The Rallying Point

I went to a meeting tonight at a special group for me: I had a spiritual experience there my first closed meeting January 2012. I don’t remember anything of that meeting at all, but I left with the earnest belief that I would never drink again. Of course that night I did, but I didn’t again for seven months, which was my longest stretch of sobriety at that point.

So it wasn’t strange that, in the tiny meeting of the night, I voiced up and said let’s do Step Two. And so we did, and I was grateful. I offered to speak first, and I read the first sentence of the last paragraph, “Step Two is the rallying point for all of us.” There were a few new men who were struggling, so I just went in for the kill. I said it’s new years’ eve, and we’re all here, so let’s for an hour pretend we have Step One down and go to what matters – God. 

While I had a spiritual experience of some sort my first night in that church basement nearly two years to the night, this time I had a complete psychic change, and I was ready to Twelfth Step. I think my best work was done at the end of the meeting though. One of the new guys said to me that he’s conflicted and that he is using the meetings as his higher power. I said okay, I did that too.

Truthfully, Step Two has taken me nearly two years to “get”, and everyone who I know whom I consider to be recovered also took years of continuous drinking and or relapsing to finally hand it over. But as it is written, “when all of our score cards read ‘zero’”; we truly do not move past Step One and truly enter the program until we are willing to admit we are utterly powerless, and that no human power can restore us to a state of well being.

It is normal and natural to use the program as the higher power, but it is not the intention to be a permanent solution. Step Two states some people have “begun” to solve their problem by using the group, and that members have “crossed the threshold” via a manipulation of a higher power, but once their lives transformed they “came to believe…(and) talk of God.”

I had to be nearly locked up to get deflated. I was too sick to just “get it”, but I was bright enough to associate with recovered people. I knew about God, though I didn’t believe. But I still went to meetings: even when I was out, I still had a foot in the door. Finally I got so desperate I actually put my ego aside just far enough to consider that someone might know better than me, and that maybe I should quit the debating society. Once I had a small gap between myself and my ego, and began listening to other people and start absorbing the information being Twelfth Stepped to me, God discretely placed some grace in that space. As the Step says, he “infiltrated” my life, and suddenly I was not in meetings in a shy whinny voice saying it seems to work for others, I hoped it would work for me too, I was becoming a confident mouthpiece of the Lord and saying YES this IS a religious program, BECAUSE we ARE BEYOND human aid and the ONLY thing that will relieve us of our sickness of body and mind is GOD, and He CAN and WILL heal us IF WE LET HIM!!!

And I have to be real, and in reality, I am accidentally harsh. I need to remember that I am only here through the love, tolerance, and patience of those who came before me, and it would be nothing short of evil for me to expect a person to understand in their minds or hearts the true premise of this program right at the start.

So I said to this newcomer to just keep coming back. I said that it took me and a couple of the other recovered guys who were there years to move past Step One and into Step Two, but what mattered was that we kept coming to meetings. I then told him that he needs to have his score card read zero, that he needs to realize he has nothing and nobody but God. Ultimately, that’s what having a losing hand is. Like King David being trapped in a cave, enclosed by his enemies, he just said forget it, I’m a goner. Lord, just take me. And the thing is, God does take us: in our defeat we have finally “rightly related ourselves to Him”, and he removes our rags, our old dead selves, and clothes us in his grace. We no longer have our own power, that power was useless, that power couldn’t keep us sober: we now have God’s power. 

We have become co-pilots to God; we’re no longer dead weight, we are ready to work through the Steps and clean up the wreckage of our past so that we may relieve the weight of others. That is our religion, and this is where you either come with us and live, or stay where you are and die.