Create Your Own Concept of God

I was at a noon meeting today and the topic was "Love." A guy who just picked up his 6 month chip shared that he was working on his 3rd step and was feeling some love from and for his Higher Power, but that he was struggling with some "hate" that he still had toward his higher power. Hate was what he felt when he thought about the "fact" that his God had created him to be an alcoholic and that ended up resulting in much pain and suffering, not only for this guy but also for many other victims strewn along the path of his life.

I talked to him after the meeting and shared with him that in my view, one of the great things about AA is the fact that if there's something you hate about your Higher Power, you can change it! You can come up with a new understanding of your higher power. That's one of the main things that distinguishes AA from religions or cults: In a religion, if your concept of "their" God gets too far out of whack, they excommunicate you. In a cult, if your concept of "their" God gets too far out of whack, they kill you. In AA, they listen to you and most often nod their head in understanding and laugh (or cry) along with you.

I then shared with him my own personal God Myth: In the beginning, there was God and nothing else. God was lacking Love, because Love requires an "other" to love. And since there wasn't anything but God, God was very very lonely. So, out of Love, God created. God created all things. And in each "thing" God tried to place a spark of Love in such a way that God could escape the terrible loneliness that God experienced since the beginning of time. There were sparks of Love placed in all forms of existence, dirt, stones, water, light, planets, stars and animals and human beings. Lots of experimentation in this process.

It wasn't until God discovered that Love requires that the "other" have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, good and evil...that the "other" attains the ability or capacity to return Love to the creator. Without free will, there can be no Love.

And once there was free will, then there began the whole waterfall of consequences to each act of free will: both good and bad, both hate and love, both harm and healing. One right after the other.

In my myth, this is about the time when God stopped "doing" things. Once things got started with people making free choices, there was nothing left to do but watch and wait. For God to intervene after the gift of free will, God would return to the lonely existence he'd found escape from by creating others with the freedom to choose from a wide array of choices and to suffer/benefit from such choices and to inflict blessings/harms to all those around and after them.

So my God's one who just sits and watches. Hurting with the hurt and the hurters. Laughing. Crying. Laughing. Waiting for the Beloved to be what they were created to be: Beloved.

In my myth of God, I have no hatred or anger toward God. Certainly no anger over the fact that I became an alcoholic! I have nothing but gratitude for my becoming an alcoholic for were it not for that blessing, I wouldn't be where I am today, right now, right here. No. I'd be back in the lonely and isolated existence that I'd come to know at the very end of my drinking career. Interesting isn't it? The ending of my drinking placed me in the same lonely existence that my God experienced before coming upon the idea of creating another with a spark of Love and freedom to choose....

Take care!

Mike L.

3rd Step without Kneeling, without Prayer

99.9999999% of the time when I hear people talking about their "working" of the 3rd Step, their story inevitably seems to include the acts of kneeling and then saying the 3rd Step Prayer. The other .0000001% of the time? What I hear is lonely ol' me talking about my being worked by the 3rd Step without kneeling, without prayer. When I was worked by the 3rd Step, it did not and does not involve me kneeling down. Neither did it nor does it involve saying or praying what other people refer to as the 3rd Step Prayer. No step has me feeling as lonely and as isolated as the 3rd Step. And it's been that way since the beginning of my recovery in AA.

My very first sponsor was someone who took people through the book page by page. I didn't seem to mind that much at all, until we got close to the 3rd step. As we did that, he began talking about his experience of the 3rd step with his sponsor: how they walked up to the top of some hill in Pleasant Hill, California and then they both knelt down in front of a bench and together prayed the 3rd step prayer out loud. From the very first time he told me that story, I knew one thing for certain: there was not a way in Hell that I was going to kneel down with him or anyone else and pray this or any other prayer together. Not surprisingly, this sponsor was long gone before the 3rd step ended up working me.

