“God Luck”

I have a confession to make: I really do not understand people who work the program without believing in a higher power. I actually have a lot of thoughts about spirituality, about religion, faith, belief, etc. But since this blog is specifically in reference to Recovery from addiction, I’ll limit myself to just that subject.

There was a ‘Just For Today’ this week that talked a lot about realizing how those of us who get clean and sober aren’t just lucky. Our very lives are miracles. Our Recovery is not something that comes from within, but a gift we have been given from our Higher Power. However much time we have free of substances, it is not so much because of something we did, but because of what we allowed to happen. As the saying goes, we do our part and leave the rest up to God. Considering all the changes we go through by working the program, all the benefits we receive, the things we are asked to do are pretty insignificant. It is a small price to pay for the all that we are given in return.

I’ve known some addict/alcoholics in my time that maintain their militant atheism for years after they come into the program. I’ve known some who came in as militant atheists who soften their attitudes somewhat, but are still unable (or unwilling) to allow themselves a belief in a higher power. And you what I’ve observed? They have the damnedest time with the program.

Don’t get me wrong—everybody has the damnedest time with the program. This shit is hard. It’s a complete change of lifestyle. It essentially amounts to changing everything about the way you live your life. And all those things about the way we used to live our lives, we didn’t learn to live that way on a whim. The way we used to live was how we learned to live in order to survive in the environments we were in. Learning to work the program, to live according to the spiritual principles it teaches us to live by, means changing deeply ingrained patterns of thinking and behavior that our instincts tell us we need to follow in order to survive.

Looking into the history of 12-steps though, it doesn’t take long to discover how the program came about. It was deliberately constructed so that those who worked it would experience a spiritual awakening. That was the advice the early alcoholics received—that their condition was a hopeless, incurable, lost cause. The only way anyone had ever heard of for someone being able to permanently give up their old way of life and be ‘cured’ of the Disease (as it came to be called) was by having a major spiritual awakening. Christians refer to these types of experiences as ‘road to Damascus’ conversions, referencing the conversion of Paul. It was this fact that helped early members of AA to clue in to the nature of the Disease as a spiritual malady.

The 12-steps were designed to bring someone back to God. The influence of early members who were atheists were how the program settled on the importance of a God of one’s own understanding. That, in my mind, is where the genius of the program truly kicks. It’s not about finding the Christian ‘God’, it’s about recognizing that there is a spiritual element to our reality and to ourselves, and what’s important is not to do what ‘God says’, but that we seek further communion with that spiritual force—however it reveals itself to us.

Working the program while denying the spiritual aspect of it strikes me as a lot like driving a car without wheels. It may look cool, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Cars were designed to move people from place to place. The 12-step program was designed to help us to find deeper communion with the spiritual. Working the program without that spiritual component? I just don’t understand it.

There are atheist groups out there. There are even whole Recovery fellowships dedicated to 12-step Recovery without the ‘God’ aspect. I don’t get that. For the most part, I can let go of it. There’s always a little voice in my head, though, that says, “So how does that work? You let go and let… what, exactly?” I don’t know. But I do know it’s not my place to tell others how to work the program or what to believe.

The freedom I have to believe is the same freedom that allows others to not believe. I don’t tell them how to live, how to work the program, or what to believe. And they don’t get to tell me how to live, or how to work the program, or what I can or can’t believe.