“Try ‘Group of Drunks’”, they would say. “Or the great outdoors.” “Or a doorknob.” My temporary sponsor tried to explain how “simple” it was: if I just keep my mind open to the idea of some sort of Higher Power (always with a capital H and P) and its ability to remove my desire to drink, the urge would magically disappear. And it seemed that “It’s a non-religious program---you can do this!” always finished out the pep talk.
So desperate was I----a very sick person who abused alcohol for 40 years, had liver damage, could barely get through a day without vomiting, and lost half of my family to my drinking----that I listened. And I tried. I kept going to meetings and doing what I was told to do. I got in service. I opened my mind. If my mind had become any more open I would have had to look into supplying it with stadium seating. Yet I still didn’t believe the “God removing my desire to drink” thing, even though my cravings had evaporated and I no longer felt in the clutches of alcohol after the first few days. I just didn’t believe that some power from the great beyond was responsible for that, and I still don’t.
They repeated, “Work the Steps!” I thought maybe, although I had been married to someone in recovery for 27 years and had read the steps many times, the steps would explain it, and I would finally get the “Higher Power” thing. Step 1 was a no-brainer. I had absolutely no problem admitting I was powerless over a substance that had nearly destroyed my life. And a bonus: “God” didn’t appear in this step, so I was able to fully embrace it without doing optic gymnastics when I read it, whipping out a thesaurus, or engaging in an endless debate with someone about how to dress up a concept that I couldn’t get my mind around so that it finally made sense to me. For this reason it was easy-peasy. Steps 2 and 3, not so much. Steps 6 and 7 may as well have been instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant. I made countless attempts to grasp the language of these steps, and I started feeling like the character Diana Morales in A Chorus Line, the aspiring actress who failed to understand her coach’s commands to feel like an ice cream cone.
“They all felt something
But I felt nothing
Except the feeling
That this bullshit was absurd”*
Still, terrified of relapse, I plugged forward, and although I struggled with a lot of the language, both written and spoken, I kept returning to continue to try to interpret the steps as a practical design for living, and to hear the underlying message of any AA meeting: don’t drink no matter what. I continued hearing story after story that I could relate to, building friendships in sobriety, and started embracing the basic concept of each step as much as is possible if you don’t believe a “Higher Power” has reached into your soul and removed your obsession. At the same time, I also started noticing that there were people in meetings who didn’t say the Lord’s Prayer, and who, like me, voiced their skepticism in their shares, and the fact that they had avoided AA because of the subject of God. Naturally, we turned to each other to try to help one another navigate the vernacular of the Big Book, and meetings in which “God” is mentioned constantly. But we were always a tiny minority, and the longer I continued to go to conventional AA meetings and, as everyone suggested, to “take what I needed and leave the rest”, the harder it became to feel authentic.
With the start of practically every traditional AA meeting, we hear, “They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty” the clause from “How it Works” which refers to people who cannot find their way into the rooms. I started really thinking about that sentence as it applied to me and my program, and I realized that if I am to be rigorously honest, I was to share my apprehension, which was often not enthusiastically accepted by fellow AA folk. Included in my shares was that yes, I do believe nature is more powerful than I, and that if, for example, I get caught in a rip tide, struck by lightning, or attacked by a mountain lion on one of my trail runs that I am toast. But what did it have to do with lifting my desire to drink? And “Turn it Over”? What does that really mean, if you don’t believe that a greater force is writing code for the inner workings of your psyche? These are critical questions for one who is committed to working a 100% rigorously honest program, and the central role the “Higher Power” plays in the thesis of conventional AA made it impossible for me to merely file these questions under “leave the rest behind.” I needed more answers, and I wasn’t fully on board with the program. In order to maintain my sobriety, I longed for meetings where my journey in recovery is bolstered by a room full of like-minded alcoholics who are seeking the same answers.
Fast forward to March 2020, and a global pandemic. We all scrambled----to Zoom, and at a head-spinning pace, on-line AA meetings popped up like whack-a-moles, literally overnight. (We are not an unresourceful lot!) One day, as I perused an international listing of on-line AA meetings, the link to a secular AA meeting out of Los Angeles appeared on my screen, as if a beacon. The preamble of this meeting spoke to me: “Though this is a secular meeting, we welcome everyone, including Atheists, Agnostics, and people of all religious beliefs and backgrounds. Our meeting endeavors to maintain a tradition of free expression, where alcoholics may feel free to express any doubts or disbeliefs they may have, and to share their own personal form of spiritual experience, their search for it, or their rejection of it.” Eureka! After 26 months of trying to force a square peg through a round hole, I learned that there were rooms in which I could fly my freak flag and also hear the input of others from across the globe: alcoholics whose backgrounds were not Judeo-Christian; full-on atheists; and people of all stripes who were looking for a secular approach. And many of the pillars of mainstream AA that I found so helpful: the comradeship, the traditions, the need to maintain anonymity, the principles, and even the steps, which had been translated to a non-theistic version, were still present, and the underlying requirement to identify with a Higher Power was gone. At last, I felt like I could work a fully uninhibited program.
In no way do I intend to demean conventional AA, or its members. I am grateful to it and to them for lifting me out of the depths of hell, and for providing me with a life raft on which to dry out and become the beneficiary of the support and genuine care that happens in the rooms. Nor do I mean to imply that secular AA is for everyone any more than conventional AA is, or to cultivate any notion of “us vs. them”; the world most certainly already has more than enough of that. All I intend to convey is how happy I am to be sober one more day, and not to have to pretend to be an ice cream cone.