"When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you. At the start, this was all we needed to commence spiritual growth, to effect our first conscious relation with God as we understood Him. Afterward, we found ourselves accepting many things which then seemed entirely out of reach. That was growth, but if we wished to grow we had to begin somewhere. So we used our own conception, however limited it was.
We needed to ask ourselves but one short question. "Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?" As soon as a man can say that he does believe, or is willing to believe, we emphatically assure him that he is on his way. It has been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully effective spiritual structure can be built."
whoa. cosmic, dude.
Perhaps you can understand why a group of about 14 recovering alcoholics, in various stages of the process and with wildly different lengths of sober time, would spend 90 minutes discussing those two paragraphs. For many people, the 2nd Step-- Came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore us to sanity-- and the 3rd Step-- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God-- are just unthinkable. Both of them represent insurmountable hurdles for many people who do desperately want to stop addictive behavior and who have no hope of recovery. To find, in our hopelessness, that the proposed solution is to establish "a conscious relation with God" just adds hopelessness to the already infinite hopelessness of our situation. We don't believe in God, we don't see much evidence for God, we are probably at our utmost bottom in life and feel beat to shit and wonder how any God must feel about us if we have been allowed to sink so low, etc. Many would-be recovering alcoholics also have a lot of baggage from childhood or earlier conceptions of God-- abuse, disappointment, fear of a punishing and spiteful God, painful pressures for unthinking conformity, confusion, cynicism, acute awareness of hypocrisy, disillusionment.
To be told that the only way out of our suffering and the mental obsession which leads to the first drink is to "accept spiritual help" is really a difficult moment for many people. It in fact leads to many people saying "fuck AA," and getting sober some other way or dying of alcoholism. There are positions that are so fierce where a person would rather die an alcoholic death than get even anywhere near anything having to do with that fucking God bastard. I don't know for a fact, but I imagine my paternal grandfather had just this position.
About God, I really don't know anything at all. So it's particularly daunting to the thinking mind to accept the proposition that I have to or am even able to enter into a conscious relation with this unknown. It makes no sense. My being is demonstrably limited in time and space, for example- I sometimes work with sponsees around the powerlessness we have over time and space, as a way to get into a comprehensive view of the powerlessness of step 1, the unmanageability of it-- and any reasonable conception of "God" would probably be some entity or being that is infinite and not limited by time and space, so how can we even enter into a conscious relation with the infinite? Etc. This is the way the mind tries to bring some sense to this situation and ends up flummoxed repeatedly, inevitably, always.
My own conscious contact recently has felt honestly broken into a billion pieces. The insight last night is that I fucking hate "God" and I am so incredibly angry at "God" through this passage. My resentment is palpable. I am at a loss to understand what I am going through, why it happened, how it could in any way be for any good purpose, etc. When I do not get what I want, and when my entire narrative is fucked over, of course it is my tendency to resent the living goddamned fuck out of any concept of a loving God or a God that gives a shit about me.
So a lot of my anxiety, restlessness, obsession and other hell states for the past while of course are all rooted in this fundamental resentment. I am at odds with what is.
"Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?" A). No and B). if so, it is a malicious power bent on tormenting me.
A rough position for an alcoholic to be in.
I am not anywhere near healing this chasm and reconciling my own suffering with my old conception of "God," but what occurred to me last night is that I have to start with what is. I am forcefully put in the position of facing and accepting reality. No complications on that word, "reality," allowed. Simply: what is actually happening and what actually happened. The simple truth of the situation.
So the question for a new starting place in this deeply damaged "conscious relation" with fucking bastard God is "Do I now believe in exactly what is, or am I even willing to believe in what is?"
It seems like it wouldn't be very difficult to believe in reality. You'd be surprised.
On Job "That was when the poorest, the most solitary man on earth--for he had possessed everything and lost everything--suddenly acquired unsuspected strength and decided to express his rebellion, deriving his courage and arguments from his very poverty, weakness and solitude. He rejected all easy solutions, all debasing compromises. He discovered within himself unequaled power and he reversed the roles. Though accused, condemned and repudiated, he defied the system that kept him imprisoned. He launched an inquiry and suddenly God was the defendant. Job spoke his outrage, his grief; he told God what God should have known for a long time, perhaps since always, that something was amiss in God's universe. The just were punished for no reason, the criminal rewarded for no reason. The just and the wicked were subjected to the same fate--God having turned his back on them, on everyone;. God had lost interest in His creation. He was absent." Elie Wiesel.
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