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Author: Monahan, Molly.
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Book review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Book Description
From Penguin Books home page: A surprising and enlightening assessment of AA--its basic tenets and how it works on the spirit--by a nun and recovering alcoholic. When Sister Molly Monahan joined Alcoholics Anonymous she was looking for the help and support she needed to stop drinking. But what she found was something more, something that surprised her: a deeper spirituality than she had ever experienced in her religious community. How could a nonreligious group espousing the most basic of spiritual beliefs have anything to teach a nun who had already spent three decades steeped in the values, rituals, and traditions of the contemplative life? The mystery of the effectiveness of AA has yet to be explained. This book looks at that question in new, interesting, and important ways. In Seeds of Grace, Sister Molly Monahan traces her progress through the Twelve Steps and identifies the lessons that Alcoholics Anonymous has to instruct all of us about grace, forgiveness, community, and, in AA parlance, the God of our understanding. Along the way, through a series of meditations, she shares her insights on why AA works, how it works, and how it has changed her life and the lives of millions of people. SEEDS OF GRACE. I picked up a new book at the public library last week titled “Seeds of Grace: A Nun’s Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous” by Sister Molly Monahan (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001). Monahan, herself a recovering alcoholic, demonstrates the depth and effectiveness of AA in helping people connect with God. Most compellingly, she explores a statement often made in AA circles: “I found spirituality in AA, not religion.” To what extent is spirituality and religion both complementary and exclusive of each other (theological question of the week!)? by John Hay, Jr. Week of April 29, 2001 From Writers Digest This Review , SISTER MOLLY MONAHAN entered her religious community after graduation from college in 1953 and has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous since 1983. Although she has previously worked as an editor, Seeds of Grace: A Nun's Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous (Riverhead Books) is the first book she wrote.THE BEGINNING THE MESSAGE THE CHALLENGES AND PERCEPTIONS I'm sure that various inspirational writers are as variously perceived as writers of fiction are, producing books that cover a range from the sentimental and cliched to works of real human value, depending on who is doing the perceiving. THE ADVICE THE FUTURE From Grace Online http://www.gracecathedral.org/enrichment/excerpts/exc_20010530.shtml Excerpt of book Molly Monahan Seeds of Grace My Name Is Molly and I'm an Alcoholic Imagine yourself coming to your first A.A. meeting and saying that sentence with your own name in it. Really, try to imagine it. For all the information disseminated in recent decades about alcoholism as a disease, coming to a meeting is not like a visit to the doctor or going to a health spa. There is still a stigma attached to the condition, and no one is more aware of it than the alcoholic herself. So, stinging shame for some, as it was for me. For others, as for some of the young Turks in the program, the humiliating admission that they can't drink the way their buddies can. Nor does one come for social reasons, to meet friends or make new ones, like joining a club or attending a singles event. Many people come expecting to see the legendary Bowery bums there. Or worse, like me, they fear they will meet someone they know. It was an irrational fear, I know. The people at meetings would be there for the same reason I was. But just such a fear prompts some newcomers to find meetings out of town, in places where they won't be recognized. Might you do that?
