Great is thy faithfulness, oh God my father,

There is no shadow of turning in thee.

Thy changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

As thou hast been, thou forever will be.

For the last few days, I can’t stop singing this old church song, especially the part about “no shadow of turning.” I think of how much I long for that full, unconditional love, without a shadow of turning. I’ve looked for it my whole life. It’s hard to imagine how I’ve always had it if I’d just looked in the right place. Even when I feel as close to God as I’ve…

I just celebrated my third year in recovery, which hardly seems possible.  If you told me three years ago that I’d still be clean and I’d still be happy about it, I probably would have laughed in your face.  I think I’ve said before that when I got sober, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to use anymore; it was because I didn’t want to hurt anymore.  I didn’t really accomplish that goal.  Sure, I hurt less often and for shorter periods, but guess what?  Life is HARD.  Pain is real and pain is not always self inflicted.  I wanted…

“For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

-2 Corinthians 4: 6-7

I keep bumping into this idea from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, and I love it. Since the beginning of my adventures in seeking God, my image of what God looks and feels like in my life is bright, white light…a glowing…

Hi God. It’s me.

I wanted to take a few minutes right in the middle of my day to thank you. Thank you so, so much for the way my life is taking shape over the last few months. Thank you for the changes in my work. Thank you for my new friends and mentors. Thank you for the work you are doing in my husband’s life and for the people you have put around him for support and encouragement.

Thank you for friends. Thank you for community. Thank you for the sweet, warm people you’ve put in my life to buoy…

Ahh, it is so frustrating when it’s all spread out. When everything is off the shelves, all the parts are scattered everywhere. You can’t even see the floor, which needs cleaning itself. It’s underneath all the other things that used to be on shelves, in drawers. Granted, they were on the wrong shelves and haphazardly piled into drawers, but they were invisible. You could pretendthey weren’t there. It was easier that way.

Or it was kind of easier that way. It wasn’t easier when you wanted to find something, or when you wanted to wear something and it was all wrinkled.…

Earlier this month, I decided I was going to set aside one day each week for spirituality and health, a sort of personal Sabbath. I picked a day of the week and made some rules for myself and set about my spiritual experiment. This week will be my fourth “Sabbath,” and while three weeks is hardly enough to see substantial change, I have noticed some interesting things:

1. It’s hard to break out of my routine and not do my usual work. It’s like the first time I sat in meditation and was there for about fifteen seconds and thought, “Ok, is this…

I’ve been on a little spiritual sabbatical of late.  Actually, my spirituality is  not so much on sabbatical as are the methods that I use to express it.  I was born and raised Roman Catholic - I think I already told you that I went to Catholic grade school, high school, college and grad school.  I left “The Church” in my early twenties, only to return in my early thirties when my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  I made the standard bargain with God - “Save my mom and I’ll come back.”  I came back.  My mom died.  But…

On Thanksgiving morning, I needed to run out to the grocery store for a few last minute items, and if the parking lot of my local store was any indication, I was far from the only one. As I weaved my way slowly through the traffic at the front of the store looking for an available space, I noticed a man standing in front of the store holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign bearing the words, “Please help.” I thought about the family I had at home, the friends we would be getting together with later that day and the feast…

Now and then, I get a real hankering for justice. I start obsessing about how my husband should be carrying around a little bit of my pain for me. I think that I should sit him down and explain to him all the ways that all the various things he’s done have hurt me. I want a witness, and I want it to be him. I want to recite my litany of offenses. I want him to look at me and to see all the bits and pieces of my heart. I want to hand it to him.

And man, when…

It’s me.

I have been fighting with you a lot over the last few days. I don’t know why. I know who will win this fight. I’m glad you love me even when I pick fights with you.

I’m hurting, though, because there are needs I have that only you can meet, and I really don’t want you to be the one to meet those needs. I really, really want my husband to see me, hear me, and love me in the ways that only you can. I’m sorry I don’t want you, but I don’t. I want him.

