Foxhole Prayers
On the true value of Alcoholics Anonymous
Lately, I’ve taken to sleeping with Niner in bed at night.
That’s right: In bed. A bed I own thanks to my fiancée, Keeli. It is the most comfortable bed I’ve had in a long, long time (twin size because of course it is). Memory foam. I don’t care what anyone says, that shit is amazing. This bed has put an end to certain sleeping problems I’ve had for about 10 years. Not all of them.
One of the last things I do before I go to sleep now is to hold Niner close, under the covers, mindfully cradling her nine tails under my arm for support (otherwise I will need to get out the sewing kit again and give her stitches). I kiss her on her little forehead and I tell her how much I love her and that everything is going to be okay. I tell her I will keep her safe, I promise, as I stroke the back of her head at the place where I know humans are vulnerable to spiritual attack according to many traditions.
Niner means a lot of things to me, but in this context, I recognize her as my inner child. Her form is highly appropriate, because Niner is a kitsune, and the entire reason I have trouble sleeping without “medication” (which, at present, is cannabis...and I want to pause for a second to note the lyrics of the current song I’m playing in the background: “In the city of big dreams, you better have a team / if you tryna do big things, you better have a scheme,” in the song “High Energy” by Xzibit) is that I tend to wind up having “intrusive dreams” brought on by a time in my life when I was living with and being sexually groomed by my aunt. I hesitate to call them “nightmares,” but they do make sleep something I want to avoid. Anyway, one of my aunt’s main moves was to low-key support my masturbation and porn habit by paying for our Playboy subscription. I would watch “Naughty Amateur Home Videos” at night, and one of the co-hosts uses the stage name Inari Vachs, and Inari is a Japanese kitsune-Ōkami.
Get the picture?
Really, this explains a lot about me. And about my adoration of foxes. I do think that’s where it really got started.
Anyway, I just think it’s buck wild to be doing this shit now, considering that when I was in high school, I used to sense the presence of a big red dragon named Ilyas at the foot of my bed (read When They Talk Back for more about him and other spirit guides) who said he was me-outside-of-time, and that one day, I would be him, sitting there protecting me. At the time, I couldn’t imagine such a thing.
Now I am doing the thing (Trust me. This is actually how that works).
After the way things have gone down since writing the post Full of Wrath, the title of “Foxhole Prayers” for any potential follow-up post became the obvious choice for anyone with the kind of experience that I have in Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s because I absolutely failed in my efforts to live up to the vows I swore to solemnly before Hekate. That’s okay, because I’m pretty sure Hekate knew how hollow that promise was, and that’s true whether you understand Her as an actual Titan or as a voice from my own unconscious mind. Hekate is on the faculty at the school of hard knocks, so She was probably already lining up the lessons She’d be teaching me through my inevitable failures. Actually, I couldn’t help but dimly harbor some doubts of my own, and I think I even asked myself, in the back of my mind, if that whole thing was, indeed, one big foxhole prayer.
Colloquially, a “foxhole prayer” is a plea for divine intervention uttered during a crisis, and due to the role imminent mortal danger tends to play in their utterance, they are most often insincere: Once the danger subsides, whatever intention was expressed during the crisis falls away along with it. The term originated in World War II in reference to the actual prayers of this nature that emanated from the trenches, also known as foxholes. One of the best-known examples was found near the body of a soldier after the battle of El Agheila in Tunisia:
Stay with me, God. the night is dark,
The night is cold; My little spark
Of Courage dies. the night is long;
Be with me, God, make me strong.
I know that death is but a door.
I know what we are fighting for;
Peace for the kids, our brothers freed,
A kinder world, a cleaner breed.
Help me, O God, when death is near
To mock the haggard face of fear,
That when I fall - if fall I must -
My soul may Triumph in the dust.
Of course, like many people, I first heard the term “foxhole prayers” in the context of recovery. It makes good bedfellows with a related idea, that of “rock bottom,” perhaps best exemplified in the tarot by the 10 of Swords. Addicts are familiar with the scene: Shivering and sweating in a cell at then local precinct, or nodding out in the bullpen at County, thinking to yourself, “God, if you just get me out of this one, I swear I’ll never do this shit again.” Famous last words. When you get out, you’re off to the races again. That’s okay, we’ve got an axiom for that, too. Sounds like a job for “fake it ‘til you make it.”
