Home

Monday, August 29, 2011

Another View

SOMETHING WE DON'T SEE TOO MUCH OF AROUND HERE.



By Marya Hornbacher, Special to CNN

(CNN) - Kicked back with his boots on the table at the head of the smoke-dense room, the meeting's leader banged his fist and bellowed, “By the grace of this program and the blood of Jesus Christ, I’m sober today!”

I blinked.

This was not an auspicious beginning for the project of getting my vaguely atheistic, very alcoholic self off the sauce.

I wondered if perhaps I’d wandered into the wrong room. I thought maybe I’d wound up in Alcoholics Anonymous for crown-of-thorn Christians, and in the next room might find AA for lapsed Catholics, and downstairs a group for AA Hare Krishnas and one for AA Ukrainian Jews.

But a decade later, I’ve become aware that 12-step programs are home to people from every religion, denomination, sect, cult, political tilt, gender identity, sexual preference, economic strata, racial and ethnic background, believers in gun rights and abortion rights and the right to home schooling, drinkers of coffee and tea, whiskey and mouthwash, people who sleep on their sides or their stomachs or sidewalks.

Anyone who cares to sober up, in other words, can give it a shot the 12-step way. The official preamble Alcoholics Anonymous states: "The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

And millions of people want that and find a way to do it in this program. I’m one of them. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a raging drunk. Now I’m not.

It wasn’t magic; it was brutally hard work to get from point A to B. I do believe I’d be dead without the help of the people and the structure of the steps in AA.

But I don’t believe in God.

And this can be something of a sticking point when you’re sitting in a meeting room, desperate for almost any route out of hell, and someone cites “the blood of Jesus” as the only way to go. Or when you realize that six of AA's 12 steps explicitly refer to God, a Higher Power, or He.

But this shouldn't be a deal breaker. I’m going to make a lot of old-style AA’s cranky with this, but it’s perfectly possible to sober up, sans belief in God.

At first that wasn’t clear to me. It’s unclear to most people because AA has a reputation as a cult, a religion unto itself, a bunch of blathering self-helpers, a herd of lemmings, or morons, and it isn’t those things either. It’s a pretty straightforward series of steps, based on spiritual principles, that helps people clean up their lives in a whole lot of ways.

But if you are of an atheistic or strongly agnostic mindset, chances are you’ll walk into a meeting, see the steps hanging on the wall, and want to scream, laugh, or walk back out.

I tried another tack: I made a valiant attempt to believe. I figured a) these people were funny, kind, and not plastered; b) they believed that some kind of higher power had helped them get sober; c) they knew something I did not.

So I did research. I read every word of AA literature I could find. I read up on the history of half a dozen important religions and a wide variety of frou-frou nonsense. I earnestly discussed my lack of belief with priests, rabbis, fanatics and my father.

People told me their stories — of God, the divine, the power of love, an intelligent creator. Something that made all this. Some origin, some end.

I told them I believed in math. Chaos, I said. Infinity. That sort of thing.

They looked at me in despair.

And not infrequently, they said, “So you think you’re the biggest, most important thing in the universe?”

On the contrary. I think I am among the smallest. Cosmically speaking, I barely exist.

Like anything else, I came into being by the chance, consist mostly of water, am composed of cells that can be reduced and reduced, down to the quarks and leptons and so forth, that make up matter and force. If you broke down all matter, the atom or my body, you’d arrive at the same thing: what scientists call one strange quark, with its half-integer spin.

And I find that not only fascinating, but wondrous, awe-inspiring, and humbling.

I believe that the most important spiritual principle of AA is humility. The recognition that we are flawed, that we can and must change and that our purpose not only in sobriety but in life is to be of service to others.

I believe that I exist at random, but I do not exist alone; and that as long as my quarks cohere, my entire function on this hurtling planet is to give what I can to the other extant things.

That keeps me sober. Amen.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Marya Hornbacher.

The Editors - CNN Belief Blog

Filed under: AtheismBeliefMy Take

6 comments:

  1. I love shit like this, so much for anonymity. Another big shot who knows more than the traditions, terrific.............

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like this even though It's thought provoking as well.

    Setting aside the traditions violations for a second... I think It's equally wrong to go spouting a Blood of Christ speech in an A.A. meeting as well.

    Until Jesus comes down and tells us to put His name in the steps, we ought to afford Him His anonymity too.

    Now, I'm not always in the mood for some blowhard atheist to go spouting off, but this isn't your God killed my puppy-dog atheist either. This person just don't believe in no deity. Fine.

    Is like to bring this person along with me next time some nominal Christian fundie-wanna be comes a preachin at me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like it. If this woman elects to break her anonymity that's her choice. She doesn't claim to speak for AA, only as a member who has balanced her beliefs of a higher power with those espoused by the Big Book.

    She comes across as a pretty honest person, and I'd guess that she has some decent sobriety.

    Like Patrick, I don't like the Blood of Christ stuff either, and that may have caused me to walk out of my first meeting, too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Not that I don't like it... I just don't like it crammed anywhere by anybody else.

    ReplyDelete
  5. She likes math, in AA we've surrendered to the master mathematician. She finds the universe “fascinating, but wondrous, awe-inspiring, and humbling", only a mind conscious of values can experience such an observation. Self clamors for recognition and autonomy but alludes it's own logic when it simultaneously transcends the material by making value judgments while claiming the material is all there is.

    The moon doesn’t look at the earth or a crab nebula and find it amazing, only a mind conscious of values finds any appeal in contrasting the beautiful with the ugly. Truth is such when contrasted with error, good with evil.

    “……materialism, atheism, is the maximation of ugliness, the climax of the finite antithesis of the beautiful.” UB 1955


    Colter

    ReplyDelete
  6. If you ain't one of us, you ain't real. Or, as the song goes, "There's no one left but me and thee, and I'm not sure of thee."

    ReplyDelete