A bleak situation was rendered that much more so in the light of her frantic quest for answers. Anger and fear had morphed into a numbing pain. Like anyone faced with rocks and hard places, desperate measures become their moment by moment reality, and, caught in that place, she contemplated her options. “Do I stay with the boys but kick him out of the house? Is there a way for us to escape back to Canada where we at least know more people and have a support system?” she pondered fearfully.

She chose instead to call a counselor seeking…well, counsel. His advice offered a modicum of comfort. Their tenuous immigration situation denied quick and easy solutions, even in the face of such challenges as presently faced them. It was complicated. If she left and went back to Canada, she would throw away everything she had already endured through the whole arduous process.  Besides, “if I couldn’t return to see my Dad who’s diagnosed with cancer, I certainly won’t do so for a drunk” she agonized.

Some relief came by way of a phone call. Susie, his soprano confronter and close family friend called, offering her and the boys a weekend getaway to what she called, “Camp Susie.” It provided opportunity for long soaks in bathtubs of tears, still longer talks well into the night with an understanding soul. It was somewhere for their boys to play with hers blissfully unaware of the gravity of the situation.

* * *

Meanwhile, events were moving quickly for him. He had already met with his discernment team, was assigned a sponsor and, two hours later, still green and nauseous, sat in his first A.A. meeting. He would come to know that Methodist church basement intimately. There, in that cold but hopeful room that smelled of nicotine and bad coffee, he vocalized what would be the first of hundreds of similar introductions, “hi, I’m Rob, and I’m an alcoholic.”

He walked the twenty minutes home and sheepishly entered the front door. He showed her and his boys his first coin and then left for the conference he had been drinking all week to forget. Rather foolishly he had offered to sit on the steering committee in charge of his denomination’s annual regional gathering. It was his responsibility to organize and implement all plenary worship times complete with “special” music, technical requirements and liturgies. It was a job he knew well but with which he had never become totally confident. And, since Kent and entourage felt it important for him to carry on with present responsibilities as a path to healing, he turned and drove away. He had no idea what, if anything, might be awaiting him upon his return.

* * *

After a Friday evening drenched in heavy tears, she hauled herself reluctantly out of bed on Saturday in order for her to go home and check on their dog, Skittles. On the way, she discussed with Calum, their eldest, the very real possibility of them leaving the country, never to return.  She still waffled back and forth with what few options were available. As is so often the case, wisdom is held in the hands of its youth. Calum shared that he didn’t want to leave the country without paying a five-dollar debt he owed to a local record store merchant. She couldn’t help but think to herself, “wow, all this integrity from an eleven year old, in comparison to….”

As they walked into the house, she headed straight to the phone and called her Dad. The sound of his voice was more than she could handle. His strong and vibrant presence bespoke an unwavering commitment to her and hers, despite his weakened state. He sensed her call was urgent and paused to let her speak. He got tears instead. Lots of them. He knew immediately what was up and just let her cry. As her grief subsided enough to do so, he asked astutely, “it’s Rob isn’t it? He’s been drinking again.”  An overfull kettle of grief and despair spewed out as she retold the events of the last few days in wave upon wave of fresh tears.

Then Judy, his wife and their step Mother-in-law, on speakerphone prodded gently, “if alcoholism is really a disease, would you leave? If he had cancer would you leave him?”
“No.”
“If he had heart disease would you leave?”
“No”. If indeed it was true that this alcoholism was a disease, she couldn’t possibly leave one who is sick, even if every cell in her weary body begged otherwise.

Following an exhausting but cathartic conversation, the three of them arrived at some conclusions. Perhaps A.A. was the first time he would turn to honestly face this disease with some prospect of healing. Her Dad made it clear that they were always welcome home but strongly urged her to carry on. As an immigrant himself from England many years earlier, when Rae was four years old, no one understood better than he the high stakes of immigration.

That night, Rae and boys all slept together in their bed, she hurting and afraid but with a heightened awareness of grace, they with limited understanding and heightened need for a good cuddle. Graeme, their youngest, had overheard some of her conversation from earlier, something about Daddy lying. As she turned to kiss him goodnight, his words, revealing complete trust in his father, reopened the argument between her head and her heart. “Daddy would never lie to us, right?” he asked innocently. She thought it best not to answer and they fell fast asleep, exhausted.

* * *

He was discovering something as if for the first time. He could function at very high levels of wit, competence, creativity and responsibility…without alcohol. For most, this was called normal adulthood. For him, it was a welcome epiphany. He was flying, for completely different reasons. It felt like being born again. Again.

To tell a tale of someone’s headlong rush into chaos is to open many doors at once. And doing so acknowledges the many conflicting winds that come from every direction upon a person; winds that create a chaotic, heady mixture of life lived in fear, doubt, suspicion, anger and pain. He had come to this one point at the convergence of many others. He was now the fly caught at the center of a complicated web of childish misfires. The swirling tempest that was his head found its root not so much in a life mis-lived, but more perhaps a life under-lived.

