern. Yet genetically, it is not possible for two white humans to produce a dark-skinned child, yet it is quite possible for two dark-skinned humans to produce one that is very Caucasian in appearance. Click, click and click. Obviously a huge amount of human history has been lost to us over the centuries, which is sad, but one side benefit of getting one’s own story straight becomes an uncanny ability to sniff out bullshit from the collections of stories other humans tell about themselves and to start identifying and resolving similar patterns of denial, delusion and dishonesty.

My problem with the phenomenally wealthy is not so much that they are not human but that, like any human ceded that much authority over other humans, the slightest character flaw in them produces an enormous amount of suffering in those occupying the lower rungs of the social strata beneath them. The problem is not that human beings possess flaws so much as we are utilizing a system of social organization that magnifies the impact of human flaws on the lives of others. In time this condition will need to be adjusted so that compassion and mercy can be more evenly distributed throughout the human family. Merit may well strike in one person for a particular of time, but that good fortune seldom passes on to one’s progeny. Certainly the times where one is called to demonstrate their merit change such that what is required at one time may be more or less than what is required in another. A genetically oriented social hierarchy is not fluid enough to allow solutions to flow to the problems where they exist.

I continue to distrust, as do many, the religion that water-boarded a fear of drowning into my consciousness at the age of six months – the only memory I possess from that period in time. I continue to distrust any collection of humans hierarchically organized to manage the thinking, beliefs, money, property and/or prestige of any social collective – I do not believe that such trust is merited given both history and the known unknowns we can deduce from the lack of it in key areas of import. But most importantly, I am coming to realize that not every phenomenally wealthy human is a psychopath, nor is it entirely ill-conceived that merit be considered when deciding who deserves their station in society and who does not. My great sin in life has been that I did not possess the merit required, at the proper time, to bring down the psychopathic conspiracies of wealth under whose heel we all now suffer. I only hope that I can be of some service to those who hope to make our present conditions survivable, tenable and known to others for all time. We dare not repeat these same mistakes ever again.

Before I encourage anyone to snap out of this trance we find ourselves in and become a conscious adult human, let me assure my readers, first, of the many effects a massive gravitational anomaly in our midst might have.

Nothing escapes the odd beauty of the event horizon of a black hole. The warp of space-time at this perimeter bends all available light between the observer and what exists beyond the boundary observed, creating a fiery ribbon’s edge composed of the light of things not ordinarily seen. This is the fascination we have with this cosmic anomaly: in one small place we can see what happened a million years ago and compare it with what happened a billion years ago, along with what happened a dozen years prior. A truly vast perspective on reality we behold imbuing us with a sense of godlike vision over the affairs of our lives. The dense and enormous gravitational pull of a black hole lenses reality into a radial focus, giving a sense of eternity to the observer, the observed and the process of observation.

What follows very swiftly as one begins to embrace this most stimulating of horizons is a noticeable difference between the gravity at one’s feet and the gravity at the top of one’s skull, establishing a sensation of heaviness, of importance, such that every step taken towards the fuller embrace of the anomaly becomes a grander, deeper more meaningful encounter with all that can ever be seen.

But what can be seen inside the event horizon of a hole in space so deep that it bends light from a billion years away into itself? For those of us watching this embrace, what becomes clear is not a whit of illumination escapes; there is no light, only a darkness deeper than imagination’s many children. But for those enraptured of the things just seen and their own sense of gravity, the darkness is but a pittance. Look at all that we have seen and achieved so quickly, they proclaim!

More swiftly still the difference in gravity between feet and brain becomes ever more acute as the body of the observer is pulled into smaller and smaller pieces by the embrace of the observed. There can be no escape from this fall, event horizon to core, an end as inevitable as death itself awaits as acceleration pulls apart the very soul of a man or woman into its component parts. No one can see this end for all occurs in the cover of deepest darkness, yet we can know from abstraction and deduction that the end stage disintegration was never the initial intention of the observer viewing the observed. All too soon this End became everything that the observer could speak of as the Madness pulled even life-giving blood from the brain into the feet of an otherwise good man or woman running to catch a train that has long since left the station.

Then, perhaps, a flash of X-rays expelled from the center of the hole reminds us that a drastic transformation has taken place before the event horizon expands ever so slightly to compensate for the mass just consumed.

