Introduction

“These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”1

— Jose Ortega y Gasset


Almost twenty-five years ago, I gave a set of talks in Cincinnati to link the wisdom of the Twelve Step Program with what St. Francis called “the marrow of the Gospel.”2 I was amazed how obvious and easy a task it was, and was surprised this was not equally obvious to everybody involved in either of these fields. So the least I can hope to do here is to make what seems obvious a bit more obvious.

“Twelve Steppers” sometimes thought they had left the church for the Wednesday night meetings in the basement; and many upstairs in the sanctuary presumed that their “higher” concerns were something different from “those people with problems” down below. The similar messages between the two teachings assure me that we are dealing with a common inspiration from the Holy Spirit and from the same collective unconscious. In fact, I am still convinced that on the practical (read “transformational”) level, the Gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message, even in some detail, as I will try to show in this book. (I will frequently quote Bill W as the assigned author of the Twelve Steps and the so-called Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I am aware there is some doubt as to who exactly wrote what.)

My original lectures were called “Breathing Under Water,” a title taken from a telling poem by Carol Bieleck, r.s.c.j., which seemed to sum up so much of the common message. I quote it here in full:

“Breathing Under Water”

I built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you;

not on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

by a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbors.

Not that we spoke much.

We met in silences.

Respectful, keeping our distance,

but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always, the fence of sand our barrier,

always, the sand between.

And then one day,

—and I still don’t know how it happened—

the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome, even

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand

like wine,

less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but coming.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning

and I thought of death.

And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it

reached my door.

And I knew then, there was neither flight, nor death,

nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling you stop being

neighbors

Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors

And you give your house for a coral castle,

And you learn to breathe underwater.3

The original cassette recordings continued to move over the years, eventually became CDs, and morphed into a second set of talks called “How Do We Breathe Under Water?” done over fifteen years later. People continued to encourage me to put some of these ideas into written form. So, with some added growth and experience, here is my attempt. I hope it can offer all of us some underwater breathing lessons—for a culture, and a church, that often appears to be drowning without knowing it. But do not despair. What Ortega y Gasset calls the state of mind of the “shipwrecked” is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.Connecting the Gospel and the Twelve Steps

Although in this book I will first look at the trapped individual, I will also try to point out the very similar parallels in institutions, cultures, and nations. As organizational consultant and psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef said many years ago, our society itself shows all the signs of classic addiction. I began to wonder whether addiction could be one very helpful metaphor for what the biblical tradition called “sin.”

I personally am convinced that is the case, which might be the first foundational connection between the Gospel and the Twelve Step Program. How helpful it is to see sin, like addiction, as a disease, a very destructive disease, instead of merely something that was culpable, punishable, or “made God unhappy.” If sin indeed made God unhappy, it was because God desires nothing more than our happiness, and wills the healing of our disease. The healing ministry of Jesus should have made that crystal clear; healing was about all that he did, with much of his teaching illustrating the healings—and vice versa. It is rather amazing that this did not remain at the top of all church agendas.

As Carol Bieleck says in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, and build a coral castle and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for “enlightenment at gunpoint” (death) instead of enjoying God’s banquet much earlier in life.

The Twelve Step Program parallels, mirrors, and makes practical the same messages that Jesus gave us, but now without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future and metaphysical world. By the fourth century Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, which left us needing to agree on its transcendent truth claims (for example, Jesus is God, God is Trinity, Mary was a virgin, etc.), instead of experiencing the very practical “steps” of human enlightenment, the central message of our own transformation into “the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), and bringing about a “new creation” on this earth (Galatians 6:15). It became theory over practice.

We henceforth concentrated on how to worship Jesus as one united empire instead of following Jesus in any practical ways (even though he never once said “worship me” but often said “follow me”). The emperors, not popes or bishops, convened the next few councils of the church, and their concerns were usually not the healing of the masses but a united empire; and surely not Jesus’ clear teaching on nonviolence, simplicity of lifestyle, and healing those on the edge, which would have derailed the urgent concerns of an empire, as we see to this day.

Our Christian preoccupation with metaphysics and the future became the avoiding of the “physics” itself and the present. Endless theorizing, and the taking of sides, opinions about which we could be right or wrong, trumped and toppled the universally available gift of the Divine Indwelling, the real “incarnation” which still has the power to change the world.

As Tertullian, sometimes called the first Western theologian (ad 166–225), said, “Caro salutis cardo,”4 the flesh is the hinge on which salvation swings and the axis on which it hangs. When Christianity loses its material/physical/earthly interests, it has very little to say about how God actually loves the world into wholeness. In endless arguing about Spirit, we too often avoided both body and soul. Now we suffer the consequences of a bodily addicted and too often soulless society, while still arguing the abstractions of theology and liturgy, and paying out an always available Holy Spirit to the very few who meet all the requirements.

Going Toward the Pain

There is no side to take in the Twelve Step Program! It is not a worthiness contest. There is only an absolutely necessary starting point! The experience of “powerlessness” is where we all must begin. And Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) is honest and humble enough to state this, just as Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now. It is rather amazing and very sad that we pushed it all off into a future reward system for those who were “worthy.” As if any of us are.Is it this human pain that we are afraid of? Powerlessness, the state of the shipwrecked, is an experience we all share anyway, if we are sincere, but Bill Wilson found we are not very good at that either. He called it “denial.” It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.

