Читать книгу Spiritual Awakenings II - Группа авторов - Страница 27

April 2010

I recently had an experience in AA that I know is not unique, but I wish it upon no one. For a time I was raising my hand to volunteer at my home group; I was active, serving on two different committees and a sub-committee; and I sponsored a handful of guys. If you looked at my life from the outside you would say that I was “doing the deal.” I thought I was on top of the world. I was in a happy marriage with a new baby and, despite a downturn of my industry, I was employed. In spite of that, there was an uneasy feeling in my gut, a feeling that I'd been aware of many times before AA and in early sobriety, but that I hadn't felt in close to four years.

I went through the magic equation of Steps Ten and Eleven to search for the cause of the problem, only to find that I was drawing a blank. What was I to do? The thought that I wasn't involved enough in service entered my mind. That's the ticket, I thought. I need another commitment. After all, in early sobriety, any time I got involved more I felt better. When I told my wife that I needed to do more service, she looked at me like I was crazy. She must not understand, I thought.

So there I sat between a rock and a hard place. The Big Book calls it the turning point. I was four years sober and dying of alcoholism in the rooms of AA. Fear began to dominate my life. I couldn't speak of this in AA—or so I thought. After all, I was “Johnny AA.” I was not supposed to feel the way I did. My life looked great on the outside. What was I going to do?

Here is where my story takes a turn I never thought could happen. I began to journey back through the Steps. As I went through “The Doctor's Opinion” and the first 57 pages, things began to make sense. When I got to “There Is a Solution” and read how Rowland H. was crushed by the fact that his religious convictions did not spell the necessary spiritual experience, a light turned on for me: My AA convictions did not spell the necessary spiritual experience.

I came across this realization again in “We Agnostics.” “If a mere code of morals or better philosophy were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered a long time ago.” I had been treating AA as that very thing—a better philosophy for life. The result was that I had began to suffer from untreated alcoholism. See, I had thought AA was this magic formula. Go to meetings, get involved, read the book and help others. While all those things are vital to access a spiritual experience, those things are not the spiritual experience. Lack of power is my dilemma. AA is a path to power, not the power.

I took an infinite God and restricted him to an A+B=C formula. In essence, I'd made God finite and I got finite results. What a lonely feeling.

I faced the same proposition at nearly five years of sobriety that I did at six months of sobriety. “God either is or he isn't. What was my choice to be?”

Today here I sit at a new beginning. I am on a new journey with a new God of my understanding. The opportunities, I believe, are truly infinite. I will do my best to not turn AA into something it is not—a religion. I can get wrapped up in the principles and rituals of AA and forget the only thing that truly keeps me sober and sane: God. My life depends on a constant contact with him and an infinitely growing relationship.

Jason E.

Greendale, Wisconsin