Fascism, the inevitable result of vast concentrations of wealth and power into the hands of the few, is just such a warping of space and time, pulling apart the very fabric that makes community and fellowship with our brothers and sisters a pleasure and such a joyous possibility. Fascism pulls each of us into our component parts until nothing, not even light, can escape its embrace. We might know of the dangers of approaching this much gravity so brazenly except that all evidence of its presence disappears without a trace in history, its consumption of witnesses and evidence vacuumed completely out of existence.

So what was the essential “sin” in this flirtation with the acceleration of human possibilities and potential? Comprehending as we now do why an individual or a group might be deceived at the edge of the event horizon, why do we not chart a course completely avoiding these cosmic sinkholes, knowing the inevitability of the end?

Why does the addict pick up their drug of choice, again and again, after every painful detoxification, when they know the pain and suffering that must always await them?

Why does the obsessive love partner return, again and again, to a relationship that they both demand be functional even long after they discover the impossibility of the relationship chemistry between the two people involved?

Why do we humans believe that it is possible to behold a “cake” with our eyes while also enjoying the consumption of the same “cake?” Why do we tear concepts to shreds in order to “better” understand them, yet insist on entertaining the expectation that our reassembly of component parts must always yield the initial concept? Is it not a magical belief that our perceptions of phenomena reveal everything relevant to our senses? What has our collection of novel empirical data always demonstrated without fail in the past?

Our great flaw in all these instances is that we have seen only the past in all the light that has ever met our eyes. We projected futures onto what we saw based on what had already come and gone, regardless of how we assembled and structured the meaning of that past. And so our projected futures, regardless of the quantity of the past data we have had at our disposal, suffered from the same observational flaws we used in assembling and systematizing our pasts in the first place. We have become fixated on seeing nothing right here, right now, just as it is to us. We look at scientific data or the video footage of a war atrocity and we have trained ourselves to associate what we observe with what we have already experienced, what we thought about that experience and how we felt about it. What we miss by occupying a past or projected future state based on that past, is the here and now experience of novelty, revulsion or sensory overload that informs those we share our experiences with that we have rendered the rawest possible data to our fellow interpreters for their own interpretation and use.

So we need to encourage each other to “snap out of” the trance we are in regarding the fascist/capitalist/corporatist dialogue we observe spewing forth from the mouths of television pundits and media personalities with specific, money-making agendas not likely to give us the raw data we need to make informed decisions for ourselves. We already know, if we are conscious, thoughtful adults, that two massive steel-reinforced concrete structures do not collapse into nearly their own footprint at near free-fall speed because two large jetliners crashed into them two hours prior. We know this is rubbish. But why must fascists shock us with nonsense before they proceed with their plans to subvert our liberties and our freedoms? Why do they not want us to be at liberty to decide for ourselves about the nature of reality? Does truth not benefit everyone equally? Why not?

Qui bono?

I smiled not because I am an atheist or agnostic, but because I am an atheist/theist/agnostic spirit-jester who doesn’t give a damn about labels, snapshots or philosophical underpinnings when it comes to the issue of getting sober and staying that way.

I have been sober and dope-free since March 17, 1991. That was about the time my Irish girlfriend informed me that I was too drunk to accompany her and her sister to a Saint Patrick’s Day Party with a crowd of locally well-known, if drunken, fools. I was nearly 30 years old at that time and she was 44. Her sister was almost 40. They were from a blue-blooded Illinois family and I was from a red-blooded American family packed to the gills with drunken nar-do-wells and abuse victims. The schism was fated, certainly, but it was my delusional thinking that caused me to believe that I was actually experiencing a deep and abiding love with a woman who only wanted to get the hell away from an emotionally vacuous 18 year marriage. A marriage to a well-respected executroid who had eaten enough of m’lady’s crap over an 18 year period to float a battleship. Many in recovering circles will suggest that you need to get sober for your self and no other way will work. Bullshit. You can get sober any way the wind blows. Staying sober, however, is a horse of a different color.

And this is where the ardently articulate atheists and I part company.

If you are an alcoholic or an addict, you are powerless over that feeling of blissful abandon that accompanies every significant contact with your drug du jour. A normal person may, in fact, become addicted to a substance known to cause addiction, but, once detoxed, a normal person will never go back to that substance. The thought of repeating the same desperate experience of withdrawal is enough to keep these individuals sober. Not me. Not an alcoholic or an addict. We’re just getting the Party started.

