The Last Chance Texaco

Posts Tagged ‘2nd Tradition’

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?
Hedwig: No, but I… I love his work.

John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I don’t want to make this about religion because it isn’t about religion. It’s about the same thing everything else here is about. Me. It’s what it was like, what happened (and what’s happening), and what it’s like now. For me. It is my experience, my strength and my hope. It is also a place where I can sit down, slow down, cool down and give the loving Creator of my own understanding room to go to work. It is part inventory, part meditation, all reaching out.

My story is not unique by any stretch. Young men from my home town have gone down similar, almost identical paths. I don’t know all the specifics of Troy’s story but I know he grew up in a similar environment, one fought with pressure to conform to the dominant culture. I can only hope that there was more tollerance in 2006 than in the 70′s and 80′s, when I was his age. In my own case, by the time I was 14 years old I had developed a concrete intellectual bias against every system of thinking which claimed to be the only truth. I carried that bias into every part of my life, judging things which I had never examined.

In my own experience, gaining hope in the second step that a “Power greater than myself” could restore me to sanity, and then gaining enough faith to turn my will and life over to the care of that power, as I understood it, was only possible because the message was delivered to me in a way that I could hear. The men who guided me left the specifics of their own conception of a Higher Power at the door, and instead shared what happened that made them willing to seek that relationship and what that relationship had done for them. At no point did they ever tell me that they had the one truth. They carried the message by strictly adhering to the instructions on page 93 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which says, among other things, that I could choose any conception of a Higher Power I liked, as long as it made sense to me, and that there was no use arousing any prejudice I may have against theological terms. I was willing to believe in something, so long as you didn’t tell me what to believe.

The meetings I attend most regularly have now been completely invaded by a group of not very Christlike Jesus people who call on themselves to share at meeting level to watch out in the rooms of AA. “There are forces of darkness in these rooms that are marking Christians and taking them out of here.” If you point out to them that there is a way we do things in AA and a reason that we do it they just say, “Then we’ll disagree.” If you call attention to the fact that when they share the way they share, that newcomers and young people get up and leave the meeting, visibly upset; that the way they are sharing does not help to carry the message, they say that they are merely sharing the truth as they understand it.

The program, however, has nothing to do with looking at them, with judging them, and everything to do with looking at me. What part of me is so prideful that I need to be ‘right’ on this point? What within me makes me refuse to accept these people as they are? What is the origin of the blind spot in my faith that makes me think that as a group, the 2nd Tradition won’t see us through this or that the people being driven from the rooms won’t find their way back when the time is right? What am I so afraid of that I cannot seem to find it within myself to treat these people with the same pity, patience and tolerance with which I treat people who can’t stay sober or people to only identify as addicts or people who talk about taking steps they have never taken. Why do I only see that they are not helping the program rather than seeing that the program could help them?

In my 5th step my sponsor pointed out that he though I had a lot more work to do in the area of God and religion. I actually blew him off. “No. Really. I’m so completely OK with all that,” I told him.

No. Really I’m not.

“Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure; having this seal,
The Lord knoweth them that are his.”
Timothy 2;19

If the meeting I was at last night was the first AA meeting I had ever been to, I am quite sure I would have ran out the back door and never returned. Perhaps I should lower my expectations since I live deep in the heart of Jesusland. It is one of the essential parts of any real 12 step program that we don’t shove some particular idea of “Higher Power” down the throats of newcomers. It is absolutely essential that we guide them toward a personal relationship with that power by taking a path that begins right where they are.

That’s why, well that along with the fact that I am a contrary, sarcastic, vicious, deeply egotistical mo-fo, when I hear people in meetings talk about the only real Higher Power being Jesus Christ, it is almost all I can do not to start talking about, “My Higher Power, whom I choose to call Lucifer,.” I’m afraid I’m not really that much better than I was when I was actively using. Some defects are only slightly diminished.

Here’s the thing. If you’re a Christian you know that the crime of heresy Jesus was executed for was the heresy of teaching that one’s relationship with God is personal. It didn’t require High Priests. Nobody needed to stand between you and God. So if you’re a Christian and you attend 12 step meetings, for God’s sake (seriously) leave Jesus at the door. He doesn’t mind.

I may end up being a Christian yet, but I’m pretty turned off by it every time someone brings up His name in an AA meeting, particularly when it comes with a warning about how other people in the room are selling false prophets. I got sober and I got sober without Jesus, thank you very much. I got sober believing that Jesus didn’t die for my sins but so that Mel Gibson could become a billionaire. I’ve been sober a few months and never even had the compulsion to place a name on God or feel like I needed an agent or broker to reach Him.

When I was new my prejudice was so powerful that if anyone had told me that I had to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour in order to get sober I would simply have said thank you, I’d rather be high. Ciao. Remember, that in AA, God expresses Himself in our group conscience, and for over 70 years that expression has told us that it is a God of our own understanding. So to all the freaks in Jesusland, Jesus says shut the fuck up. You’re killing alcoholics.