This question has come back to haunt me periodically throughout my sobriety. What if my sobriety depends on belief in and access to a power greater than myself, and there is no God? Some say I can use a doorknob, or a lamppost, for a God, but I don’t think so. How can I turn my life and will over to a doorknob? How can a lamppost remove the character defects that the book says will lead me back to drinking?
What about using the Group as my higher power? Well, great, except that at one year of sobriety, I found the power of the fellowship alone insufficient; I was depressed and indifferent and mainly wanted to sleep. The Group was great, mostly, as long as I was at a meeting, but it wasn’t very portable, and I needed something to sustain me between meetings.
I was dissatisfied with our book’s chapter on the subject. I felt that We Agnostics was a classic bait-and-switch. “Our own conception . . .” morphed quickly into GOD, with all the attendant masculine pronouns and biblical implications. And yet I was sold on the idea that, on my own, I was in deep trouble.
Two phrases in the book rang true for me. One was “something at work in a human heart . . .” This was something I could work with. And then, thank God (ha!), there was the appendix on Spiritual Experience, which mentions “an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.”
I have been sober nearly twenty-four years now, and I still can’t say much about a God “out there,” one that created the universe, involves itself in natural events, or dispenses the occasional convenient parking spot on a lucky day. I have, however, had a deep and effective spiritual experience as a result of AA’s steps bringing me into contact with “an unsuspected inner resource,” which I call God as a matter of convenience. If someone asks, I might just say that there’s something inside of me that’s smarter and kinder than I am and I think I’ll listen to it.
It is easy enough to give alcoholism a personality: it’s cunning, baffling, and powerful; it’s patient, doesn’t discriminate, and it wants to kill me. It’s tied up in a tangle of knots with my selfishness, pride, and fear, which are both cause and effect of my problem. So it seems reasonable to personify the other side, the “place” within from which emanate love, honesty, compassion, sanity, and a willingness to help others. And it seems reasonable to appeal to this place – to state a willingness to live my life under its guidance. I call this appeal prayer.
I like to read “other books,” as mentioned in the eleventh step – on religion, philosophy, and science, on skepticism as well as faith. I haven’t rejoined the debate society; I just enjoy exploring ideas. An old-timer once told me that “religion is a finger pointing at the moon.” What that tells me is that if I spend too much time staring at the finger I will forever miss the moon. I am no longer so interested in labels like “atheism,” “agnosticism,” “deism,” or “theism”; I just can’t afford to revert to “me-ism” – when I’m the center of the universe, it’s a dark and lonely place.
My small god might seem insufficient to some, but it works for me. And, I believe that that same inner resource is a part of each of us; when I’m in a room full of people talking about its effect on their lives, it becomes a presence that we can all sense even as our individual concepts vary.
Occasionally I have the intuitive sense that my unsuspected inner resource is an expression of something much larger.