It is not necessarily bad will or even conscious denial on our part. We just can’t see what we are not forced to see. As Jesus put it, we “see the splinter in our brother’s or sister’s eye and miss the log in our own” (Matthew 7:4–5). The whole deceptive game is revealed in that one brilliant line from Jesus. But we seem to need something to force us to deal with that log. For many, if not most, people the only thing strong enough to force them is some experience of addiction, some moral failure, or some falling over which they are powerless.5

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive, even “demonic,” nature of all addiction and of the mind, in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself. We really are our own worst enemies, and salvation is primarily from ourselves. It seems humans would sooner die than change or admit that they are mistaken.

This thinking mind, with a certain tit-for-tat rationality, made the Gospel itself into an achievement contest in which “the one with the most willpower wins,” even though almost everybody actually loses by the normal criteria. That is how far the ego (read “false self” or Paul’s word “the flesh”) will go to promote and protect itself. It would sooner die than change or admit that it is mistaken. It would sooner live in a win/lose world in which most lose than allow God any win-win victory. Grace is always a humiliation for the ego, it seems.

At that level, organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries (and in those who just keep up the externals). I now have more people tell me they are “recovering Catholics” than those in recovery from addiction. I am told that for every person that is joining the church, three are leaving. Are these all bad or insincere people? I don’t think so. Perhaps we failed to give them the good news they desired, needed, and expected?“The Vital Spiritual Experience”

On the other hand, the Twelve Step Program often became a program for mere sobriety from a substance, and never moved many toward the “vital spiritual experience” that Bill W deemed absolutely foundational for full recovery.6 If we can speak of the traditional Christian stages of the spiritual journey as (1) purgation, (2) illumination, and (3) union, too many addicts never seem to get to the second or third stages—any real spiritual illumination of the self—and even fewer get to the rich life of experienced union with God. In that, they mirror many mainline Christians, I am sad to say.

The Twelve Step Program has too often stayed at the problem-solving level, and missed out on the ecstasy itself—trustful intimacy with God, or what Jesus consistently called “the wedding banquet.” The world was left with the difficult task of trying to live with even more difficult “dry drunks.” These are people who do not drink or take drugs anymore, but they drive the rest of us to want to drink by their “all or nothing” thinking, which distorts and destroys most calm and clear communication.

If you think I am being unfair, hear Bill Wilson’s comment himself in his later years:

When A.A. was quite young, a number of eminent psychologists and doctors made an exhaustive study of a good-sized group of so-called problem drinkers. They finally came up with a conclusion that shocked the A.A. members of that time. These distin­guished men had the nerve to say that most of the alcoholics under investigation were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose.

How we alcoholics did resent that verdict! We would not believe that our adult dreams were often truly childish. And considering the rough deal life had given us, we felt it perfectly natural that we were sensitive. As to our grandiose behavior, we insisted that we had been possessed of nothing but a high and legitimate ambition to win the battle of life!7

It is my experience after over forty years as a priest that we could say the same about many well-intentioned Christians and clergy. Their religion has never touched them or healed them at the unconscious level where all of the real motivation, hurts, unforgiveness, anger, wounds, and illusions are stored, hiding—and often fully operative. They never went to “the inner room” where Jesus invited us, and where things hid “secretly” (Matthew 6:6).

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often gave them a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I am afraid.

People were Catholic, for example, because they were Italian, Spanish, or Irish, not because they “did the steps” or had any “vital spiritual experience” that changed their lives. We must be honest here, and not defensive; the issues are now too grave and too urgent. Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too. It is the identical and same pattern of addiction and denial. Thank God that Pope John Paul II introduced into our vocabulary words like “structural sin” and “institutional evil.” It was not even part of the conversation in most of Christian history up to now, as we exclusively concentrated on “personal” sins. The three sources of evil were traditionally called “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We so concentrated on the flesh that we let the world and “the devil” get off scot-free.8

We have our work cut out for us, and the Twelve Step Program made it very clear that it is indeed work, and not fast food or cheap grace. Gospel people need to do their honest inner work, “Steppers” need to “do the steps”; and they both need to know that they are then eating from the very rich and nutritious “marrow of the Gospel.”

Four Assumptions About Addiction

I am writing this book, therefore, with these four assumptions:

We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin,” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures, or practices, were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments; in fact the New Testament calls them in some cases “exorcisms”! They knew they were dealing with non-rational evil or “demons.”“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process our reality. The very fact we have to say this shows how much we are blinded inside of it. By definition, you can never see or handle what you are addicted to. It is always “hidden” and disguised as something else. As Jesus did with the demon at Gerasa, someone must say, “What is your name?” (Luke 8:30). The problem must be correctly named before the demon can be exorcised. You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. The Gospel exposes those lies in every culture: The American addiction to oil, war, and empire; the church’s addiction to its own absolute exceptionalism; the poor person’s addiction to powerlessness and victimhood; the white person’s addiction to superiority; the wealthy person’s addiction to entitlement.

Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from this self and from cultural lies. If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the
primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice, once just called “prayer,” to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking, and superiority thinking. “Praying” is changing your operating system! This was well recognized in Step 11 of the Twelve Steps.

When religion does not move people to the mystical or non-dual level of consciousness9 it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of “sinner.” At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking. When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation.

Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:

We suffer to get well.

We surrender to win.

We die to live.

We give it away to keep it.

This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us—by some reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.