a god of your understanding

at midnight you sat in a poorly lit second floor sweltering room in the middle of downtown. midnight meetings were never that well attended. but the poor souls sitting in the room wanted recovery so they came started sharing about their lives and their gods.

as you sat listening, you were introspective, running over all the ideas you had about what god was. in the meetings people said that it was god of their understanding. you could see a spirit in the people that you worked with. people diagnosed with serious mental illness who came to work even though the voices whispered distractions, sometimes screamed obscenities, and told them jokes making their laugher bubble out at inopportune moments. you were awed by how someone in the depths of a serious depression could get out of bed on time, shower, tie their shoes and try day-in and day-out to become accepted in american society. that's what you saw, you saw something moving them. and when people in the rooms spoke of insanity, that's what you had to compare to. the insanity that the literature talks about though is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results though, not the same type of mental illness. it was a more generic type of insanity. even though you saw insanity and spirit in everyone around you, you don't think that there's a spirit in you. you're so broken, so unworthy of love, so self-centered that you imagine that you're the one singled out for rejection. tears stream down your face, sitting quietly in the middle of the dank humidity.

a rotund black woman in a tight white shirt comes up to you after the meeting has ended, after you shared about what you had been thinking about, she hugs you and tells you that you're in the right place.

A few days later you went out to eat to a hookah bar after a meeting with a bunch of other people in recovery, one of whom is working on a doctorate in philosophy. As you sit across the table, smugly humored by your own wit you say, "If it's a god of my understanding, and I have a disease of fucked up thinking, what's to say that my god isn't fucked as a result?" Over his food, hand almost to his mouth he chuckles and says, "it doesn't matter." At that moment, his serene confidence that the idea of a higher power isn't a logic problem settles. To start thinking about your higher power as a string that connects all people, as simple humanity, some sort of transcendental entity, move onto page 35.

Most people describe the abyss of their spiritual condition when they were using as a "god- sized hole." Without something to move into the void left by self-medication, that you can't move away from feeling abandoned and bereft. If you'd like to stay in this banal existence go back to where you were and keep repeating the same mistakes and expect different results until you're ready to make new mistakes and trust that you will be taken care of by something other than yourself.