I’d like to thank Pope Francis for the most productive day I’ve had in a while.

I had the day off of work today.  A random Wednesday off isn’t something I look for until around January, when the snow drifts in.  But, and this is a secret now, the Pope is in DC today, and so my school closed to allow everyone to go down to the Mall and have a peek.

I stayed home.

I’m not big on crowds.  I don’t mind them as much as I used to, but they are not something I seek out.  I’m especially not big on Catholic crowds.  When I said this to co-workers the last couple days I received looks ranging from mild horror to gentle puzzlement.  Is she serious?  Or in the case of new people who joined this year and I’ve only known for a few weeks, is she Catholic?  I’m both serious and Catholic.  After an unfortunate experience at a canonization I sort of soured on large-scale religious events.

And this saved me from having to explain to anyone that when it comes down to it, I just don’t want to see the Pope.

I am what is called a revert.  I left the Church for a time.  About 4 years, maybe 5.  It’s hard to remember.  I didn’t go join another church, unless you count my trinity at the time: Vodka, gin, and whiskey.  In fact, I didn’t have any theological disagreements with Catholicism.  I didn’t really change my position on hot-button social issues, and I never stopped believing in the tenets of the Faith.  Honestly, I just didn’t want to do what God wanted.  I had come to see God’s will as a lifetime of misery for me that would provide happiness for others and I was real fucking tired of it, so I decided to stop.  It’s a common problem, plenty of people face it.  I had simply come to believe that God hated me.  Of course, God didn’t hate me.  And in fact, God wasn’t really asking all that much of me at the time.  Now, I kind of wonder what I was really bitching about, but it isn’t dreadfully important.  Funny enough, a life-saving conversion experience will mellow you out about some of the pettier shit.

A few months into my sobriety I made the choice to return to the Church.  It has been a rocky path to say the least.  I managed to rejoin just at the moment when they decided to change all the prayers in the Mass, so I didn’t even have the familiarity of habit to ease me back into it.  More troubling, it didn’t seem to matter which parish I went to, either out of geographical proximity or hour of convenience, I seemed bombarded by people happy to tell me how I should think, and feel, and speak, but without very much to say about, well, God.  Three and half years of soppy, emotive, self-indulgent sermons, exhortations on boutique charisms offering “community,” and seemingly endless capacity of holiness one-upmanship has often left me with the feeling that as I am is as holy as I will be, the dampening sense that my soul will not grow, because no one is talking about souls.

Sobriety is a struggle.  Not always the late-night-sweating-staring-at-a-bottle struggle you see in movies.  More often it’s a struggle of the is-this-worth-it? variety.  But there is a common phrase in AA: “don’t leave before the miracle happens.”  And, sadly, I find myself in a similar struggle in Mass sometimes.  Not, is God worth it? Rather, can I do it, can I keep myself in this seat through one more long-winded, poorly organized, tent-revival stump speech everyone else is calling a homily?  Can I make it to the miracle?  Can I keep myself from running screaming into the night (or on occasion, early morning) when well-meaning idiots try to peddle to me social status and Catholic cache wrapped up in the words of religious education?  Can I keep the ultimate salvation of the human race through the sacrifice of the Almighty Creator in the forefront of my mind when it seems like that is the last thing anyone wants to talk about?

That which is cared for by humans is subject to the environment it inhabits, and the Church in the metropolitan DC area is no exception.  The Church is the Bride of Christ, and Christ is Christ, but the people in the Church are just people.  And the people of DC have a strong tendency to be competitive, snobby, vain, and dismissive.  I sat through a homily on Sunday during which the priest railed against another priest in the diocese for upholding basic, run-of-the-mill, practices as an example of a lack of love and understanding on the part of priests.  The horrifying act for which this (thankfully) unnamed local priest committed, for which he should be publicly castigated?  Telling a young woman that to be married at a particular parish one needs to be a member of that parish.  And she was sad about that, because it made getting what she wanted harder.  Boo fucking hoo.  Even if this had been an appropriate anecdote to relay in a homily, which it isn’t, and even if there was not a bit of a logic-problem using a single, out of context, example to condemn an entire institution as lacking love and understanding (dude, it’s almost like I’m talking about race right now!), the priest giving the homily GOT THE WRONG MORAL LESSON OUT OF IT!  He stood in front of a large gathering of blithely affirmative people and told them that the Catholic Church is around to pander to the desires of each and every individual because no one should ever get their feelings hurt.  I could almost hear the John Stewart-esque self-satisfied musing that accompanied the right-on head nods: “oh man, he just DESTROYED that mean priest!”  So then he talked about Pope Francis’ visit for 15 minutes.  I tuned him out.

The Pope is the dually appointed head of the Catholic Church.  He is infallible on matters of morals and doctrine.  On matters political, scientific, and cultural, he is as fallible as the guy before him, and the guy that will follow him.  My personal feelings about him, one way or another, are essentially irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter if I am a “fan” or not.

But, when Pope Francis speaks, my soul is not lifted to God.  Maybe that’s me, maybe that’s him.  Maybe if I had gone downtown today I would have experienced something that would have changed my mind completely and helped me to understand why other people are not so upset to see the authority of the Church squandered on trivial issues and terrible misunderstandings of basic economics.  Or maybe it would be exactly as I assume: the Catholic version of DC social jockeying, just on a larger scale.  I guess I will never know.

