A GOD DRIVEN LIFE

A God Driven Life

That question around which we professionals will dance when there is that ten ton elephant in the room, that wall of logical incomprehensibility, comes up time and again. How, after all of the rational and reasoned answers, all the emotional cries for help, all the angst and tribulations, all the familial upheaval; after all of that, how can we continue to believe that sustained sobriety depends only upon a belief in the inner voice of the spirit of a higher being that some of us call God?

I cannot explain it. This flies in the face of logic, this notion that in order to live a life worth living I have to give up all of my preconceived notions of what it means to live a good life ; what constitutes a selfless existence, how I can listen to and then hear God, and then feel humble enough to accept that ; and then in accepting that I should not feel guilty because I feel special in that singular belief.

That sounds messianic, egocentric, self interested and totally un-humble and not like a set of principles that will set me up for a lifelong design for living.

And then I hear story of Sue whose faith is anything but unshakeable, in fact very difficult to maintain since she has had the hardest time getting past some ordeals during this past year. And she knows that everyone has problems. And she knows that if she prays perhaps God will hear her entreaties, but she has doubts. What is so special about her for God to hear her prayers? Aren’t her prayers of the so called fox hole variety?

Her sponsor says to let go of her world weariness. “You cannot do anything about it anyway”, speaking about life’s afflictions that threw her into that foxhole. And the things she cannot do anything about are the home disasters, health problems, the children’s school problems and the post divorce carnage, she has finally slogged through battered, bruised and beaten but has managed to live through. And she has not yet taken a drink! But she is short $15K that she owes Uncle Sam and it is tax day and she has no money to pay him. What to do?

“Pray on it”, says her sponsor, the kind of exhortation that sends chills down the spine of the agnostic but in final desperation she does just that, heavens! but with no expectations that anything will happen yet she acquiesces.

Today, tax day, she is planning on finding how to mitigate the debacle with the government and perhaps she will not have to go to jail or pay any major penalties.

But over the weekend a client sends her in a check for a job for just the amount she owes to the government. And Sue goes from Atheist to Possibilian, finding herself just this side of unable to go all the way to believer.

And thus one more moment of reprieve is granted. And a new concept is born in the universe that there is a Possibility that the Cosmos has room for the notion that faith and belief can adjust the laws of life.

But the cynic in me falls back to say that maybe you only hear of these miracles from the ones for whom the Cosmos has conspired to commit a grand delusion of coincidental serendipity and they are the “successes” of the program for whom the “miracle” worked. The cynic in me asks, “where are all the people for whom the miracle did not happen”? What was the quality of their “ moments of reprieve”?

What did God or fate or the Cosmos drive into their lives to not make the miracle happen for them?

For how many in the program does the confluence of this virtual Tigris and Euphrates combine to make one signal fertile delta? But instead of the resulting alluvial fields of this delta, the river was sucked dry like the Colorado is upstream of the Rio Grande . That is the kind of thinking that I have to fight daily, because it is that cynicism that rips away all hope from my program.

It recalls my mood when a year ago I was talking with Lanie after one meeting and she was counseling me to hold on and wait for the miracle to happen. And at each epoch in one’s sobriety I have determined, “waiting for the miracle to happen”, has a different context, a different meaning and one cannot apprehend that context until one has lived past that point in time. At which point new angsts, challenges, needs and imperatives requiring new miracles attend to one’s regard.

During that twenty minutes or so of chatting, her higher power, “which I (Lanie) choose to call God”, came up on several occasions and as a raw recruit to the program, I guess I was not used to nor ready to hear so much divine reference in such a cramped space of talk. It irritated me, it made me uncomfortable. I did not understand her and frankly her serenity annoyed me. Nobody should be that calm! Nobody has the right to appear so self-possessed!

But as I have learned, time changes perspectives. Time permits reflection to look at situations not just from one’s most feared redoubts, but to change aspects and look at things with a more benign point of view. And with that fresh perspective perhaps filled with more hope than charged with so much fear and aversion.

