September 1, 2011
A Perspective on “Waiting: A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power” 9
At the end of this week, I look forward to interviewing Marya Hornbacher about her book: “Waiting: A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power” (Hazelden Publishing, May 2011)
I think believers have as much to learn from agnostics about faith as the other way around. And this book is a good start to the new millennium. What she means by waiting as a higher power (I think) is that spirituality isn’t about knowing, getting what you want, or those “aha” moments. It’s about the vulnerability of not knowing, doubting, seeking; “waiting” for the answers to come, regardless of if they come at all. If we are waiting, this is a state of humbleness as we accept that we aren’t in charge, don’t have control, and we don’t know it all.
She says the absence of God in her life is not the absence of spiritual living because sobriety is based on a program of action. Sobriety, at least by way of the 12 steps isn’t an intellectual process; it isn’t about what I think or believe and no one has proven to me that a deity picks and chooses to whom He grants sobriety. Recovery is all about what I do; it’s what I do after I get off my knees that counts.
Marya’s spirituality is a room full of people; I like that idea. Maybe we all have this Sunday-school idea of “being in the light” alone – enlightened, at one with god. But to Marya, it’s only when she is in flight, in action, or in the service of others that the spirit is flowing. The self-indulgent navel gazing gets us ready but it isn’t a ‘spiritual’ state, so to speak.
I finished the book and I find no bitterness, no reactive bigotry. The religious discrimination in Twelve Step programs is very polite most of the time. But for atheists, why wouldn’t someone who was tired of the preaching members praying for them, lash out with equal stubbornness? Shit, I just ranted all over Chad H’s article, Not the “God” Word. I get fed up at times. I came out of the closet about not believing a God exists and Letting Go of God has been the most liberating step in my sobriety. It’s not for everyone, not for the faint of heart. It is lonely at first, but not as lonely as being a faker in a program of fellows, some of which are drunk on dogma.
By “drunk” I mean that belief shouldn’t be over-indulged. None of us should go from “this is what I believe” over the deep end to “this is how it is.” When we are drunk on idealism, self-righteousness, or any other intoxicant, we can’t think straight. We can hurt people and we do. We say things that are insensitive. Believers do that all the time in AA. At least over-indulgent believers do. The moderate believer knows he or she could be wrong, they know only a little and there are many ways to skin a cat.
Atheists can be drunk on dogma too. Calling belief in god a crutch more crippling than booze would be this type of drunk on dogma talk. Telling someone, “When you grow up you won’t need that baby-sitter, God, to tuck you in at night and tell you to brush your teeth.” Pretty obnoxious isn’t it? Well it’s no better than Bill Wilson telling an atheist “We once believed as you did.” How the fuck can he know what I believe? Just because he resisted God and I do too, that does not mean we have the same world-view. If AA told Catholics they had to convert, it wouldn’t be any more arrogant than telling someone they can’t get sober without finding God. It just isn’t true; This notion is the delusion of drunkenness.
It seems that AA finds not enough room in the middle. From one drunken, “There is no God, it’s all a crock” while we were out-there in our self-will-run-riot self-destruction, to “only Divine providence can relieve our merciless obsession” is rather naïve and extreme. In the middle there is so much room for everyone to breathe. I know that I can, like countless others, live a value-based, sober, seeking life without prayer or mythology. Others can indulge mythology without offending me so long as they don’t tell me “God as I understand Him” is inclusive language.
It might have been a good starting point last millennium, but we have to do better if AA is going to be more than a couple thousand drunks holding hands saying the Lord’s Prayer and reading the same 164 pages on our 100th anniversary. If we don’t adapt we will become obsolete, just as the Washingtonians and Oxford Group did before us.
From what I see, Marya shows no sign of fatigue from AA patronization. I look forward to hearing what her secret is. She politely explains how it is for her without preaching or drawing a line in the sand.
I live in a city where agnostic discrimination is tolerated at our intergroup and a “White Paper on Non-Believers” is being circulated as a warning about the risk to AA from giving a voice to non-Christian/Judeo sobriety. It reads like Mein Kampf. It is just the type of drunk-on-dogma discrimination that can only make AA smaller and less helpful.
Marya, I am “waiting” to hear what you have to say.
INTERVIEW will be early September, I will have more to share soon.