For me, this sponsor's plan for me seemed totally contrary to everything I had been taught and had read in AA literature. What I had taken from the readings and the meetings was that we were free to come up with our own concept of a higher power, or not. We didn't have to accept anyone else's concept of God nor did we have to accept existence of God in order to stay sober or to be a full fledged member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And if that was true, then why were we expecting (or even suggesting!) one another to take on a specific practice common to some, but not all religions or spiritual traditions, involving kneeling before one's God in prayer. If the words of the 3rd step prayer were really suggested as it is written in the Big Book, then why is it everyone seems to follow like sheep and use only those words of prayer to express their "decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God, as they understood him."

Nope. There was no way I was going to do that. To do that would make me a member of a cult. And to assure myself that this was not a cult, I was going to make sure that I could stay a full fledged and sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous without kneeling and without saying the 3rd Step Prayer. And I have done just that. [Thank you Dr. Earle!]

For me, my decision to turn my life and my will over to my higher power involved and still involves the simple and repeated daily acts of letting go. Letting go of the deep seeded but mistaken belief that I am God. Or at least God-like. The very act of my drinking was the clearest example of my learning to play God. With alcohol, I found a powerful means of changing myself, my feelings, my surroundings, my past. Everything. God could create the world. And in effect, with alcohol, so could I. Until I couldn't. Eventually, what I thought was a solution turned on me.

I was a flea on the tail, thinking it was wagging the dog.

All this said, I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that I do not kneel or that I do not pray. I do. I kneel most mornings when I do several stretching movements (based on a book, 3 Minutes to a Painfree Life). I also kneel when I meditate: I use a sitting stool which allows me to kneel down and sit on a stool just above the back of my heals. This meditation stool helps me kneel in meditation without any pain in my knees or legs and it allows me to keep my back/spine straight and my breathing slow and natural. I'd done this several months before I realized I'd broken my vow never to kneel before God or anyone else! Kneeling in prayer never made sense to me after I had the feeling that God's response to my kneeling was something along the lines of, "Hey, Mike? What are you doing down there?" And then we laughed at the silliness of it all.

I use a variety of prayers that I've memorized to help me become focused on positive and loving thoughts. You might even be surprised that I even use a version of the 3rd Step Prayer, which I call "My Version":

God, I offer myself to you to build with me and to do with me as you will. Take away my difficulties, or not, that victory or defeat over them may bear witness to those I would help of your power, your powerlessness, your love and your way of life. May I do your will always.

As you can see, my version takes out all the Thees and Thous and replaces them with today's English. And as I ask my God to take away my difficulties, I also add that "or not" to express that I don't have a big investment or desire to have my difficulties taken away: some, if not all, of my difficulties have been my biggest gift in life! Alcoholism being the greatest difficulty/gift! Victory over difficulties is nice, but defeat over difficulties has oftentimes been far more important: my 30 year attempt to "not be an alcoholic" has been my most important and life-saving defeat. God's powerlessness: as I see it, God is just as powerless over my alcoholism as I am. I'm an alcoholic whether God likes it or not. I don't subscribe to the view that God made me an alcoholic and/or that God had some sort of "purpose" in mind by making me an alcoholic. The God of my understanding doesn't seem to get involved in that sort of day-to-day stuff or to intervene in the ongoing creation process that was begun bzillions of years ago from a simple and complete act of love. And that commitment to do God's will always? God's will is nothing more or less that same simple and complete act of love. May that Love be the source of my will, my acts, my thoughts, my words....always.
Turns out then that neither the acts of kneeling or praying were part of the commitment or decision I made in the 3rd step----but they are tools I can use on a daily basis to maintain my commitment to let go of the idea that I am God-like and to accept myself as the particular human being I am today.
Mike L.

Key Things to Include in a Fourth Step

I once heard a guy (he later became one of my sponsors) say that what he felt was most important to include in a fourth step were those events in our past that made us “wince”. When he said the word “wince” he puckered up his face as though he had just bit into a lemon. I knew exactly the sorts of things he meant: those events in my past that brought high levels of shame and guilt to my consciousness.

