Session 2
Five & Five Group (3pm meeting)
Friendship House “202”
Fall 2009
The GPS led us to a rather unassuming house on 23rd Avenue. There were no distinct markings on the outside to designate its purpose. It looked very average. I could easily imagine myself driving past it with little regard. The only distinguishing symbols at all were the numbers 202 printed largely on the side of house which, though they appeared just as any other address, had become insider language for us thanks to Bill. We parked in the rear of the house and walked up onto the back porch that Bill had described where several people sat smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. They seemed rather indifferent to our presence.
The back door opened into a large room where several others sat talking. They too barely glanced our way. We wandered through the lower rooms of the house finding a kitchen that had been converted into a sort of coffee shop, and another filled with tables, seemingly designated for study, where people sat reading and talking. This seemed like the most likely place for a meeting though there were only a few people there. Still we were early so we grabbed a couple of pamphlets from what was reminiscent of a tract board and sat down to wait. As the time for the meeting approached the room did not seem to fill at all. In fact a couple of the people had dismissed themselves. From our table we could see the back door and had observed several people entering over the past few minutes heading for a hallway that led toward the coffee shop. We finally discovered a staircase in that hall that led to the second floor. At the top of the stair dawned the words Five & Five which we recognized from the directory of locations that Bill had handed us along with the 24-hour chips. This door led into a larger room filled mostly with the plastic outdoor chairs that you would most often see arranged around a pool. It was filled with an odor of sweat and cigarettes and in some strange way reminded me of getting my license renewed at the DMV. We positioned ourselves this time in the comfortable background of one of the back rows hoping to listen and observe without really being seen.
Since we had struggled to find this room, the meeting had already begun when we walked in. A young man who seemed to me to have a casual demeanor, if not an indifferent one, was chairing the meeting. His countenance did not seem to show great concern or empathy. I wondered if he had ended his introduction with “I’m an alcoholic.” I would have guessed him to be an employee of some kind. After our experience with the Late Lunch Meeting in Brentwood, the script that began the meeting seemed familiar. As had been the case there, someone read the 12 traditions from a laminated sheet that had been taken from a similar three-ring notebook then another read the group guidelines. Visitors were asked to identify themselves and we chose to remain anonymous, not wanting to draw any more attention to ourselves than was necessary.
The open sharing began and several shared. I don’t remember if there was a specific topic suggested. If so it was certainly not strictly enforced. One after another people in the room shared. Some spoke of their journey into alcoholism from a holistic almost historical perspective. Others shared of recent experiences or current struggles. The stories were breathtaking. Once again I became increasingly aware of the bubble within which I had chosen to live and work. Many of these stories were strikingly unfamiliar to my own experience. Its not as if I had never been around people that struggled with alcohol or that my lips had never tasted it. But these accounts were raw and revealed much more than just substance abuse. The circumstances of these lives and the marked pain that had been endured left me feeling great empathy and once again conviction that I must get out of this sheltered life at least enough to see the broken who I have largely ignored.
Interwoven with many of the stories was what might be identified as mini sermonettes. I wondered if they were spoken in an effort to impact the lives of those who listened or those who spoke. Who exactly were they trying to convince? The thought led me to wonder the same question about my own sermonettes. As the stories continued my attention returned to the young man at the front of the room. He listened with his eyes while his face still showed relatively little emotion, other than to laugh at the occasional joke. If he was an employee I wondered how difficult his job must be. How many of these stories had he heard? How many times had he heard about the subsequent relapses (I had heard several just in that meeting). Did anything shock him anymore? Had he become calloused? Did I have any room to judge?
The meeting ended very much like the Brentwood meeting including a reading of “The Promises” by someone that I could hardly see near the front of the room. Then the leader began the Serenity Prayer and everyone ,as if on cue, began to stand and recite it together. Though this was my second time it still caught me a little off guard. By the time the final words had been uttered the white plastic pool chairs had been repositioned enough so that the group could stand in a circle holding hands. Suddenly the DMV analogy broke down. A group of seeming strangers suddenly became family and I was reminded of some times at retreats and camps when our teenagers have stood in a circle and recited certain traditions together. Then someone was asked to lead the Lord’s Prayer initiated by the phrase, “Who is our Father?” As the familiar words were spoken I was brought back to lunchtime at the Lutheran preschool of my childhood. At once I was experiencing both the familiar and the dissonant. When the prayer concluded the held hands were rocked back and forth in rhythm to the recited phrase “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.” Somehow the phrase had a different tone uttered by those in this room than it had for those in the Late Lunch Meeting. We would indeed come back…
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