Episode 78 -- January 11, 2021

New Year, New Hope: Spiritual Skeptics Welcome

You don't have to believe in an all-knowing supreme being for AA to work for you. as A.J. Adams says in Undrunk: A Skeptic's Guide to AA, the spirituality of recovery is a personal thing, and shows up in sneaky ways. With the blunt and beautiful wisdom found in his own experience of stepping away from "death-by-the-pint" daily living, Adams welcomes fellow spiritual skeptics and religious rebels to consider the lifegiving gifts of acceptance and willingness throughout the recovery journey.

It has been edited for brevity.

Spirituality
If you are a religiously affiliated person, AA should not be too hard to accommodate in your existing belief system. If, on the other hand, you are agnostic, atheist, or just un-impressed with organized faith, AA's rebel spirituality might strike a chord. I was a little of both. You don't have to believe in an all-knowing supreme being for AA to work for you. It does help to recognize that you are not an all-knowing supreme being yourself. If you can get that far, you're ready to consider spirituality on its own merits.

Spirituality has come on the installment plan for me. I've moved toward acceptance of a few things today that would have seemed seriously out of bounds a year ago. At no point did I say to myself, I have to digest this doctrine now or else I can't move forward. It's not like that. Typically, as a certain part of the AA program began to work for me, I became willing to accept some of the spiritual baggage that was associated with that part. This step-by-step model was my choice and may not work for anyone else. For me, it's working a lot better than the death-by-the-pint lifestyle I brought to AA.

The journey to spirituality in AA is so personal that you can't use generalizations to describe it—with one apparent exception. A fair number of AAs I've compared notes with on this subject say they never seem to be actively aware of moving toward a more spiritual life. Unlike the rituals and rites of passage in organized religion, AA spirituality sneaks up on you. For example, one morning I might wake up feeling so damn good that I just want to be cheerful to everyone I meet. The next day I could find myself wildly grateful for the changes happening in my life. Before I know it, I truly want to be a better person and, miraculously, have the ambition to start in on the project. Recently, I've become interested in the higher- order functions of the mind and spirit. There it is! It seems that whenever I pursue any line of thinking on morality or living the right kind of life, I end up in the general vicinity of "the spirit." That's as mystical as I'm willing to get.

The following are two stories from the first days of my own recovery that illustrate what I mean about giving spirituality a try without expecting anything.

First story. In the late stages of my drinking career, I knew I was in trouble. I had lost control and had no more fingers for the leaks in my levee. I was alone at home one morning, feeling toxically hungover and remorseful beyond belief. I was scared too. I decided that the time had come to call in reinforcements, so I set about praying. It was a typical foxhole message: "I'll do anything if you'll just get me out of this." When I had done all the pleading I could manage, I felt a strange calm. (Any calm was strange in those days, so I did notice it.) I also felt a certain gratitude. Maybe this would work. It did and it didn't. I sobered up enough to get fabulously drunk again and stayed that way for the better part of a month. I finally hit my bottom. I ended up in detox and then in rehab and then in AA.

Second story. For a couple months before I went into rehab, I was dropping in on AA meetings to keep the heat off at home. Since some of the meetings were during the day, I decided to tell a co-worker what was up so he could cover for my midday disappearances. My confidant sent me a nice get-well card the next day and promptly ratted me out to the boss. While I was in rehab, he went after my job. I was consumed with hatred for him. The chaplain at the rehab center suggested that I try praying for the guy to see if forgiveness could remove him from my tortured mind. I was skeptical, but after about a week of praying for him, my resentment just went away. I got focused on recovery and have never thought much about him since. This really happened, and no one was more surprised than I was at how it ended up.

I've come to believe that spirituality in AA is built on two foundations: acceptance and willingness. Here's how it crystallized for me.

It began with acceptance. Accepting that I'm an alcoholic is the price of my chair at an AA meeting for as long as I want to be there. It's also the essence of Step 1: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol..." Acceptance of our alcoholism is the only part of AA that is considered a must. If we're not alcoholics, we don't belong in AA. If we're honestly not sure, we try some controlled drinking and see what happens. If we're pretty sure we're alcoholics but don't have sufficient desire to stop drinking, our drinking career is probably not over yet. I thought accepting that I was an alcoholic would be a terrible personal defeat, a blow to my self-esteem that I wouldn't recover from. In another one of those peculiar AA twists, acceptance didn't mean defeat. It was a victory over my personal four horsemen of fear, dishonesty, selfishness, and resentment. I stopped judging my inner self by the standard of other people's outward appearance. I was so incredibly relieved when I finally "came out" that I had to control my urge to tell everyone around me.

Once I accepted myself as I was, it got a lot easier to accept the people and the world around me as they were. It was like driving out of a fog along the California coast. Everything is gloomy and disorienting, with no end in sight, and then, bang, all of a sudden it's clear and sunny. Accepting that I was an alcoholic was a little miracle for three reasons. First, I never thought I'd have the courage to do it. Second, it made me feel really good, not really bad. Third, after that, I found myself more willing to accept other things in life that also pleasantly surprised me.