Adult life had never been especially easy for him. He took his cues from whoever was the most influential or interesting person in the room. This made him good at any party since he had already lived everyone else’s life and could draw on his social chameleon talents to woo and entertain. He had little to no knowledge, however, of his own. Such is a dangerous vacuum within one so predisposed to the inoculation of pain, the euphoria required to feel normal in a large, scary world.

Meanwhile back at home, pieces of an already piece-meal existence lay in shattered reminders on the kitchen floor of his inability to face his own reality. His wife had little reason to believe that hope was anywhere near this debacle. They had stood at this crossroads before. He had already been through at least one bout of drink, repent, drink, repeat. The incision of betrayal left on her soul was still red and raw. This, however, was a whole new level of betrayal and gut level disruption.

Her head spun round in a veritable tornado of disbelief and emotional turbulence. What now? was the question pounding in her mind so unrelentingly. She knew how tenuous was their circumstance here in Oregon. They had moved to this town one month before the horrific events of 9/11. And now, with American and, by association, world events in such turmoil, those poor bastards seeking permanent residency were indefinitely put out to pasture.

They were no strangers to upheaval having moved a total of eight times in just over fifteen years. It seemed the dust rarely settled, boxes remained packed, trinkets still stored was a family pattern. It had bored a restless hole in the center of things and left them feeling unmoored and afloat somewhere in the open ocean of discontented homelessness. The stakes were high with this one, and they knew it.

The move from Kelowna to McMinnville had been expedited the quickest by means of a Religious Worker Visa. These are considerably more rare than other more conventional ways of moving into the country. Hence, on advice that could never have been informed enough to provide adequate shelter from unforeseen events they drove their two busted down vehicles, their dog and two sons across the border.

Within three months of their arrival, his father-in-law had been diagnosed with colon cancer, his brother-in-law, an Edmonton city police officer, had sustained serious injuries in a foolish dive into his pool from a third story balcony leaving him a quadriplegic and planes had flown into buildings that crashed to the ground. They were living their own ground zero with no recourse of leaving the country for the comforts of extended family, now in profound suffering. To leave would mean forfeiting any hope of permanent residency. And too much was riding on this gig.

A border that had always meant freedom of movement and welcome was to become for a time a three thousand mile prison wall.

His was to be a long and heavy road. But all roads that lead to healing places necessarily pass through fetid gardens of defeat before arriving at redemption’s fresh air. His head pounded with that most precise of head pains otherwise known as the hangover. His drinking had become so bad in recent months that such things were unheard of in his experience. Why “hang-over” when one was already leaning over the edge of insanity?

He met with Kent, Roger and Reed for what seemed like hours, his stomach and his head reminding each other of their shared misdeeds. Soon, a sense of clarity began to come. They would determine an appropriate date when he would tell his story to the church board. Later, with the board’s direction, he would do so with the congregation. In actual fact, the board later decided to deal with it behind closed doors rather than alert the whole congregation of his woes and perhaps deepen rather than lighten them. Just as well, since the very thought of pursuing such public exculpation was more than his fractured conscience could bear. There was to be nothing delicate about any of this. It was without opportunity to either titivate the sad truth or remove himself from its consequences. His mind reeled and boiled and he was drowning in the stew of his own making. And yet, on another level, he had secretly hoped for this. It meant freedom and, if he still remembered anything from theology 101 it was that true freedom comes through the shame of another.

Since beginning his ministry at the church slightly more than two years earlier, he had immersed himself in the work. Mostly, it helped remove him just a little from the overwhelming sense of exile and loneliness that had stormed his consciousness. It was an Apollo sized burden of inner cataclysm that had taken him quite by surprise. He was a Canadian boy through and through. He bled white and red, knew the ethos of the place by heart, understood the bad inside jokes, stupid politics, heady talk shows, social pariahs, and art house music scene inside and out. Often had he quipped, “you can take the boy out of Canada, but….”

He knew her and she knew him.

So then, why the hell had he thought it a good idea to pack up and leave for a call in Oregon? For years, his spiritual journey had been tottering on the brink of collapse, built on a thin, wispy and kitschy evangelicalism that no longer supported his increasingly dangerous questions. Or, at least, the shoes didn’t fit anymore. He needed to stretch his theological arms, raise his head above the crested waves in the wading pool and look for deeper water, or else find land and toss the whole thing.

But other voices had grown louder in him. Subtle but insistent voices calling him to dig deeper, or in other places more suited to his shovel. His was a spiritual spade meant to dig from the left that had been tending garden from the right. They seemed incompatible, at least from where he was then. His limited vantage point disallowed view of the whole garden in all its expansive glory. He had grown tired of snap peas and longed for the bitter taste of something new and fresh but still excitingly foreign to titillate his bone-dry palette.

