Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  Do I believe in a God that plays dice with the universe? No, but what I believe doesn’t matter. There either is a God or there is not. It has nothing to do with my faith, which is that there is a God and God really does love everybody, including people that don’t believe that there is a God. I’ve seen a lot of damage done in the name of God in this world, so I understand why people are sensitive about it. I have seen the Catholic Church do horrible fucking things, I have read about them, but I lived in Mexico in the late seventies and I saw women go to church every Sunday, and I am absolutely positive that they were getting their God by doing that. Whatever gets you there.

  Unfortunately, there are always going to be political entities. My friend in recovery said, “The best concept, which becomes a necessity in recovery, is the difference between spirituality and religion, because a lot of people are becoming traumatized by religions.” You know—“Oooh, she said, ‘God.’ That’s religion! I don’t want to hear it.” You have to try to convince people this is not religion, this is spirituality, it’s something different. Eventually they’re going to say, “What’s the difference between religion and spirituality?” The difference is that religion is a group of people’s agreement about what God is or, worst case scenario, what God is not. But it’s an agreement, therefore it’s political. That’s the essence of what politics is, isn’t it?

  Spirituality is one person’s individual, one-on-one relationship with God. It doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. People can get spiritual in a group, but really it’s just like dying. You can have your family all around, all your friends, but when you go, you’re going by yourself. Nobody is fucking going with you.

  I am much more forgiving now, because I frequently have to forgive myself as I just stumble through the wreckage and try to recover. I have to be mindful of the fact that I’m forgiving other people because I have to forgive myself and vice versa. You can’t do one without the other.

  The biggest difference now is that I have to feel stuff and be there for it, and if I hurt somebody’s feelings I have to deal with the consequences. Before, if I hurt somebody’s feelings—and I’m sure I hurt lots of people’s feelings—I was capable of living with it because I was high all the time. That’s why people think we’re assholes, because we are. We aren’t out there operating with all of our senses, and we aren’t operating with our hearts. We’re operating with our brains and our “want to” and that’s it. Recovery doesn’t promise that you won’t be an asshole, but most of the people that practice spiritual principles of recovery in all their affairs, they do get to be better people than they were when they came in. I may still be, relatively speaking, an asshole, but I know I’m better than I was, and that’s because I have to be. It’s absolutely necessary to my survival, and I don’t do it for everybody else, I do it for me.

  I hear people come into recovery meetings and share how they wish everybody had a program because this world would be a lot better place. I believe that, but I don’t think it makes that much difference to my life. It’s not about anybody else’s program, it’s about mine. It’s the only thing that I can do. Is the world a better place if I don’t succumb to this disease? Yeah, if for nothing else because I won’t be driving cars upside down the wrong way along the interstate. All I can do is what I need to do to keep from ending up back where I started. The main thing about being sober is suiting up and showing up. Just the stuff that I have seen, the normal everyday stuff that I missed before, that’s miraculous enough. Then you add to it capital-M Miracles—and those happen too. I have seen them.

  Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey

  Both Stephen and Janet are clinical therapists at Harvard Medical School and at the Stone Center at Wellesley College. Together, they’ve written the book We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Men and Women (with Samuel Shem), as well as the play Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. My cousin Patrick suggested that I go see the play while I was visiting New York, and I was blown away. Janet and Stephen are the only married couple I interviewed for the book, and it was interesting to see how their stories connected and separated and reconnected again. There’s another whole book there about recovery in relationships.

  Janet: There are four moments that really stand out in my mind. The first one got me to go to a mutual support recovery group, just open the door. It was an experience I had of letting go, just of tears.

  It was a very nice summer day and it was hot, and I was in the house. I was eating chocolate cupcakes with white frosting and drinking Scotch. I was inside, it was a beautiful day, and there was just a real sense of being cut off from life, in isolation, and not wanting to be there. I just . . . for some reason, I let myself cry. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t go out, I didn’t pick up the phone, I didn’t do anything but stay with my experience. Just stay with what I was feeling for a really, really long time. It was the only time in my life I went to the end of my tears. And at the end of the tears, I felt this enormous peace.

  I went outside and I had a sense of the skies opening up and the light pouring down. It felt like something really opened up for me, and I just surrendered to the depth of that feeling. I wasn’t trying to make it better or tell myself anything about it. For once in my life, I let myself just feel what I felt. And it led me to the sense of peace, of sumati.

  That was a Sunday afternoon, and I finally went back in the house and made a phone call to find out where there was a recovery meeting, and there was one a half hour later close to where I was. I had that miraculous feeling when things click.

  I really believe that the universe rewards surrender—but you can’t surrender because of that, because then it’s not surrender. This idea of diving into the pain instead of running away—it’s a surrender to the truths, the things you’ve been running from your whole life.

