Chastity Office 47
“Celibacy, Service and Laughter”
What actions bring you closest to God?
Living “One day at a time”?
“Letting go and letting God”?
Practicing “Be grateful” or “Easy does it”?
For me, there are three things that I can do to increase the probability that I will feel God in my life:
1. Practice celibacy: This means no genital contact with myself or others. “Hard celibacy”, or more commonly called, “Chastity”, also includes no objectification, no fantasy and no intrigue.
2. Service: This has to be addiction-specific to work. That is, if I’m a sex addict I have to help sex addicts get sober. If I am an alcoholic I have to help alcoholics not to drink. It can’t be that I help an old lady across the street or that I find a stray puppy and take him home. That’s nice…But it won’t stop addiction, because there’s no humility involved with that.
3. Laughter: There is an expression in 12 step, “If you haven’t got joy…you haven’t got anything I want”.
Laughter is the perfect expression of joy. It shows that you can be joyous even when you’re not perfect.
In that sense, laughter is the perfect expression of God’s presence for people who grew up with an attitude of merciless self-demandingness...as all addicts do.
“Celibacy, Service and Laughter” is a prayer that I use as a silent chant throughout the day, if I feel rattled.
The initials “C.S.L.” are emblazoned, in abalone pearl, on the 20th fret of my Martin guitar, so that every time I look down while I’m playing I can be reminded of how I can best get to God...I need a lot of reminders because I forget God a lot.
Chastity Office 48
“Sister may no harm come to you from me”.
This prayer is my first line of defense against objectifying if I see a beautiful woman in person, in a magazine, a movie, online or on a billboard.
It’s also my first defense against fantasy. If an image of a former partner pops up from my subconscious I can defeat it with this prayer.
Thirdly, if I want to intrigue-sexualize conversations with women-I can stop myself with this prayer.
But, this prayer is good for other things besides defending my middle circle (or boundaries).
When someone does something wrong to me, particularly if not provoked, I feel hurt and have a hard time not “re-senting” the injury.
Resentment comes from the French verb “Sentire” which means to feel.
So, I feel the hurt over and over, and it is hard for me to let it go.
But, if I pray this prayer for the person who has hurt me...I am able to let go of the hurt.
Of course the prayer works as well in the masculine gender, “Brother may no harm come to you from me”, but it also works in the first person as well as the third person.
If I am doing self-destructive things, instead of, as Gandhi suggests self-restrained things, I can pray this prayer to myself, for myself: “Steve, may no harm come to you from me”.
Chastity Office 49
“Chastity is contentment”.
“I see problems that I didn’t see before”.
When I came in to recovery 40 years ago this June (2020) all I could see was that I was hung over all the time from drinking too much.
It didn’t occur to me for eight years that pills and pot might be causing me problems, too.
Once I got clean and sober I wanted to lose some weight because I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. I started by giving up sugar.
I couldn’t have heard that about needing to give up sugar eight years before. I would’ve thought you were crazy if you had suggested that to me , or at least a know-it-all, controlling, busy body.
But, I lost that weight 32 years ago and I’m glad that I’ve lived my life as a thin man.
I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, coughing so hard I would wake myself up at night.
So, eight years into recovery, the cigarettes and the food were problems I just couldn’t see before that time.
That process of ridiculously slow discovery of problems that needing work would go on for four decades and include things like masturbation, affairs, debting, overworking and many others, but....
There is something completely unique about surrendering all sex.
You cross a line when you do that.
That line crosses into the realm, not of health (which is what all 12 Step programs address)...but of holiness and you get to try out something that some interesting people tried like:
Mohammed Ali (for six weeks before a title fight)
Saint Augustine
Gandhi
Jesus
Pythagoras
Joan of Arc
Leonardo da Vinci
Pythia...The Oracle of Delphi
Now the air is too thin for me to stay in that exalted spiritual state long, but I love to climb that mountain from time to time (and I am very, very happily married).
Why? Because “Chastity is contentment”...
Chastity Office 50
“Chastity is peace”.
There is an attitude of self-demandingness, below the level of self-pity, which drives me mercilessly, madly on, like those armies who’ve decided to attack Mother Russia in the winter snow.
As Bill W. would say in the Big Book p.4: “The old fierce determination to win came back”.
This attitude comes from a conversation with my father when I was 12.
He took me to a pretty creek and was going to give me the “Birds and Bees” talk. He started by saying, “Is there anything you want to know about?”
I, naively, said “Yes. I’d like to know about that brown liquid you are drinking”.
He tried to recover his composure, but was clearly stung deeply with a sense of shame.
In trying to explain his current behavior he said that “No matter what we do, we can always do better.”
As Bill Wilson would say, from that moment “The drive for success was on”.
Big Book p.2
That would be the seed, for me, that would grow into a life long pursuit of absolute perfection. That’s the bad news.
Here’s the good news...“Chastity is peace”.
Looking back, my father’s shame was not motivated by drinking...but by his sexual behavior.
And the best way to eradicate sexual shame, at least initially, is through chastity.
“Chastity is peace”.