The worst part was I couldn’t even talk about it. I couldn’t talk about the supposed miracle without lying since I suspected that it wasn’t a genuine miracle at all. And I couldn’t talk about the elves and all that because I’d prefer not to exchange my apartment for a room with padded walls.
At least I had an excuse to avoid people for the rest of the day.
It was a football Sunday.
Not many football fans in St. Louis. Not since the Rams hightailed it out of town and went to LA. Truthfully, there hadn’t been a lot of football fans in St. Louis before that, or the Rams would have stayed. It was, and always has been, more of a baseball town. Still, I chose to root for our cross-state team, the Chiefs. I’d lived in Missouri my whole life, and while I’d gone into the ministry in St. Louis, I grew up closer to Kansas City.
Kansas City was a football town. I’d always been a Chiefs fan, which for most of my life, meant a lot of heartbreak and early exits from the playoffs. Until recently, when we acquired the best quarterback in a generation and won a Superbowl. Now I didn’t miss a game, ever.
While I generally went out to eat after the service with the members, everyone knew lunch was off the table when the Chiefs played at noon. Today, since I wasn’t properly attired to go to lunch anyway, I was thankful that the NFL schedule correlated with my current state of pantslessness.
Watching the game would be a good distraction. That was what I needed now, a distraction.
So, I hung around the church until everyone left. I didn’t have a good enough excuse for why I had to leave still wearing an alb. At least in my robe, I didn’t have to run.
A car whizzed by and honked, a teenage boy leaning out the window. “Hey, Gandalf! Where’s your staff?”
I smiled and waved. On the inside, I wanted to flip him off. But you know, being a minister and all, I had to behave myself in public. Why’d he have to call me Gandalf? I mean, Gandalf is cool and all, but he’s old. He has white hair and a beard. He also came from a world populated by orcs and elves. Gandalf was the last person I wanted to compare myself to at the moment.
He could have called me a Jedi. Jedi knights also wear robes.
It was the Force that had healed Doris because it made sense.
“God, I’m such a geek,” I said to myself as I continued making my way to my apartment. Believe it or not, there are a disproportionately high number of pastors who happen to be Star Wars fan-boys. I can’t say why, but it’s a fact. At the moment, it did feel a little like I was a rebel facing off against all odds with an evil empire.
My apartment was above a small Irish pub in the Central West End. Probably not the best place to live as a recovering alcoholic, but the Big Book is clear that if you’re in a fit spiritual condition, you can go to bars and even what the book calls old-fashioned whoopee parties without risk of losing your sobriety. I hadn’t had any real craving to drink since I’d started working the steps with my sponsor. He was an electrician named Rusty. Not the sort of man from whom you’d think a seminary-trained minister could learn spirituality.
At least, I didn’t think I could at first. When I first got into the program, I thought I could outsmart the steps. I thought, being trained in matters of religion, I could backward-engineer the psychology of the twelve steps and figure out the easiest way to make the program work for me. That worked for about a month my first time around. A few late-night binges in my apartment later, I found myself back in the meeting hall, humbled enough to admit that I might be able to learn something from an electrician. After all, he was a sober electrician, with more than two decades of sobriety under his belt. He’d faced cancer twice without picking up a bottle again.
I had to admit that the intellectual, theological, academic sort of spirituality I’d learned from seminary wasn’t working. I needed enough humility to shut my pie-hole and listen to what the man had to say.
All Rusty did was take me through the Big Book page by page. He shared his experience. He shared his strength. He shared his hope. Five years later, I was still sober. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why the program worked. I can’t explain it. All I know is that it did work, and I wasn’t of a mind to question it.
I say all that to say this. Living above a pub didn’t bother me in the least. I even went there every Tuesday for a Reuben sandwich. Nowhere had better Reubens than O'Donnell’s.
I turned the key in the lock and stepped inside my apartment, getting a head-butt of greeting from my oversized feline companion, Agnus.
Agnus had been with me through thick and thin. He was a gray tabby with wild eyes. I’d had him since he was just a kitten. He used to be a handful, literally and figuratively. As a kitten, he once scaled the wall, pressed himself through the suspended ceiling that my landlord had installed in my apartment, and from there made his way into the interior of one of the walls.
I had to cut out a section of drywall to get him out. Half a week, a bucket of drywall mud, and twenty YouTube videos later, I successfully managed to patch the hole. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d done a good enough job to avoid the wrath of my landlord.
He was named after the Agnus Dei, a canticle in our church’s liturgy. It meant “lamb of God.” The song was based on John the Baptist’s exclamation when Jesus showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It was a metaphor taken from the Old Testament, where the sacrifice of an unblemished lamb was meant to atone for the people’s sins. But the name was now anything but fitting when it came to my cat. An unblemished lamb? He was more of a hellcat. When he was a kitten, I had been too smitten to notice.
I grabbed my remote and turned on the game. Thankfully, I’d only missed about two minutes of the first quarter. The score was still zero-zero. I chuckled. I almost felt bad for the Broncos. It was just a matter of time before our quarterback got hot, leaving them in the dust and begging for mercy.