Doing the Dishes
I’m going to spend a lot less time belaboring it than I initially thought I would: Alcoholics Anonymous is undoubtedly still the global “go-to,” ad-hoc recovery program, but it certainly leaves much to be desired; so much so that the wider “recovery industry” has long since transcended A.A.’s more practical limitations…but there are three problems:
Many of them are for-profit, which immediately rules out their usefulness to the rest of the world in any kind of deeply meaningful way because this means only the very privileged tend to enjoy access.
Of the options remaining, even the motives and energies of the larger not-for-profit recovery options are deeply enmeshed in the context of capitalism; they are still embedded in capitalist systems, and are largely centralized solutions. For example, Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center is the best recovery environment I’ve ever seen and recently gave me a run for my money, asking whether or not my work toward establishing Freak Flag Recovery is redundant; but as promising as they are, they are specifically meant to serve a local community.
Out of the most promising of the larger, decentralized, “portable” recovery approaches I’ve seen—I’m sorry—not one of them has the same medicine that makes A.A. work at least well enough to technically be the best.
That’s because not one of them suitably replicates the function of facilitating Individuation that A.A. pulls off under the best conditions. That’s because it was part of A.A.’s very “DNA,” and it has either been unintentionally overlooked or intentionally left out, depending on the case.
I’m gonna give a shout-out to three of my sponsors. Call them my Top 3. I’m going to use their first names, because first names are allowed. These three people were each examples of the best that is possible in A.A. when the significance of the 12 Steps is properly understood. I’ve talked about them in live streams, but I’m yet to put pen to paper about them here.
There was my first sponsor, Jerry. He was the father of a schoolmate and literally took my to my first meeting when I was 15. He looked like Merlin and he told me he would teach me how to astrally project if I worked the steps with him. I chose to drink twice instead, once landing in the emergency room, where he looked down at me and told me he wasn’t going to watch me do that to myself again.
I’m going to skip one because I actually want to give him pride of place here, but there was also Kimball. Kimball was well-known in the Chicago nightlife scene. He was a onetime bouncer at Neo (here’s the Facebook link to his memorial) who was an actual tai chi master, and also a master swordsman (he trained in Thailand). He was allowed to carry his sword while bouncing, in fact. That probably helped. He caught my eye at a local club when I saw his amazing, Giger-like sketches he would scrawl out with a Bic pen in the middle of meetings. Then he’d give an incredibly insightful and thoughtful comment that usually showed how much attention he had been paying regardless.
It was when I spotted the Qabbalistic Tree of Life in one of his sketches that I asked him to be my sponsor, and I remember that in our first conversation as a working team, his first homework assignment for me was to go home, get in the shower, and talk to God for 20 minutes straight without stopping, even if I had to talk to him about the most mundane thing in the world.
I got thrown out of the halfway house where I was living while working with him, and that’s why I was living in the house where my aunt began to groom me. In a wild twist of fate, the first time I walked up the street to the local Pivot Point to get a haircut, I got it from the daughter of the man who owned the halfway house. She had been a good friend of my cousins in Riverside, growing up. You can’t make this shit up.
That was also why I stopped going to A.A. for a good while. Many years later, I made an impromptu decision one afternoon to “surrender” and get clean, and I went to a meeting in Riverside. Kimball showed up, which was odd because he had always been a city dweller when I knew him, not a suburbanite. It was his first time at that meeting, too.
He was dying of the liver cancer that developed as a result of the Hep C he contracted as a drug user. He was so near death’s door, so gaunt, that I barely recognized him and he did not recognize me, either. I told him I had been his sponsee and that he had changed my life. He wished me well. That was the last time I saw him.
Since others have publicly aired his struggles with drugs and alcohol, I feel that there is no shame in revealing the fact that he got better, too.
