The 12 Steps – Step 3 – A Decision

March 23, 2011 under lenten, personalinthepubliceye, thehumancondition, theology

In this series of posts, I’m reflecting on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 3

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

For this step, I’m going to examine the assumptions hidden inside – the claims  about who God is, and who we are.

Made a decision

This step means believing:

  • We can decide!
  • We can choose things!
  • We are not animals driven by instinct and urges!

If we have been led to believe that we are a product strictly of our genetics and our culture and our brain chemistry – then taking this step will not deliver us from badness. Genetics and culture and brain chemistry will have to deliver us from badness, because that is all there is. To stop taking a drug, we’ll probably have to start taking another drug. We may struggle to make a cosmic case as to why the one drug is better than the other.

This step demands a belief in something more than a natural world of cause and effect. This step demands a belief in decisions as real things.

Decisions are real things; we can make them; We have the power to make real decisions.

to turn our will and our lives over

  • We have a will!
  • We have lives!

Our will is that thing we have which enables us to make real decisions. Our decision making center, it is above and beyond natural cause and effect. The Step 3 universe is not built out of a complex web of fated dominoes sprinkled with random chance.

Another belief - we can turn it over. I’ll admit, I’m not sure of all the implications of saying “I can turn my will over to… “. At the very least it means there is a thing outside myself which is able to receive my will. And another hidden belief - I won’t die if I turn my will over!

(It’s valid to say this is an assumption of any of the steps – “Following this step will not cause you to die.” Just as it’s fair to say that another assumption of any of the steps is “Following this step will help you escape from the badness.”)

over to the care of God

More claims about the nature of God!

  • God is able(powerful and willing) to receive my will and my life (without me dying).
  • God is greater than my will. (else how could he receive it?)
  • God is greater than my life. (else how could he care for them?)
  • God is willing to care for my will and life – he will not refuse my turning over.

The use of the word care is special. We can’t use the word care about everything. Rocks don’t care. Gravity doesn’t care. This is an emotional word. And God cares. God takes care.

In order to take care of our lives and wills, God must be able to prevent certain bad things from happening (e.g we die) and ensure that certain good things keep happening (e.g. we keep living).

So to follow this step, we accept that God has the concept of good things and of bad things. (Otherwise how could he know which stuff to stop and which stuff to perpetuate?)

Mind you, we already knew that back in step 2, because if God is restoring us to goodness, he must necessarily have the concept of goodness. The assumption in Step 2 is that sanity is good, otherwise we wouldn’t be taking the step.

as we understood him

Now here is a controversial statement. This is what is most likely to make someone look at the 12 steps and say, “Look, they’re not Christian.”

But this far into the steps, “God as we understood him” is not a completely open concept.

If we have walked to Step 3, we have already accepted these things about God:

  • He is greater than we are
  • He is greater than our life
  • He is greater than our will
  • He is sane
  • He is external to us
  • He is powerful enough to restore us to goodness
  • His nature does not preclude us from restoring us to goodness – he is, in some case, willing
  • He can receive control of our will and our life
  • He cares
  • He has a concept of good and bad
  • It matters that we believe in his existence
  • He does not change his nature (at least in the time it takes to restore us to goodness)

Wow!

Given the picture the steps present of God and of us, it’s clear that a faithful follower of the steps is bound to certain views. I am not a God (I am powerless; I must turn over to God). I am not a meatsack (I have a will). I’m sure there are more worldview premises that can be dragged out from the steps thus far, but I think these are a good starting point.

There is another massive belief in the clause, “as we understood him”. It assumes we can hold an understanding of God that is serviceable enough to deliver us (practically, tangibly, presently- not just abstractly) from badness.

Not a perfect understanding of God… But an understanding of God that is at least powerful enough to turn our lives completely around.

Perhaps the greatest gem of this step is that we don’t have to understand God perfectly in order to trust him with our lives and wills. But it’s terribly important that we believe.

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The 12 Steps – Step 2 – A Sane Power

March 21, 2011 under lenten, personalinthepubliceye, thehumancondition, theology

In this series of posts, I’m reflecting on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 2

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

I love the 12 steps because they’re so terse; every word adds a critical stone to their foundation. Let’s look at the phrases in this step.

Step one left us mired in a badness we were powerless against, by our very nature. Step two outlines a way out.

Came to believe

Why came to believe? Why not, “Believed”, full stop? There’s big wisdom here because there is a journey in believing. Although we can profess anything, we can’t just flip a switch and change our belief.

And why believe? Why should believing have anything to do with addiction or powerlessness?

