Promises in Parables
I’ve mentioned God and prayer in a couple posts, but I haven’t exclusively talked about my faith on this site. Faith has played such a huge role in my recovery and continues to be vital to my life, so that seems a little remiss for my vision of my site. I was raised Catholic and did all the things you’d expect of an Irish Catholic family growing up. I went to Mass; I received all the sacraments except Marriage, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction; I took a confirmation name; I sat in and taught CCD classes at our local parish. I went to Mass every Sunday because that’s what my family did. I like it a lot of the time, and I viewed it as a chore a good amount of the time, but it was primarily a habit enforced by my upbringing up until college. Since then, my relationship with my faith and with religion went through a lot of change for various reasons as I went through different stages in life.
When I attend Mass these days, I do so because I know my spirit needs it and my whole being benefits as a result. I may not always want to leave my bed extra early on a Sunday or go out in the cold rain, but I’ve learned it’s something I need and welcome every time I do. Sunday Mass has a lot in common with AA meetings for me in this way. I feel connected there - with God, with myself, with the people sitting in their pews around me, and even with the people in my life who aren’t there but are very much present in my thoughts and prayers in this time. And when I’m listening with an open heart and mind, I always hear something I need to hear at Mass, whether in the readings or the sermon or from someone else who shows up.
The gospel this weekend was one of Jesus’s parables about the kingdom of heaven. He likens the kingdom to a landowner who has this vineyard. There are a lot of vineyards in the Bible, and Jesus for sure drank his fair share of wine. This is not an invitation to all of us to just drink wine and be fine. When Jesus drinks wine or deals with wine throughout the majority of the gospels, he does so in a way reflective of connection. Alternately, when he was at his greatest point of physical suffering, he refused the vinegar and gall-soaked sponge offered to him by a Roman soldier. This was a customary Roman practice to offer this sour wine mixture to victims of crucifixion since it numbed the mind and made their fate less unendurable. Jesus refusing to drink at this point in his journey on earth reflects his refusal to deny real pain and feeling, to use alcohol as a numbing agent rather than an agent complementing connection.
So back to the vineyard. This landowner went out early in the day to hire men to work in his vineyard, offering them a full day’s wage for their labor. They agree and go to work in the vineyard. The landowner goes out again several different times, each time finding laborers and offering them a day’s wage to work in his vineyard, even the ones he hires with only an hour remaining in the work day. Everyone who responds to his call for labor and works in the field finally lines up to receive their pay at the end of the work day. The guys who got there early are standing last in line, and they begin to expect a higher wage for their longer hours when they see what everyone else receives. When they receive the same wage as the others, they grow resentful and confront the master, who reminds them of their promised wage, telling them to take what is rightly theirs and go.
The whole thing seems a little unfair from the standpoint of the men who worked longest, but only because they are comparing their efforts and viewing the reward as something they earn rather than the fulfillment of a promise. The story got me thinking about a few recovery related things. These are the concepts of time, work, and reward. I was in a conversation recently with a woman who told me she was in “long term recovery” and then clarified what she meant by the number of years usually associated with “long term recovery” in her experience. I know many people who use this same phrase when speaking of their journey. I’m not in “long term” recovery by those standards, but this parable reveals that “in recovery” is the important part. Many people say they have “twenty four hours today” even when they have years of sobriety under their belts; this kind of emphasis on the current day reflects the belief that today, right now, is always the most important time in recovery no matter how many days have come before it. In the parable, despite the differences in hours worked by the laborers, the master treated each of them the same in upholding his end of the contract. He gave of his generosity exactly what he promised to each of them.
I don’t think that any of the laborers have it better than the others, even the ones who only worked an hour for the same full day’s wage. It’s not a justification for staying out there drinking in the same way a bit longer before giving up for good though. The men found at that last hour were found standing idle because no one else had come to hire them. They were not enjoying themselves; rather, they felt directionless and unwanted. They had been waiting all day for someone to call on them for work, and that is what we are really living with when we choose to postpone truly living in a life of recovery. We may be free to do as we wish, but we are not happy and not earning a reward in our lifestyle. Everyone hears the call to a true way of living at different points in life. There are challenges and gifts at every age and circumstance. At 31 I’m on the younger side of many of the meetings I go to, and I get a lot of older people saying they wish they had made the decision to become sober when they were my age. But I look back at the wreckage of my past and wish I had been sober earlier too. I’ve also been on the other side of it, anticipating a life without drinking before I really knew what it was like and thinking I couldn’t bear to live the rest of my life feeling so limited and different and just missing out. I didn’t realize then that I had a skewed concept of limitations and isolation. I was like those workers standing idle - free to do as I chose but purposeless, unhappy and waiting for someone to show me the way. There’s no perfect age to answer the call or perfect time of day to go work in the vineyard. It’s more about being ready to go now rather than later once you do hear that summons to do the work.
Multiple years of sobriety is a feat for anyone in recovery no matter the quality of those years, but I’m also learning that the number of days or years someone in recovery has are only rewarding if they include the work. As shown in the parable, the work is essential. This landowner isn’t just asking these random guys to come hang out for the day in his vineyard. He’s asking them to work for something. Working in a vineyard was no easy task in the time of this parable. It’s hard, monotonous work that takes a toll physically and mentally on the laborers. It’s important that they’re doing this work because of a promised end, and because they have chosen to do what is asked of them to achieve this promise. They’re also not alone in their work; they work in the company of other laborers whose number grows throughout the day. The parable doesn’t mention it, but these laborers have the option to quit at any time. No one is forcing them to stay, but they will not receive the promised wage if they leave. Recovery is like this work in all these ways. The promises outlined in the Big Book pertain to major shifts in perception, in life circumstances and in attitude. They come to fruition sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. But they always come to those who work an honest program.
Through this parable, Jesus reminds his listeners that these promises are real and fulfilled in this way, and that they are the work of a higher power rather than the result of individual merit. Working a program of recovery involves a lot of self work, but it’s the kind of work in which we aim to shed the selfishness and fear-fueled efforts at control that characterized our behaviors in active addiction. When I’m holding a resentment or operating out of fear, I’m failing to see that I’m one of many recipients of God’s generosity and a small part of a world not in my power to control. Taking personal inventory reminds me that being selfish in this way is akin to throwing away my place in the vineyard to work in my own patch of weeds. I’d rather work in the vineyard, because there I am doing work as part of a community and with the certainty that someone greater than me has been generous enough to promise me something good.