Lastly, there’s Rob. He was actually my sponsor long before Kimball, back when I was hitting meetings on 34th St. in Berwyn, at First Baptist. I remember one of my first conversations with him was when he asked me if I thought A.A. was a cult, and we both agreed that in the strictest definition of the term, yes: A.A. was definitely a cult, but it was a good one. I remember that he was a marathon runner, and said he now got his “highs” in the gym, and that they were actually better in quality than any high he ever felt from a drug. I remember watching Fight Club with him, and him being impacted by its profundity, digging out some of its deeper themes which I was hoping he would spot when I showed it to him. I remember having conversations with him about yogis who claimed it was possible to learn how to literally trip via meditation. He would literally phrase this in the terms of learning how to make your brain give you a little DMT trip.
And because of this, as I look back, I honestly think that our initial conversation was literally intended to plant the seed in my mind that A.A could function in some ways as a modern Mystery cult. And I think that he had been fibbing when he said he had never seen Fight Club. I think he probably had personal experience with the meditative techniques, too, and was just subtly nudging me in those directions. Keeping it on the DL. I think he figured his best way to be of service would be to harbor such secrets and even spread them to those he thought might be receptive…but never by pointing directly at them. Never.
It is to him that my playlist, “Dishes Malishes,” is dedicated. The story is darkly funny, and it dovetails with themes in my recent couple of posts, too. That was intentional.
Back in the day, on the Tonight Show, it was actually okay for Jay Leno to tell an off-color joke about Mike Tyson’s speech impediment, saying that he actually had a much bigger vocabulary than people think, including such words as “malicious,” as evidenced when he came home from school and said, “Mama, them milk and cookies was malicious.” Yeah. Cringe. But I told Rob this joke, and he responded by telling me about a friend of his who used to call an “ambulance” a “bambalance.” And I built on this and said that “Malicious Bambalance” would make a hell of a band name.
Of course, nowadays, we don’t talk like that. At least not in mixed company. So we need to clean that shit up.
Given the other clear signs that Rob knew his Kundalini Yoga (I haven’t even gotten into his deep knowledge of the erotic, which we would often discuss in the car before walking into the meeting), I think he also would have been familiar with alcohol’s reputed pernicious effect on the pineal gland. If you want to see clearly through your third eye, many mystics swear that the alcohol has got to go.
So yes, Rob was the inspiration, too, behind the ritual setup I illustrated in Full of Wrath, with a ceramic dish in the center of the altar.
Tying Up Loose Ends
My time as Rob’s sponsee was so much more influential than I had any business supposing at the time. I can’t tell you the number of times I would think back to that man, nor the improbable (I just noticed it’s 11:11) number of different contexts. He was just interested in such an idiosyncratic array of things that, as my own studies along various lines progressed, I began to see them converging in other places, too. At this point and in this day and age, all I really need to say at this point, as cliché as it is, is: iykyk.
And the more I learned in these various other areas, the more I was able to appreciate why it might have been that Rob would have taken “the indirect approach.”
I remember great frustration, because I also remember reading Man and His Symbols by Jung around that time in my life. I was just getting to know Ilyas, Rose, and Minora at that time in my life, and I was starting to branch out from witchcraft to start understanding Ceremonial Magic(k) around that time. It was around that time that I began unironically talking about my Higher Power in terms of “the Force” from Star Wars, but after some of my conversations with Ilyas, I was privately considering him to be my Higher Power, and I also understood that this essentially meant making my Higher Self my Higher Power.
And something deep in my bones knew that that was probably the one “non-starter” in A.A.: To refer to my Higher Power in those terms in particular would contradict the program because it had to be something other than oneself.
I do remember wondering how many people around me had made a similar compromise, and just decided it was easiest to split the difference and use the word, “God,” dispassionately, as a placeholder even if they saw things the way I was beginning to. In fact, although the term “God” is the one used in the 12 Steps themselves, it has always been my understanding that A.A. does not require theism, but that one could make pretty much anything their Higher Power. I had come to take as a given that many people whose worldviews were basically atheist had the (here comes that word so many of A.A.’s critics hate) humility to just nut up and say the word “God” so they could otherwise hunker down and enjoy a meeting that worked surprisingly well if one could simply leave one’s ego at the door…however one understood that term.
So I always grasped that under the right conditions, it was not at all difficult to be “spiritual” even as an atheist. And from this, I also understood at a very deep level that a lot of people get their first introduction to the concept of living a spiritual life as opposed to a “religious” one from A.A.
