Room of miracles - Teresa Pirola

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other as they strive to quit excessive drinking and recover from their addiction to alcohol. Although not affiliated with any religious denomination, the AA experience has a spiritual basis in that it recognises human dependency on the help of a ‘higher power’. AA groups meet every day, all over the world, a testimony to the courage of ordinary people to confront their demons and embrace real change in their lives. An AA member who recently celebrated eight years of sobriety shared the following story.

The AA meeting is surely the best meditation of the week. I just left about 75 people in a room of miracles. The room we use on Monday nights, in a Lutheran church, is their centre for pre-school children and so it is filled with their artistic treasures hung on every bit of wall space: Easter bunnies, butterflies and oversized blooming flowers, as well as icons of religious significance depicting Jesus in resurrection scenes. A room brimming with the evidence and exuberance of young life.

Around the large central oval table in the middle of the room there is the evidence of battered, dying and dead lives that are miraculously experiencing resurrection. And around them there is a large circle of those of us who have embraced sobriety—no longer in the program but no more secure than anybody else for whom this life of sobriety is a one-day-at-a-time gift. Those at the centre table are invited to be there if they have less than one year of sobriety. The centre table participants have the opportunity to speak first and to know that the rest of us are cheering for them.

The main speaker tonight, a member of AA in a neighbouring suburb, was more than engrossing. He has nine years of sobriety and his story of what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now was riveting. These people speak to the very essence and inspiration of conversion. Raw life stories with no camouflage or make-up; no searching for sympathy; not a hope of fooling the audience who already have known and lived the worst of these stories. Tears. Laughter. Sobbing. ‘Hi. I'm Helen. I have just gone without a drink for one week and I'm so scared’, followed by a lusty round of applause. ‘Nice going, Helen. You're the one, girl!’

I look at the faces. Some of them are the faces of bar habitués right out of central casting, faces heavily lined and pock-marked, dark shadows under permanently strained eyes. But others are the beautiful, handsome, unscarred faces of women and men of whom I would say, ‘Surely you have never had a problem with alcohol and drugs’.

I know many people would say the same of me. After all, my excessive drinking habits never had dire consequences: I never fell down in a drunken stupor, I never had a car accident and killed anyone, I never showed up late for work, and I was always a success in my profession. But the truth was I was using alcohol as an anaesthetic, as healing balm on wounds. It was unhealthy, it was robbing me of fullness of life, and it had to stop.

And one day I did, with God’s help and the support of AA. And so this is how I find myself in a room such as this, privy to stories of miracles of love and determination and courage and failure and success and desperation and hope, hope, hope.

God can do anything that we allow God to do.

To locate an AA meeting in your locality, visit www.alcoholicsanonymous.org.au