Forty Days and Forty Nights

So today marks 40 days of sobriety.  And, indeed, I do see clouds parting and the audible flap of a bird’s wing (perhaps a labored one, heavy with its olive branched burden).  They have not always been an easy 40 days–especially the last 10 or so.  My obsession came back ferociously around Day 30, which I’m told is not uncommon. One day, one week, thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, one year… these are “anniversaries” celebrated in AA with little coins bearing the number of sober days one has achieved.  Apparently, some of us get squirrely around these notable dates.  I am not immune.

The past 10 days have been pockmarked with desperate moments of alcoholic obsession.   It reminds me painfully of a tragic little crush I had on a student of mine some years ago.  (Please, no rolling of the eyes at this dreadful cliche.  When Sting sang about it, you ate it up and suckled the spoon afterward.  And this one was a legal 23 years old, thank you very much.)  It wouldn’t have been so awful had the crush not been returned and had the opportunities to have pursued this passion been so damned numerous.  Ethics of all sorts were not merely observed but put into painful,  self-abnegating practice for the span of about 3 1/2 months.  Happily, and unspectacularly, my relationship to inappropriate peccadilloes places me archetypally alongside  the Jimmy Carters of the world and not the Bill Clintons.  I only sinned in my heart (and sometimes with my right hand… but you can’t blame a girl, right?)

Just so:  I have romanced this phantom bottle for almost two weeks.  Like my student, that bottle always seems to be showing up–quite physically.  Not as a pair of brown eyes gazing adoringly at me from across a desk, but at any party I attend, any grocery I frequent, even in my house (when some folks took advantage of the BYOB on the invitation).  Tantalizingly out of reach, of course, only because of my ethics.  What is the harm?  Surely one drink–maybe just two–could not hurt.  Think about how good it would feel, smell, taste–and, ah!, the thrill of getting away with it!

Play the tape to the end, I tell myself.  Look at the consequences.

With these temptations around me and the complacence that sometimes follows a mile-stone like the 30-day marker, surely I’d envy the enforced de-tox of Noah’s experience?  No liquor stores to tempt me there.  Every partygoer’s six pack would be under hundreds of cubits of God’s deluvian wrath.  But, no thanks, anyway.  I’d take some temptation over that period of time packed in with thousands of smelly animals and, worse, all the members of my extended family.  A tee-totaler might be tempted to ferment the first fruit dry ground offered after that experience.

We think of Noah’s forty days and forty nights as that period of prolonged terror mixed with faith.  The Bible reads like a Weather Channel account, of course, and no word is spared for what Noah et al. enduring spiritually during the trial.  Faith that the waters would recede was all anyone had.  The narrative is silent about the difficult, resentful prayers that might have been on the survivor’s lips, the gallows humor that might have abounded, the petty spats, and the sleepless nights.  But forty days doesn’t sound like all that much; Chilean miners have endured more.

But it wasn’t forty days, as our amnesiac Sunday School-trained minds will misremember.  Those were only the days of rain.  The Almighty’s watery fury takes a long time to abate.  If Genesis is to be believed:  it takes exactly a year.  And if you’re Noah, you’re grateful for the initial reprieve, but you spend the next eight and a half months sending out ravens and doves in the hope of discovering dry land.  Forty days is the time of terror and half-certainty of death:  the months after are the long, bitter battle with and for hope.

To read the passage of Genesis describing Noah’s post-forty-day experience is to confront a certain resentful weariness with the process of trusting God’s will.  “And God remembered Noah, and every living thing . . . and the waters were asswaged” (8: 1).  Remembered?  Seriously?  Was Our Lord off playing golf or out moonlighting in some other universe?  Noah is cautious in his approach to what’s going on outside the ark.  The dove brings back the olive branch?  He still stays.  The dove doesn’t come back at all?  He still stays.  It’s dangerous out there, and God doesn’t seem in such a hurry to “remember” Noah.

I won’t get into what happens afterward.  God decides flooding isn’t in His best interest from now on, but we still get bad human behavior in the form of hubris and the tower of Babel hard on the heels of Noah’s holy fidelity.  But like most things in the Bible, I’m usually more interested in what is NOT said than what is.  For instance, what happened to the Ark?  It was not merely home for a year; it was the physical vessel of salvation.  It was most certainly a mess, however.  C’mon:   “every beast after his kind, and every cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth… every fowl… every bird” are going to make for a Biblical manure heap after 365 days.  (Of course, creationists have some pretty interesting theories about this.  If I didn’t have to pay, I’d like to see The Creation Museum’s exhibit on this one.)

My analogy with my recovery goes only so far here, I know.  But all that animal dung and mess reminds me of my past–the pain I’ve felt and cause, the ugliness of addiction, and the smell and wreck that still clings to my present life.  The Ark got Noah through the rain and the flood’s aftermath, but what does he do with the wreckage?

What would an AA member do?  I tell you exactly what she’d do:  she’d take an inventory.  She’d catalog all the scat, every last bit of it, then humbly ask God to help her get rid of it.  If she’d hurt some people in the Ark, she’d apologize and do her best to make amends.   An AA-attending Noah would sweep that Ark out and make it useful or maybe turn it into a museum for generations to come.  It would be a monument to salvation.  This is the untold AA-inspired narrative of Noah’s adventures post-Ark.

Now, if we’re following Women for Sobriety founder Jean Kirkpatrick’s program, we get a different story.  St. Jean isn’t much for inventory taking; it was one of the ways WFS broke definitively from Alcoholics Anonymous.  Of steps Four and Five Dr. Kirpatrick had this to say:  “I began to wonder why I was feeling guilt and atonement for my physical disease.  Was I so immoral that I had to make this searching and fearless moral inventory?  …. I began to see that my problem was the lack  of self-confidence, a lack of self-esteem.  I didn’t need the heaviness of all this moral atonement, not now anyway, not if I were going to stay sober.” (102)   The WFS statement #9 most clearly articulates this position:  “The past is gone forever.”  Kirkpatrick was roundly criticized for this position, but defended herself with the simple statement that she did not “see any value to be had from a constant reiteration of past misdeeds and misconduct.  I do not have to talk about my past continualy to know it is there.” (154)

A Noah–or let’s say Noah’s wife-would look at the Ark, be grateful for the safe passage it wrought, and either sink it in what was left of the oceans or turn it into kindling or break it up for building materials.  There would be no lingering over the remains.  Noah always struck me as being more or less pragmatic, and one can’t help thinking that the immediate needs for warmth and shelter after the deluge would prompt such exigent use of resources.

These analogies do some epistemological violence to both AA and WFS–neither of which in practice either enshrine and endlessly rehearse the past on the one hand or bury it like an inconvenient corpse on the other.  But they do offer different paths for dealing with the wreckage of the past–even, in my case, just the recent past.  Do I search endlessly for the triggers that prompted the return of my obsession?  Do I firmly close the door on this uncomfortable hiccup and walk away with only the gratitude that the episode is over?  Are those who do not master and inventory the details of their personal history doomed to repeat it?  Or do those who continually inventory their pasts (distant and recent) only live in it?

I raise these questions with the most genuine of rhetorical motives.  However I deal with the frightening, if now receded, return of my drinking obsession, I am at least grateful for the momentary reprieve–a lull in the rain that can make the space for asking such questions possible.

Reference

Kirkpatrick, Jean.  Turnabout:  New Help for the Woman Alcoholic.  New York:  Bantam/Madrona.  1977/1990.