Principles Before Personalities

Principle:  A fundamental assumption or guiding belief.

I'm interested in seeing how writing The Kenner Tapes work out.  So far my recollections about the cat were a big hit; dad played out about as I expected; and mom was a huge, surprising, slap-in-the-face train-wreck.  Where, o where, will the Kenner fall?

Ken had three basic responses to any issue I brought up so I knew before I called that I was going to have to figure out into which category my current pressing problem fell.  Twenty five years of phone calls and he could solve anything with these responses.  He didn't practice a complicated Program and he didn't have a complicated spiritual life.

1.  This, too, shall pass.
I really liked this piece of advice when I was not getting my way; not so much when I was happy with the results.

2.  Principles before personalities.
I heard this one a lot, befitting a person with 10 index fingers that I used to point out the flaws in other people, places, or things.  Ken never, ever, ever let me talk about anyone else unless I was being positive.  He simply wouldn't let me do it and I never, ever, ever heard him speak poorly of another person.  He was like mom in that regard: say something nice or take it outside.  

After agreeing with him on this point for like five years I finally had to say: "What does that mean exactly, anyway?"  I was too embarrassed to admit that I was clueless about the meaning of a key phrase in Tradition Twelve.

In someone else's words:  "What does 'principles before personalities" really mean?  It means we practice honesty, humility, compassion, tolerance, and patience with everyone, whether we like them or not.  Putting principles before personalities teaches us to treat everyone equally."

3.  I can't remember what the third thing was.

Ken H: "Take two Steps and call me in the morning."

One time I was struggling with an issue so I rang up my sponsor.  After explaining the situation in great detail I asked Ken what he thought I should do.  He started to laugh.

"Oh, no, you don't," he said.  "If it doesn't work out I don't want to hear about it."

I learned that advice is like a person's blowhole - everybody has one.  I learned that even if someone asks my advice they still don't want my advice.  They're going to do whatever they want to do anyway.  If someone has a problem all I can do is help them consider the matter from a lot different angles, the possibility being that they might find a new way of thinking about the issue.  I can also share what I did and how it worked out for me.  Or not.  I'm not in the advice business anymore - I barely know what I should do.  I barely know where my wallet is most of the time and I'm going to give you advice on how to live your life?  I don't think so.  If you like what I did give it a shot; if you want to try something else give it a shot.  Give it all a shot.  Blast away.

The other thing I learned from Kenner was the importance of Rule #62: Don't take yourself so damn seriously.  He laughed a lot and he laughed at himself the most.  He did not, however, laugh about The Government, but more about that later.

He was a devout lifelong Catholic and proud of his faith.  I believe that - although we were both skeptical for the longest while - we came to appreciate each other's brand of spirituality.  I believe that we are both spiritual men but that we arrived at our spirituality by taking very different paths.  I was the lapsed Lutheran with a sharp distrust of anything that smacked of rules or dogma or bestowed authority on an average man.  He loved the tradition and dogma and the rules in his church - it was clean and clear-cut to him, unlike my free-form, fill-in-the-blanks, whatever-goes type of faith.

The last time I visited him I arrived in the wee hours of Sunday morning.  He got up when I let myself in the house and had a hearty laugh at my appearance for no apparent reason.  I told him I wanted to go to Mass with him the next day.

"Really?" he said, perplexed.  "Okay."  I had not attended a Mass in many years and - of course - I enjoyed it.  Kenner had a ton of friends there - he was clearly loved - and it was a relaxed, peaceful environment, very casual.  I didn't hear anything that I found objectionable although I confess to not paying attention to much other than the Bible readings.  We drove to a local breakfast spot and broke the fast afterwards.

That was the last time I saw him alive.  I talked to him dozens of times after that but never put eyes on him again.

So there appears to be a long tradition of jokes in Catholicism ascribed to a scamp called Little Johnny.  The jokes are pretty silly but Ken would roar like a third grader every time we told one and he was a lawyer, for chrissake.  LWSJ and I tried to get one in every time we saw him.  He was the show.  The joke wasn't the show.

"One day the teacher in Little Johnny's class was giving each child a word that she asked them to use in a sentence.  She would toss out the word 'lovely,' for example, and a student would say: "That's a lovely flower."

When Little Johnny's turn came she asked him to use the word 'beautiful.'  She was careful to pick words for LJ that he couldn't run amok with.

LJ thought for a minute: "OK.  Last night my sister came home and told my dad that she was pregnant."

"Beautiful, just beautiful," my dad said.  "That's fucking beautiful."