not your ordinary church

 

 

now playing: dan fogelberg, “the innocent age”

 

after getting to bed sometime after 3 am on saturday night/sunday morning, i got up at 7 am to accompany my ex sister-in-law to church.

i know how crazy that sounds, but hear me out.

here’s the necessary backstory…

many years ago, when chris and i split up for the final time and i found myself in therapy, a good friend of mine (whom i’ve taken to calling my adopted mom) recommended that i come with her to an ACOA (adult children of alcoholics) meeting that she went to on occasion – and i was desperate enough for insight that i came along. i don’t know what i expected, and what i got certainly didn’t resemble my assumptions in any way, shape or form…but that first meeting changed my life. i actually ended up suspending my sessions with my therapist, because i felt that my group understood me better than he possibly could’ve – they seemed more real to me. my therapist represented something that seemed unattainable to me…he seemed so incredibly emotionally healthy that i had a hard time relating to him in some instances. and certainly, being completely honest with him about how fucked up i felt was out of the question, because i wasn’t ready to reveal that to him at that point.

this is not to say that he wasn’t brilliant, because he was. somehow, he knew a lot more about me than i think i was ever willing to show him, and i’m not sure how he was able to pull that off. but he said things to me, about me, that stick with me to this day.

but he just didn’t seem as real to me as the folks at my wednesday night meetings.

these were people who’d fucked up, who’d made mistakes, and who’d managed to learn something about themselves in the process – and were willing to share some pretty sordid things about their lives with other people. i felt almost instantly at home with this group, and i started going every wednesday. it was like getting my batteries recharged.

i made some great friendships, though…i even became a sponsor for a time, for a gentle soul named barry, who was suffering from hepatitis C and waiting for a liver transplant. i talked to barry on the phone, drove him back and forth to philadelphia for treatment, took him to meetings…he had another sponsor, a great guy named glenn who had helped him settle into the YMCA when he first got into a treatment program…glenn was one of those perpetually happy guys who just made everyone around him feel good. once, when barry had been taken to the hospital in philadelphia, i drove to the city with glenn and his girlfriend and barry’s mother. we went in to visit him for a while, and then went to geno’s for cheesesteaks (barry’s mom had never had an actual philadelphia cheesesteak before). later, we drove home singing old motown songs the whole way. barry’s mom told me later that she’d never been around such nice people in her life.

barry brought some drama to my life, to be certain – i got a phone call in the wee hours of the morning from a nurse at the UPENN hospital on christmas eve, telling me that they had a donor for barry and that they needed him at the hospital within hours in order to give him the organ. i went nuts – i couldn’t get barry on the phone, and i ended up calling the police to go to both his house and his mother’s house to try to find him. i was on the phone with the cops one minute, and with the nurse at UPENN the next – and several hours later, time ran out and they had to pass the organ on to the next person on the list.

i was devastated that i wasn’t able to connect the dots and get barry where he needed to be…but glenn was the grounding force – he reinforced the point that everything happens for a reason, and that this just wasn’t barry’s time.

barry did get his day, though…he got a new liver around valentine’s day of the following year.

as my life changed, though, and as my career path veered down the path it ultimately ended up on, it became harder and harder to make the 7 pm meetings, and i gradually stopped going…not because i wanted to, but because the number of hours in a day has remained pretty much static over the centuries, and i kept finding myself trying to pack more and more into my days…and then, at some point, my “kid nights” went to mondays and wednesdays for a time, and that was pretty much the fatal blow to my wednesday night routine. and, over that time period, i fell out of touch with barry, too.

i’ve always regretted that i let that slip away, to some extent – those wednesday night sessions were a grounding force in my life, and i took so much good away from that room…but i had only just begun to walk the tightrope that is my life at that point, and it hasn’t gotten much better in the time since. at that point in time, i had my kids on tuesdays and thursdays, stone road rehearsals on mondays, and my meetings on wednesday nights…which left the weekend, a portion of which would be taken up wither with gigs or with being a father…and something had to give. as it turned out, it was easier to phase out my wednesday nights than to try to rearrange anything else.

now, during that time, i had often heard about the sunday morning services at caron foundation with “father bill”, whom i’d heard about but had never actually met…marie, my aforementioned adopted mom, had worked at caron for a time, and was a big fan of father bill’s.

now, i haven’t talked much about religion publicly – certainly not much in this particular space – so there are a couple of things i feel compelled to mention at this point.

first of all, i think that one’s religious beliefs are personal. i think there can be no more intimate relationship than the relationship a person has with their higher power, and i think that the more intimate that relationship is, the more successful it is. i think that the more public we try to make that relationship, the more superficial and fake it appears.

secondly, i think that organized religion past a certain scale is nothing more than a business that renders God as a product. once a church grows to a certain level, there are echelons of power and politics and financial motivations…and it falls into the same corporate quagmire as any other business. i’ve often wondered if i’d live to see the day when tithing was replaced with ticketed admission, and i haven’t given up on that concept yet. i may yet live to see that…as it stands right now, the fact that this hasn’t yet taken hold is the only thing holding back our churches from the precipice of religious prostitution – drop a few bucks, get your Jesus on, dip back to the crib and pretend nothing ever happened.