I was probably a year and a half sober before I felt ready to do my fourth step. I’d been in no real rush, in large part because the compulsion/obsession to drink had completely left me the moment I awoke the morning following my last drink, two days before my first AA meeting. I never felt compelled or motivated to work the steps due to a desire to stop drinking because that desire had already left me. My only motivations to work the steps were that there was a part of me that suspected that if I didn’t, the desire/compulsion to drink might return; that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be considered a “full member” of AA; that if I didn’t, the drinking dream might become a drinking reality and hell.

Those motivations got me to begin working the steps, but really, I became open to each step because in each case, I became convinced that the process would lead me to a better way of living, greater serenity and some sense of contentment. So I dove into the steps, one at a time. I’m sure that I did them differently than most, but doing things differently is something that comes naturally for me.

My first step sort of happened without my really knowing it and without my awareness of what was happening. It began in January 2001 when my 15 year old son began his own recovery---neither of us knew it at the time, but when he entered a drug treatment program, that was the moment in time when I was finally unable to stop drinking. Until then, I had always been able “to stop” --- that is, stop long enough to convince myself (or my wife) or others that I was really not an alcoholic. Inevitably, every stopping led to a moment where I became convinced that I apparently could stop drinking and if that were true, I was obviously not an alcoholic! With that awareness in hand, I could safely resume drinking: being as careful as I could not to have another “alcoholic incident”. The day would always come for such another alcoholic incident, to be followed by another display of control via stopping, becoming convinced that I’d really stopped, resuming, etc. What made that moment in January 2001 different from the others is that at that moment I knew, for the first time ever, that I couldn’t stop. No way. No fucking way. True, I loved my son more than life itself and clearly, he needed to stop! But I couldn’t. I needed it like oxygen.

My first step ended the morning of October 20, 2001 when I awoke and realized that I couldn’t stop drinking; that this inability to stop drinking is what they were calling “alcoholism”, that alcoholism was a disease and that I had it. On that morning, I realized or accepted that this simply was what it was and that, like my son, I had the ability to do something about it: I could begin a process of recovery along the lines of what he had been doing. Some months later and after many AA meetings (many of them Step Meetings) it dawned on me that my first step had already happened and all I needed to do was accept that fact. I did and the first step was done, fully cooked, as it were.

The second and third steps sort of blended together for me over the next year. Once I was able to understand that neither of these steps had anything at all to do with “God” as I understood God, but more to do with coming to a comfort level with the fact that in terms of my recovery, my “higher power” was really “Truth” (the truth I was an alcoholic and that I was not going to have to deal with that fact and with my recovery all by myself…) and that the so-called God issue was really not much of a concern for me in terms of my own recovery. That completed my second step.

The third step was a little more challenging in that everyone I heard talk about their 3rd step in meetings kept referring to the step involving kneeling down and praying the 3rd Step Prayer with their sponsor. Communal prayers in AA have always bothered me and for quite a few years now I’ve chosen not to participate in the act of communal prayer in an AA meeting. I remain silent during recitations of both the Serenity Prayer and Lord’s Prayer. And, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I did my third step without ever kneeling down, with or without a sponsor or anyone else nearby. My third step was completed, I think, when I realized that much of my past life, drinking and sober, had been done with the unconscious conviction that I was God: if life wasn’t the way I wanted it, I took on the role of God by trying my best to make it the way it was supposed to be. If my feelings were not what I wanted (and they NEVER were!) then I took on the role of God (often with the assistance of alcohol) and tried my best to change those feelings.
My third step was a commitment to begin letting go of that conviction to be God and just remain content being me, just as I was at any particular moment in time. The third step, like the first two, are part of a daily practice for me.