I don’t know why.…

The Friday night meeting was pretty cool, I haven’t liked it that much lately and only gone occasionally. Noisy summer fans and not being able to hear didn’t help. Too many ugly old men, hardly any girls with the students out of town, and yada, yada yada. I’ve caught flack for that attitude from you know “who you are.” Women see checking out the girls as a pretty piss poor reason to go to a meeting. You work your program, and I’ll work mine, OK. That is a principle of AA. Women go because of the guys a little too.…

My kitten is beautiful…orange and white and pink on her nose. She charms me to no end. She is incredibly soft to touch, and her kitteny antics amuse me. She makes me smile every day. She hunts grasshoppers. She makes crazy, flying leaps to attack things like shoelaces or the dog’s tail.  She comes to me when she’s hungry or lonely or wanting affection, and she curls up in a little ball on my lap. She’ll reach her lovely little pink-padded paws up and pet my face, lovingly…looking deep into my eyes like I’m the greatest thing, ever.

And then, sometimes, I’ll…

Lately, I’ve been real thankful that the recovery bug has bitten me. It’s much better than that pesky tick which bit me a few years ago and infested my blood with Lyme’s disease. The recovery bug actually showed up first in my life in a spiritual dedication to the Noble Eightfold path towards enlightenment. Both are about healing, self-improvement and compassion. Both are about ethical and mental development. Both are about freedom from attachments and delusions. My spiritual bug gave me the faith to quit using and survive the rough years of anxiety and craving. My recovery bug is also…

I have been AWOl from the blogging and meeting scene lately.  Why doesn’t matter.

That little thought or quote popped into my head last fall as I thought about the attitude of many of the non program friends I had made through getting involved with music and people that don’t go to church. God just isn’t something they think about, care about or believe in at all.
Even so, God is always there no matter what we think, our personal beliefs or our religious affiliation. He’s still there despite what the atheists think or what we feel about him. Ladies, please don’t…

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I’ll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen’s autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn’t the one closest…

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me — or at least like the me I used to be — find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of…

I logged in to my e-mail tonight for the first time in a busy few days, capping a busy few weeks in which we’ve done everything from smash up my car (we are all fine, but it had to make a trip to the body shop to render it safely drivable again) to visit the ER (totally unrelated to the smashing of the car, but again everyone is fine) to host a party for my daughter’s entire first grade class. If I could afford to go to a body shop for humans (otherwise known as a spa, I believe), I’d…

It’s me. I wanted to thank you for some things today.

I spent time with my sister in law. She’s a real gift in my life. We talked about you some, God, and she has a lot of insteresting spiritual insight for someone so young. I guess she’s had a big life in her own way, growing up among all those drug addicts.

I had a good time at church today. Thank you for giving me these people in my life. You always surround me with strong, healthy community, and I’m so grateful. I couldn’t have made it through the last few…

I remember the day I realized that God loves me. I was listening to Krishna Das at the end of a yoga class, and the words rang so true:

My God is real, for I can feel his love in my soul.

I lay on the floor with tears running down my cheeks. God loved me. I could feel it, pure and warm and real as anything I’d ever felt before. It was the beginning for me of my God-journey.

In the intervening years, I’ve tried on nearly every god under the sun. I may even have tried on the sun as a…

Roger Ebert breaks his anonymity:

You may be wondering, in fact, why I’m violating the A.A. policy of anonymity and outing myself. A.A. is anonymous not because of shame but because of prudence; people who go public with their newly-found sobriety have an alarming tendency to relapse. Case studies: those pathetic celebrities who check into rehab and hold a press conference.

