Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
—Step 2 of the Twelve Steps
“The God of old is still your refuge. This God has everlasting arms that can drive out the enemy before you.”
—Deuteronomy 33:27
“Yes, we are carrying our own death warrant with us, but it is teaching us not to rely on ourselves, but on a God whose task is to raise the dead to life.”
—2 Corinthians 1:9
“While he was still a long way off, the father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him tenderly.”
—Luke 15:21
Step 2 is the necessary longing, delaying, and backsliding that invariably precedes the full-blown leap of faith. The statement is wise enough to use an active verb to describe this step: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” The surrender of faith does not happen in one moment but is an extended journey, a trust walk, a gradual letting go, unlearning, and handing over. No one does it on the first or even second try. Desire and longing must be significantly deepened and broadened.
To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces opened up within us—and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality—and it is work. Yes, it is finally the work of “a Power greater than ourselves,” and it will lead to great luminosity and depth of seeing. That is why true faith is one of the most holistic and free actions a human can perform. It leads to such broad and deep perception, that most traditions would just call it “light.” Remember, Jesus said that we were the light of the world also (Matthew 5:14) and not just himself (John 8:12). Christians often forget this. Such luminous seeing is quite the opposite of the closed-minded, dead heart, body-denying thing that much religion has allowed faith to become. As you have surely heard before, “Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell.”
The innocuous mental belief systems of much religion are probably the major cause of atheism in the world today, because people see that they have not generally created people who are more strong, caring, or creative than other groups—and often a lot worse. I wish I did not have to say that, but religion either produces the very best people or the very worst. Jesus makes this point in many settings and stories. Mere mental belief systems split people apart, whereas actual faith puts all our parts (body, heart, head) on notice and on call, and offers us a new broadband station, with full surround sound, instead of a static-filled monotone. Honestly, it takes major surgery and much of one’s life to get head, heart, and body to put down their defenses, their false programs for happiness, and their many forms of resistance to what is right in front of them. This is the meat and the muscle of the whole conversion process.
As hard as it is to believe, many formally religious people do not believe in the reality of Spirit in any active or effective way. They think it is their job to somehow teach, introduce, or “win” Spirit, and they never get around to enjoying what is already and always there—and actively on their side. Walter Wink, a professor of biblical interpretation, calls it the mere “theological” worldview as opposed to the incarnational worldview, which is authentic Christianity.1 When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.
But as Jesus said in his many banquet stories, we all find our very proper excuses why not to come to anything so free, so spacious, and so available to all. “There is still more room!” he says at the end. (See Luke 14:15–24.) Many seem to be put off by the fact that the invitation list includes “both good and bad alike” (Matthew 22:10). The ego, or the “flesh,” would prefer to join a private country club or a gated community, whereas Peter will say, “God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean” (Acts 10:28), although it took him a while to get there himself.
When all three inner spaces are open and listening together, we can always be present. To be present is to know what you need to know in the moment. To be present to something is to allow the moment, the person, the idea, or the situation to change you.
Opening Three Inner Spaces
I will describe the three openings briefly here, but I am encouraging any reader to seek other resources to deepen each of these disciplines.
To keep the mind space open, we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. This has been the most neglected in recent centuries, substituting the mere reciting and “saying” of prayers, which is not the same as a contemplative mind, and often merely confirms us in our superior or fear-based system. Step 11 was wise enough to name “prayer and meditation” as necessary to the process. I personally describe contemplation as “non-dual consciousness” and find that it is necessary to overcome the “stinking thinking” of most addicts, which tends to be “all or nothing thinking.”2 One could say that authentic spirituality is invariably a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.
To keep the heart space open, we need several things. First, we almost all need some healing in regard to our carried hurts from the past. The church’s somewhat strange word for this was “original sin,” which we were told was not something we were personally guilty of but was something that was done to us and passed from generation to generation. No point in blaming anybody. If it was not one thing, it was another. The Enneagram is one marvelous spiritual tool that names the nine most common “programs for happiness” or strategies for survival. It reveals that we are all wounded in our “feeling function” in one way or another. Each type is invariably half right but also half wrong, and it is important that we recognize the half-wrong side, so the good side can be set free.3 Also, we need to be in right relationship with people, so that other people can love us and touch us at deeper levels, and so we can love and touch them. Nothing else opens up the heart space in such a positive and ongoing way. Fortunately, Steps 4 through 10 are precisely named to make that possible, and we will talk about this more in subsequent chapters.