Sep 02, 2011 @ 13:11:13
I believe in A god but not necessarily your idea of god or anyone else. I am however sometimes reluctant to voice my beliefs not because I am unsure of them or that I don’t stand up for them but for the simple fact that I know there is always going to be some asshole who tells me I’m wrong and will argue until the end that they are following the right way. I choose not to waste my breath or time… even if it is granted from God or Buddha or whoever they think gave them life.
I attended A Private Christian College and got my degree in Theology with an emphasis in Christian Counseling… but sadly as the years progressed the peers I was with I saw many of them to believe less and less what they were being tought. A friend once told me that the more he knows the less he believes… so i guess some things are best kept a mystery of sorts.
Just as I prefer to keep my personal beliefs… a mystery.
Sep 02, 2011 @ 14:22:14
What a profound sharing, thank you Eve. Maybe an open mind and an education bring us all to the middle. I have heard Atheists say in AA or out, that which they could not experience with the five senses was a waste of time and/or irrelevant. But in pursuing Spiritual possibilities they developed awe for the unknown, the unknowable and the non-material, spiritual world.
Not to dismiss your believe or those of the strict secularist, but maybe as we explore ideas that move us from rigid or literal constructs, we find our way to a common ground in our human experience.
Bill Wilson is quoted in Ernest Kurtz’s Not God, “As time passes our book literature has a tendency to get more and more frozen, a tendency for conversion into something like dogma, a human trait I am afraid we can do little about. We may as well face the fact that AA will always have its fundamentalists, its absolutists, and its relativists.”
I hope the rooms can be home to all of us and for me, I don’t want to limit my learning to the people who sing from the same hymnal. If I surround myself with those who sing the songs as I do, that’s the end of my learning. Yes Bill, we will always have the fundamentalists, absolutist and relativist – let’s hope we all feel welcome and all treat each other with dignity.
Sep 02, 2011 @ 17:57:19
Thankyou for posting about this disaster.
When we look at the big picture, we have a large group of very unqualified people demanding religious conversion to newcomers to this group. We have corporate AA actively recruiting judges, parole officers, rehabs, prisons, social workers, the medical community including organ transplant teams, and employers to get fresh meat in their rehabs and meetings. Recruitment propaganda to these programs is available at the corporate site AA.org. All of this is to sell promotional material from AAWS and Hazelden.
According to the corporate AA website, AA.org, the vast majority of people are forced and coerced to the AA faith through various channels. It is by means a system of promotion rather than attraction. This is a $20 billion dollar a year industry, complete with weekly informcials such as A&E Intervention, TLC Addicted, and the murderer Drew Pinsky with his trainwreck of a show.
This process apparently is promoted as ‘arresting’ (as it is indoctrinated)that no one can be actually ‘cured’ of a concocted ‘disease’. A disease that is not only not an actual disease, but really has no support in the academic, medical, or scientific community. Only in the AA faith, and its profitable arm, the recovery industry cartel, does the faulty disease model of addiction have any following.
Yet apparently the worship of the AA god and strict adherence and promotion of the AA faith and its faulty theology is still wrongly promoted as program of spiritual enlightenment.
It is sad that so many people people continue to die because the faulty and ineffective AA faith continues to recieve so much unearned admiration and undeserved credibility.
Sep 02, 2011 @ 20:27:43
“It’s about the vulnerability of not knowing, doubting, seeking; “waiting” for the answers to come, regardless of if they come at all. If we are waiting, this is a state of humbleness as we accept that we aren’t in charge, don’t have control, and we don’t know it all.”
That’s it! That’s what faith is to me. God is a construct, a useful word to describe (for me) something “out there” that is not me, that is bigger than me, and that higher hopes for me than me sitting around on a barstool drinking my liver into a pickle. For me, “faith” is a kind of patience, a trust that things will work out somehow, things that initially I may think are bad may actually turn out to benefit me in the long run, that I don’t know what wonderful things may be around the corner, so I may as well forge on and not give up. “God” and “faith” (for me) simply help me get over myself… with them, I stop trying to control outcomes all the time and accept that fact with serenity instead of its freaking me out and making me all anxious (as I was when I was drinking).
Perhaps I’m lucky because I’m in an AA group where not too many people go off on preaching tangents and nobody says you have to embrace one particular idea of God. There are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, and probably everything in between. My sponsor is Buddhist. I am not. It doesn’t matter.
I do agree that proselytizing of any kind (be it religious, political, or a belief that dogs are better than cats) can be a real turn-off. I also think we could really stand to update the language of the Steps. It’s pretty unpalatable to me, for instance, to state that I was born with character defects that only God can help me overcome. I am continually having to translate the Steps into more modern phraseology that I can stomach.
