Father Richard Rohr connects lessons from the Gospels and the Twelve Steps as life-changing and healing messages that we can all benefit from.
I am convinced that, on a practical level, the gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message. The Twelve Step Program parallels, mirrors, and makes practical the same messages that Jesus gave us, but without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future world.
Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction:
We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures or practices were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments.
“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible forms of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual ways of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking and processing reality. These attachments are at first hidden to us; by definition, we can never see or handle what we are addicted to, but we cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.
All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions. We have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and unaware of the same problems. The gospel exposes those lies in every culture.
Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies. If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice or prayer to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking and superiority thinking. Prayer is a form of non-dual resting in “what is.” Eventually, this contemplative practice changes our whole operating system!
Let me sum up, then. These are the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it.
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted, denied, and avoided, until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless—and, if we’re honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.
We are all spiritually powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments.
Reference:
Selected from Richard Rohr, introduction to Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), xix, xxii–xxiii, xxviii, xxix–xxx, xxv.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, drop (detail), 2020, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Water’s shapes and currents can be confusing. Where is the beauty in being underwater?
Story from Our Community:
I came across Richard Rohr’s writings just when I needed them. Circumstances beyond my control or wishes had led me to become stuck in negative emotions. Reading Falling Upward, the Daily Meditations, and attending the online course “Breathing Under Water” gave me a completely new approach to my relationship with God, Jesus Christ, and my Christian faith. Instead of fighting each thing in my path, I started to look for God in all of life. I have now entered a new broader, different space…. I continue to journey onwards with a bright sadness and deeper joy.
—Caroline L.
