Recovery Today – May 2010
There’s a passage in the book 12 Steps and 12 Traditions that’s always stopped me cold. Bill Wilson wrote: “It’s a spiritual axiom that any time I am disturbed there’s something wrong with me.” Now, as a self-centered addict, I had always believed: “It’s a spiritual axiom that any time I am disturbed there’s something wrong with you.” Getting that axiom turned around was a long and painful process – especially when it came to practicing “forgiveness.”
When I began working the Steps and it came time for me to make amends, my father’s name kept coming up. Now my old man and me had pretty well parted company many years before; and I carried a huge and, of course, a very well-justified resentment against him. He was a bad alcoholic who never did get sober. Growing up, he used to knock the hell out of me, lock me in closets, and do some other things that were pretty hurtful. Naturally, I hated him and felt perfectly justified in doing so.
But when I got to Steps 8 and 9, my sponsor Floyd said, “That attitude simply isn’t gonna work.” He said if I wanted to be free then I had to make amends to my father. “But why do I have to make amends to that Son of a Beachcomber,” I cried. “He ought to be the one making amends to me!”
But old, Saint Floyd wouldn’t listen. He said, “We ain’t talking about you forgiving your father for what he did – we’re talking about you asking his forgiveness for what you did.” What I had done, Floyd said, was I had withheld from my father the only thing I had any control over – I held back my love from him. But in holding back my love from him, it turned out that I also held it back from my wife, and from my kids and from everyone else who ever tried to get close to me. That was the moment I started to understand Wilson’s spiritual axiom! “…There was something wrong with me.”
Twice I got on a plane and went back home, wanting to say the words: “I love you” to my father and “I’m sorry for what I had done.” Twice I got back on the plane choosing to hang on to my own hatred over asking his forgiveness. I simply wasn’t done with my hating.
I’m forever grateful that some years later, the third time proved to be the charm. My father was dying and I knew this was going to be my last chance. I went to see him in the hospital and I said the words – and by then, I even meant them - and when I did that, an old, wound that had festered so long in my heart began to heal.
Several years ago, I had the privilege of visiting another old man before he died. His name was James Houck. James was just under a hundred years old when I visited him in his assisted living residence just outside of Washington, D.C. James had gotten sober back in 1934 – actually on the day after Bill Wilson drank his last drink. James stayed sober through the Oxford Group – the same program that sobered up Wilson and Dr. Bob.
In our meeting, James reminded me that forgiveness was the principle on which so much of the Oxford Group and AA had been built but that the radical nature of that forgiveness seemed to have been watered down and almost lost over the years. It was a kind of “radical forgiveness” that left nobody out.
To make his point, he told me the story of Irene Laure. During World War II, Irene was a member of the French underground resistance. She’d watched as the armies of Nazi Germany took over her small town in Southern France. They arrested and killed large numbers of her community along with members of her own family. Irene hated the Germans – she hated them with a passion to which most people in the world would say she was perfectly justified. But God moves in mysterious ways – especially inside the human heart.
One day, about a year after the war ended, Irene found herself in Switzerland at an Oxford Group Conference with several German women in attendance. She said that for three days she shut herself up in her room and wouldn’t come out. She couldn’t stand being in the same room with these women; her hatred was so strong.
But she heard that these German women had suffered too. That many of them had lost husbands and children through the Allied bombings that destroyed their homes and leveled their cities. She fought any thoughts of forgiveness for these people just as long and as hard as she could. But in the end she lost her battle – in the end God won out.
She came out of her room and begged the German women to forgive her. She didn’t come out saying: “I forgive you.” She came out asking those women to forgive her! Forgive her for all the hatred she bore in her heart for them and for their people. Her hatred was killing her and she wanted release from her self-constructed prison.
Like sobriety, Forgiveness is a hard truth for us to learn – perhaps the very hardest. Most of us don’t even attempt it until the prison-pains it brings, become unbearable. But when they do – God is waiting to unlock our hearts. “Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage.”
Fr. Bill Wigmore is President/CEO of Austin Recovery. Send comments, questions and treatment scholarship donations to:
Fr. Bill Wigmore, President/CEO / Austin Recovery / 8402 Cross Park Dr. /Austin, Texas 78754 or email: BillW@AustinRecovery.org