  So that was the first moment. It allowed me to listen, and it made everyone at that meeting look like they were angels to me that night. That was twenty-eight years ago, and I still vividly, vividly remember what was said and what the speaker was wearing and what the light looked like. I could see the light in her. I could feel it in her story. I listened in a way that felt like “I’m home.” I had this sense that I needed to really listen in a way I had never listened to anything else before. You know, like it says in one of the books we use in recovery, “As willing to listen as only the dying can be.”

  I did get a mentor in recovery, but I was doing that on the energy of that first moment, and just being a good girl. I remember hearing, “There will come a time when no power on Earth will stop you.” I didn’t know what that meant until later, when I was having cravings. I got on my knees because I was told to do that, and I asked for help and the craving was lifted. That was like an opening to a new reality, that I did not have to be controlled by the craving. To get through that craving moment, ask for help and feel something answer—it was just awesome to me. That was my second moment.

  The third moment that really stands out to me was in another recovery meeting. Sunday morning, full of smoke, VFW hall. I was looking at the banners, you know, the slogans they used to have up in the rooms. One of them said You Are Not Alone, and I’d looked at it a million times, but suddenly I overwhelmingly felt for the first time that I wasn’t alone. I had never known that I was living in aloneness, and suddenly I knew that the thing I wanted most in my whole life was to feel connected, and that was possible by being at this meeting.

  That’s not to say I always feel connected, because I don’t. I struggle with that all the time. But I feel like something crossed over, something happened that made me understand both the possibility of connection and also the pain I’d been living in. Those moments of connection, they’re bridges to something else. You won’t be there forever, but once you’ve been there, you’re never the same again.

  One night I was at my house in Gloucester, overlooking the water. There was an incredible lightning storm, and this tremendous flas
h lit up the whole ocean and the whole bay. For a moment, you could see everything, and then it would get dark again. But once you’ve seen that flash, you never go back to total darkness. The light goes away, and yes, you’re in the dark, but you have to cultivate the gratitude that you have seen the light and you might see it again. You can’t have it all the time, because we’re human and we don’t live in those moments. But the moments open something for you, something in you. You get insight or expansion or illumination, or you see and feel what’s real at a deeper level.

  Stephen: I think that my struggle was different. It was really around—I mean there were two struggles I didn’t know I was in. The longest one was alcohol. Jews aren’t alcoholics; you know that, right? Only in looking back do I realize how many times I should have been dead, through various accidents or whatever. I didn’t realize that I was living such a risky life. I just thought it was kind of normal, you know, after I started drinking.

  And then the second struggle, which I only realized later was the spiritual struggle with self-centeredness, with ego. I was this society’s definition of high achievement. I did Harvard College and I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then Harvard Medical School. It was really a pretty self- centered quest, and I didn’t question it. I thought that was what you did. Then it caught up with me. I hit the wall after turning forty, and I realized all of these things had gotten so much more important than what ever one could call a soul or compassion.

  I got depressed. Writing was the thing I wanted to do, but I was too depressed to write. I spent a year lying in a bathtub, you know, not knowing what I should do, because writing had gotten too important to me and I couldn’t write.

  Earlier, Janet had gone to a seminar by an Indian woman, a very wonderful teacher. I had met her here in the United States and I didn’t think there was much in what she was talking about, but Janet was going to go off to a weeklong seminar with her in Holland. Janet and I were not getting along very well, but something made me say, “Well, I’m going with you.” Janet was shocked, because we hadn’t really been participating very much in each other’s lives by then. She was living on the top floor and I was living in the carriage house, and we were not doing too well. Somehow I sensed that if she went to this thing alone, it might all be over, and I didn’t want that. It just came out of me: “Well, I’m going with you.” There was no calculation involved. I surprised myself by saying that.

  So I went, and at first I still didn’t get anything out of what this woman was talking about. We’d sit in meditation, and then she’d give a lecture. Then she gave a lecture on psychological suffering. I had majored in psychology at Harvard, I was a psychiatrist, I’m supposed to know about this. But she just put a whole different slant on the causes of psychological suffering and the ways to work through it.

  I remember sitting there, with my knees aching and my back hurting. But I was, all of a sudden I was really there. I wasn’t taking notes; I was just listening with this sustained attention. I had an hour’s worth of sustained attention.

  And it wasn’t a lecture. It was really saying, “This is who you are. You don’t know it, but I’m sharing with you because I know it.” Janet said afterward—she was sitting in back of me—she said my ears actually got big.

  So that was really the first moment. It didn’t have anything to do with alcohol. It had to do with understanding and listening. She was saying that self-centeredness was the basis of psychological suffering—“Oh, of course. That’s it. It’s not your mother and father, it’s not your toilet training.” I had never understood that before. That started me on this Buddhist-practice path, and it’s a remarkable journey.

  Then one of my students was given the job of starting an addictions center and I became their doctor. I didn’t know anything about recovery. It was never mentioned in medical school or anywhere else. So here I am, treating alcoholics, and I would tell them, “Oh, you’ve gotta go to this mutual support group.” Then I thought, “Well, if I’m sending them to this recovery group that I’ve never gone to, maybe I ought to figure out what it is. Otherwise I’m bullshitting them.”