If a Power exists, it exists. If it doesn’t,  it doesn’t.  What does our believing matter? What does it say about “a Power” that we are required to believe in it if we want to stop drinking?

a Power greater than ourselves

Greater means better. It means more good – in this case, more powerful.

could

What are the implications of could? The first implication is that the Power is powerful enough to restore sanity. This means a lot!

Does an insane power restore sanity, or does a sane one? When we say a Power could restore sanity, we are saying that the Power is sane; that we choose to believe in a sane Power.

Saying, “could” also implies there is nothing in the nature of the Power that prevents it from restoring. Conditions may apply, but it is possible. It is able to. There’s a distinction here.

Picture in your mind an Olympic swimmer who wakes up one morning, and finds that he is suddenly terrified of water. He is powerful enough to win the race – he has trained hard enough, has enough strength – but he cannot. He stands at the side of the pool, bone dry yet shivering, because something in his nature is holding him back. He is powerful enough, but he is unable.

Saying could means that circumstances exist in which the Power is willing (if it has a will) to restore.

restore us to sanity

There is a potent claim here - I am insane. It means that I, in the life I am living now, do not perceive the world as it really is. Insanity means interacting with the world in a way that is not based on the truth of things.

This is an admission that I hold to and live in a false reality.

There is another claim, hidden in the word restore.  The assumption is that there was a time when I was not this way. It means that before the badness caught me, I was sane. I was truly well and I can again be so.

This means there is a goodness. There is a good life, to which we can be restored. If you do not believe in a previous goodness, restoration has no meaning for you. We don’t restore things to rubble, corrosion and chaos. We restore things back to the beautiful things they once were.  The opposite of restoration is destruction and vandalism.

As with the first step, we don’t need to be saved from abstract insanity or generic insanity or from someone else’s insanity.

I need to be restored from my insanity, the badness that I suffer from.

Came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

It should not be surprising that when we look at the language of the step, it’s presuppositions and assumptions all carve out the nature of “a Power” that is the nature of God as the Bible describes him.

This step is talking about the Christian God; it is Biblically derived. These are not my opinions – these are historical facts. The AA program grew out of the Oxford Group, which based its principles on the Bible.

This step has stripped its language about the Christian God down to the most general, most concise statement needed to fight alcoholism.  Yet the Christian God he remains.

The “Christian God” is the God that Jesus Christ believed in. The picture of “a Power” described in this step – a sane, willing, capable power that has control over the goodness of life – is exactly the picture that Jesus had of his Father.

And the picture of the world – the badness, the insanity, the unmanageability and the powerlessness – is exactly the picture that Jesus had of the world.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. — Matthew 9:36 (NIV)

The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach  good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” — Luke 4: 17-21

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The 12 Steps – Step 1 – Powerless

March 18, 2011 under lenten, personalinthepubliceye, thehumancondition, theology

In this series of posts, I’m reflecting on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 1 – “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

The first step starts with an assumption – there is such a thing as badness and we are caught in it.

There are two bold claims in this Step that point to the source of our suffering.

  1. We are powerless.
  2. Our lives have become unmanageable.

These two claims seem to fly in the face of most everything we are taught growing up. We’re taught to work hard (a good thing), achieve much (another good thing), and be as powerful as we can be. We are taught to be in control; to be the kings of our own world.

This step counters:  ”We are caught in badness and we cannot get out.”

The Bible says we are slaves to sin and death: caught, enslaved, and powerless. The Biblical picture is not that we have merely failed to be hardworking, diligent and upstanding. It is not that we’ve just doing a bad job of upholding our childhood teaching.

We have failed and we are doing a bad job, but the Biblical message, and the supposition of this step,  is that our failure is innate, inevitable and chronic, because it comes from who we are. This is our  powerlessness.

The first step is to STOP. Stop denying these forces exist. Stop trying to cope; stop trying to manage. Stop holding on to a false image of power that keeps us from receiving a true understanding of what power is, how it works, and where it comes from.

We shouldn’t think abstractly about this. This is not a theological premise but the very present reality of our own situation. The step does not say, “I am subject to an abstract master.” No. I am subject to alcohol. Specific. Tangible.

If we’re interested in mind games, this step will not help.

If we are serious about changing our real lives,  we must looking at what is causing us misery.  We won’t address alcohol problems by talking about general problems of sin and suffering.  We must address our problems with alcohol.

There is a massive assumption in this step. This step assumes, in life, there is goodness and it assumes there is badness. It assumes that goodness and badness are knowable.  In order to take this step, we have to first know that those things which alcohol is bringing into are lives are bad. They are a problem.

We have a problem. That we can’t solve.

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The 12 Steps

March 16, 2011 under lenten, thehumancondition, theology

I don’t drink. I never have.

And yet… I love the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have a copy of them on my cubicle wall.