When we have become generous enough in spirit to allow for new viewpoints , we learn that there are genuine folk who have innate piety, goodness and charity in them. But because of our narrow dogma they just seem like unlikely and impossible characters. It is only we who have made their existence impossible in our own minds and confabulated a universe constructed with the forces of nature aligned against their being. But once we allow for their very reality, we can accept that the universe can create true goodness for no other purpose than for its own sake, and with no other motive than it is that it is.

So with Lanie, seventeen months after that discussion sounding so calm and serene, it has not been such an unruffled period as I would have expected all this time. Since then, she has revealed that she has been less than honest with herself and as a result with the people in the rooms, as to her serenity and the quality of her program. Of course, that speaks more to the needs of her own sobriety and sanity than the trust or needs of the group as a whole, since it is less a question of honesty in general, than a matter of self deception in particular. Hiding the truth from yourself can only get you in trouble in the end. “Practicing the principles of honesty, kindness, selflessness in all our affairs” is something she forgot along the way. She forgot to take the advice of others. She was prideful and stopped listening to the suggestions of her sponsor. She stopped doing the steps.

And then three weeks ago she confessed to the group that things had suddenly gone horribly wrong. Lanie began to enumerate all of these character flaws that I just listed and many of us scratched our heads. Because, as is usual in the rooms, people only reveal a small part of the deep troubles that return them to the rooms when they have strayed for any period of time. So we could only imagine the depths of the shame, and pain that had driven her back. The need to unburden herself of all of that guilt. Whatever it was, she has now taken on the coffee commitment which she had not done in years. And cake even too! And almost a daily share.

And daily we hear about her higher power, (that has not gone away) and her attachment to that power has not been weakened in the least. In fact it is stronger than ever. And I have to say that each day there is a brighter visage that adorns her face, and a lighter carriage that moves her body. She is clearly in the process of a retransformation. How and why I do not know. But she clearly attributes this to the program and her buckling down to it with greater sincerity and interest.

And I have to say that my skepticism is not nearly as challenged as it was at the beginning of last year. My empiricism has fallen away to a belief in belief. I have seen how powerful belief can be and I have come to believe that without a guiding belief, the program is just an endurance test of how long one can last until the urge to drink finally gets you into trouble.

So I have developed a firm sense of a higher power. All things are now possible to this Possibilian. I have a sense that permits faith in the future and hope for tomorrow. It allows me to take a breath so that at any stage I can say today “wait for the miracle to happen” even if that is a different miracle than I was expecting a year ago.

Ultimately, it is in that belief that I am relieved of the obsession to drink that in the final instance allows success in the program; that some power greater than myself lifts that horror from me so I no longer have to drink. It is that belief that enables me to say to myself that I, with the help of someone, something, some “other”, will enable me to stop.
And along with belief comes the concept of acceptance, a “surrender” of will, and willpower. The willpower that resists stopping drinking and the willpower that resists the power to accept help wherever it may be found. It is the act of ultimate contrition that permits one to accept that there is help to be had if one is ready to receive it.

Science cannot help take one past the empiricism. Scientific “ leaps of faith” must always be tested through theory and hypothesis. And when proof of theory fails, any “faith” in the facts that empiricism holds fails too. The only “faith” that one can have in empiricism at all is the “faith” that the scientific method will ultimately prove or disprove the theory to let it take its place in the pantheon of knowledge that we call fact. But beyond fact there is no faith. There is no hope. There is only speculation.


And no hope is no place for the perplexed, and an even worse place for the alcoholic. But for a Possibilian, a belief in the belief of faith works. Allowing for the possibility of faith can make all the difference in whether one can actually experience the “miracle” happening or is left to wait for the miracle to happen; and in that faith remains the possibility as to whether moments of reprieve really do come true.

© res 4/18/2011