You Ain't God

This is the how and why of it.  First of all, we had to quit playing God.  It didn’t work.

We had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.  God either is, or He isn't.

Look. We get it. The Higher Power thing is hard for many of us, maybe most of us, and the founders liberally sprinkle around "God" with a capital G a lot more than they sprinkle around "Higher Power." But the concept of Something Greater Than Ourselves is a foundation block of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous and I truly believe that the founders were sincerely open-minded about how we can come to an understanding of that power, or at least they were trying to be open-minded about it. I'm assuming in our early meetings there weren't too many women in full Muslim burkas or Sikhs with their distinctive head coverings drinking bad coffee and going on 12 Step calls. I assume there were a lot of pinched-looking white people who attended Christian churches regularly. And then there's the famous story about these guys exhibiting a certain amount of pious glee when the first avowed atheist in The Fellowship went back out and drank again. He was the guy who got the "as we understand him" qualifier into our 3rd Step.

I've always said that you can use A.A. or not. You can get sober by yourself, using willpower and self-knowledge, easily or with clenched teeth, and you can go to church or you can join a commune or rely on a psychotherapist or whatever the fuck you want to do. We're really open to anything that allows you to be relatively happy and completely sober. That's the simple goal here, after all. But if you're going to use Alcoholics Anonymous, a non-denominational spiritual 12 Step Program, you'd be doing yourself a favor by keeping an open mind to the whole Higher Power thing. It's awfully hard to avoid. And this is a non-official Seaweed survey but I'd bet in today's increasingly secular world there a lot more non-religious people in A.A. than the other way around. I think you hear more groans if someone says "Jeebus" than if they say "atheist" or "Buddhist." I think we've gotten a hell of a lot more tolerant. I really don't feel any pressure to believe in any particular way anymore.

The minute I stopped fighting or arguing, I could begin to see and feel.  We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.  We are in the world to play the role God assigns.  Just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us, and humbly rely on him, does he enable to match calamity with serenity.

Fight: To try to overpower; to fiercely counteract.

Argue: To have a verbal dispute; to quarrel.

Don't tell me what to do. I have a better solution which I am going to point out to you here, incontrovertibly. I'm going to play my own role and I'm not humbly-ing a goddamn thing.

Now what's that about calamity or serenity?

Calamity: An event resulting in great loss.

Serenity: Calmness; peacefulness; a lack of agitation or disturbance.

Hmmmm. Give me a minute to think about this. I'm not sure which one sounds better.

Lack of power, that was our dilemma.  Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions.  In this respect alcohol was a great persuader.  It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness.

Destruction: Damaged beyond use or repair. (Ed. Note: I really like this definition - "beyond repair." We become open-minded when the destruction is so great that it renders us useless and beyond repair. That's quite a thing to face. We're pretty far down the road before we become open-minded.)

Beat: To strike or pound repeatedly; to knock vigorously or loudly; to inflict repeated blows.

Get it? You are the one being beaten. Alcohol is the one doing the beating. You are losing. You are being pounded and struck over and over. Does this sound at all like you are winning?

It does not.