The first time I read the twelve steps, I was shocked, because though I’d heard of AA I’d always thought, “Therapy group, yeah, nothing special here.”

But the 12 steps are special. They’re beautiful. They’re scary.

They hold tremendous power and influence (Google them – you’ll find 170 million results) and are, I believe, as good a 12 step manual for coming to know God as will be found anywhere.  Their power is obviously God, and it’s not the material in the steps that is novel, but the difficulty in actually following them.

Edit: I should add that the steps stand in direct opposition to our secular Western culture – the assumptions they make are commonly reviled in the court of public opinion.

They describe, in clear and simple language, the path of confession and repentance that John the Baptist preached, the path that prepares our hearts to welcome Jesus the Lord.

They come from the Christian Church. The message?

“…all people are sinners, all sinners can be changed, confession is a prerequisite to change, the change can access god directly, miracles are again possible, the change must change others.”

I’m going to be releasing a series of blog posts on the 12 steps, reflecting on them, meditating on them and trying to put into words exactly what it is that draws me to them.

Maybe I’ll even muster the courage to follow them a little bit.

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Feeling

March 2, 2011 under thehumancondition

It was the first of the month, and I didn’t have my new transit pass.

This means one thing: scraping together bus fare from loose change.

When I looked at my bedside desk this March 1st morning, what registered most clearly in my pre-coffee mind was that there was a massive deposit of quarters there. (The right approach to my desk is a prospector’s approach. The stuff on top of it consists of many layers of deposits (papers, books, coins, pens, etc), slowly accrued by the twin processes of time and dumping stuff there. There’s gold in them thar hills, but digging is required. If you are historically aware, you can guess at which layer holds what. I am not historically aware, so I generally just excavate.)

A flash of genius came to me. The transit ticket machine generally doesn’t give you dirty looks if you try and use more than four quarters to pay for things. Unlike some cashiers. So I stuffed my pockets with quarters and felt well equipped to get to work.
It was only when I started to feed quarters into the machine that I realized something was wrong.

I couldn’t pinch the quarters properly or position them in my fingers to feed the machine! I kept feeling like I was going to drop them. It was the darndest thing; as if I had become clumsy overnight. I managed to to feed them into the machine, but only with  care and difficulty.

You know something is awry when subconcious stuff becomes a matter of conscious debate, when you find yourself thinking about something that sane people oughtn’t to be thinking about. Coin feeding should be automatic – grab, position, feed. If you catch yourself conscious of it, there’s a problem.

Well, when I looked,  I saw the bandaid I had put on that morning, covering the ball of my thumb. I couldn’t feel the coins!

In a previous post I lamented how emotions can become disconnected from reality, how they don’t necessarily reflect the truth of a situation.

The difficulty is that emotional feeling (like physical feeling) forms a necessary part of how we interact with the world. When our emotions are thrown out of whack with reality, we are left fumbling – things go wrong and we don’t know why. What should be a natural, subconscious response suddenly needs to be dragged out and dealt with.

It’s not a question about whether emotions should guide us; they do guide us. When they works, they really does work, but when they don’t, there is a problem, and it needs redemption.

When I realized that my quarter shoving was failing miserably, and that it was because I couldn’t feel, a little bell went ding in my head.

Because if I try to do anything else, and I can’t feel, I get the same result.

Happy feeling, everybody!

Bonus Link – Narcissism watch (warning: language)

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Emotional truth

February 11, 2011 under personalinthepubliceye, thehumancondition, wholenessinreallife

Emotions are like a leaky roof.

A leaky roof is always leaky; its real state (the truth of it) never changes. But the experience changes on a daily basis and is entirely dependent on the weather.

God’s purpose for us is that we be made whole. Unfortunately I often have that leaky roof relationship with God – when I feel fine I don’t have a problem, do I? The difficulty with running on feeling is that it flops up and down. It suffers delays; often it takes a long pattern of behaviour before the full force of feeling follows. Often it takes a long pattern of behaviour reversal before feelings are finally reversed.

One of the things that confounds me and trips me up on a daily basis is that it’s easy to know how I feel in a given moment (it’s a simple gut check :- ) but truth is not necessarily so apparent. One of the daily struggles of the Christian faith for me is to constantly remind myself that I have to seek the truth.

Of course, this is in no way an exclusively Christian dilemma – how many parents have told their children,

“You don’t feel like it? Do it anyway.”

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Bad Manners

October 30, 2010 under thehumancondition

Let’s see… A man posts abusive messages on Facebook sites set up as tributes for people who have died. He gets 18 weeks in jail. (BBC)

From the story,

He was charged under the Communications Act 2003, for sending malicious communications that were grossly offensive.

Unemployed Coss was only caught when he sent residents on his street photos of himself saying he was an internet “troll”.

