“at the same time avoiding certain alluring distractions of the road, about which any traveling man can inform you” (Chapter 11, Big Book)
One of the most important conversations I’ve ever had was a Step Five with an ageing minibus driver who lived in a small public housing flat in very deprived and grim-looking part of London. Changed the direction of my life.
A common fallacy (and one I’ve fallen for) is that the spiritual must necessarily be apart from everyday life and be special-seeming, alien, flattering, glamourous, colourful, and fun. Westerners will rush off to do native American sweat lodge or smudging ceremonies, head to Costa Rica, the Amazon (a perennial favourite), Sedona, or New Mexico to consult a shaman and take drugs (but in small doses, so it’s fine: just enough to affect one’s consciousness but not enough to affect one’s consciousness, ahem), or jet to Thailand, Nepal, or Goa for a meditation retreat. Anything but that with which one is familiar. Helping out with the bible study group at the Church of England church four minutes’ walk from one’s house, going to confession at the local catholic church, sitting for an hour in silence at a Quaker meeting, or simply talking to a puking newcomer or admitting one’s faults to another alcoholic and hearing others admit theirs: not so romantic, interesting, or even hygienic.
The alluring distractions of the spiritual road: the sensational, the romantic, the mysterious, and the quick.
Reconfiguration of the mind, destruction or self, alignment with God, and acquiring the expertise of working for God can just as easily be done in Bermondsey, Poplar, or Canning Town as in the tropics or the desert, arguably more so, because there are no illusions to cut through, there is no romantic thrill, there is simply direct confrontation with content, and there’s no one to pay.
If one cannot find God “in the parlour, in the bed, in the curtains, in the silver, in the buttons, in the bread”, one won’t find it at the end of a sixteen-hour flight, either; if one cannot find God for free, one won’t find it for a fee.