Finally, I think the heart space is often opened by “right brain” activities4 such as music, art, dance, nature, fasting, poetry, games, life-affirming sexuality, and, of course, the art of relationship itself. Mass murderers are invariably loners who participate in none of these things but merely ruminate and retreat to their head and their explanations.
I can think of times when I was celebrating Mass in proper form but with a hidden cold heart, and only when I moved into the congregation and received their genuine smiles and warm hugs did I even realize that my heart had been hardened before. Suddenly it was caring and connecting again. That is the rub of any conversion experience: You only know how much you needed it when you are on the other side! That is why you need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry you across to most transformational experiences. When you can let others actually influence you and change you, your heart space is open.
And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others. As Simeon told Mary, “A sword will pierce your heart, so that the secret thoughts of many will be laid bare” (Luke 2:35).To keep our bodies less defended, to live in our body right now, to be present to others in a cellular way, is also the work of healing of past hurts and the many memories that seem to store themselves in the body. The body seems to never stop offering its messages; but fortunately, the body never lies, even though the mind will deceive you constantly. Zen practitioners tend to be well-trained in seeing this. It is very telling that Jesus usually physically touched people when he healed them; he knew where the memory and hurt was lodged, and it was in the body itself.
Any massage therapist knows the power of healing touch, and surely it is part of the function of healthy sexual encounters, exercise, the importance of hugging, and why it is so important to protect children from any negative or fearful body messages. The body knows and the body remembers.
It has always deeply disappointed me that the Christian religion was the only one that believed God became a human body, and yet we have had such deficient and frankly negative attitudes toward embodiment, the physical world, sexuality, emotions, animals, healthy physical practices like yoga, and nature itself. It often seems to me that Western Christianity has been much more formed by Plato (body and soul are at war) than by Jesus (body and soul are already one). For many of us the body is more repressed and denied than even the mind or the heart.
The body is like the ignored middle child in a family unit, and so now it is having its revenge through so much compulsive eating, sexuality, anorexia, and addiction, plus a wholesale disregard for the physical planet, animals, water, and healthy foods.5 In every way, we seem to be fouling our own nest, because after all, this nest does not really matter, salvation is merely “an evacuation plan for the next world.” There has been little belief in what the Bible offers, which is both a new heaven and a new earth too (Revelation 21:1).
So the work of spirituality is the ongoing liberation of head, heart, and body, toward full luminous seeing and living, and not a mere mental “decision for Jesus” or the one-time insurance policy of sacraments received. Most head churches do not touch the heart, most heart churches do not bother with the head, and almost all of them ignore the body as if of no account. Further, the head churches are usually not contemplative, the heart churches have little discrimination or training in the more subtle emotions whereby we see truthfully, and the body people have either left the church or, even worse, stay in the pew but do not take it seriously as anything real, urgent, or wonderful.
Reconnecting Head, Heart, and Body
If we are to come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity, then we will come to that belief by developing the capacity for a simple, clear, and uncluttered presence. Those who can be present with head, heart, and body at the same time will always encounter The Presence, whether they call it God or not. For the most part, those skills are learned by letting life come at us on its own terms, and not resisting the wonderful underlying Mystery that is everywhere, all the time, and offered to us too. “God comes to us disguised as our life,” as spiritual writer and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy so beautifully puts it in her talks and retreats.
All we can do is keep out of the way, note, and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God’s side, the ineffectiveness is whatever time it takes for us to “come to believe,” which is the slow and gradual healing and reconnecting of head, heart, and body so they can operate as one. Both movements are crucial: the healing of ourselves and the healing of our always limited and even toxic image of God. This, of itself, will often reconnect all three parts of our humanity into a marvelous receiving station. A “true God” experience really does save us, because it is always better than we thought we could expect or earn.6
Let’s end with a blessing from St. Paul who recognized these three parts of the human person in his very first letter: “May the God of peace make you whole and holy, may you be kept safe in body, heart, and mind, and thus ready for the presence. God has called you and will not fail you” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).