There and Back, Part 7: I Got a Rock

Back when I was perpetually confused and miserable from dealing with the capricious vagaries of a primary relationship with a drug addict, a friend suggested I start attending Al-Anon meetings, which I did with great fervor up until my reversion back to the Catholic faith. After that, for some reason, "the rooms," as devotees call the church basements and community centers where Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are generally held, lost their allure for me. I made some friends in Al-Anon, but those friendships fell casualty to the enormous changes in my life through my conversion and my marriage three years later. I broke off with my closest Al-Anon friend during my most recent miscarriage, but that's a more complicated story that I'll tell another time.

In retrospect, I know that what I was searching for in those rooms was some formula or magic spell to make my boyfriend want to stay with me, love me, and marry me, but I believed at the time that I was treading a spiritual path towards the masterful ability to love people with detachment. No one came out and mentioned that you have to detach when you love an addict, or your heart will be broken over and over in a way that can only be described as abusive. The best advice anyone could have given me at the time, of course, would have been to break up with A., but no one did, and if anyone had, I probably would have ignored it. I was desperately afraid to be alone. My first marriage had just ended, and I was consumed by grief and guilt, but I thought one had to simply make the best of things and move on, and I assumed that, because A. was a sort of latter-day hippie, he would simply become my husband by default if not by intention, as I imagined was the way with hippies. And that was good enough for me.

One day, at my favorite meeting, which was held on Saturdays in an Episcopalian Church on the Upper West Side and was attended by lots of writers, artists, and actors, it occurred to me that all the talk of God in "the rooms" was just a consolation prize for me. I didn't really want God. I wanted a man. I wanted true, mad, deep, everlasting love. Since I couldn't have that at the moment, I was turning with a huge sigh of resignation to "the God of my understanding." My Al-Anon friends had their "God boxes," in which they placed scraps of paper on which they'd written their supplications, and I tried this too, but, when I read them over, I saw that the few requests that were not for A. to stay were all for God's forgiveness for my many sins. I began to realize that no matter how sympathetic my Al-Anon friends were to my plight, and however much they suffered in ther own bad circumstances, they neither sought to change their own nor advised their friends and those they sponsored to change theirs. There was an awful sense sameness, and sadness, about the enterprise of learning to "detach with love" from those with whom one's life and future were intertwined.

I have to admit that I still often think of God as a consolation prize. Quite often I want something else -- something easier, sweeter, more apparently beautiful, and certainly more fun -- and I get God instead. I feel like Charlie Brown on Halloween, in his disastrous costume, reaching into his trick-or-treat bag and realizing, with both exasperated resignation and recognition, that he got a rock.

But a Turkish woman I met once shared a Turkish proverb with me: "God takes the sugar, but leaves the honey." And God has, after all, promised that He will give us honey out of that rock.