Wishing You Another Year of Growth (and Pain)

by Fr. Bill Wigmore

In this time of New Year’s resolutions, I happened on a passage the other day that I thought was kind of interesting. It was a list of three things that the author said have the power to bring people true happiness. Isak Dinesen, the Danish woman who wrote the book, Out of Africa composed the list, and what caught my attention was that if you’d have asked me to write that list – not one of the things she listed would have ever made it onto mine; and yet, after thinking about hers, there wasn’t one thing there that I would say didn’t belong.

The first thing that brings true happiness she said is: a surplus of energy. She wasn’t referring to an extra tank of gas in your car.” She meant the kind of pure energy that kids and mystics seem to have: Energy that comes from being at one with your soul and the world – even moments of being at one with God. Kids are in touch with all the awe and wonder of life. Their worlds are full of raw energy – and they are too! Nobody’s happier than a kid. Life isn’t complicated. It’s always now – and now lasts forever. Jesus said: “Unless we become like little children, we’ll never find our way into the kingdom of God.” 

…But then, as we begin to grow up, and as we become a bit more sophisticated – life has a way of becoming more and more complex – and so our lives become more complicated and we become a little less alive. Now we’re confronted with all the dualities of the world – the clash of opposites and the contradictions of life. Life doesn’t last forever – there’s also death. And if you choose this path –you can’t also choose that one. Suffering now enters every life – physical, psychological, spiritual. To live consciously is now to know pain, to know we’re each going to die and that everything and everyone we love is only here for a short while. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we loved our drinking and drugging so very much. They blocked out our awareness of the pain. Toward the end of my drinking I didn’t drink to get high or even to try to feel good – I drank to get numb –I drank, so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain.–         

And so maybe this is why the author lists as her second source of true happiness: That which brings an end to our suffering. For most of us in the Program, that means having a spiritual awakening. Finding our way out or through the pain. Finding the God who meets us there at our bottom and the people he sends us who take hold of our hands and leads us out of our own personal hell….Life hurts! But when life hurts enough it has a way of taking us to a whole new level of awareness and a whole new level of willingness. Pain can bring a new awareness of who we are, and why we’re here, and what our lie is really all about. If we don’t learn those lessons, if we’re not willing to live life on life’s terms and grow through them – then life has a way of dumping us back into the soup to simmer, and soften, and suffer some more. When I came back into treatment my second time, all my old counselor wanted to know was one thing – did it hurt enough out there this time? Thank God it did!

And then the final bit of wisdom to make that author’s list is: the absolute certainty that you are doing the will of God. Jesus calls this: “the peace that passes all understanding.” Now the conflicts are all gone. Now all the seeming complexities of life have disappeared. We simply do the next right thing – and we know that God is somehow with us through it all.

In 1946, Bill Wilson wrote an article that sums this pain stuff up pretty well. He wrote it after coming through another round of his own suffering. Bill wrote: “I saw that I had been living too much alone, too much aloof from my fellows, and too deaf to hear that Voice within. Instead of seeing myself as a simple agent bearing the message of experience, I had thought of myself as the founder of A.A. How much better it would have been had I felt gratitude rather than self-satisfaction. Gratitude that I had once suffered the pains of addiction.

Gratitude that a miracle of recovery had been worked upon me from above. Gratitude for the privilege of serving my fellow alcoholics (and addicts). And gratitude for those fraternal ties which bound me ever closer to them in a comradeship such as few societies of men (or women) have ever known. Truly did a clergyman (once) say to me, “you mis-fortune has become your good fortune. You people in recovery are truly a privileged people.” We are blessed! And may this New Year bring you and yours God’s every blessing with life’s every pain.