(The one I just referred to is more like, “Now that I’ve realized what a hypocritical lying selfish jerk I can be when I’m drinking, I have faith that I can start aligning my words and behaviors with the values I actually hold.” Haha)
But I suppose if you get for a sponsor a very dogmatic religious person who believes their way is the ONLY way, then your experience with AA isn’t going to be a good one. Thank goodness you can always change groups or change your sponsor…..
Sep 02, 2011 @ 22:03:29
There are versions of AA’s steps translated into a secular or agnostic language.
http://aaagnostics.org/agnostic12steps.html
http://aatorontoagnostics.org/the-12-steps-secular-version/
AA Agnostic Groups have been part of AA since 1975
http://www.agnosticaanyc.org/worldwide.html
The Agnostic Preamble is:
This group of A.A. attempts to maintain a tradition of free expression, and conduct a meeting where alcoholics may feel free to express any doubts or disbeliefs they may have, and to share their own personal form of spiritual experience, their search for it, or their rejection of it. We do not endorse or oppose any form of religion or atheism. Our only wish is to assure suffering alcoholics that they can find sobriety in A.A. without having to accept anyone else’s beliefs or having to deny their own.
Such groups have found support in the General Service Structure that recognizes the rights granted under Tradition Four to autonomously read what they want, say what they want, take what they want, leave what they want and add what they want.
Some Intergroups, most recently Indy and Toronto Canada have exercised their accountability to no higher authority and intolerantly discriminated, delisting the agnostic groups from the directory. These things will sort themselves out. Literalists say you can’t “change the Steps,” that is blasphemy and the agnostic groups say, “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.” Like gay AA or young-peoples AA which now both enjoy almost universal acceptance, fear is behind the intolerance as Bill Wilson warned us about in his essays of the Twelve Traditions.
A favorite anti-agnostic argument is that the World Service Manual requires a 75% consensus from AA members to change the Steps; true. But agnostic groups are not asking AA to change anything – the rule refers to the Steps being changed universally. The General Service Office declares that AA does not approve or disapprove of anything read at an AA meeting. That’s up to the group.
Some agnostic groups and members are exercising their rights under Tradition Three and Four to interpret, post, read and share as they see fit. We are AA members and groups if we say we are. But this God-free recovery “threat” is a hot topic which will take a generation to put behind us.
Not all believers think agnostics should not be permitted to call their group’s AA, not all non-believers embrace the secular version of the Steps.
For the record, Marya is candid about the archaic language in the literature but finds inspiration and a way to make the Big Book work for her. She quotes the Big Book and says, “We stopped fighting with anyone or anything.” She thinks that if you don’t like the way they talk at one meeting, find another down the road. Her minority creed in AA of non-theistic belief has been no barrier to working the AA principals in her life and getting the benefits of recovery. I look forward to sharing more about “how Marya see’s it,” soon.
Apr 19, 2012 @ 18:18:17
Joe- I loved your write-up on Marya’s book and I loved the book. I agreed so much with what you said about it being lonely in the rooms when you are honest about your disbelief. I, too, would rather be this kind of lonely than the other, which would be living a lie.
Sep 02, 2011 @ 23:25:08
Sounds like I’d enjoy her book! Looking forward to reading what you have to say about your interview.
Thanks for an important discussion.
Joyce
Sep 05, 2011 @ 17:59:35
I am a non-theist whose higher power at this point is the goodness that I see manifest in the world on a daily basis. The steps have worked me (not a typo) for 23 years and 4 months now, and in that time I have witnessed the miracle of recovery in countless lives. Sometimes I have encountered those who have insisted that their HP is the only one, but for the most part it seems that the AA traditions and steps make it possible for just about anyone to engage in recovery. There are those, too, like Deconstructor (very clever name) who seem to have a bone to pick with the movement and would love to see it cease to exist, for some reason, and your voice is welcomed as well, because we in recovery realize “that we know only a little, that more will be revealed.” My empirical experiential evidence, aka, my life in sobriety, points to the conclusion that AA and the program of recovery it has outlined and freely shared with a multitude of other sufferers from addiction and compulsion is quite effective, and for that I am grateful.
Sep 21, 2011 @ 20:31:07
Meet Marya
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVtCYI4URXA
free samples from the book coming to you here.
Marya deals with adapting to the Big Book language with a Gen-X brain:
http://www.thefix.com/content/marya-hornbacher-takes-god9165?page=all