wayside

The program I’m in right now is a part of Wayside Cross Ministries in Aurora, Illinois, named Master’s Touch. It’s a men’s residential program which has been around for eighty-two years, I think. It’s twenty-four weeks in duration, after which there are options for staying on for an extended amount of time. It’s a really great program.

No place is perfect, though. The buildings we live and work in have to be fifty years old or more. There are two dorms, the third and fourth floors. The third floor packs fifty-seven men together, the fourth, thirty-eight. There are few modern amenities – air conditioning, for instance, is available for those who’d like to sleep on the floor in the chapel downstairs – but we have the necessities (three squares a day, a mattress and pillow with the accompanying linen, indoor plumbing) and that’s more than most the world can say.

It gets pretty hot on the fourth floor, which is where I sleep. It also gets… malodorous… what with thirty-eight sweating men, some of whom haven’t learned the finer points of hygiene. Like showering. (I wish I wasn’t serious, but I’ve witnessed some of them using a sink and a rag for their daily routine. Lord, have mercy.)

The staff isn’t perfect, but this does not phase me as it once might have. Why it is that so many come in the doors expecting everyone but themselves to be perfect – especially those in authority over them – baffles me. Or perhaps they are blind and believe they are, indeed, perfect. Not so baffling, when put in those terms, because I’ve been guilty of the same over and over again. Daily, in fact. I’m always getting angry at someone for doing something wrong or not being who I want them to be, and then God – sometimes gently, sometimes not – shows me the hundred ways I’ve not hit the mark that day.

Anyway, every once in a while, I kind of snap to, and I observe my surroundings. This happened yesterday. I was thinking about all the less-than-pleasing parts of being at Wayside, and it occurred to me that, despite all of them, I’m sober, and have been for almost five months (woohoo!). Then, it occurred to me that the exorbitantly expensive Hazelden didn’t keep me sober. Nor did Calvary Center in Phoenix. Okay, don’t hear me saying they’re bad places. They aren’t. Also, don’t hear me saying Wayside is keeping me sober. It isn’t. But Hazelden and Calvary lack the foundation I’ve found here at Wayside, namely, a solid theology. A “god of my understanding” doesn’t do it for me. In fact, it was detrimental.

Jesus means everything to my sobriety, and, for that matter, my sanity. If I’m just going to create a god out of a tree or a rock, as a counselor at Hazelden and some in AA told me to do, I’m going to struggle – did struggle – with applying any sort of logic. How did that rock reach into my life and bring me out of my addiction to heroin? How is that tree going to fill the void in my soul? Addicts and alcoholics are really comfortable talking about that void, but they get mad when I tell them an inanimate object probably won’t fill it. As my grandpa would say, Cada loco con su tema!

My God makes sense. Indeed, the Christian religion, as founded on the Bible, is the only belief system that makes sense of all this terrible stuff that keeps happening in and around me. I was told the higher-ups in AA added that line “of my own understanding” so they wouldn’t offend people, because God knows addicts and alcoholics are in a vulnerable spot. Please. Everyone’s in a vulnerable spot. Maybe we need to have our ideas about God and the universe and everything challenged. Maybe the logic we’ve employed – especially as addicts and alcoholics – isn’t the best logic in the world, it having gotten us into rehab at best, or sleeping in some gutter, at worst.

I’m glad I’m at Wayside, with its many failings. Coming up against these (relatively) difficult situations has made me a better person. And that makes me happy.