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God or no God is not the Question.
“We came to be aware that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
—Step 2 of the 12 Steps
“I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities.
But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.”
—Reza Aslan
Everyone has a God story. This is a big statement given that many of us do not even believe in a God. The term God requires one to think about the existence or non-existence of God. Is God a being or a non-being? Your God story is an uncovered narrative about how you failed to resource yourself through healthy self-parenting to address unmet needs. To fill in the emptiness, you learned to rely upon a cocktail of addictive experiences or dysfunctional behaviors. Like consuming empty calories, your soul encountered deprivation which simply craved more empty calories through addictive/unhealthy behaviors.
Through working the first step with your sponsor you unearthed your story of addictive behavior. Now it is time to get clear about your God story.
You remember thinking about going to Sunday School as a kid. It was fun at first but quickly it became a drag. Eventually, you didn’t go back and you can’t remember much about the experience. Your parents were never the religious type. Even so, you learned to relate spirituality as being religious and that you were not! You navigated pretty well through adolescence and into adulthood without any connection with God, religion, or spirituality. After all, you figured those words applied to the life of a monk which always seemed weird to you.
But, here you are broken with out-of-control addictive behavior and your sponsor is telling you that for the next month, you will be challenged to get in touch with your “God story” by completing a Step 2 in a 12-step recovery program!
Just what is a power greater than yourself? Is it outside, inside, or both? Some identify God as a religious figure, Yahweh, Buddha, Jesus, Holy Spirit, etc. Others reference Nature, the collective energy of a 12-step group, or the energy that connects all things in the Universe. Any and all of these references can be experienced outside or within your sense of self.
Eckhart Tolle describes God as “the transcendent source of all life”. Reza Aslan (author of No God but God) states that he can believe in God as long as he understands the metaphor of that belief. Some feel that God is in your spirit and therefore you are with God and God is with you. It’s sort of like the sun ray is like the sun but not the sun. Likewise at the same time so too are you both God and not God.
These are different concepts of God that fit for many but are incompatible with others. In Step 2 your goal is to figure out how you resource yourself with energy and strength that gives you sanity in the chaos of your upside-down world of addictive behavior. It is not to insist that you understand or believe in God as defined or described by any other person. Step 2 allows you to not even reference or believe in a God.
As you are introduced to Step 2, you ask your sponsor, “Then why in the hell do they even reference God”? It’s because the men who created the steps were religiously influenced. Your sponsor is clear with you. You do not have to be religious in any way!
You begin to understand that spirituality is about connection to yourself and others. You haven’t been emotionally present to be connected to anyone including yourself. You’ve been outside yourself and spaced, always looking for some way to fill in the emptiness with a dopamine rush.
The challenge in addiction is that it brings you to a very unhappy experience of misery—physically, emotionally, and spiritually (a lack of connection). Your miserable brokenness causes you to search within yourself. It awakens your consciousness to your own brilliance which can only be accessed through comprehension and awareness of strength that comes from a deeper inner connection. Your experience of misery in addiction is the universe’s ploy to help you get out of your comfort zone to experience the growth and enlightenment of recovery.
You may think of that connection as a Higher Power or energy source. But for sure it will lead you to a deeper awareness of your own personal brilliance. You are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe.
The process relies upon many metaphors and paradoxes. Your out-of-control life in addiction is a metaphor of what you must die to in order to live. You must die to your ego (I want what I want when I want it) in order to live with an awakened consciousness of joyous peace.
There is the paradox that “in order to know God is to humbly embrace what you don’t know”. Here is the metaphor of “knowing God” (enlightenment) hinging upon the experience of “not knowing” (humility). The process underscores a move from an awakened consciousness that does not know, to the concept of acceptance that somehow in not knowing you comprehend knowing God.
Your sponsor asks you to make a list of all the experiences of being traumatized or traumatizing others that you can recall in your lifetime. So you do. He tells you that God (Higher Power, personal brilliance, energy source, etc) can be found in the wound of your trauma experience, whether you are the victim or the perpetrator. He tells you that spirituality, your Step 2 work, is in the acceptance of the flawed, the imperfect, and the wound. Healing means not the elimination but the embracing of imperfection. That part of trauma, victim or perpetrator, that is most difficult to acknowledge or embrace is where God, Higher Power, or personal brilliance meets your conscious awareness to provide healing. This is where you practice believing that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe! It requires conditioning and practice. Yet, Step 2 provides a transformation of self from a life of addiction. This is your opportunity to embrace a deep belief in who you are (your being) that transcends everything that you have shamefully ever done.
Though it seemed as if Step 1 was like getting naked, Step 2 goes yet deeper to uncover your deepest personal brilliance that addiction had hidden with shame. Practicing Step 2 restores sanity. Like Camus once wrote, “You begin in the depth of winter to realize deep within yourself an invincible summer”. After a month of sleuthing Step 2 metaphors and paradoxes, you are ready to address Step 3.
