Twelve-Step Spirituality: Part One
Help from a Higher Power
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
Step Two: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [1]
Yes, we are carrying our own death warrant with us, but it is teaching us not to rely on ourselves, but on a God whose task is to raise the dead to life. —2 Corinthians 1:9
I’m told that often the people who are most in need of the Twelve-Step program have a very negative attitude toward God that was taught them by immature religion. This can be challenging since the essence of both the spiritual journey and the healing journey of AA is “a movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness.” [2] Moreover, Bill Wilson insisted on the necessity of a “vital spiritual experience.” Here’s how Thomas Keating explained how AA can handle this challenge. Naturally, Keating, who was one of the original creators of Centering Prayer, would have liked to see contemplation introduced into the program much earlier than the Eleventh Step as an aid to relating to God.
People can harbor very negative feelings about God. For example, “God does not love me; God is a tyrant demanding instant obedience; God is a policeman always on the watch for my least misstep; or, finally, God is a judge who is always ready to bring down upon me the irrevocable verdict of guilty.” Most people in this category will develop corresponding emotions of fear of God. Since you don’t think about God at all in non-conceptual meditation, God has a chance to introduce God as God actually is. And in the silence of meditation . . . it gives the negative feelings or negatively charged thoughts about God a chance to calm down and to be moderated by the experience of a certain peace and calm that ordinarily comes from the interior silence of meditation itself. . . .
In AA you have a chance to get acquainted and there is no great rush. You are just open to the possibility that God is not the way you think God is from your particular cultural background or human experience thus far. In actual fact, God is existence and must be present in everything that is. So instead of thinking of God, you can think of God’s presence, which is the source of everything that is. It is this presence that supports the whole movement of AA. . . .
Many AA people are sponsors helping others in their effort of recovery. God is present in service. God is present in human love. God is present in conjugal relationships. God is present in the flowers, in the sunsets, and in the fields. God is present in all of nature without calling it God. Being open to the Higher Power actually opens us to the fact that all creation is penetrated by a presence that transcends our sensible faculties and introduces us to a world both of mystery and experience. [3]
References:
[1] “J,” A Simple Program: A Contemporary Translation of the Book “Alcoholics Anonymous” (Hyperion: 1996), 55.
[2] Thomas Keating with Tom S., Divine Therapy and Addiction: Centering Prayer and the Twelve Steps (Lantern Books: 2009), 3.
[3] Ibid., 19, 20.
