300 minutes to freedom

Two months of soul-searching and it all came down to this. Two men, alone in a loungeroom, to do the business of trust for transformation. Nothing kooky about it. Just two men trusting God. And to think I’ve done this many times over the interceding years with and for other people.

What I’m talking about is what people in the Twelve Step program call Step 5:

“Admitted to God,
to ourselves and to another human being
the exact nature of our wrongs.”

The Twelve Step program is a program that leads us to true faith through repentance. There is no faith without it. And the faith involved in this Step is the risk we take to be condemned when we share all sorts of sordid secrets about ourselves with someone who could judge us but probably won’t.

Do you see the conundrum for the person about to spill their entire corpus of sin in the presence of another human being who may be disgusted?

Until you’ve been in a position where your back’s against the wall and recovery is your only option, you don’t know what guts that takes. To step into the cauldron, not knowing whether you’ll be fried or not. Sensing you should be safe, but having no assurance of such a thing.

For me, it was five hours (300-minutes) on a balmy Sunday night.

We started at 7pm and went through until I was finished at Midnight. Charlie, my sponsor from Kwinana, was marvellous, especially during those times when I struggled to share — for guilt and shame — and at the teary times as well. A man’s man, tattooed and bald, thickset with a jaw to match, his grin conveyed confidence that you wouldn’t mess with this man, who seemed to belong on a Harley Davidson.

Two months I’d been on an intensive reflective meditative exacting searching moral inventory — using the seven deadly sins — greed, anger, pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, lust.

Lust. Pride. Anger. Gluttony. Envy. Greed. Sloth.

A couple of those really stung. How do we even begin to utter words, even to another man, about how lust has been an issue. It reveals such shame. Pride. Phew. Anger… woah, more shame for my lack of self-control over my emotions.

As I shared, Charlie just listened. A labourer, he was a master counsellor — an AA sponsor (mentor). Occasionally he would interject to gain clarification or to encourage me to continue. But mostly, he just listened. And with his grin, he conveyed complete and utter unconditional positive regard. He never missed a trick. He listened to fifty or sixty vignettes that night, that conveyed the kinds of common depravity that I’d engaged in over my thirty-six years.

I learned a lot about counselling practice from this kind of encounter. I experienced such compassion when I so richly needed it.

300-minutes to freedom. The very next day I woke with an impenetrable purpose. Within days I was baptised in the Holy Spirit for the first time; with no human evoking it. Within weeks I was darkening the door of the church again. Within months I was leading a life of Christian discipleship. Within a year I was enrolling in theological seminary.

But freedom is a spiritual possession.

Those 300-minutes instilled in me the belief that I could be brutally honest with someone else, telling them my most shameful stuff, and, not only that, but that this sharing would liberate me.

No longer would the enemy have power over me because of my disclosures, and the life of disclosure that I learned wisely to maintain.

We must have space where we can share the worst parts of ourselves, and not be judged or condemned. We must have a place where the trauma we bear can be shared, such that the abuse we’ve suffered is heard and believed. We must have a place where weakness can become strength, no less through the courage to share what is most vulnerably ours. Most of all, we must have a safe place!

Words in above photo are mine.