still, marie had often asked me if i wanted to go to one of the services at caron, but it didn’t feel relevant to me – i didn’t have a substance abuse problem personally, although i was willing to acknowledge the effects it had on my life…and it didn’t feel like the same fit to me as my wednesday night family, so i never went.

but on sunday, i went.

and, it must be mentioned – this is no ordinary church.

jodi asked me if i’d be willing to go with her to sing a song with her at the service for her son, ryan…he’s been in and out of trouble with the law and with substance abuse for ages, and he’s had varying degrees of success on a sporadic basis in trying to overcome his demons.

she didn’t have to tell me how important this was to her, and i didn’t have to ask. i didn’t even have to think about it.

i knew i’d be up all night the night before, but i agreed to do it anyway.

jodi is an enigma to most of her family (a trait that she shares with my daughter) – they don’t know what to make of either of them, in a lot of ways. jodi has stuck by ryan when other, lesser-willed people would have written their children off as a loss and would’ve tried to forget that they ever existed. as many times as her will has been tested, i’ve often wondered myself what it is that keeps her centered and allows her to stick by him.

you’d think that as a parent myself, there wouldn’t be any great mystery to why she does it, but i can’t help but wonder sometimes, too…how is it that she’s able to remain so steadfast in her support of her son, when he’s let her down every time thus far?

ultimately, i know the answer to that question…because i’d do the same thing myself. i’ve threatened otherwise to my kids at times, but they know too that i’d stand by them through anything i’m able to stand for.

so jodi came over last week and we ran through the song, and i set my cellphone alarm and slept on the sofa when i got home from the village late saturday night and i got up and made my way over to jodi’s house (only five minutes late, even…who knew i had it in me?) bright and early sunday morning.

we walked into the chapel and made our way down the kleenex box-lined aisles to find a seat (“allergies must be pretty bad up here, huh?”, i later joked to jodi) and wait for the service to begin. i made a mental note that father mike looked like he could’ve been howard dean’s twin brother..and a very familiar looking fella in a pullover sweater got up to start the service…

“hi, everybody, my name is glenn….”

i had asked jodi before the service if she knew who he was, because i was almost certain it was him, but i wasn’t sure. it had been a long time, after all. but it was him.

anyway, this service was almost exactly what i’d expected it to be, based on my experience with the program – it wasn’t denominational at all, and referred more to our “higher powers” than to a God with a name. it was comprised almost entirely of testimonals – “sharing” – after a brief message from father bill at the beginning of the service…and sharing could consist of pretty much anything – poetry, music (either played live or prerecorded), or just personal experience, meeting-style. this was a family service, too, so there were a lot of family members of patients in attendance.

there were a few poignant moments…

there was a guy on the other side of the chapel who was in line to speak…i remember thinking something goofy when he walked up to the podium, because he looked like john mccain – and howard dean was standing right behind him.

but he was a parent.

he was visibly choked up as he talked about his need to work on his own issues, and he looked right in my direction and addressed “thomas”, his son – which fucked me up for about eight to ten seconds until i realized that his son was sitting in front of me – and he stood there before everyone and committed his resolve to his son and to himself to change…and then he walked over to meet his son halfway and hugged him for a long time.

i can’t imagine what kind of courage that must’ve taken for him to do that.

one young guy, maybe 22 or 23, drove all the way out from philadelphia after driving a cab all night long and scoring after work, to be at the service. he actually got up and did an a cappella rap that he wrote that was amazing. at the end of the service, father charlie gave him an address on west lehigh street in north philly and told him to go in and ask for clarice and to tell them that charlie sent him and it wouldn’t cost him a cent.

after the service, i went up to him and gave him my number and told him that i didn’t know if he lived in reading or philly, but that if he needed a place to work here that he could record for free in my studio, once it’s up and online.

there was a clergyman there from northeast maryland (that’s actually the name of the town – northeast, maryland) who admitted before this group for the first time in his life that he was an alcoholic…he said that he’d heard about caron from his hairdresser, of all people, and that she told him that he needed to come here and get some of what they had and bring it back to their congregation.

as jodi and i stood in line, i kept scouring the faces in the crowd to see if glenn had gone back to a seat in the chapel, but i didn’t see him anywhere.

as i was walking outside to head home, though, he was standing outside. i went over to him and asked him if he remembered me…he said that he saw me come in and he didn’t know if i remembered him, but he couldn’t remember my name.

he told me that barry died about a year and a half after getting his liver transplant.

he’d battled infections, he’d had episodes of heightened vulnerability to viruses and the like, and finally his body just out-and-out rejected the organ. he’d ended up in a home and had wasted away to 115 pounds or so before he died…but he did get the one thing he wanted after he got his transplant: he went to the jersey shore for a week and stayed at the beach.

the last time i saw barry was at soberstock, the year i played there (the same year jayda got up and absolutely knocked the crowd out with her version of “you were meant for me” by jewel). we talked for about twenty minutes or so that afternoon, and he didn’t look good…certainly not as good as someone that far past a transplant should have looked at that point, and i knew something was wrong, but that’s not something you say to someone you’ve been out of touch with.

he lived less than a year after that, from what glenn told me.

i left alone – jodi and her husband had gone on ahead to a class they were scheduled for after the service. i don’t even remember how i got home…i just pulled out of the parking lot and started driving, and somehow i ended up in sinking spring – the rest kinda took care of itself.

and now i find myself wondering if they still have those wednesday night meetings…