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It Pertains to Us
by James Stone Goodman

I am eavesdropping to someone talking to his friend at the counter of a diner I frequent. "It pertains to me," he says to her. "I hear the truth spoken there." He is talking about Alcoholics Anonymous. He is talking about how A.A. has saved his life and he is trying to describe why he continues to attend, why it is life-saving for him, why it is (my words, not his) transformational for him. "It pertains to me," he says and I laugh inside at the pure artistry of that phrase.

It pertains to him because he hears what he feels spoken there. He hears names given to feelings and thoughts and experiences that he himself could not name. Just to have a vocabulary is in itself a great gift. If he learned nothing else from A.A. but the vocabulary with which he now describes his experience, would it not be enough? Yes, it would be enough. But that is not all he learns.

He also learns that he is not alone. He sheds the first burden of all dependencies, the burden of isolation. The burden that we carry around that isolates us from the world, from help, from the shared understanding of our condition, that insulates us from the ready strength available to all of us once we recognize that we are not alone. What a great relief it is not to be so burdened. What a relief not to be the only one in the universe with these problems. What a relief not to be the center of the universe, singled out by God or Nature for a specifically miserable fate. What a relief not to be, as it were, God. That's the second burden of all dependencies.

We think we are God when we occupy the center of the Universe and hold specific expectations of how persons, places, and things around us are supposed to behave. We are the center when we cannot let go of our expectations and our lives are characterized by the daily wrestle with what Is, the wrestle which saps our energy because we cannot win that match. What Is always prevails over What Is Supposed To Be and the wrestle itself demands a great price in strength.

That's right, what a relief it is to be sitting at a counter, in a twenty-four hour diner somewhere, recognizing that you have moved from the center of the Universe to this anonymous outpost of civilization in front of a cup of coffee in a porcelain mug. To be not-God, as it were, and just another brick in the wall. We need some education for this, though, some of us need to be broken and busted to our knees, some of us need to run up against the people, places, and things who inevitably resist our effort to manage from the center where we have set up a base of operations. Only then do we relinquish the center, and give it up to something that endures, something that endures that rightfully belongs in the center, a power greater than yourself, not you, but something you may choose to call God.

This is a dependency we can tolerate, because it is not fragile like the objects of our other dependencies. It endures. It cannot be exhausted, it does not go away, it does not become stale with age, it does not lose its luster, it is not irresponsible, it will not abandon us. It endures. Everyone needs a center, a center with an occupying force that endures. Dependable. It is not you, or it, or him, or her, or food, or drugs, or booze, or success, or money, or status. The center is not a you, not a him, not a her, not an it at all. And when it is, you have a serious jones.

That is how I define addiction: confusing the partial for the whole. When booze becomes everything, when drugs become everything, when he becomes everything, when she becomes everything, when money becomes everything, when sex becomes everything, we have an addiction. Only Everything is everything. The antidote to addiction is to move the perishables out of the center and replace them with the Endurables.

When one learns this lesson, one has learned one of the great spiritual lessons of humankind. We learn it through our experience, our lives have taught us this lesson of living, we have lived it and we hear it as it has been lived by others around us. It pertains to us, it is the story of our lives, it is the tale that we tell by living, by surviving, by having made it, by the daily confirmation of meaning, by the daily affirmation of hope, to which our continued existence witnesses. We are witnesses for hope, just by being here. Just by accepting what Is.

I am staring into my mug at the diner as I hear the words spoken, these holy words, not ten feet away. "It pertains to me," it has saved a life. This one possibility means all possibilities, so when it pertains to him, it pertains to me and it pertains to you. We have entered the gates of hope, where all things are possible.

James Stone Goodman
November, 1990
St. Louis

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