Hope for the heathen: a gentle rant

Damn it, I lost track of time again and missed two days of posting. I can't believe I'm going to be somebody's employee as of Tuesday. Watch and tremble, my friends. Watch and tremble.

Speaking of which--the university, not trembling--at tonight's meeting a fellow made repeated references to the university administration. He has tons of sobriety, as does his wife (who comes with him to the meeting). Safe vibes from both of them. Feeling emboldened as well as perkier than usual, I went into chatty mode after the meeting and told him that I'm about to start a job at the university myself.

Turns out he is the super-duper head honcho of the very division where I'll be working--my boss's boss's boss, or something along those lines.

Smallish world, it is. As he put it, when I hear my colleagues swearing about the guy in charge, I'll know who they're talking about!

Coincidences aside, tonight's meeting kicked some serious spiritual ass. It was a step meeting, meaning that the group reads about one of the steps and then talks about it as it applies to their sobriety. Tonight was Step Eleven, which is about maintaining conscious contact with "God" as we understand "him." (Grumble.)

The reading was about prayer and meditation. It was rather prescriptive, and it pissed me off. Within AA there's a weird contradiction, to me, about the godthingie. You get to determine your own understanding of your Higher Power, but once you do that the program directs you to do a bunch of things that really make sense only if you believe in an entity much or exactly like the traditional Judeo-Christian divine daddy. You're supposed to come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. You're supposed to turn your will over to "God," attempting to follow "his" will rather than your own. You're supposed to pray about your character defects and humbly ask God to remove them. (Doesn't happen easily, says the program, but you are supposed to give it a whirl.) You're supposed to engage in daily attempts to commune with God--Step Eleven.

Most of this advice presumes a definition of Higher Power that includes its personal interest in and involvement with the everyday affairs of every human being. Many, many people in AA believe that God "has a plan" for each of us. As I've noted here previously, I can't swallow these ideas. I just can't. There is material in AA's literature about the arrogance of the intellectual, the unfortunates who just can't quit the "debating society." Well, I'm among them.

I've heard it said that newcomers often utilize the program as their Higher Power "at first," the implication being that most "progress" to faith in a deity. (I've met one old-timer who still, after something like 30 years, views the spirit of the fellowship of AA as his Higher Power. Everybody else who talks about starting this way says they ended up with an understanding of a godthingie after they'd hung around the program for a while.)

Another answer is that the incomprehensibility of god doesn't preclude attempting to connect with it or to live by its "will." To me that's like praying to the Great Invisible. It feels inauthentic, made up because nothing else makes sense but you gotta have a god of some kind. That's not for me either.

I haven't written about this stuff for a couple of weeks because I just had to quit banging my head against it for a while. I was feeling some anger toward the program in an abstract sense because I feel marginalized--still do, clearly. So when the subject of prayer came up in tonight's meeting, I got my undies in a bundle, and quickly. Humph, I thought. Don't tell me how to pray. Humph.

Then came the sharing. Some of it was entirely run of the fatherly mill. Then a woman named S spoke. "I don't have a personal god, a god who looks like me or anything like that," she said. "But I do pray every morning. Mostly it's about gratitude. I thank the earth for supporting us with its resources. I thank the sun for the incredible miracle of holding our planet in a life-sustaining orbit. I thank the plants for helping us breathe--for chlorophyll!" (Here she laughed at herself.) "When I feel a need to pray for someone who's in pain, I picture that person in my mind, surrounded by healing light."

Lest I misrepresent her, S didn't mean that she thinks the sun or the earth or the plants are sentient beings. She meant that her Higher Power is simply the miraculous universe; her spirituality is about a sense of wonder at her tiny part in all of it.

That I get.

This HP of hers is nothing at all like the one I see reflected in the steps and the literature. Yet S works the program; she's got years of sobriety. I don't know how she reconciles the seeming contradictions between her HP with the specifics of the steps, but I will be asking.