Wednesday, 22nd November 2023

60 years ago today, my parents (who were engaged to be married) were taking the bus to get into town and had to change by the cricket ground at Edgbaston. That was when they heard the news from Dallas – on a street, in a crowd of people waiting for their bus on a Friday … Continue reading Wednesday, 22nd November 2023 →

60 years ago today, my parents (who were engaged to be married) were taking the bus to get into town and had to change by the cricket ground at Edgbaston. That was when they heard the news from Dallas – on a street, in a crowd of people waiting for their bus on a Friday evening.

Further research is required to ascertain whether either of them watched the first episode of Doctor Who the following evening. Personally, I doubt it.

A sunny spring day in downtown Dallas, TX.

I’ve told the story before about my first experience of downtown Dallas. I was on a train from Chicago to Austin in March 2011 and Dallas was a point where there was an extended stop (half an hour or so) to change engines. I like to think that there are northern engines that can handle Chicago winter and southern engines that are more at home once you get into Texas, but I’ve never dug deep into that one. Anyway. Some friends that I’d made on board and I decided to take a little walk while we were waiting and strolled along the road. As we got into the more built-up area, I started having the weirdest feeling of deja-vu, or really that I’d been there before, but I knew the nearest I’d gotten was to change flights at Dallas-Fort Worth once. But then, as I looked, I saw a sign saying we were in Dealey Plaza and everything suddenly fell into place and came into focus. Those familiar landmarks of the railway bridge crossing the road, the green spaces (one might call one of them a ‘knoll’), the tall redbrick buildings all revealed themselves to be the backdrop of that dramatic day, the location for the Zapruder film, a place where a man got shot and the world shifted. I tend not to want to travel to places just to see sights – to be in places where things happened. I’m more interested in the people who are here and now and what’s going on today, but this shocked me out of that present perspective and said “Oi. There’s something else to pay attention to!”

I’ve had time to think a bit more about the thing I went to last night. I think what disturbed me was focusing on the testimony of the newly converted, or as we call them in recovery circles “the newcomer”. In AA, the newcomer is often described as “the most important person in the room”. This is not just to flatter them into staying (although it worked on me!) it’s also a reminder to the rest of us that a big part of the work is “giving away what we were so generously given ourselves”. Our own recovery depends more on being able to help someone who has no hope than it does on sitting around with the same bunch of folk reinforcing our well-worn stories. And that means that the newcomer needs to be welcome, but also to recognise that they have more to hear than they have to say. Much is made in media portrayals of our meetings of the poor addict who wanders in and gets to tell their story for the first time – it’s great drama, but the more important stuff comes after that, when they sit quietly and hear the testimonies of other people who’ve been in a similar predicament – not telling them what to do, but just letting them know that they’re in the right place, and importantly that there is a solution and it’s a spiritual one. This, of course, is an ideal that is practiced less than 100% and often the newcomer has to step over the line in order to know there is a line (as do we all at times). The bottom line is: just because you’re the most important person in the room, doesn’t mean you get to dominate the space or preach to everyone.

I had a lot of love for Martin and Paul telling their stories of coming to their brand of faith, but the setting was confusing, because people who stand at the front on a platform with a mic (whether it works or not) are taken to be the ones who have more important things to say than everyone else and then the Q&A reinforces that. It’s not that I was desperate to tell my own story, just that it felt off, like the content was being shoehorned into a format that didn’t quite fit. So you can see I’ve thought it through a little, but not completely.