What happens inside my body can be explained in biochemical and psycho-pharmicological terms by addictionologists with advanced medical degrees. What I will tell you is that the experience of spree and remorse seems like the only “normal” possible in a lifetime punctuated at the end by the awareness that all that has ever been considered a luxury, or a dignified entitlement, has been lost, or cruelly taken, by the same anthropomorphic schmuck who granted them in the first place. So the moment where my nervous system is compromised just enough to not give a damn about how I feel about any of this or that, or fear of any of this or that, is a place I would sacrifice any comfort, any pleasure or suffer any indignity to experience. In the end, a split second of the comfort of this place is enough to justify all the misery, depression, alienation and loneliness of what can be decades of suffering. A split second of freedom from the bondage of a nervous system that, for addicts, screams and cries about the indignity of feeling more powerful than a normal human, and yet counting the seconds until I finally discover that my feelings have no actual truth to them, and perhaps never did. I may feel immortal, at times, and yet I am confined to a bag of water consigned to a variety of limitations most of which I will never overcome. Every human must have something like these same kinds of internal experiences, but alcoholics and addicts simply cannot let them go or get past them and onto the business of living a “normal” life.

This dichotomy of human experience, these perceptual boundaries of sensuality, form the basis of human perception. Without dark and light, sweet and sour, pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, there can be no distinction between one moment and the next. For the addict this dichotomy feels like the most polarizing of opposites, one of which makes us desire to have only one and forego having the other. To soar to the highest of heights and beyond, or to locate the lowest of lows and then burrow under it, these are the feelings we obsess over and become compulsive about. In a nutshell, addicts simply feel entirely too much, too fast, to feel of much use to anyone, including themselves. Even years into recovery we take to hiding ourselves from spouses, partners and coworkers out of fear that no one could ever understand what it means to experience life without buffer or moderation. Not autism or Asperger’s, but something sets our teeth on edge whenever we feel this experience of raw, naked life coming on. Ecstacy, perhaps, but what good is an experience that cannot be shared or spoken of, much less controlled?

Not to put too fine a point on this state of affairs, but an alcoholic or addict is stuck in this predicament. We can try to medicate it away, but the fact of dependence on a buffering agent is a reality upon which we cannot ignore, or we imperil our survival. We are, in fact, powerless over addictive substances and compulsive thinking. Our lives in this condition, over time, become unmanageable to us. Our bodies can no longer tolerate ingesting our buffering agent over any considerable period of time while the lack of a buffering agent causes us to feel restless, irritable and generally discontent. On occasion, our long suffering spouses confined or imprisoned in relationships with us during a spell of clean-time without benefit of recovery prefer to be around us while we are under the influence, rather than under the lash of the dubious luxury of dry abstinence. “So-dry-ity,” as many of us refer to it.

Addicts get to experience a hopeless place that few humans do, a place where we cannot imagine life with, or life without, our drug of choice. The loneliness and alienation of such a place eventually becomes intolerable. Suicide begins to seem appealing as the ultimate state of oblivion. Meanwhile, we keep trying to regain that first experience with our drug of choice regardless of how many times we have demonstrated to ourselves that we cannot have a better past. Those first days of blissful indulgence are long gone by the time we have had enough to qualify as addicts, yet we cannot stop trying, persevering, or demanding that justice be served to us in a form we can finally approve of. Insanity is one characterization of this DMZ of human contact; mental illness of a sort can be another. Regardless, anyone attempting to scratch out an existence living anywhere near us when we are in this state of being will be driven into a neurotic stupor. Caring for us will be your keys to a frustrating level of despair that no human being should ever inflict on another.

Where is the possibility of hope for recovery in any of this misery and suffering?

It can only come from a belief in a power greater than the addiction problem. Does that power have to come from a belief in a supreme being? In my experience, no. Whether this reality eliminates the possibility of the existence of a supreme being seems a separate issue to me. An unrecovered addict is out of their right mind and right-mindedness seems like a minimum baseline to be achieved before anyone bothers to risk thinking in philosophical terms; the very threads of sanity hang tenuously in the balance.

What I will suggest to the atheists of AA is that it is simple-minded dumbassery to assert that your non-belief in our conjoint belief is both necessary and sufficient proof for the non-existence of a god that you, yourself, create by negating our simple-minded, theistic belief. In the hole left behind by your atheism, you only draw attention to what you seek to ignore. What you attack only makes your belief in that which you would attack, stronger. Serve yourself and be rid of such foolishness.

Agnosticism is the only philosophically defensible position to take in any theistic challenge to religious ideology and dogma. We simply do not know if a supreme being exists or does not; our perceptions report to us the nature of our reality. Omniscience makes perception impossible since there can be no contrasting agent to render a perception to our brain. And, even if by some alchemy we could perceive omniscience, we could never conceptualize it through a limiting definition and so there could never be a word like, “god,” through which we could communicate anything like a true meaning for the experience of omniscience. So not-knowing is an honest appraisal of the god issue and it is one that serves me well in my recovery. Contemplative discussions of the notion of a personal, omnipotent god serve no useful purpose because they must always become what they are, by definition: void of real interpersonal meaning.