I hung my alb in my closet and replaced it with a t-shirt and sweatpants. Much more comfortable.
I grabbed a box of cold pizza from the fridge and helped myself to a piece.
Agnus meowed loudly. His meow is so loud that my neighbor in the next apartment over once thought we had a plumbing problem and asked me if I’d been hearing the same noise. Nope, it was just Agnus.
“You can’t have pizza, boy. You’re too fat as it is.”
Meeoowww
“Yeah, I know. The pot’s calling the kettle black again. But you don’t even like pizza that much.”
I grabbed a can of tuna from the pantry and turned the can opener, and he leaped on the counter, which at his size was quite impressive.
Meeerooow
“Patience, mister!” No sooner did I pull off the lid than he was whiskers-deep in the can.
I stuck another piece of cold pizza on my plate and made it back to the television in time for the next drive.
No time to microwave it. I didn’t want to miss this.
Sure enough, three passes were all it took. Two to the tight end and a forty-yarder to our wide receiver. Quick extra point, and it was seven to nothing.
“High paw, Agnus!”
I raised my hand toward my cat, who was still perched on the kitchen counter.
He looked at me like I was a moron. Then, with a swipe of his paw, he knocked his empty tuna can on the floor.
I chuckled. I’d pick that up later. Or I wouldn’t. Surely I’d toss it in the garbage at some point during the next week.
Five minutes later, we were up fourteen-zero. Yes, I said, “We.” I might not be part of the team officially, but I had my rituals that surely impacted the results of the game. I had a good-luck jersey. Pizza was fine. If I ate popcorn, though, the other team would invariably score or get an interception. If I got up to pee, we’d do something good. I kept a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke nearby at all times just in case the game got tight and my Chiefs needed me to take a pee-break to help them out.
No such soda binge was going to be necessary
today. My teammates had this game in the bag, even if it was only the first quarter. It was going to be one of those games. Fun to a point, but not particularly exciting.
I couldn’t focus.
My mind drifted back to all that had happened over the last twenty-four hours.
The bullshit at the council meeting. Stabbed. Healed somehow by someone who thought she was an elf. Running across St. Louis in my underwear. Healing Doris. No clue how I did that. The bishop had been there and hadn’t seemed particularly impressed by what had happened.
Not even football could distract me. Maybe if the game had been more competitive. But even then, probably not.
There was one thing that usually worked to satisfy my anxiety whenever I felt like I was out of control. I hadn’t turned to it in five years. Why was I entertaining the idea now?
I knew well enough that once those thoughts started creeping in, I had to get my ass to a meeting.
Chapter Seven
Fortunately, there is an old mansion not far from my apartment where they have AA meetings several times a day. You’d be surprised, perhaps, how big the recovery community is in a city like St. Louis. Technically, it’s against the fellowship’s traditions for AA to officially own any property. Instead, several members banded together to form a separate not-for-profit organization that allowed us to purchase the building and dedicate it to AA meetings.
For the most part, though, I didn’t get involved in all those details. I chaired meetings from time to time, but there was usually an old-timer with two decades of sobriety or even more who’d run the show. I still remember my very first meeting. Some old dude was celebrating thirty-five years.
I thought it was bullshit.
Why the hell would anyone keep going to these damned meetings after thirty-five years?
Now, with five years in myself, I got it. The twelve steps weren’t just about getting sober. They were about living sober. And that was two vastly different things.
When I drank back in the day, it was largely about escape. I didn’t know how to deal with emotions, which in short meant I didn’t know how to deal with life. I drank when I was bored. I drank when I got too busy. I drank over failure, and I drank over success. It didn’t matter.
To this day, I can’t tell you why I ever drank. I knew from the first time alcohol passed through my lips that I wasn’t like other people. It was like love at first taste. Not that it was the taste that drew me to it; it was the sensation, the feeling.
I’d always been something of an introvert. A little socially awkward. Sure, most people liked me well enough. I wasn’t so awkward that people made fun of me or anything. Just enough that I felt mildly uncomfortable in crowds of people. Until the golden lady entered my life. After a few sips, I was bold, I was confident, I was funny. I could even talk to girls, and they talked back.
I was hooked.
Four years of college, another four years at seminary, I hid it well. I tamed the addiction for the most part. Until my wife left.
We’d met at the seminary. No, she wasn’t training to become a minister. Women can’t do that in my bass-ackward denomination. But she was one of a few females who attended the school in pursuit of an academic degree. She wanted to teach at a religious school. And, so long as she wasn’t teaching men, that was denominationally acceptable.
There was a lot of pressure at the seminary to get married. After all, what pastor doesn’t have a pastor’s wife, complete with a whole host of defined responsibilities? So, we married sooner than we should have. Only problem? She hated being a pastor’s wife. She left just a few years into my ministry.
So I welcomed my familiar liquid mistress back into my life.
I tried to ask the bishop for help. I asked other ministers. But I was a pastor getting a divorce. I was untouchable.