No one comes to A.A. for spiritual enlightenment either. I didn't. After all, I was a nun, and had been for years. I knew I was in trouble spiritually--I could pray hardly at all--but I had not connected this condition with my drinking. I thought that I was experiencing the dark night of the soul described by the mystics, and reserved for chosen souls called to the higher states of the contemplative life. What could A.A. teach me about spirituality? Going to meetings did not feel like going to church, or going on a retreat, or sitting at the feet of some guru in pursuit of lofty spiritual goals. It felt like defeat to me, as it does for most. As a matter of fact, I have found all of these benefits in A.A.--the ability not to drink and physical recovery from overindulgence in alcohol; friendship; and a solid and realistic spirituality. But I came to A.A. only from a desire to stop drinking, the blessedly single requirement that the Third Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous lays down for membership in this fellowship of oddly chosen souls. I am not going to tell my drinking story in any detail here. That is not the point. It is, anyway, a rather tame story compared to some, given any dramatic edge at all by the simple fact of my being a nun. I drank occasionally, socially, as a teenager and a college student. And for the first ten years of my religious life, the time before Vatican II, I drank hardly at all; wine was served in the convent only on Holy Thursday in a ritualized evening meal. After Vatican II, when things loosened up in the convent, happy hours (preprandials, as the Jesuits call them) became customary in some of the communities I lived in, and I was a moderate partaker, but very early on a faithful one. I did not drink much but I drank regularly. My drinking picked up in the seventies. I had been teaching in the religious studies department at the college sponsored by my religious community. Then in 1973, for reasons that I did not fully understand, my teaching contract at the college was not renewed. I was offered a position on the college campus ministry team, but I chose not to accept it. Instead, taking advantage of the freedom that nuns had after Vatican II to engage in ministries outside of their communities, I looked for and found exciting work on the staff of an interreligious organization devoted to the place of religion in higher education. It was a high-pressure job. I did a lot of traveling; ate out a lot, joining my colleagues (all male, as it happened) in a Scotch before dinner and wine during it; attended conferences and enjoyed the bibulous socializing that accompanies such events. Then, whether out of town or not and even after I left this work, I was a daily drinker; I could not go for one day, try though I might, without drinking. And then not just one or two, but drinks before dinner, with it, at night when I couldn't sleep, and at times during the day. But it isn't how much you drink that counts, it's what it does to you, as we say in A.A. Alcohol was doing dreadful things to me, and I began to realize it.
The drug is, after all, a depressant. And I lived during the last years of my drinking with a pervasive, ever-growing, dull ache of sadness, like a deep wound inside that nothing could touch, not therapy, not spiritual direction, nothing. Critical by nature and by academic training, I became negative, querulous, judging others harshly while entertaining grandiose notions of myself. With close friends I grew to be unhealthily dependent on the one hand and demanding and controlling on the other. My emotions were like an infected sore, sensitive to the slightest touch of perceived offense. I was bewildered and felt myself an utter failure. What had happened to the ideals of discipline and self-sacrifice that I had embraced so ardently on entering the convent? I betrayed them daily. Where was the faith that had inspired me to become a nun and that had sustained me for two decades, even amidst the turmoil of changes in the church and in vowed religious life after Vatican II? Why could I not pray, I, who had longed above all for a life of prayer and union with God? One reason prayer was impossible for me, I learned in A.A., was because I could not concentrate for any length of time, a direct result of the physiological effects of too much alcohol on my brain. But the malady went deeper than that, as I also learned in A.A. My spirit was dead, I heard a man say at a meeting. I knew that he was describing me. And I knew then that alcoholism is indeed a soul-sickness which eats away at the innermost fiber of our being. As the disease progressed on all fronts and as my efforts not to drink failed again and again, I was filled with remorse, shame, and, finally, self-loathing. I had never experienced such a feeling before, and, mercifully, have not since. I felt dirty, filthy, inside; I was hopeless and helpless. I could not help myself. In desperation, in January 1983, I secretly arranged to see a nun who was, and is, an alcoholism counselor. I told her how much I was drinking, hoping against hope that she would tell me that I didn't have a problem. Instead, she asked me only one question: Did I want to go for in-patient or out-patient treatment? And thus it was that four days later I found myself in a twenty-eight-day rehab. I have always been grateful to the superior of my community, who arranged this for me as soon as I told her what was going on. Not only did I feel incapable of not drinking on my own, but the education I got there convinced me of what I was up against in my struggle with alcohol, described as cunning, baffling, powerful in the book Alcoholics Anonymous (commonly referred to as The Big Book). If you think that the disease of alcoholism is just a question of drinking too much and perhaps of behaving badly, even often, you are wrong. A.A. itself is careful to distinguish between social drinking, heavy drinking, and alcoholic drinking, and it makes it quite clear that only the person herself can tell the difference. No, alcoholism is, as the founders of A.A. knew decades before the body/soul connection was being made in medicine and psychology, a threefold disease: a physical, mental (including emotional), and spiritual disease, the last to our point here. We were taught about all of these aspects in rehab. But it was only the notion of alcoholism as a physical disease that impressed me and that I took away with me. I was not ready to deal with the other aspects. A.A. wisdom has it that the disease progresses by affecting us first spiritually, then mentally, and finally physically, and that recovery happens in the opposite order. So it took some time before I became aware of the spiritual effects of alcoholism in myself and of the spiritual benefits of the program. And longer still before I began to reflect on both as I shall do in this book.
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