I have lived in the Bible belt since 1995 and, let me assure the gentle reader, AA is chalk-full of crazy religious zealots and people-pleasers who fawningly enable the belief in a Christian god of insanity, impossible mystery, magic and religious hokum. In my opinion religion has no place in AA and, if I had my druthers, it would have no place in human experience. Religion has served an important purpose, as has science, and they have both come full-circle and dumped humanity on its collective head. The objective each of these systems of thought had at their outsets was the civilizing of human beings into stable interdependent communities. The only thing our current science and religious practices achieve is the polarizing of each of us into mutually-exclusive thought groups hell-bent on destroying one another for the crime of thinking differently about the nature of human experience. This situation, and in particular its denial, must result in sheer nonsense.

And, if you are still unfortunate enough to believe that religion provides humanity with salvation, let me share with you a bit of lore from the experience of one of my friends in recovery, a thoracic surgeon. A brilliant man in retirement from a long and successful practice, Raymond had carried his religious beliefs on his sleeves as only a charismatic soul can. But it was the opening of Raymond’s skull as a child to the belief in the father, son and holy ghost that, like a bowling ball, allowed Raymond’s mind to be slung down a greased alleyway where a gifted confidence man was able to convince Raymond to spend a significant chunk of his retirement on a scheme to wrest marketable quantities of gold from the raw sewage ponds of New York City. Not quite the whopper of transubstantiation, Raymond’s religious beliefs suggested that “faith, alone” could save any day. Well, Raymond now works as a glorified physician’s assistant in a local doc-in-the-box, a far cry from the dramatic outcomes he had been a party to as a thoracic surgeon. Religion and religious dogma prey on every vulnerable mind regardless of its gifts, turning it into useless goo at precisely the wrong time.

This case contains an important lesson about the power of sheer bullshit to literally stun and paralyze human ingenuity in trying times. There have been, and will be, many others. This the price we pay for going through the motions of belief in the unreasonable propositions of religious myth; these consequences, rather than the imaginary ones posthumously experienced before a disembodied Saint Peter, are the real consequences we need to be concerned about as living, breathing human beings.

I thank my atheist and agnostic friends for coming into sobriety to carry their message to me as I carry my message to them. I smile because both messages are crucial to understanding just how precious this AA phenomenon has been for me and countless others like me. I smile because I relate to the alienation and isolation of human experience, and I smile because I appreciate the fact that I am not, and never have been, alone in that experience. At times the pain can be excruciating.

Of course none of this means that you should burn your Bible and never again darken the doors of your local church. Something should be sacred in everyone’s life and, for me, there is nothing more mysterious and sacred than the relationship I have with my own unconscious mind. I have no direct experience of this place, but I know it exists because I have seen powerful patterns cutting through and through my Fourth and Tenth Step inventories. And I am, in a word, powerless to deal with these patterns in anything like the manner a focused, conscious thought might allow me to toss a rock through a stained glass window. My unconscious mind is my sacred friend guiding and directing me into brick walls, bad relationships, traumas and all of their opposite experiences. And so I begin my spiritual awakening and my belief in a super-ordinant higher power right there.

As it turns out, I do not have to go any farther or make any grand pronouncements requiring your expressed faith in my beliefs about myself in order to feel whole or holy. Those sorts of pronouncements have all already been made, today and every day, for thousands of years, to the effects we see before us. Yet my relationship with myself has been sacred and profound enough to keep me from doing, for over twenty years now, what I used to love doing every day. I do not need to convince you of it and you have your own unconscious drives to become conscious of and contend with. I have found a way of contending constructively with my more self-destructive unconscious drives, a way shown to me long ago now, and you do not have to believe in dead people reanimating or the weekly conversion of water and wine into blood in order for this method to work for you. There is no longer any rational justification to abandon hope in what was once a heartbreaking and hopeless situation for thousands of years.

What is most important to life is that it be permitted to flourish and that it be enjoyed by all creation capable of such an experience. I don’t think life cares a damn if we eat meat on Fridays during Lent and I don’t believe that a loving higher power wants us to invade the wombs of women trapped by an economic system designed to enslave us all. But that’s what I believe today. Tomorrow may be different. For everyone.

Let us hope so.