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I’ve often wondered, why does the 12-step approach to God and faith work so well for me when I struggled with it for most of my life?
The answer came to me at a meeting the other day where the importance of faith was the topic. It’s still amazing to me sometimes that spending an hour listening to people unpack a topic can go so far to assist me in my life. It just doesn’t happen if I spend an hour talking to my friends about football games, or scrolling Instagram reels for 45 minutes. I have to be in the right environment.
Lots of people shared about how they had bad experiences with religion when they were younger, and that has made it hard for them to go back to any kind of church. I never had bad experiences in church, but I never did connect with a specific church, religion or concept of God. And I did see instances where religion tore people apart, not brought them together.
But with the help of people and the principles of recovery, I have gotten to a place where I found a faith that works. Mine is squishy and hard to explain to anybody else. But I have just come to believe that I do not know how we got here or where we go when we die. I don’t understand some of the magnificence of the universe, and neither do scientists—I still often think about a 60 Minutes piece I saw about 5 years ago about NASA. In it, some of the world’s smartest space experts ended up agreeing that we know about 5 percent of how the world and the universe work. Think about that—for every 1 thing we know, there are 19 that we don’t. How did the universe start? Is there other life? Where do stars come from? Why are there stars? Why are we here? What’s in a black hole?
The answer: They don’t really know! That’s enough for me to stop picking holes in anybody else’s theory about how we got here.
The big thing that hit me during that meeting was that I think the reason recovery-based faith works so well for me and so many others is that we leave it open-ended. So much of my experience with religion has a specific final destination you have to get to—believe in this exact God, with his picture on the wall, and do these exact 10 things to become saved, and never interact with other concepts of higher powers, and always try to collect other people to believe the same thing… it just doesn’t work for me. It may sound like I am pointing directly at Christianity, but I’m not. I think almost every version of organized religion that I have encountered has some pretty strict requirements that the entire congregation must get to, or else you might not qualify. There’s a not a lot of room to introduce what those NASA people said without somebody smiling and saying that they already know the answer based on a book that people wrote hundreds or thousands of years ago.
So with recovery faith, we’re encouraged to keep trying, and there’s no test or criteria for how you get there. Most of the people who bristle badly at the idea of God being mentioned in recovery say that with their fists balled up, acting as if other sober people are going to come to their houses and question if they’ve been a good boy or not. There’s nothing like that. I’ve been sober for 16 years. Been to thousands of meetings. Had thousands of phone calls with sober people. Nobody has ever inquired about my relationship with my higher power, or interrogated me on what it is.
I love that, and I think most people in recovery do. One of my favorite recovery stories was that I once was struggling with figuring out the God thing and I asked a guy, “Who is your higher power and how do you stay connected to it?”
And he took a bite of his breakfast and said, “It’s interesting that you should ask. I’m actually between higher powers right now. I’m looking at a few possibilities…”
It blew my mind, in the best possible way. He was talking about finding faith as if he were considering switching realtors or his wireless company! It was a spiritual experience, because I realized this wonderful sober person had embraced the idea of finding a higher power that is loving, kind and not rigid. That’s what I needed, and continue to need… though I’m always looking at all the possibilities.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS:
“When I go to one AA meeting a week, I can stay sober. When I go to two meetings a week, I start to like myself. When I go to at least three meetings a week, other people begin to like me.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2001, Thomas W. from Missoula, Montana)
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