INTRO: Eleventh Step

Before I came into AA, I prayed often and meditated never.  Praying improved my conscious contact with God, as I understood God.  The problem was that contact does not lead anywhere when one does not feel anything.  Subconsciously, I blamed God for the setbacks that I faced in life.  Some of them, like alcoholism, were related to nature.  Other disappointments may have been attributed to bad decisions and/or bad luck.  Still, I wondered, "Why doesn't the God of my understanding intervene?"

I prayed at the hospital between the scene of the accident and being taken to jail for the DUI, and I prayed in jail.  When I attended my first AA meeting, I prayed the Serenity Prayer with the group in the beginning of the meeting and the Lord's Prayer with them in the end.

The thought of meditating made me laugh.  I was the opposite of a contemplative when I came into the program.  Meditation, I thought, was for men and women who were comfortable withdrawing from the world and sitting with themselves.  It was not for the person whose body still ached from drunk-driving into an inanimate object.

AA changed my prayer life, and this change started by praying as often as I did with men and women who were as desperate as me.  Even after I accrued some time in the program, praying with a group of other alcoholics was different than praying within a faith community.  Alcoholics may be called to prayer with profanity (a feature of life in AA that still makes me laugh), and yet the only thing that is considered profane in AA is not taking sobriety seriously.

Everybody at an AA meeting has come to a place in which he or she had to admit that he or she belonged there, and for those with some time in the program, remembering his or her first meeting always breeds gratitude.  Praying not only improves my conscious contact with God, it also improves my conscious contact with others whose hearts yearn for healing and wholeness as much as mine does.

I did not experiment with meditation until my second year of sobriety.  Now that I have, I think about meditating differently.  For years, I have heard people say, "Prayer is talking to God; meditation is listening to God," and yet the meditation experiences that are the most meaningful to me are the ones without words, not mine or God's.

I sit regularly with a group of Buddhists, who have taught me the spiritual and psychological value of being still.  I sit for a half-hour at a time with this group and think about nothing but my breath, which, of course, is a power greater than myself.  I have the same sense of relief and relaxation after meditating that I do after attending an AA meeting.  Both provide me with an alternative to going through life restless, irritable and discontented.

I pray for God's will for me, even though experience has taught me to be careful when I become too clear about what God's plan for me is.  When I pray for this knowledge, I find that I may become impatient.  Once I think that I know what God's will is, I think that change should come quickly.  Sometimes I complain, because I want God to disclose more of the future than God is in the business of disclosing.  I am aggressive in pursuing what I interpret God's will for my life to be, and yet I find that I am more content when I focus on receiving the day than seizing it.

Stuff happens, even in sobriety, and yet when I am centered spiritually, even the most tragic events are bearable.  Prayer and meditation center me spiritually, like steps four through ten center me emotionally.  By practicing the steps together, I find balance in my life, and with this balance, I am able to be at peace and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

INTRO: Fifth Step

The longer I drank, the more I often drank alone.  I sat at bars by myself and would drive home from them almost every night.  When I went out with other people, I would drink as they did, at least in the early years, and drink more after we said "goodnight".  Often I would stop on the way home to purchase more alcohol to drink before I went to sleep.  At some point, I stopped going to sleep and started passing out night after night.

I do not remember much about the accident that led to my incarceration.  When I attended my first AA meeting upon my release from jail, I was not feeling much but fear.  Alcohol does that to a person.  It takes away  his or her ability to remember; it takes away his or her capacity to feel.  

Statements like "alcohol does that to a person" make less sense after the fourth step than they do after the first one.  Even though I knew that I was powerless over alcohol, I chose to take the first drink hoping that alcohol would numb senses and calm fears.  Irrationally, I thought that it would help me to forget the past and set me up to succeed in the future.  It did neither one, because I insisted on dwelling on the past and fearing the future, and in so doing, found it impossible to live in the present.

Looking at myself honestly and sharing this story with another person helped me to accept myself as I was without beating myself up or blaming all of my problems on alcohol.  The moral inventory helped me to recognize how much I lied to myself about who I was and how my drinking affected others.  It helped me to start being honest with myself so that I would eventually be able to trust my thoughts and feelings.

The fifth step opened me to the possibility of trusting God and other human beings.  It is about practicing the honesty that the fourth step demands with somebody other than one's aggrandizing and loathing self.  There were few surprises when I did my personal inventory.  In my gut, I remembered how I wronged others.  The challenge was being honest enough to write down these wrongs.  Then, once they were written, the challenge became speaking them aloud.

The fifth step says that we "admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."  Notice that the audiences are God, ourselves and another human being.  The God of my understanding was familiar with my offenses, as was I, so what I was doing in the first part of this step was simply acknowledging what was already known, and there is power in knowing.  Admitting the exact nature of my wrongs to another person was the bigger problem, because one of the problems that I was admitting was how I struggle with pride.

The word "admitted" appears in the steps for the first time since the step one in which "we admitted we were powerless over alcohol".  For me, this language serves as a reminder that all of the alcoholic's problems are related.  Both the first step and the fifth step are about letting go of that which stands in the way of being who we are and of being well.  

Taking the fifth step with another person is an intimate act (which is not to be confused with a romantic one).  It establishes faith in the possibility of a mutually affirming relationship with another person.  It help one begin to trust again.  It empowers one to set his or her sights on life on the other side of the consequences of alcoholic behavior, and about this much I am sure: this life in relationship with God and neighbors is far, far better than drinking alone.