My thinking concerning God is probably better understood in the light of my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, where my single most astonishing experience wasn't the fact of my own spiritual awakening, but rather the fact of a spiritual awakening in others. A spiritual awakening is the whole point of the Twelve Steps. These aren’t always of the “burning bush” variety. Mine certainly wasn’t. For me, it was coming to an awareness that I had been lying to myself all of my life, especially about my relationships with other people and my ability to sustain them.
But I had a problem with this spiritual awakening business: I was fettered with a conception of God that was in direct conflict with what I was seeing with my own eyes. I had associated the Power behind this much-needed spiritual awakening with the Almighty God that I had been brought up with, the God in which I had believed for as long as I could remember. But no matter how steadfastly I clung to it, I simply didn't have the honesty or the humility to make the "old time religion" work for me.
In A. A., I saw a colorful cross-section of humanity, people of dissimilar backgrounds, different ages, shapes, sizes, races, genders; the rich and the famous were there too, as well as the poor (I was in this category), the smokers and the non-smokers, all assembled together in one room without wanting to maim, torture and kill one another. The social distinctions and barriers that existed on the other side of the door, did not apply on this side of it. More importantly to me, they were all sober. (Secretly, though, in the beginning, I thought they were all liars. How could anyone sit around for an hour talking about alcohol and not get thirsty? I couldn't wait to get drunk after those first few meetings; I simply could not envision a life without alcohol.).
But what so radically altered my conception of God was more than just the hope of recovery. I saw quite a number of people there with sexual and religious orientations very different from mine. The gays and the bisexuals alongside the celibates and the straights, laughing, talking, drinking coffee, all of them still practicing their familiar lifestyles. I didn't understand. As if that wasn't enough, there was also a mottled assortment of Baptists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Hindus, Muslims - you name it - among them, still practicing their religion. Yet none of them were in disagreement on the matter of a spiritual awakening - religious practices, yes, but a spiritual awakening, no, and all of them claimed to be sober as a result of it. Yes, it may seem weird, but it is true.
My disillusionment at this point was literally hurting me: it wasn’t supposed to be this way. I had been told it wasn't supposed to be this way since I was a child, and all my church-going life, that's what I had heard from the pulpit. Derisively, I asked myself: is this potpourri of insanity, this unlikely gathering of hopelessly lost and misguided, helplessly deluded drunks actually sober by the Devil’s power?! My mother told me so, as did the pastor of the church she attended. Only they could save me! But they knew, as well as I, that they couldn’t.
The only reason I hadn’t been institutionalized (I had had a few short-term visits), was because my mother was willing to take care of me in her own home. I had tried the psychiatrists, the churches, the drugs, the geographical cure and everything else I could think of, to get sober and to stay that way, and none of it worked. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before I would be committed or thrown in jail. I knew it too. My physical and mental health had deteriorated, I thought, beyond any hope of repair. (One night a friend of mine, stunned at my recovery, told me that he never expected to see me again, outside the walls of an institution.). I was 36 years old, and had somehow managed to lose my family, my career, and everything else that was important to me.
I had to scrap the “God of my fathers” and start over. So, I thanked Him for seeing me through life thus far, told Him I was in a bit of a pickle, and then fired Him, with the proviso that I could get Him back in case things didn't work out. I modified my conception of God to fit the circumstances. There was no other way. And I will forever be grateful that I did, as it freed me from the influence of my own deceit, and made a spiritual awakening - a new awareness - possible for me, just like it had for everyone else, irrespective of religion or lifestyle.
Gradually, I came to believe that it isn't a person's language, or their lifestyle, or their intelligence, or anything else we ordinarily judge them by that is important; it was something in the heart, something only God can see. Of all the times I had been "saved" in church - answering the altar call, responding to the beautiful music, the preacher's soft, beckoning voice, feelings of guilt and shame overcoming me - none of them were as lasting or meaningful to me as the salvation from alcoholic madness and death that I was to find in A. A.
And it was this undeniable change that I saw taking place in so many different lives, this spiritual awakening I was witnessing in others who were very much like me, and yet not like me at all, that eventually led me to give God some breathing room, and in so doing, myself and others as well.