In my case, I haven’t taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God’s truth: Since the first A.A. meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been…

I had a long talk with a mentor and friend last night about all the things that are eating at me. I told her about how weary I feel, how tired of this long, exhausting life. I told her about how tired I am of repeating, again and again, the same patterns, the same experiences with my husband. I told her how it will seem to get better, but then, suddenly, there will be a new routine in his repertoire…new pain. New injury. New offense. I recounted all his latest antics that were frightening me, and I told her my…

I have this picture of my husband and me. It’s from the before time, from shortly after we were married. He was just dabbling around with drugs at the time, successfully hiding it from me with the occasional “boy’s night out” or “sickness” that required him to retreat outside of our home or deep inside of himself. It hadn’t yet gotten out of hand, and I was fumbling along in a peaceful state of denial.

We were so in love, and it’s apparent by the looks on both of our faces. He is looking at me like I’m the most delicious…

I shared in a meeting recently about my fear around my husband’s business trips and how that fear is a reminder to me to connect with my Higher Power. After the meeting a newcomer asked me what I’m going to do now: I mean, he’s going on a business trip soon, right? So what do you do now? Check his phone records? How can you make sure he’s not acting out in his addiction?

Of course, I had already said what I was going to do: recognize, accept and take responsibility for my own emotions, pray and meditate, work my program,…

Green taco sauce was poured into the glass’s clear water, representing envy. Yellow mustard was fear, vinegar was bitterness, beer represented addictions. We’d started with a glass of pure water, a symbol of the way we begin our lives. As the speaker added one contaminant after another, the demonstration resonated with each of us in the audience: We all start with good intentions. But life gets complicated, and poison is everywhere.

At the time, I was full of vinegar. “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender,” says the Big Book [p64]. Bitterness, resentment, anger – these consumed me so I drowned them nightly in vodka. What was I so…

I fear business trips. But it’s not my own business trips I fear — as a mom who left corporate work behind some nine years ago, I don’t get those myself anymore — it’s my husband’s. When Mark was active in his sex addiction, (unbeknownst to me at the time) the trips he took for business were veritable perfect storms for acting out. The simmering brew of loneliness in an unfamiliar city, exhaustion brought on by travel and stress about his work triggered the compulsive behaviors he used to self-medicate. And on top of that, his location (most often a…

“Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?” Mark asked the other day, “You said, ‘I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!’”

“Really? I said that?!”

“Yes, you did.”

“That’s completely insane, and exactly like something I would say,” I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of…

Most of the time, I find a lot of comfort in the idea that I have a God who is watching out for me, taking care of me, and creating a more fit container for the God within me through the dificulties I face in my life. I appreciate the freedom from worry that I feel when I realize that I am not in charge and that no matter what kinds of foolish decisions I make along the way, I will always be able to re-center and find myself again if I’m receptive to my Higher Power’s will.

There are times,…

Step 7: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

I’ve been going through the process of working the 12 Steps around my own personal craziness, and last week, I reached the point where I was supposed to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. Whew! That has so many problematic words in it. I mean even if we forget about “shortcomings” (because, let’s face it, don’t most of us want to keep on keeping on with the ignoring in that department?), we have words like “God” and “ask” and “remove” and (trickiest of all) “humbly.”

I don’t know about you, but I…

A few days ago, as I was sitting in my living room writing, two smiling grey-haired women knocked on my front door. They handed me a pamphlet titled “Would You Like to Know the Truth?” and told me it had answers to many of the questions people ask about life and about God.

A few years ago I would have been angry and resentful that they interrupted my writing time to try to push their God on me. I would have mocked their pamphlet as full of opinions masquerading as “The Truth.” I would have torn it apart, bit by bit,…

I stayed up way too late on Thursday watching the VP debate. I found that I was riveted by the brilliance of one candidate and the incoherency of the other. I’m not going to make any other political comments here, but I was struck by an emotional moment during the debate.

And that moment came when Sen. Biden talked about the loss of his wife and child during an accident. I knew that Sen. Biden had lost his wife and a young daughter during a tragic auto accident early in his senate career. His two sons were critically injured in the…