My Name is Everybody

We were learning about Mickey Mantle last week, and I don’t know why, but that course of study always makes me really emotional. I don’t know why the story of people in recovery is so close to my heart, but it just is.

Mickey Mantle said "I put everything into my
swing, even my teeth."

Part of it is that the recovery story is a story about transformation as it really is. It’s not some luck and pluck and spunk and whatAlger BS. It’s the story about how the real things are real work, and what the real rewards are.

Part of it is that he truth of the 12 steps and the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer represent this kind of home-grown, nicotine fingers buddhism that is the most vital spirituality I know.

The very first step is to see things as they really are. To tell the truth. All faiths ask us to do that, to bear witness, not to bear false witness. Integrity is the I in the Quaker spice. Buddhism and Daoism, at their core are a minute by minute attempt not to cloud what is. And it is to accept that as things really are, you are not the most powerful thing in the universe. 

‘We accepted that we were powerless over our addiction.”

Submission is at the core of my faith. I love the poses in yoga that are about putting your head on the floor, just as Muslims pray. I learned to do this in China, where I would ke tou (literally knock my head on the floor) in front of giant statues of Guan Yin. Although I was raised Catholic, this posture of submission feels so right, and so much like coming home. I love the feeling of releasing all my weight into the floor. One time when we visited a Chinese temple a secular Jewish friend that I was traveling said ‘I could never do that- my people don’t submit like that.”

I think this is a common American response to postures of submission. We are so obsessively mindful about not submitting to the wrong thing, which is a wonderful part of our character, in ideal if not always in execution.

And of course, it’s easy for people who act like middle managers in corporation god to take advantage of this idea.

You probably shouldn’t ever submit to people.

But as buddha and Bill Wilson well knew, some things are not in your control. To believe anything else is not just a delusion, but a destructive one.

If you believe that, our theologies are pretty much in line. I am really not fussed about what does control those things that you do not control. A sentient creator? I doubt it, but maybe. A mechanical universe? That’s a good partial answer. I don’t know. And I don’t care. X is the variable force, but you don’t need to solve for X to respond to it appropriately.

Knowing this truth is the point. And know it you can respond in two ways- you can reject it, you can work to wrest control from X, or you can accept it. To accept it is to submit. That sounds easy, but it is not. Wrestling with the illusion of control occupies a good part of my day, and it has occupied a good part of my life. The only relief from that struggle is in submission, and when I can achieve true willful submission what I feel is peace. Peace knowing that I’m responding to the truth regardless of how much I like it.

What a perfect, visible allegory for the struggle of being alive recovery is. Addicts, predisposed from their family lines, shoved by trauma or shame or anxious depression enshrine another reality. Not out of weakness and not out of the true pleasure of being high, but because the truth of what is is unbearable.

For most of human history there was no help for addicts. Just, as Jossy from Philly Fight says “prison, institutions or death.”

And Bill Wilson was just a drunk. Only a drunk could have come up with the realizations that he did.

Bill Wilson

That alcoholics would never be ‘cured.’ No American Makeover Miracles here. Alcoholism never goes away, it can only be managed. Those with 30 years of sobriety still say “I’m Bill and I’m an alcoholic.”  That submission, that humility, is key to keeping them real.

That only a drunk can talk to another drunk about drinking. AA has no outsiders, no professionals. People who get it talk about it, and people who get it listen. A network. A listening community that doesn’t prescribe advice.

These ideas are a counter cultural American spirituality. And although they reject our rags to riches and altar call ideas of transformation, they really are American. Because they’re practical. Because they’re suspicious of human power.  Because they’re conscious of human limitation. Because it’s a user-made innovation rooted in experience.  

I really hate it when I hear people piss on AA because it requires a relinquishment of one’s struggle to a ‘higher power’ or to ‘god as we understand god.’

Bill Wilson was right. There’s no peace without submission. As long as we believe that we are responsible for what we actually do not control, the only result is that patented American anxiety that comes with that false belief. The anxiety of rape victims who are told they could have made choices to avoid their rape, of people with mental illness who are supposed to grab their bootstraps and heal, of cancer patients who are told that they can save themselves with ‘positivity,’

‘Higher Power’ isn’t some metaphysical tyranny. It’s straight up common sense reality. Something is more powerful than you. It just is.

Watching the way that every little boy and grown up man in America, starting with his own father put the burden of perfection on Mickey Mantle, how he played through crippling injury and drank through the pain of carrying around everyone’s dreams on his little boy shoulders, and then watching how he came out of Betty Ford a breathing human- finally at peace even though he was sick and dying-- that’s the story I want America to love. It would do us good. All his talent and fame were ornament the true treasure of the person. And we’re all people.