I was talking to a friend the other day about spiritual awakenings and as we talked I realized how many of my own milestones I remember - particular incidents that moved me forward on a path I didn't even know I was walking.
I wouldn't have found my way at all if I hadn't been drinking way too much, enough for me to pass out every night, to shake when I lifted a coffee cup, to dread the phone ringing because I was certain something would be required of me that I couldn't possibly do. I'd become used to reeling off the walls in the dark of 3AM as I made my way to the refrigerator for one more tumbler of vodka or white wine. I was after oblivion; I couldn't bear to feel my sometimes hidden but always constant despair, my certainty that I would never be the woman I wanted to be or have any of the things I wanted, and thought I needed, or be recognized by the world for the many things I wanted to accomplish. I believed that no matter how hard I tried, nothing would change, so it was far better to put myself in a place where I didn't even have to try. Not to sleep but to be unconscious without the possibility of the pain of unfulfilled dreams.
One night, as I stumbled my way to the vodka, I hung over the refrigerator door staring into the light. I was reaching for the bottle when I suddenly thought, I can't do this anymore. I had no idea what that meant but I astonished myself by pouring the vodka down the drain. I slowly walked back to bed. Something had shifted; something had been decided.
But the decisiveness I felt at 3AM had faded by morning and very early I found myself getting dressed to go to the liquor store. The memory is very vivid - I'm sitting on the edge of the bed lacing up my sneakers when I again have the thought, I can't do this anymore. For an instant, I knew that was true; there was a flash of light, palpable and uplifting, a shaft of light that released all my tension and anxiety. But in the next instant I felt my stomach clench in fear - there was no way for me to move forward without the means of deadening reality, without chemicals to get me out from under all my fears and frustrations. I see now I was like a prisoner who, when the gates are thrown open, is afraid to leave the safety of her cell, to walk away from the certainty of what is known, no matter how harsh and painful it is. But once the gates are open - and you know that they are - there's no going back. I hated that I'd somehow brought myself to this crossroads. I felt tricked by my own resolve.
But something real had shifted in me that morning and I haven't had a drink since. I haven't done it alone - I've had all the help I could wish for, all the help I need - and now it's been years since the thought of having a drink or a drug has even entered my mind.
I often think about what happened to me early morning, sitting on the edge of my bed. I had said many times, I have to stop drinking, but as soon as I said it, it went out of my mind. What was the point of trying when I knew I wouldn't succeed, I who couldn't keep any commitment I made to myself? If, for instance, I was driving on the freeway and said, I won't light a cigarette until the LaBrea off ramp, I had the lit cigarette in my mouth before I'd gone a mile. I knew anything that depended on my using self-discipline simply wouldn't get done. My constant reiteration of all the ways I disappointed myself and why there was no reason, no reason at all, for hope brought me lower and lower, and eventually I'd come to believe I was completely helpless, without resources of any kind, unable even to take care of myself. A terrible phrase kept going through me - I would become a ward of the state...a ward of the state. Or I would be out on the streets, a bag lady like the woman in Doris Lessing's impossibly sad story, "An Old Woman and Her Cat," which traces the step by step descent of a woman from middle class comfort to life on the streets and finally death with only a stray cat for company. I held on to that story as evidence for the prosecution - see, that can happen and it will happen to me.
William James describes grace as a sense of inrushing energy that feels as if it comes from somewhere outside ourselves. He wasn't so much interested in where this energy comes from. We can't prove the reality of the Unseen; we can't touch grace or the "reality" of He From Whom It Comes. But what we can see is the altered behavior and feelings of those who have experienced that energy. Accounts of those changes, whether religious or political - or spiritual - are all around us and for James they were stories of the power belief has. Belief is real to the person who has it, and that belief, that insight, often results in real change.
Thinking of it this way, I would say now that I, who was (and has remained) an atheist and thought all talk of "the spiritual" was California new age hooey, had a moment of grace. Something happened, and I stopped drinking. At the time I didn't know what to call it. It wasn't the result of my frantic search to understand myself, to uncover and analyze all the hidden forces that blocked me and led to self-destruction. It didn't happen because I used my will as a battering ram for change. None of that brought me any closer to the liberation I craved. But in that moment on the edge of my bed, my shoelaces in my hands, something new had come in. A light had flickered for a moment. The stunning thing was that I recognized it as something different, a new feeling I had never had before, a good feeling which wasn't ridiculous or threatening, in need of being quickly repressed. It was new and it was good. For a moment, that was enough.
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