Most of us at some point or another in our lives have found ourselves either literally or figuratively falling to our knees to cry out, for whatever reason, “God help me!”
It might have been a death in the family or a particularly painful crisis that brought us to that point, but there we were.
And, of course, it may not have been on our knees. It may have been lying in bed, sitting in front of the Blessed Sacrament or praying at Mass. It may have been on a walk in the moonlight or watching a spouse or child suffer or standing by a hospital bed or looking down upon a crib with an angel dreaming there or, God forbid, looking down upon an empty coverlet where once an angel slept or where one was to have slept.
Sometimes over the years we let loose of the memory and pack away the notion that indeed, a cry to heaven, a prayer, was answered, quickly or slowly, clearly or in some language we had to figure out; perhaps even a prayer from the depths of our soul, a prayer that may just have changed our lives, that may have allowed us to continue living.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1981 I found myself in a treatment center for alcoholism. The disease had already left quite a bit of destruction in its wake. One person had been crippled and another had died as a result of my drinking and driving. I don’t remember either incident but I know they happened and that knowledge has never left me. I learned about shame from the inside out. In the years that followed I looked out windows praying for the courage to jump. I drank more and more to mask the pain. I often woke up not knowing where I was or what had happened over the previous 12 hours. Alcohol was my drug of choice and I abused it in a hundred varieties – from wine to vodka, from beer to bourbon. I got kicked out of nice places and not-so-nice places, partnered with good people gone astray and not-so-good people who didn’t much care. My world got smaller and smaller.
Then one morning, after yet another night of half-recollected humiliation, I called one of my brothers to ask for help and he pointed me to a family friend. As has happened so often in the life of my family, a Benedictine monk came to the rescue. He got me to the grounds of his monastery and shared his own story of past intemperance with me. With God’s help, the monk began to guide me in my recovery, which is how I got to an inpatient treatment facility.
Sometime several days after I entered that center, alone in my room, not knowing how in God’s heaven I was going to make it, I fell to my knees. And even though at that point in my life I had no idea what I believed or in whom I believed, I broke down anyway and cried out in the lamplight, “Please, God, help me!”
But how does one know if the petition is real and from the heart? I remember a Catholic priest who used to lecture in the addiction field. His name was Father Joseph Martin and he said, “You know, when I have a toothache I pray to God to take away the pain... I do it in the car on the way to the dentist’s office!”
I asked God for help, and my heart opened to what was being said in that treatment facility. And when I was released (on Dec. 26) I immersed myself in a recovery community. For the first five years of sobriety, I met with others in recovery about five times a week. And the Benedictine monk became one of the dearest friends I’ve ever had. He once called me a “slow motion miracle!” I wavered some at first and drank one more time, but as of May 15, 1982, I have been without a drink of alcohol for more than 35 years.
It’s hard to say how I’ve done it. One old-timer sober for 40 some years was asked by others how he had done it and he said, with the characteristic understatement of so many in my recovery fellowship, “Well, I didn’t drink…and I didn’t die!” I know it has taken willingness on my part, but definitely not willpower. It has taken faith, but not proselytizing. Perhaps more than anything, it has taken the love of God filtered through so many others who have reached out to me over the decades, including my Benedictine friend, now of happy memory.
I have done all I know to do to make amends, some of which can only be a living amends. I am reconciled with my past, which is to say my God has graciously forgiven me as He has done over and over for my other faults over the years. But the past is still with me, perhaps so that it might help somebody else. I know something of the strength of the human spirit just as I know what destruction I am capable of in certain circumstances. It is, therefore, a little less easy to be judgmental, though I lapse regularly.
And though I have never been granted a visual memory of my worst transgressions, to remain sober and faithful to the principles of my recovery it has taken a regular return in my mind and in my heart to that crystal clear moment, mystical in retrospect, when I fell to my knees and cried out to a God I didn’t even know was there…like we all do at one time or another.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.