AA, Recovery and a Higher Power

Since my induction in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous years ago, a significant constant I have observed in all that time is the problem or challenge presented in the concept of a higher power. The concept is evoked early in the program's 12 Steps: Step 2: "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." And soon thereafter, that "power," arguably, is identified or at least linked to a concept of "god:" Step 3: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

Maybe because God is evoked so early in the Steps and spelled with a capital "G," any debate intended to argue that God is meant to be a "spiritual" rather than a theological concept seems to be automatically based on a religious foundation. This can be a hard sell of the Program to the newcomer and the AA-seasoned veteran who is either agnostic or atheist. Even to those who have a religious-based belief in God, surrendering to Him provokes a counter-argument that He abandoned us when we needed Him most, that He would have rescued us from the depth to which we sank as alcoholics and from the outcome of our drinking. After all, where was God when we got fired for drinking on the job or showing up hung over, if we showed up at all? Where was God when our spouses and families gave up on us, and where was He when a judge who'd had enough of us showing up in his courtroom threw the maximum sentence at us?

There is an argument that some AA long-timers who try to "convince" the Doubting Thomas that belief in a Higher Power is an absolute in recovery come close, as they say, to "rewriting the program" instead of simply "sharing" their "experience, strength and hope." That said, in my own experience, I always had a belief in God but as a religious entity. Accordingly, my first "surrender" to Him early in my recovery was from a religious perspective. It didn't work.

Instead, I came to understand that my relationship to my Higher Power, whom I chose to call God, had to be rooted in something other than religion. Our relationship - mine and God's - evolved to my understanding that He gave me, just as He did to all other people, certain "gifts" that He expected me to use in my recovery. Not that God would not be there for me when I called on Him, but He expected me to assume responsibility for both my alcoholism and my recovery by putting those gifts into action.

If I were asked today how to name or identify my Higher Power, it might be the use of the common sense or logic that God gave everyone or with which we were simply born. And this was my own "spiritual awakening" that the program promises, when I understood that I did to myself what I blamed God or alcohol for, and when I accepted - however reluctantly or unwillingly - that I was responsible to the consequences of my destructive behavior as a drinking alcoholic. In short, I understood what being responsible for my own recovery meant and that my Higher Power, if nothing more than my common sense or logic, would help me through that recovery.

While the message of AA program itself has always remained constant for me, my own recovery program that integrates AA's multiple concepts has changes. Which as it should be because life is an ever-changing process; what works for me now didn't work three years ago and, my Higher Power granting, what works for me now will not work three years from now because I hope I will "grow" in the next three years. But today, my program that the logic as my guide is summarized in three concepts - choice, consequences, responsibility. That is, if I drink, I choose to drink and not because my life isn't what I want it to be; when I make the choice to drink, that choice, like all others in life, will have consequences; and with consequences comes personal responsibility to the consequences. If I don't want to be responsible to consequences of my choices because my experience has been that the consequences are too costly, the choice is simple: don't drink.

Whether we call our Higher Power "God" or our own logical and common sense, we can reach that "spiritual awakening" the program promises. For me, that spiritual awakening is understanding that I do have the choice not to drink.