What I do know is that I paid my bills today.  I brought in the garbage can and recycling bin from the street so that my housemate didn’t have to do it when she came home.  I cleaned the bathroom and ran laundry.  I took the time offered to me to put my life in a little bit better order than it was before.

Hey, look, dignity of work!  Pope Francis should be proud of me.

(4 Years and 3 Days Sober)

Wedding receptions can be awkward.  They are even more awkward when one of your friends says that she can’t stop drinking.

Just ask my friend Mary.

Mary and I could not be more different.  We met our freshman year of college because we lived a few doors away from each other, and I think our roommates had met.  Physically, Mary and I are opposites.  She is willowy, tan, and blonde.  I’m round, pale, and brunette.  But those are the least of our differences.  Mary is fun, mischievous, friendly, gentle, humble, gracious, and compassionate.  It is no surprise that she became a NICU nurse.

In that first year of our friendship I often wondered why she was friends with me.  Why would someone pretty, popular, and adventurous want to hang out with a sullen, angry, misanthrope?  I never got an answer to that question, other than the obvious one: because Mary loved me.

Mary wasn’t the only one who loved me despite my abject disagreement with their decision, but she made it look effortless.  I can only remember one instance when Mary lost her temper with me, and I totally deserved it.  Mary had held my hand while I cried, she had made me laugh even when I really didn’t want to, and she had always been willing to listen.

I knew before I got on the plane to go to Marissa’s wedding that I was in trouble.  In fact, I had known for almost a year.  There had been the nights lost on binges and the days recovering from binges.  There was the job I was barely hanging on to, the threat of being fired hurled at me from my boss almost every day.  There were the periods of shaking I was convinced was the onset of MS, but turns out were just DTs.  Going into what was supposed to be a beautiful celebration of love and an exciting weekend to catch up with long-time friends, I already knew in my heart I was going to die.  I knew that I had been trying to die since I was 12, and that of all the methods I’d tested out, alcohol was the only constant, the winner.  I knew that for once, I was going to achieve a goal.  I hadn’t gotten thin (although, at the time, I was so sick from drinking that I did weight less), I hadn’t finished my Master’s degree, I hadn’t become a loved wife.  But I was going to achieve my death, because there was simply nothing inside of me that wanted to live.

And I was willing to let it go there.  I didn’t go to California looking for help.  In fact, I think I went to say goodbye.  I went finally have it be over, to close the last connections, outside of my family, I had to the person I had once been.  In the ways that mattered I was already gone, lost as Kathleen would put it later, and I think I needed to see them to accept that it was over.  I was over.

In the midst of the wedding ceremony I lost my hearing.  It was only for about two minutes, but I could not hear any sound.  It should have been terrifying, but it had happened to me before.  Up from the smallest spark left of my soul I heard only one sentence.

This is wrong.

I was shaken.  I didn’t understand.  It took me months to understand.  But I didn’t need to understand.  I just needed to hear that there we something still alive inside of me.

I had a few glasses of wine at the reception.  But I could sense the wrongness.  For the first time in years I couldn’t muster my own arguments of why I deserved to get drunk.  I couldn’t manage to plan for the next drink while half-way through the current one.  Something was wrong, and I had to find it.

Mary and I went to the balcony to have a cigarette.  I don’t remember exactly what she asked me, probably something along the lines of “are you alright, you seem upset?”  And I’m not completely sure what I said to her in return, but it was probably, “I think I’m an alcoholic.  I’m trying to drink myself to death.”  We stood out on that balcony talking for a long time.  We missed the toasts.  We smoked a lot of cigarettes. Various people came out to check on us.  I don’t remember what we said.  I just don’t.  Some conversations stick in my head word for word.  But this one, the one that saved my life is almost a complete blank.

Because it was Mary, not her words that saved my life.  Make no mistake, Mary saved my life.  She simply loved me then, the way she had loved me for years.  With a patience I cannot ever understand and a heart of kindness I can only hope to emulate a fraction of someday, Mary became of real person to me in a way no one had been in so long.  Her existence, the singular person God made, were a thread of reality I could feel attaching to me, because her love attached to me.  Her love was real, and for a moment it made me real again, and that moment was enough.

I flew back to Maryland at the ass-crack of dawn the next day.  I cried the entire flight.  I cried the whole night.  I cried off and on all day at work, especially when I sent an email to six people.  In the midst of those tears I made a decision.  I told those six people what I was going to do.  And that night I did it.  I called the national Alcoholics Anonymous hotline and found the time and location of a meeting near me.  The next night I went.

That night was 4 years ago.  I have been sober for 4 years.  Some days I cannot remember what it was like to drink, it seems like such a far away dream.  Some days I cannot remember why I stopped, it seems like such a cruel injustice.  Many days I don’t think about it one way or another, I’m just too busy.  There have been so many tears, more than a few chuckles, a few awkward moments when people ask me to share with them things I’m not ready to share.  (Just some general advice, when someone refuses a drink, just say “ok,” and move on.  Don’t ask why, don’t ask them if they are sure, don’t say, “it’s just one.”  All bad ideas.  “Ok,” and move on.)  My family and friends have given me more love, support, and understanding than I can ever recount, but I’ll keep trying.

Mary deserves a special thank you.  I can never thank Mary the way she should be, because I don’t know that I will ever fully appreciate the grace of God that worked through her.  I believe God will thank her in the next life.  My words will never be enough.  But I always give them to her.

Thank you Mary.  You saved my life.

(4 Years Sober)