Then there's willingness, which for me means taking risks.

I'm not talking about driving under the influence or playing games with other people's money or any of the other crazy things I did while I was drinking. The risks I now take require an open mind, and some of them take courage. There is no part of the AA program that requires more willingness than embracing spirituality. When I accepted that I could not beat booze alone, I didn't just give up. I was desperate enough to consider the possibility that a power greater than myself might be able to rescue me. That was a crushing realization for a person who was used to gutting it out. I feared pity more than failure.

Here's another AA story that says something important about willingness. The AA World Service chairman from 1951 to 1956, Bernard B. Smith, was on an airplane when the man seated next to him recognized him and began chatting about AA. In those days, the AA chair was always a non-alcoholic. The man asked Smith why it was that something as practical and admirable as the AA program couldn't have a wider application among people in general. Smith's famous one-word reply: "Motivation."

For me and for many other AAs, the path to motivation was a very rough road. Some of us lost everything before willingness to trust spiritual principles became an option. All of us lost something. As Smith also said, "The tragedy of our life is how deep must be our suffering before we learn the simple truths by which we can live." One of those simple truths is that we can break alcohol's hold at any time we wish.

The price is willingness. For a long time, I was stingy—I was only able to muster dribs and drabs of willingness. It was all I thought I could "afford" at the moment. The good news is that what I could afford was always just enough to keep my AA program going. Considering how clueless I was when I came into AA, it's lucky for me that even a little bit of willingness did the trick.

Catastrophe is not the only route to spirituality. Many folks get there in the context of a religion or personal philosophy. But it seems as though a lot of us in AA choose to rain hell down on ourselves to get to "Uh, this is not working out." A military friend suggested that my spiritual awakening in rehab sounded a bit like what happened to some of our pilots held by the North Vietnamese. The big difference, of course, is that I had the key to my cell all along. I believe Bernard Smith was right. It really is about motivation.

I like to know how things work, and maybe you do too. The way spirituality works in my life is through a simple reinforcing loop. Let's say I'm uncertain about changing jobs. This is just the kind of question I used to ponder over a fifth of vodka. Now I'm more likely to ask my Higher Power for a steer. In response, I may receive an inspiration on the subject that helps me decide. As I mull it all over, I might come to understand why one course of action is the right one. This happy cycle produces both gratitude for my connection with a Higher Power and an incentive to take another spiritual action in the future.

This loop of action-inspiration-understanding-action is admittedly a cautious approach to spirituality, but it's solid and it works for me. Some people get their spirituality all in one big bang. AA's cofounder Bill Wilson did, and in the beginning, he thought all AAs would too. Some people never get it, but maybe they're not really trying. As I said, I'm doing it on the installment plan. The longer I'm in AA, the more I believe that most of us baby-step into spirituality.

It's hard to describe how adding a spiritual dimension to my life makes me feel. Anything I say is bound to sound corny, naive, and maybe even made up. But 2 million other AAs are getting something spiritual out of the program too, and we can't all be wrong about this. So, here goes.

I can think of four tangible benefits of opening up to the spirituality that seems to be a natural result of working the Steps. First, the obsession and craving for alcohol left me. I never thought this would be possible. I believe it's a daily reprieve, but I have a little more confidence in it with every day that goes by. Second, I'm not so damn worried about everything. The fear and anxiety that were my constant companions as a drinker have largely been replaced by assurance and optimism. Not everything is settled in my personal affairs, nor is it ever likely to be. But I seem to know what to work on and how. I'm generally confident that things will turn out, and most things do. Third, I feel as though I've been let in on a few things that previously eluded me, such as these: What's really important? Who am I and what am I supposed to be doing? How do I make things better for me, mine, and others? Finally, I see the day-to-day world in a noticeably different way. My natural surroundings are more beautiful. People I meet are nicer and more interesting. Books I read seem to have more significance. I have new solutions for old problems, and not as many new problems. I'm happier, and I look forward to the routine and the surprises of daily life.

In AA, spirituality is its own reward. It is the source of energy to face my life with confidence. Rationalism, science, and all the other stuff in the reality family couldn't help me with my alcoholic despair because they exclude the personal and the private. Spirituality was the missing piece for me. I don't really know how spirituality works. For now, I've concluded that it's not knowable, only doable. Because I have to see and touch things to believe them, spirituality had to yield results for me in every important part of my life: family, job, friends, dreams, and aspirations. It has.

I don't worry about losing my shiny new spirituality. I assume I have it to use it. As long as my spiritual side gets regular exercise, I'll be okay. We alcoholics are happiest and most successful when we regularly do the right thing in three areas of our lives: for ourselves and our sobriety, for other alcoholics, and for everyone else. Simple, really.

About the Author:
A. J. Adams, a recovering alcoholic, consults, writes, and teaches. He lives with his wife in the Southwest. A. J. Adams is a pen name.

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