I knew that A.A. had alchemical gold, and that it was a blessing to know this gold could potentially be made in cities all over the world.
Still…it’s time to polish off just one more axiom: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” There’s just no getting around the fact that A.A.’s roots are sufficiently rooted in a narrow band of Protestant Christianity and is thus pretty much inseparable from the Protestant work ethic that has been such a successful driver of capitalism in this country.
Now that is no mere coincidence.
This also means that even in the best rooms, there yet remain many people who are inconvenienced, hindered, or even completely hampered by many of A.A.’s norms because of who they are. I remember it myself; even though I would say the meetings here on 34th St. constituted some of the best spirituality I’ve ever been a part of (and my readers know I have gotten around), I had my moments of exclusion. I remember one guy walking up to me in the hall after the meeting one night and feeling so entitled as to pick up the bat-winged pentagram hanging from my neck and ask me, “Is this your…faith?” I remember a sponsor that I was living with finally breaking down one day and criticizing my AFI shirt with a black cat motif and the number 666 on it, and having to explain to him how similar my witchcraft was to the (syncretized and white-bred) Native American spirituality he was into.
I got an amends from him about it years later, but fuck.
As many people know, it is not typically easy being a witch in these rooms, and that’s because A.A. really doesn’t like overtly magic(k)al people. There are actually some deep and fascinating reasons for this that I think I will explore at greater depth in future writings, but we really can just chalk it up to the whole “powerlessness” and “surrender” thing.
I have seen attempts to address this by forming emphatically pro-Pagan 12-Step groups (shoutout, funnily enough, to the Reverend Selena Fox, author of When Goddess is God: Pagans, Recovery, and Alcoholics Anonymous, of which I actually own a copy and highly recommend), but all of them simply take the same 12 Steps and apply a Pagan gloss to them.
This is sufficient for quite a few people, actually.
However, there is just something in that first step that automatically rules out one class of folks in particular:
Those for whom the Will to Power is a central theme in their Individuation.
For those folks, we need to fix this shit.
I have thought this on and off for many years. Many may not know this, but going back to my very first “occult” blog, Mundane Line, I’ve written occasionally about this issue and how I’ve attempted to approach it. I’ve tried all kinds of things, but I think I’ve always known in my bones that someone just needed to start a new group altogether and do it right.
However, I didn’t feel qualified to do it myself (and honestly, until recently, I don’t think I was), for one thing. For another thing, that was right around the time I started seeing some contenders emerge. The first on my radar was called Refuge Recovery, and it was the predecessor to Recovery Dharma, which is still going strong. I thought it was super promising because I loved the memoir of its founder, Noah Levine.
Alas that there was a sex scandal, and that was that.
That’s okay, because from what I’ve seen of its successor, they aren’t necessarily out to even attempt addressing the Individuation aspect. Honestly, as a Buddhist organization, its theological roots would have problems with the Western concept of Individuation. The two are really only compatible in certain traditions (read: Vajrayana and Zen), and those tend to require special initiation. This would be considered patently unsuitable for incorporation into such a program from their perspective. The focus in Recovery Dharma is simply on reducing suffering.
The problem thus remains: A.A. can do that under a lot of circumstances, but buried within it is also some deep infrastructural programming that makes for a unique environment for Individuation that is not addressed anywhere else equally well.
As I have recently told Keeli, I think there are many people who understand this, and probably operate within A.A. as something of a “hidden fraternity” making the best of it; but I think it has also always been recognized that its special hindrances keep it from helping a lot of people that something like it could otherwise reach.
I think this fraternity has been waiting for the right vessel to emerge. I think that A.A got it so close, however, that there has also been a need to bide our time and wait until the conditions are right to outfit an appropriate vehicle that can address recovery from the most comprehensive way, serving the greatest number of people possible while also centering the function of Individuation in the context of recovery, which is probably its most promising metaphor to date. We just want to make sure, given the magnitude of the shift that would be necessary, that if we go for it, we get that shit right in one fell swoop.
Lots of syncs surrounding that this morning. Here’s one from my texts with Keeli this morning:
Enter Freak Flag Recovery.
Ah…notification on my phone. What’s this? A photo taken on 34th St., one year ago today:
