Easy Does ItI am an alcoholic, an adult child of an alcoholic, married to an alcoholic, and have ingested more than my fair share of legal and illegal substances. I consider myself to be the luckiest person in the world. I get to go to any meeting I want.
It appears we have some folks in a huge hurry. Whoopee! Let’s just whiz through these steps and things will be much better. Not so fast, now. Remember this is not a one-time event – this is a conversion experience and it will continue the rest of your life. I toyed with the idea of replacing the word alcohol with some generic term but decided to leave that part up to you. Consider it “active participation” without the Kumbaya and tambourines.
When I first went to AA, I was determined to be the best “sober” person I could possibly be. After all, I was a darn good drunk and I wanted to continue being the best at what ever I did. I obsessively studied my Big Book, which is what we call our publication; “Alcoholics Anonymous.” My copy of “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” quickly became dog-eared. I studied everything I could possibly lay my hands on until I was an expert in the field of recovery. What great drunken thinking that turned out to be. About year three it hit me – I’m supposed to live the 12 steps - not just work them.
Let’s take a look at the entire 12 Step program. Just like the Ten Commandments, there is a sensible order to the steps. The first three have to do with our relationship with God. The first step is the most important, and all the others flow from that instant of recognition of our helplessness without God in our lives. Without God we are nothing. It is He who willed us into existence and who sustains us. It is this step of surrender that will open the doors to the greatest freedom you have ever experienced.
Now please don’t confuse surrender to God, the love of Christ Jesus, and the workings of the Holy Spirit, with lack of free will. Nobody gets to sit back in their recliner and say, “ Well, this is just the way I am.” Or even worse, “This is the way God made me.” Pretty tacky to blame your Creator for your problems.
Steps 4 through 9 are the action steps of this program. These are the steps that give us the practical actions we need to take on our spiritual journey. And finally, steps 10 through 12 are the maintenance steps. Ignoring these last steps will place your spiritual condition at great risk.
Those of you familiar with Ignatian spirituality will see the parallels between these two systems. Any Catholic should be able to spot Examination of Conscience and the Sacrament of Reconciliation reflected in steps 4 and 5.
If you are someone who is dealing with the addiction problems of a loved one, I do have a small bit of information for you. This program is about you - not about your “fixing” someone else. Only they are capable of fixing themselves. It would be like going to confession and telling the priest everything your spouse did wrong. Priests just love that!
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
Picture: Dr. Bob's home in Akron, Ohio considered to be the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous. There are twelve steps leading up to the front door.
11 comments:
I like these twelve steps. God seems to be an inextricable component in their ability to help others convalesce. I have to be honest with you, Auntie A, when I read about your surroundings it was almost inevitable that you would turn to alcohol. That type of environment, where so many were prone to alcoholism, must have had some kind of injurious impact on you.
Keep writing. I’m reading.
I had heard of the AA's 12 step programme before, but I honestly had no idea the steps were based on the power of God.
How dim can you get?
I got familiar with the 12 steps thru Al-Anon, the program for family/friends of people with addictions. Turns out we had a lot of the same hangups our addicted loved ones had. I left the program as I soon found myself looking for more than the Al-Anon program provided. I see it as a backbone to my healthy spiritual life (much as the 12 Commandments are) but it was missing my "next step", as the Beatitudes are the next step to the Commandments.
BTW Mother, watch out! We Christians are everywhere, and if we see something we like and haven't invented yet, we'll file the serial numbers off, baptize it, and make it our own! Copyright law doesn't apply to Christianity!
Adrienne: This is the most fantastically original and grace-filled thing I've ever seen any attempt in blogdom.
God be with you. I pray you reach many thru this series.
MOTL - you are not dim at all. You are about the smartest person I have "met" in a long time.
AA - so many people find God through AA and Al-anon.
Tom - compared to most folks I grew up in fairly decent circumstances. I would have become an alcoholic anyway. Most of my relative's alcoholism did not have much of an impact.
Adrienne, I know. It was just my experience that a good number made their particular 12 step program their "church" and didn't use it to move "up" to formal worship.
Thanks for sharing this, Adrienne. I've gone to a few AA meetings with friends trying to understand their addictions and the program better, but your post really clarified things a great deal. I pray all alcoholics find their way through these steps.
I think we all know someone with alcoholism. For my it's my SIL and her entire family and my husband's uncle. Very tragic.
One of our priests brought this program to us -- us being those who wanted to evangelize.. he said it would be the first step to telling anyone about God's love. So many of us couldn't figure out for the life of us how this would help anyone who didn't have an addiction to substances, etc.
If one looks at the back of the workbook, one finds the signs of recovery. Recovery from what? Life. We are broken. In my first reading of those signs, I could honestly only check off 2 or 3. That was a real eye-opener. By the time we'd truly worked the Steps, there were only two or three remaining goals. Turns out many of us had simply survived. Oh gosh, there's so much I could say about it all. We did the 12 Steps in the Bible (Michele Matto), and then 12 Steps of Spirituality, over the space of nearly 20 months. I would heartily recommend it to anyone. Painful? Ow.. even the memory is painful. When one hands Him the scalpel -- honest with God, self, and at least one other -- one had better expect excising followed by iodine.. whew. But one had also better expect to find that we are indeed loved Unconditionally. And can love others unconditionally, too.
Oh, Adrienne. :-) Beautiful. Beautiful.
Carol
Adrienne- Thanks for the continuing wonderful series!
AA - I found that because I was already in a church family when I went to Al-anon that it was missing something that I did receive from my church. However, I still suffer from some of those issues and have thought about looking for a study gruop to do a little "work."
Thanks again, Adrienne. Your post is powerful because it's honest. Pity the first two have been so SHORT. Just when I was beginning to move to the music it stopped. I think you need to do a 'fuller' series .. immediately after this 'intro' .. hehe. Thanks again.
again well done, my friend :-) I love the way you interweave the program with the Church. it shouldnt surprise me, as it all comes from the same Author...
Post a Comment