Some time following the time I heard the guy talk about a fourth step involving listing things that made us “wince”, I sat down on a hill overlooking the ocean and took out my handheld computer (Blackberry) and started a note called “4th”. I then gave my self permission to begin to remember events in my past that qualified as “wincers” and each time one floated to the surface, I simply typed a short phrase that described that event. I didn't go into detail as they were already clear in my mind. I just wrote enough to remind me later which events in my past qualified as wincers.

I meditated on each incident and remembered as much as I could as to the circumstances around that event, what was going on, who was involved, why I did what I did. Always in the background of my consciousness was the idea I heard expressed by Maya Angelow, "We did then what we knew how to do, when we knew better, we did better." There was very little self-hatred in this process. In fact, looking back, there was no fear or shame at all. I was just remembering and noting. No judgment. After about an hour or so, I was done. Sure, over the next several weeks, I would sometime remember something else that qualified as a wincer, and I would just open up my 4th note, and add that event to the list.

To be totally honest, today I can't remember one single thing from that list. Oh, I'm sure several of them had something to do with sex (with or without others involved), but I really can't remember any of these shamefilled events that I carried with me for so long. Several had to do with situations involving my drinking and how that hurt me or others I loved. I'm sure that if I tried, I could recreate the list, but I really don't see much point in doing that. It would be like opening up a scab and causing the bleeding to resume --- the scab is a natural part of the healing process and if we just let the body do its work, the healing takes place. The trick with the 4th step for me, was to let the healing take place as a part of the natural process of recovery. It was really no big deal.

The other thing that helped me get through the 4th step as well as I did was that I took my grand-sponsor's advice and avoid the two main hurdles to any of the steps: (1) forgetting about the previous steps that had been completed...in this case, that meant not forgetting all that I'd learned through working the first three steps! and (2) thinking about the next step...in this case, worrying about the 5th step and sharing what was on my 4th step list. I didn't forget the first three steps and I really didn't pay much attention or worry about what was going to come after the 4th step. That would come when it was time. More about that some other day.

Take care!

Mike L.

Can You Work a 3rd Step Without Praying the 3rd Step Prayer?

Given that it's March, I've been hearing lots of sharing on the 3rd Step and it's brought back a lot of memories of when I was relatively new in AA and starting hearing talk about the 3rd step. What bothered me about the talk was that while I had finally found a safe place in which to accept my alcoholism and begin learning a new way of life, all the talk about God as others saw God troubled me a lot.

In fact, the more I heard people, including my first sponsor talk about the 3rd step as though that step necessarily involved the act of me getting down on my knees with my sponsor and saying with him the "3rd step prayer" the more I started to think that this wasn't such a safe place as I had thought and hoped. In fact, I began to wonder whether or not I was going to be able to stay in this organization due to the fact that I couldn't "pretend" to believe in a God as others were portraying God. That is, a God who expected or wanted me to kneel, a God who had a "will" for me to do this or that and not to do that or this, a God who expected or wanted "offerings" or anything else from me, a God who wanted me to do something like this prayer even though it violated every fiber of my being, a God whose role in life involved in "taking away" somethings (i.e., difficulties) and not other things, a God who was defined by having "Power" over all things and who got involved in all the details of life.

When I read the Big Book, I simply didn't see a commandment that I had to kneel (it's not mentioned) or even that I had to pray a prayer at all (sure, it's suggested....but, as far as I can tell, that's not a commandment). Although, to be honest, even if the book had written this as a commandment, I wouldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it without being dishonest and to me the clear message of recovery that I found in the book and in AA was that honesty with one's self had a huge amount to do with one's ability to stay sober and to find a fulfilling and meaningful way of life without chemical enhancement or support.

For me, my 3rd step didn't involve prayer or even God as I do understand God (more more accurately, God as I misunderstand God!). It had to do with the higher power that I'd discovered in my 2nd step and that higher power wasn't really God. It was the "Truth" of who I was, an alcoholic. I came to believe that a power greater than myself, that is Truth (the truth of who I am: alcoholic). And that the path leading to greater and greater awareness of who I am was leading me to nothing less than a more "sane" and more human life.