  I started going to meetings so I could see what they were about. Then I started to understand it, and then I could talk to people about it. I wouldn’t take anybody in therapy unless they had “a meaningful connection” to the group. Then we would talk about what that means.

  And I had very good luck with people, really. These people I worked with would do fine, which flew in the face of what I’d been taught as a psychiatrist. I’d been taught you work on their depression, and they’ll stop drinking. Which of course is totally backwards.

  So I’m going to meetings and holding these therapy sessions, many times a week, and doing this intense Buddhist exploration. Then I started to work with Janet on the Bill W. and Dr. Bob play, which involved me in learning and research into alcoholism and recovery in a really big way. But even through all that, I never put it together that I was an alcoholic.

  One summer we were up in Gloucester, which has always been kind of a spiritual house for us, and we had not been getting along again. I started to see that there was a pattern in this—from my side, not from her side. Every day, late in the afternoon, I’d have a gin and tonic or two gin and tonics, and then we would have dinner, and I’d have wine with dinner. And every night, we’d have a fight after dinner. I’d get more and more irritable, we’d have a fight, and I’d conk out. Just fight and go to bed.

  Finally all these different pieces came together. Not in a flash of lightning. In the play, there’s this scene where Bob and Bill are really at each other’s throats, and Bob says, “Maybe this thing can’t rely on blinding flashes of light. It’s like the body, human nature, like the rest of medicine. Step by step, you put the pieces of the puzzle together until finally the picture is clear before your eyes.” And that’s what happened to me.

  That moment I said, “I’m not going to drink tomorrow.” The next day I didn’t drink, and I didn’t have a real bad fight with Janet, and I didn’t go to bed early. The next day the same thing happened, and I said, “Wait a second. There’s really something going on here about alcohol.” And then I looked back on my life, getting drunk, riding a BMW motorcycle without a helmet or a shirt or shoes to see if I could hit 100 miles an hour. There were lots of not only dangerous but totally humiliating episodes. Suddenly I went, “Jesus, that’s been my problem here.”

  Janet: We should talk about the moment we had together.

  Stephen: Go ahead. That’s a good one.

  Janet: It was really clear. We were standing out in front of the house, on a freezing night, and it was a terrible moment.

  Stephen: Really freezing.

  Janet: It was one of those moments where you knew if you walked away, you might walk away forever.

  Stephen: Yeah, that’s right.

  Janet: I don’t even remember the words, just the experience of having a shared moment of opening and surrendering. . . .

  Stephen: Yeah. That’s what it was, surrender.

  Janet: It was the only time I have ever felt I wasn’t alone. That shared moment, it had that sense of changing direction. It had a sense of “I have been here so many times. What just happened? What happened? I have been in that place how many times, but something just happened. What is that?”

  Stephen: We really were on the edge of something, there was no question. I mean we were standing in the freezing cold, and we were about to move apart, but something else happened. That is the only way I have to explain it is something else happened that we both felt very strongly—

  Janet: We both moved toward the relationship, moved out of self. And I felt you were in it with me.

  Stephen : And I felt you, too. One of those clicks, and you are out of yourself. It’s like a moment of awe. That’s what it was, a moment of awe. You’re not thinking in a moment of awe. You’re not thinking of yourself. You are in awe, and that’s a state of love, real love. That was a remarkable thing.


  Janet: Who knows why those moments come when they do? Or why they come at all? It’s a mystery. I remember seeing this with an anorexic I was treating. She’d looked in the mirror a billion times and saw herself as fat, and suddenly she looked in the mirror and saw she was thin, and everything changed. I’ll never forget that. I saw before me the mystery of that moment when something important gets reorganized, and it’s not under our control. It’s just a complete mystery, and it’s transformative. And it’s also truth.

  That’s the gift of desperation. Where you are is so bad, you have nothing left to lose, so why not try recovery? People tell that it will be hard, but you can get through it. People try by their human example to show you that you can lose and you gain things beyond your wildest dreams.

  Stephen: Right, right. But that’s the other side of it too, I think. I have found, in my experience anyway, that the things that I thought I needed to hold on to were actually the things I needed to let go of, and the things that I was terrified to let happen were necessary.

  Janet: When someone needs help, I tell them my story. I try to get them to talk with someone. If not me, then someone else. And I try to carry the message in a quiet way. It doesn’t always work, so I have to be very humble and not push. I have to find the right way to share and try to be sensitive, but not to expect much. Just trust you don’t know where the seeds are going.

  And if it helps, I tell people not to worry about “God.” I mean I have so much trouble with the word God. So I think of it as G.O.D., the gift of desperation, because desperation brings us to the point where we can relate to the universe in a different way. It pushes us out of ourselves, makes us ask for help in a really fundamental way. Ask for help, and have something answer you. I don’t believe it’s a being, but I think you experience the aliveness of the universe in that moment.