Alcoholics are quite spiritual people but when drinking they don’t catch it. Scene: you are in a bar, a party, social event with lots of noise, people talking loudly, people dancing, roaring music. Suddenly, in a brief moment, you feel separate from it all, as if a silence has overtaken your innards. You cannot connect with what is going on. You interpret it as loneliness, discomfort of not fitting in, and so you take a drink, another drink, to help you enter into the chaos going on in the room. But that moment of disconnect is the Power, alive in the silence you so briefly felt, a Power that for an instant calls you into an interior desert, a stillness presence, that is not loneliness. It is solitude, where you discover your sacredness. But for the practicing addict, it is not a sobering moment of truth, but something to be escaped, on the road to oblivion.
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Thanks for sharing this, Father Ryan. :) I love the new lens and will use it whenever I'm next feeling uncomfortable around a crowd. Even if it's just when I'm picking up my son from school. Another gift of sobriety paired with your blog, new glasses all the time!
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