It was a cool evening and I stood at the curb in front of my apartment, enjoying the air; looking at the stars, blunted though they were by the lights of the city.
A car pulled up and idled in front of me. The tinted glass lowered, and the driver leaned his head down to see me more clearly through the passenger side window.
"Are you Mr. SponsorPants?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Get in." He popped the locks and leaned over to open the passenger door.
Inwardly I chuckled, thinking, "Well, I guess my days of jumping into dark cars with strange men aren't over after all."
We introduced ourselves and he merrily cursed a driver who cut him off as he merged back into traffic. "Sorry." He said.
"No worries. Are you a regular at this meeting?"
"I'm the co-secretary. J. snaked you out from under me to speak, I was going to ask you next month when it's my turn. We just got elected a little while ago. I heard you speak at ..."
We chatted about meetings in the area, his day, my day. Inconsequentials. I was actually trying to get a fix on J., his co-secretary -- so far he was just a voice on the phone asking me to speak at a meeting. I wasn't sure if I'd met him and forgotten, or hadn't met him yet, and the way the conversation progressed when we spoke hadn't left room for me to politely sort that out. Didn't really matter, though.
Never say no to an AA request.
We pulled up and he pointed to the meeting door, backside of a church (aren't they always?) easily identifiable by the Usual Suspects hanging out front, smoking and drinking coffee. I thought that, apart from the vagaries of fashion and the progression of tech accessories, the look of a bunch of drunks outside an AA meeting probably hasn't changed much since the whole thing got started.
My driver went to park, and I headed in. Down the stairs, turn right, down the stairs, turn right, down the stairs, turn right again. Even I couldn't fumble those instructions.
Hanging over the stairwell was a giant portrait of Jesus, somewhat arresting in both its scale and subject. I stopped, wishing I was more familiar with my Bible passages, to deduce what scene was on display. An ornate frame surrounded the piece, with Jesus, I must admit, classically Caucasian and clean; brown haired and blue eyed (that is, the Jesus of my childhood), standing at a wall of some kind, facing partially away from the viewer. With one hand He held aloft a candle (or maybe it was a lantern) and with the other He reached towards a door in the wall. Something about His stance, the way He was seen in a kind of three-quarter profile, the lighting ... it made Jesus seem ... furtive. I thought the artist was either unconsciously revealing something secretive about his own life in this work, or had stumbled across a long lost scripture, perhaps from the gnostic Bibles, entitled "Jesus Visits The Temple of Sighs." Probably not that last one, but my giggle echoed up the stairwell behind me.
The thing about going to a lot of AA meetings is that you become a connoisseur of church basements and playrooms. This one was awesome. Clean, with colorful walls, art supplies, and even a foosball table. Cool! Far end of the room, the chalkboard bore, in child's hand, the following declaration:
Good News!
We love God!
And our Church!
And Spiderman!
I didn't know this Parish, but I liked 'em already: Sneaky Jesus, arts and crafts, foosball and Marvel comics. Our Lady of the Not Too Uptight.
The meeting itself was a really mixed bag (my favorite kind), a true example of the Big Book's often quoted line, "we are people that would not ordinarily mix."
I spoke for half an hour. It was what it was. I never know what I'm going to say before I speak, and at this point I'm not too worried about how it's received (though there was a time when I lived and died over that.) Along the way I've spoken at meetings behind bars and meetings IN bars, giant and tiny, rowdy and tame. My job is to tell my truth and try to carry the message and to smash through the ego fears and vanity that inevitably rears its head.
Afterwords, on the ride home, my driver asked me to clarify something I had spoken about, and (somewhat alarmingly I must confess) abruptly pulled over and turned off the car. Truthfully, I was kind of beat, and looking forward to getting home, but I composed myself and we sat quietly for a bit. Might have been a minute, might have been five. I already understood that this was the reason I was here tonight. Not the meeting, not the speaking. Whatever this man was going to say in the quiet of his car, traffic whizzing by us a few feet away.
Staring straight ahead, he told me a secret.
I shared my experience.
We said a prayer.
I observed that there was a time in both our lives that the idea of saying a prayer with an almost-stranger in a parked car of a Monday night was ... unlikely. He ruefully agreed.
We finished the drive in companionable silence for the most part, and after we said our goodbyes and he pulled away, I thought about his courage, and his willingness to go to any lengths to stay sober, and I was pretty much awash in gratitude to have been allowed to witness it.
So I guess tonight this is just a declaration, scrawled in my own childish hand, that I love God, and AA ... but while Spiderman is cool, I'm really more of a Batman guy.
If you have a secret, and you are carrying it with you in sobriety, I can assure you from personal experience, both in my own recovery and as a witness to others, that the pain of carrying it is far greater than the pain of sharing it.
And if you do not eventually let it go it will kill you.
Courage.