And alcohol? Well, in our denomination, despite all the other rules, drinking was par for the course. I reached out more than once, hoping my fellow ministers would help hold me accountable to sobriety, but every time, their answer was the same: just drink less.
If an alcoholic could just drink less, there’d be no need for twelve-step programs.
They didn’t want to get involved—until it got so bad that I showed up at a council meeting shit-faced. Then, they wanted to discipline me.
I voluntarily checked myself into an outpatient rehab program and started attending meetings. It took a minute to stick, but eventually, it did. I did the work. I did my moral inventory. I made my amends. I cleaned house.
And I learned to pray.
No, not like they taught us in the seminary.
I mean, really pray. Not by formulating a proper prayer, not with the appropriate address, petition, and salutation, but I learned to pray like a child speaking to a parent.
Kneeling at the side of my bed. Soaking my sheets with tears.
My bedding didn’t say much in return. I never heard any voice from heaven. But it gave me peace. It gave me serenity for the first time in my life.
That was what a lot of folks in the church don’t understand. It’s what the bishop doesn’t understand. At AA, they don’t care what you call your higher power. And I don’t think God cares what you call him, or her, or it, or whatever. What’s important is the act of praying. The act of letting go, admitting that you’re not in complete control of your life and trusting that whoever God might be, he loves me, he’s in control, and your life is in his hands.
Yes, prayer is more about what it says about you than what it says about God on a theological level.
That was what my electrician sponsor at AA understood that my theology professors and, certainly the bishop, never did.
And perhaps that was why for the first time in five years, I’d had a mild craving to drink.
Weird stuff was happening. Things I couldn’t control. But that didn’t mean I didn’t crave control, and with it, I craved drinking.
So, I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t drink until after the meeting. Then, if I still wanted to drink, maybe I would. I gave myself permission. It was a mental trick I played on myself. Thing is, I knew that any time I’d made such a pact in the past, it had worked. The craving had subsided.
I just had to make my way to the meeting.
But I had about an hour until it started. It was an impossible walk to where I’d left my car the night before, at the church where we’d held the council meeting. Thankfully, we had the Metro in St. Louis, a combination bus-and-rail public transit system. It’s nothing like they have in other cities like New York or Chicago, but it serves our city well enough. I quickly caught one of the buses that picked up just outside my apartment and took it to the church where I’d left my car.
I was slightly anxious that I’d run into the bishop. This was the church where he preached. Its attendance was even worse than ours. I mean, would you go to a church pastored by that guy? Not that I couldn’t handle him, but the last thing I needed to interrupt my plan to handle my craving was another trigger. I didn’t have a lot of triggers, but dealing with the bishop was one.
Thankfully, my car was still there. All its windows were intact. Neither of those things could be guaranteed in this particular part of the city. I counted my blessings.
My car wasn’t your typical pastor-mobile. I drove a white 2010 Mitsubishi Eclipse.
It was the coolest thing I could afford. Not that most ministers were that interested in being cool. But I was also divorced. I was single again, and I didn’t want to remain that way forever.
I had to drive something that communicated some sense of style.
The bishop’s car was there. So were a few of the other ministers’ cars that had been there the night before. Were they meeting again, without me? Was it about me?
Don’t be so paranoid, Caspar. It could be about anything. I couldn’t allow myself to worry about it.
I unlocked the door, got inside, buckled up, and turned the key in the ignition.
Thankfully, I didn’t sp
ot the bishop anywhere. I sighed in relief.
My car purred almost like my cat would mid-belly-rub as my satellite radio connected and mid-nineties alternative rock started blasting through my speakers.
Cos, by Dishwalla.
The bishop would hate that song. It referred to God as “her.”
Listening to it made me feel rebellious.
I drove to the meeting, belting out the lyrics at the top of my lungs and tapping the beat on my steering wheel.
I grabbed my Big Book off my passenger seat and made my way up the steps that led into the house and up another set of stairs to the meeting room on the upper floor.
I didn’t think I’d ever been to the early-afternoon meeting on a Sunday before. During football season, I was glued to the television. During the off-season, I was generally out to lunch with someone from the church or visiting the shut-ins. If I ever caught a Sunday meeting, it was generally the one held later in the evening. Still, most of the faces gathered around the table were familiar.
“Hey, Rusty,” I said, greeting my sponsor.
I smiled at him. I had hoped he’d be there. He wasn’t a church-going man, so there had been a chance. He practiced some kind of Shamanism. It worked for him. Who was I to question it?
“Not used to seeing you at this meeting, Caspar.”
I shook my head. “It’s been a crazy twenty-four hours.”
“Well, that’s all we have. Twenty-four hours at a time, right?”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true.”
“You’re in the right place if you need to talk about it.”
“I don’t even know where I’d begin, to tell you the truth,” I said. “Just a whole host of weird things. I’m not even sure what’s true or what isn’t. And the bishop is hovering again.”
Rusty shook his head. “That man won’t leave you alone, will he?”
I shrugged. “He’s had it in for me ever since the divorce. Just looking for a reason to drop the ax on me.”
Who Let the Dogma Out (The Elven Prophecy Book 1) Page 4