The 3rd step just carried that understanding a little farther, coincidentally, one step further...to the understanding that I didn't need to "be God" any more and that I could let go of that horrible burden. I could let go. I could just be me. Ahhhh.

As a great AAer in Sacramento says, "We're already alright!" I think that sentiment is the principle I learned in my 3rd step. Once that sunk in, I was finally ready to begin looking deeper into who I was without fear and begin seeing myself more compassionately and with more understanding and less condemnation, build, shame and hatred.

Take care!

Mike L.

Is AA a Cult?

When I began this blog, I forgot that I was publishing this log of thoughts and opinions to the wild of the Internet and foolishly allowed "Comments" to my blog. Within a few days, I was inundated with almost a dozen comments, all from a guy named 'MICKY'. Apparently, he does not share my love for the program/organization called AA and he's welcome to his own experience. I'm not sure how to accurately characterize his experience and while it's far different from my own, there were parts of his rantings that stirred up memories of my own and I couldn't help but feel some empathy for him.

When I first got sober a little over six years ago, I'd quickly gotten a sponsor who began taking me through the Big Book a page/chapter at a time, just like had been done with him by his sponsor. I didn't mind this approach at all, at least for the first two steps. But as we approached the third step, he started talking about what his sponsor had done with him and I got the distinct impression that he was fully expecting to do the same thing with me when my turn came to work this step: "Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understood him."

What his sponsor had done with him was to take him up to a hill in Pleasant Hill, California and on top of that pleasant hill, they each knelt in front of a bench and recited the so-called "Third Step Prayer" together: God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt....etc." When they were done, the 3rd step was completed and they then immediately moved on to the next step.

Well, unbeknownst to my sponsor, there just wasn't a chance in hell that I was going up to any such hill, pleasant or not, to kneel down and pray this or any other prayer with him. No fucking way.

When I got sober, I was 48 years old. The disease had been very slow, but progressively worse nonetheless. Earlier in my life, I'd been a Lutheran---had even been the President of the goddamned Luther League! I converted to Catholicism when I was in my early 20's and entered the Jesuits shortly thereafter with the full intent of becoming a Jesuit priest... I had a bachelor's degree in Catholic theology and had thought long and hard about the issues surrounding the questions of God's existence or non-existence. Ultimately, I left the Jesuits: in part, because I got tired of trying to fit my experience of God into an acceptable framework of the Catholic Church or some local manifestation of that organization, but in larger part, due to my certainty that if I were to stay much longer in this celibate religious order, I would certainly become an alcoholic! I have a long history of reaching this exact same crisis point again and again and again: if I stay here doing "this", I will certainly become an alcoholic.

Anyway, back to my 3rd step issue: after getting sober, one of the things that made me feel most comfortable and safe in AA was the language scattered throughout the book and literature which seemed to say that within this organization, each individual was absolutely free to come up with their own understanding of God or a Higher Power. In fact, if the individual's understanding of God was that God did not exist, they were still a full member of AA in good standing. No better, no less than someone whose understanding was more theistic. I love the fact that the third chapter of the Big Book was called "We Agnostics" rather than "Those Agnostics" or "We Former Agnostics."

But I had already started to have this sense of safety become challenged by certain practices and language within the rooms of AA that seemed inconsistent with this fundamental principle of AA. Not only was there the talk of a 3rd step that involved reciting a very specific prayer with another person....which seemed to me to imply that these two folks were acting as though they had a common understanding of God, else why would they be saying the same prayer together. And if everyone in AA accomplished their 3rd step by reciting this same exact prayer together with another, was the talk of a God of my own understanding really a joke or ruse?