For as long as he could remember he yearned for all things ancient, dark and mysterious, thoughtful and mystic; a poetic theology wed to an older spiritual language better fitted to who he had always been. That yearning had drawn him into the heady confines of orthodox and catholic spirituality which offered a context for a more sacramentally nourishing, liturgically demonstrative faith. It drew him to places where matters of social justice and peace-mongering weren’t just hip, new phrases but built in, irrevocable realities. It meant moving to live and work among a church community whose notoriety (accursedness to some) was for its inclusivity. More intriguing still were the twice yearly worship services with the local Catholic parish, Ash Wednesday and Pentecost.

He was hooked.

The diverse little community in this quaint Oregon college town, pastored by the man now sitting to his left (pun intended) had been that place; the only place whose centripetal force had provided sufficient gravitas to pull him out of his home and native land. The journey however would prove much more perilous than either of them could have imagined. The stress of that journey, coupled with a DNA predisposed to narcissistic, alcoholic self-destruction provided a primary reason for why he sat in this very room under such horrid circumstances. A long, serpentine road lay ahead, the end of which, only God knew.

For him, right now in this room, that was enough.

She pulled into the driveway not four minutes later, her thoughts swirling in a cacophonous mixture of rage, confusion, and concern. Even in that short time, she had to crack the windows enough to coax out the insistent smell of his all-day intoxication. She was at the door long before him, slamming it open while he was still navigating the step, that endless step, out of the van to the ground somewhere far below. When he finally made it inside, her feelings of abandonment and emotional rape took over. A family picture found its way off the wall and lay demolished on the floor. It was a convincing sound that scared their eldest son, waking him up.

A family was coming apart at the seams and he knew it. He let her rant. What else was she to do in such a moment? His self-esteem was lodged somewhere in his lower intestine anyway. “Let’s finish it”, he thought carelessly. The minutes seemed like hours as his greatest fear in being found out had already, begun its slow work of building a reality, imperceptibly at first; a new reality that might include honesty and a projected-self deconstruction. Eventually, his nights would be spent in gratitude for what was occurring right here, right now.

These were not those moments.

She grabbed blankets, a pillow and him, tossing them all into their camper which was parked beside their small Oregon rancher home. It seemed to take forever for him to find the bunk where he would sleep that night. Everything spun as though he’d been tossed, shame and all, into a blender. What would be produced from this harrowing concoction no one would know for some time. He stumbled outside again long enough to void his stomach of a small percentage of the liquid hell he’d pounded down that day. The lawn received his offering without comment. With throat burning, stomach eased and spirit desecrated, he climbed back inside and fell asleep instantly.

In what seemed an insultingly short time, the camper door swung open. With a head that felt stuffed with yesterday’s newspapers and paraffin wax, he rose to hear a quaky voice, “time to face the music.” She’d been busy. The night before, despite the late hour, she’d made numerous desperate phone calls to what few trusted friends they had, seeking advice, weeping, yelling, whatever it took. Among them was one to his boss, their pastor. Kent was no stranger to life among alcoholics having led a church for years containing any number of them, some recovering, some not. His instructions were to bring him to the church office the next morning. There, along with other trusted colleagues, a plan for repentance and healing would be discussed. There was no way to know then the extraordinary significance of that repartee.

That meeting was thirty minutes from the moment she opened the camper door and the smell of sad desperation billowed out onto the street and into her frightened nostrils. They met with Pastor Kent in the relative calm of a neutral but comfortable room designed for meetings of civil, adult amusements. A space like this, having housed numerous Habitat for Humanity planning meetings, community events and senior’s teas was more conducive than the pastor’s office, sterile by comparison, and too easily stigmatized as the principal’s office where the bad ones go to get good.

Here, in this room, he was a broken person first, one in need of the face to face confrontation required for the cauldron of grace to begin the slow-cook process of nourishing repair. They spoke together at length, mining every nook and cranny of his troubled past, washing out the backrooms of forgotten and dark things, bent and sorry places that spoke of resentments and misery, choices made, unmade, never made; of lostness.

Given that he was both an alcoholic and a church employee, the situation dictated just the right collective into which he would be entrusted. This included Roger, a congregant whose recovering alcoholic status now reached into its third decade. With a word, he became his first “sponsor”, a term that was to become easily familiar. Also present was his dear friend and colleague, Reed, whose wife had called him out the previous night. Reed knew him intimately. He had provided a steadiness for his faltering steps as he struggled to find his way in a new church, a new community, a new country, a new theology. His family had freely lavished upon them guidance, the kind of information that makes completely new situations such as what he and his family had endured more navigable. Without them, he would not have survived even to see this dark day.

In the weeks that followed, he would become privy to what the walk of grace can actually look like when Christ followers every bit as sinful and broken as he combine their shared mess into a single, bitterly hopeful outcry of “Lord, have mercy.”