I love this story because it is a case of reality winning over the internet.

Lands and possessions and roads and cities and internets don’t need governing – people need governing. Laws aren’t for things – laws are for people, and they should apply to people.

The internet is not a magical “Law and propriety don’t exist” switch. The mere fact that it has been chaotic and anarchistic from its Wild West beginning does not make digital wrong, right. And if sending malicious communications that are grossly offensive is wrong, it is wrong in speech and it is wrong in the mail and it is wrong on Facebook.

The other fascinating bit of this story is that the path of destruction he took didn’t stop with other people. No, he had to bring himself down by flaunting his lack of shame.

You can’t take a path of destruction and win. The idea that you can is a diabolical thought and it is a lie. There is a spiritual truth behind this:

The devil hates you as much as he hates the people you hate.

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Something completely different

August 31, 2010 under technical, thehumancondition

A somewhat frightening BBC story from my link archives:

It turns out that if you’re clever with a webpage, you can pretend to be a visitor’s PC for the purpose of finding out the ID number of their router.

Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. A little technical, perhaps, but not so bad.

Umm… unless Google happened to drive down everyone’s street and take notes on exactly where everyone’s router was. And made that information available as a service. So if you *really* want to stalk someone (well, stalk their router, which is often good enough) now you can! Just get them to visit your tricky website and you know where they live!

Whenever a big accident of some kind happens, like a plane crash or an oil spill or something like that, people usually get frustrated because the cause takes a long time to figure out.

The truth is, there are almost always multiple causes, multiple failures which allowed the catastrophe to occur. The pilot was tired and the ground crew slipped up.  And the weather was rocky. And, and, and… Generally security for these things is so layered that multiple failures have to occur before a major disaster happens.

The problem is, that’s an accident. Unintentional.

Security is harder than accident prevention, because in security, there is an intelligent, malicious attacker who is actively trying to combine systems in the worst possible way.

The offshoot of this is that even if one system is arguably secure, it can still participate in catastrophic failure if one of the systems it interacts with is compromised.  You cannot make it secure – you have to make all the possible combinations of systems secure.

Which is why producing systems of jaw-dropping power is a bad idea, unless you can show jaw-droppingly proportionate benefit.

I guess I just wish that someone at Google had stopped saying, “This is so cool” long enough to ask, “Is this really a good idea?”

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I’m not dead

March 8, 2010 under curios, thehumancondition

I just lack the motivation and the time to post.

So here’s a link -

a fascinating article for those who like to think about the quirks and foibles of humanity.

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Cheating

January 9, 2010 under personalinthepubliceye, thehumancondition

I’m posting this here for the benefit of my sister – she’ll probably stumble across it here. But you might enjoy it too ;-)

Cheating is a thin slice of human nature that doesn’t change. We can grow up, but we can’t grow out of it.
We want something. Our experience tells us it is a good thing (for us).
What are we willing to do to get this ‘good’ thing?

Two stories to read:

Story 1 (Two parts): A father seeing his son cheat at Candyland and teaching him a lesson. (Hat tip – The Old New Thing)

Story 2: Marvel comics fighting the heirs of Jack Kirby for the characters that will (perhaps) revert to his estate in 2014 (we’re talking Spider-Man here)

These are the same story to me.

In the first story a child wants to win because it feels good. That feeling is a good thing, and he is willing to do what he can to get it. It doesn’t matter that the game is no longer fair and that the other people are forced to lose.

In the second story someone (I don’t know who is right) wants to make millions of dollars. That money is a good thing, and they are willing to do what they can to get it. It doesn’t matter what the truth is or that they are lying about the nature of the original agreement.

A terrifying discussion of cheating can be found at the freakonomics blog. Read the comments; don’t stop until you at least hit comment #39. It frightens me because of the soullessness of the calculations, and it illustrates exactly how tolerent we are of cheating.

We?

Yeah, I mean me. I can vividly remember cheating on a spelling test in second grade. It was self marked (the things we do in the name of logistics) and as the teacher read out the correct answers, I silently erased my incorrect entries and wrote the correct ones down, putting a check mark beside them.

I wanted to receive recognition and I wanted to receive favour. It felt good.

But it felt real bad when the teacher asked me afterwards, “Did you change these answers?”

More recently when a colleague asked me if I’d performed a certain necessary task, I said, “Yes, of course.” Not having done the task would have said bad things about me; it would have meant admitting I wasn’t all that and more. After all, if I did it *before* our discussion, or did it *after* our discussion – what did it matter?

But I hadn’t done the task, and it felt real bad when I had to go back and confess that I had lied to him.

I’m constantly surprised at my own willingness and desire to cheat and deceive.

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