There was also the practice of opening and closing most AA meetings that I had attended to that point with either the Serenity Prayer or the Lord's Prayer. Both prayers are Christian prayers or at least "rooted" in the Christian tradition. If I didn't have an understanding of God that fit in with that tradition, was I some how "outside" of the fellowship if I did not hold hands with other members at the end of meetings and participate in this apparently Christianized AA ritual? Could I stay in AA if in fact it was a Christian cult or required belief in God as a condition of membership or a condition of longer term sobriety?

Luckily, at this time in my sobriety, I met Dr. Earle Marsh (deceased 1/13/03). Earle had gotten sober June 15, 1953, two days before I was born. His story, Physician Heal Thyself, was published in the 2nd edition of the Big Book and he was something of an icon around here where I was getting sober. Anyway, my first sponsor unwittingly directed me to have my path intersect with Earle's. This sponsor had encouraged me to go to a big men's meeting because they really did things right at this meeting. Well, I hated it. While the chairs (what some places refer to a "leads" where you tell your story...) were usually very good, they did not ask for volunteers to talk/share---the chair would only call on people he knew and none of them knew me. The fellowship was very strong in this meeting and there was a lot of positive energy flowing before, during and after the meeting. But I still hated it. I started to get the impression that they were all members of a AA cult and they were trying to draw me into the fold. If only I'd do what I was told....and that included getting down on my knees and praying the 3rd step prayer with my sponsor. No fucking way.

Anyway, one night---I'd already decided that it was my last visit to this meeting---toward the end of the meeting, this little man I had only known as an oldtimer who had his story in the book (when talking to others after the meeting, I referred to him as the Joker, because while he rarely got called on to talk, when he did talk, he had a wonderful way of telling stories and to make me laugh)....this little old man raised his hand and didn't wait to be called on, and simply said, "My name is Earle and I'm an alcoholic." Everyone welcomed him with a roar, "Hi Earle!". He then continued, "I've heard everything that you men have said tonight and to be honest with you, I think it's all a bunch of bullshit!" At first, there was complete silence in the room of 100+ men. And then everyone broke into laughter.... Earle looked at them with a half-smile and then said, "No, I'm serious! I think what's been said tonight is a bunch of bullshit." Well, this time, they didn't laugh so hard.

Earle then went on to tell a brief version of his story and it dawned on me that he'd gotten sober two days before I was born. He'd been sober every moment of my entire life. More importantly, this iconic figure with 48+ years of sobriety, friend of Bill Wilson himself and writer of one of the stories in the Big Book, had told an entire room of AA members that they were full of shit. And he didn't get kicked out. Now, he may very well have pissed off a few or a bunch of folks, but nonetheless, he was still allowed to have his say and to return the following week!

That's when I learned that while there are "cultish" aspects to this weird organization called Alcoholics Anonymous, that given our freedom to believe and do as we wish and remain full members in good standing, it's not a cult. At least for me. It's also where I learned that my third step didn't have to involve praying any prayer with another person. In fact, it didn't have to involve prayer at all. For me, the third step involved me coming to an understanding that much of my life had been spent "playing God" --- and, in particular, by using alcohol as a means of playing this role of God: He (me) who could change reality to fit His (my) wants and desires. My third step didn't involve a commitment to any sort of god, it was more of a resignation on my part from playing the role of God. It meant letting go and just being me. And being me, involved among other things, being an alcoholic who simply couldn't "stop" drinking...but who could stay sober, one day at a time.

This is all not to say that Micky's experience is wrong or that his opinions are bunk. His experience is apparently far different than mine and he's apparently taken it upon himself to teach everyone the "truth" about AA, Bill Wilson, etc. That's fine with me. I don't particularly find his arguments persuasive and I'm not going to become a hostage to his voluminous (clearly "cut and paste" from a library of anti-AA messages and writings....) comments and diatribes.

For that reason, I've removed the "Comments" from my blog. I am looking for other alternatives to allowing people to respond/comment on what I share here, which do not subject me or others to abusive rantings. Until then, this will be a one-way communication tool. Sorry folks!

Mike L.