Strength Office 637
I have attended and worked 37 programs in the last 40 years.
There has been much beauty, joy, freedom, love and literature.
Of all the literature in all the programs the most revolutionary line comes from page 12 of the Big Book:
“ Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”
This strikes right at the very heart of not only of the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam…but also Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and the Baháʼí Faith.
The real reason the Big Book offers this freedom is…drunks don’t want anyone telling them what to do and to drag ‘em to God you gotta give drunks a lot of rope.
Listen to these six lines from the SLAA primary text and observe how very different their relationship to God is:
“Our Higher Power seemed to require our active participation.
Apparently God was not interested in relating to us as a parent might to some helpless child who was always getting into scrapes.
God seemed to want some kind of partnership.
Perhaps we were supposed to develop our full human capacities, instead of passively turning ourselves over to God as a wholesale protector or a punitive, omnipotent dictator.
We had progressed beyond an overseeing caretaker or parent-like God to the sense of being in conscious partnership with this Power.
This relationship appeared to be structured more along the lines of a conscious adult partnership centered on mutual sharing and cooperation.”
Sharing, cooperation, partnership? That sounds more like loving a wife or husband than the loving God I grew up with in religion.
Here is another revolutionary line, from Hope and Recovery, the primary text for SAA for many years:
“Ultimately, the Second Step helped us define spirituality for ourselves.”
Wow! That is a lot of freedom…but, it comes with a lot of responsibility.
But, both SLAA and SAA’s recommendations are founded in that most fundamental yet, ultimate freedom, from page 12 “ Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”.
Why does this matter?
Because if I cannot stop acting out there is something fundamentally wrong with my relationship with God.
AA has a slogan “ Your Higher Power can be anything…It can be a lightbulb”.
But, that is silly. Try praying to a lightbulb when the craving for a drink hits…and see how that works.
So, there is some responsibility to choose a Higher Power wisely.
For me, these days I need something that keeps me away from using food to diminish my feeling anxiousness.
I find my Higher Power is like a combination lock…no single number opens the lock.
So, for me, meetings, sponsorship, service, reading literature, step work, meditation, weighing and measuring my food, exercising, writing my food down, anonymity, writing literature, searching for and finding my soul, all, collectively, comprise the surrender that I find that I need to find a Power greater than myself.
My conception of a Higher Power is a force that will help me stay away from food…if I live my life by taking the preceding sober actions.
…and I don’t have to wait around for lightbulbs.